Secret Shared

10 DAUPHINE

ELIZABETH WAS THE first to notice a stale petroleum smell wafting around outside the store. You couldn’t blame Katrina or any of the other famous hurricanes. The infrastructure in New Orleans was long compromised before those epic storms laid bare its awful issues. But a possible gas leak would mean wholesale evacuation, and that meant shutting down eleven stores and restaurants in one of the most pedestrian-heavy parts of town. The Funky Monkey was looking at a month-long shutdown to replace old gas lines buried under the sidewalks out front.

“You do realize, Cassie, when they say a month in New Orleans, it could mean six. I have not been unemployed since I was a teenager.”

My whining was taking place over margaritas at Tracy’s. I must have been anxious; I was out-drinking Cassie two to one. We’d become friends. She had even filled me in on her drama with her boss, Will, and how she almost ended up with him. Maybe that’s why I so boldly inquired about Mark Drury. We were talking about men, sex and dating, so it didn’t seem like I was prying about my weird crush.

“Yeah, we met. His name’s Mark. A musician. Who. Talks. About. Music. Non. Stop,” she said, rolling her eyes. “We’ve been out once but …”

“But?”

“He’s just … he’s not for me,” she said. “I don’t know why, or what I have to do to get Will out of my head and my heart for good. But Mark’s not going to help me.”

I hated to admit my relief. Not that I thought I had a chance with Mark. And I certainly wasn’t interested in pursuing anyone while a stack of fantasies awaited me. But still. Then a look crossed her face, like a new and singular idea had just taken her brain hostage to the detriment of all other thoughts.

“Wait one sec. Let me make a phone call. I’ll be right back.”

When she returned a minute later, she was still talking on her cell.

“Yup … yeah … she’s right here. Hold on.” She covered the receiver, her face open and hopeful. “Matilda wants to talk to you.”

Baffled, I took her phone from her.

“Hi, Matilda. What’s going on?”

“Dauphine, honey, I understand you might have some time on your hands. I have a rather exciting mission for you to consider, and at the same time, you’d be doing S.E.C.R.E.T. a big favor.”

Then she laid out what to a normal person would be a dream vacation: a free trip to Buenos Aires, where I’d stay in a five-star hotel and attend the auction of a rare painting, with plenty of time to see the sights and do some shopping. It sounded heady, glamorous and exciting. Except for the part about the plane.

“We’d pay your expenses and give you ample spending money, Dauphine. The auction is already arranged—you just have to show up and sign some papers on behalf of S.E.C.R.E.T.”

I thanked her and told her it all sounded amazing, incredible even, adding I was flattered and humbled to even be considered. In fact, Buenos Aires was a city I’d always hoped to see. But there was one small problem.

“The thing is, Matilda, I don’t fly. Ever.”

Cassie was listening to our conversation, and when she heard that, her eager smile turned to a frown.

“Oh, honey,” Matilda said, laughing. “Is that all that’s holding you back? Once a fear is exposed it’s no longer a fear. It’s an opportunity for a decision—to stay stuck or to go forward.”

I protested further, trying to explain.

“I hate being a passenger. I need to be at the wheel of things. I just … I can’t give up that control.”

“But you’ve let folks drive you around in a car, haven’t you?”

I told her at least with a car, I knew I could force it to the side of the road and get out. “A plane ride is not only a full-on commitment, it’s an act of faith, both in the plane’s ability to remain aloft and in my ability to trust a pilot to keep it there. And as silly as it sounds, I don’t have a lot of faith in either of those things, Matilda.” I added, “I don’t even have a passport.”

“Pfft. Details. We can get you one in twenty-four hours. Trust me when I tell you, Dauphine, that you can and will transform this fear into faith. Trust us. Trust this process.”

While Matilda continued to underscore the principles of flight, highlighting its best features and those also of Buenos Aires in the fall, Cassie carefully turned her paper coaster into an airplane, which she proceeded to fly over the top of my head. With sound effects.

What can I say? They wore me down, reminding me that I had told the Committee to surprise me.

After I accepted the trip and hung up, Cassie gave me a standing ovation in the middle of Tracy’s. Later, when I told Elizabeth I was getting on a plane, she was so proud of me she dragged a piece of vintage luggage, the kind without wheels, to my apartment to help me pack. In my preemptive terror I told her where all the important papers were, with strict instructions that if the plane went down, the store and all its assets would go to her, not to my sister, Bree.

“She can have a fur,” I said. “But not one of the minks.”

“Okay,” Elizabeth said. “But I’m sure it won’t come to divvying up your estate.”

“You never know. Life is weird. It throws things at you,” I said, tossing a pair of kitten heels into the suitcase. Indeed, I’d traveled from my initiation into S.E.C.R.E.T. to this, packing for a transcontinental flight. My eventual “yes” to Matilda came from the same place I found my yeses for my fantasy men so far, on a shelf below my doubt, in front of all my fears. Hopefully, there were a few more yeses left before boarding time.

Having never flown before, I so far hadn’t found much about travel to recommend it. The airport was both chaotic and bovine, generating this awful “hurry up and wait” syndrome that triggered stress sweats and the jitters.

“Heading to Buenos Aires?” a deep, accented voice asked, poking through my trance and startling me.

I turned to face a crisp white dress shirt, stretched over the fit chest of an exceptionally tall, exceptionally attractive black man. He was behind me in line, loading his plastic bin with a heavy platinum watch, a black eel-skin wallet and a carefully folded suit bag. Though dressed like a casual businessman, he had an easy smile that made him look more like a movie star.

“How do you know where I’m going?” I asked. I dropped my S.E.C.R.E.T. bracelet in my bin with a clang. I had thought of leaving it behind, but now that I had a couple of charms dangling off it, I enjoyed wearing it.

“I guessed.” He had a British accent, Cockney maybe. “Actually, it’s on your ticket. And it’s the first flight out this morning.”

If the gods were truly on my side, they’d give me this man to lean on during turbulence.

“Is that where you’re going too?” I asked, and yes, eyelashes were batted.

Before he could answer, a brusque security officer motioned me through the full-body X-ray. I stepped into the chamber, threw my hands in the air and spun, and then was reunited with my belongings. By the time I turned around to continue my conversation, the man was being ushered ahead of everyone in line, flanked by two men in uniform. He must have been someone important. He was definitely well dressed. Being in the fashion business, I noticed good buttons and well-chosen cufflinks and how a shirt that’s been properly tailored hangs spectacularly down a man’s V-shaped back as he walks away from you—turning back once, as this one did, to glance at you over his shoulder.

From the moment I sat down in my aisle seat in First Class, the cool blond flight attendant seemed specifically assigned to me.

“I’m Eileen. We were told this was your first time,” she said. “You let me know how I can make this less stressful for you.”

She brought me a hot towel, a small footrest and a stack of celebrity magazines, each time placing a reassuring hand on my forearm. During the taxi, she addressed her safety demonstration directly to me. And when the plane sucked me back into the seat on takeoff, a most shocking and intoxicating feeling, Eileen winked at me from her saddle seat. I almost burst into tears at her kindness, let alone at the thoughtfulness of Matilda to let them know of my first-timer status. Still, it wasn’t until we leveled off that I loosened the grip on my armrests, my fingers numb from clasping so tightly.

The seat-belt light went off, but I had no interest in unbuckling. In fact, my plan was to pass on every beverage, lest I had to pee while flying thirty thousand feet over Peru. I decided if I sat very, very still, I could get through this ordeal, a few hundred miles a minute, never leaving my seat, never looking out the window, even though the seat beside me was empty.

An hour and a half into the flight, we were all still alive, and I began to move my legs a little, tilting my seat back to settle in for the night flight. People began to close their windows, and Eileen dimmed the cabin lights before passing out extra blankets. When she kneeled in front of me, I thought for a moment that she was literally going to tuck me in. Instead, she deposited a folded blanket on my lap and leaned in to whisper, “Miss Mason, the captain would be happy to honor your request to visit the cockpit while the plane’s on autopilot.”

I burst out laughing. Never had anyone so seriously mistaken me for someone else.

“Oh, I didn’t ask for any such thing. I would never—”

Before I could finish my sentence, Eileen gently removed an envelope from the folds of my blanket and left it on my lap. “I’m sure we’re not mistaken,” she said, eyeing me steadily. “I’ll return in a few minutes to escort you.”

The envelope was unmarked, but I recognized the paper’s creamy color. My heart started to race. Was I facing Step Three at thirty-five-thousand feet in the air? My hand was shaky as I ripped open the envelope. Sure enough, Step Three scrolled on one side of the heavy card stock and just one simple word was on the other: Trust. But who was doing the trusting—me, or every one of the passengers on this plane who wouldn’t care to know how I was about to distract the pilot? I slipped the Step card into my purse and shook out a half-dozen Tic Tacs, which I barely had time to finish before the flight attendant returned.

“Are you ready, Miss Mason?”

I swallowed the remaining candy shards. “Um. Yes. I think so,” I said, trying to disguise the terror in my voice.

“An old friend of mine once said that a fear uncovered is no longer a fear. It’s an opportunity for a decision. Once you see how a plane operates, once you get an intimate look at all the buttons and levers, you can decide to end your fear of flying. Captain Nathan will be all too happy to help you.”

She was quoting Matilda! Eileen was one of us. She gave me her hand, and practically had to pull me to my feet because my legs were rigid with terror.

“There. See? That wasn’t so bad.”

We made it down the short aisle. Standing in front of the cockpit door, she gave three quick knocks. A second later, a sandy-haired young man with thick glasses and a space between his front teeth poked his head out. Oh dear. I hated to admit that my shallow Southern heart sank, though I politely pulled my grin a little wider, reminding myself what the C in S.E.C.R.E.T. stood for. If my fantasy man wasn’t … compelling, I didn’t have to go through with the fantasy.

“Is this our lovely visitor?” he asked with a lisp. Oh dear.

“Yes,” the flight attendant said. “Miss Dauphine Mason, this is our multitalented First Officer Friar. Miss Mason is keen to see what goes on in here. It might help her with her fear of flying.”

“Ah, yes. Dispel the mystery and the fear disperses. That’s Captain Nathan’s specialty. He can show you around while I stretch my legs. Three’s a crowd in here! Good luck!”

After enunciating all those s’s, First Officer Friar made a beeline to the back of the plane. Out the window in front was a dark sky; below, nothing but black water. The high whine of the engines masked the screams in my own head as my legs now turned to cement. Eileen nudged me through the narrow doorway.

“I’ll be back in a little while,” she said, looking at her watch. “Enjoy your flying lesson.”

She shut the door behind her.

The pilot sat silhouetted in the window. The only thing I could see above the seat was the back of his head. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, only his white shirt, the muscles on his arms apparent beneath his sleeves as he flicked a number of switches from left to right on a panel in front of him. Thankfully, the white noise drowned out my pounding heart.

“Be with you in a moment, Dauphine. I just want to make sure autopilot’s running smoothly. A robot takes over for most of the flight from now on. A very smart one.”

There it was. That accent again. The man from Security! The man with the sexy Cockney accent! The air left my chest and the pressure squeezed my lungs. Feeling tantalized and terrified at that same time had a bad effect on my stomach. I slapped both hands on the curved walls of the cockpit to steady myself as the plane rose and straightened. The pilot faced a wall of lights and levers that seemed to blink and shift on their own. Then he finally turned his chair around, aviators off, dark eyes on me. I gasped.

“Don’t worry, we’re on automatic, but we’re not going to be alone in here for long, so I apologize ahead of time for the furtive nature of our interlude,” he said, loosening the top button of his uniform. “But I need to know, before we continue with our tutorial on the safety of flight: Do you accept the Step, Miss Mason?”

I couldn’t believe this was happening.

“Here? Now?”

“Yes. Here and now. Trust me when I say I can help you with your fear of flying. And a few other things too, I suspect,” he said, leaning back into the plush leather of his pilot seat, taking me in from bottom to top.

“I’ve never been in an airplane before,” I muttered, stalling.

“I understand that,” he said, steepling his fingers. “But you are doing a fine job of your first time.”

Standing four feet from a complicated instrument panel that the pilot was no longer facing, I watched dark clouds whip by the nose of the plane through the high narrow windows.

“Are we … safe in here?”

“Very safe,” he said. “Safer than driving. Safer than almost any other activity you can do at hundreds of miles an hour, high in the air.”

“What if there’s turbulence?” I asked, just as we hit a little bump. I yelped. My arms flew up to grasp the ceiling.

He took it as a cue to gesture me over to him.

Here we go! I slowly, carefully, closed the gap between us, and over his shoulder got a better view of the world before me. It was dusk, but light poked through the clouds, illuminating little towns and villages nestled in the foot of a mountain range. They looked like a strand of jewels dropped from a great height. It was beautiful, but still I felt gut-punched and queasy. Levers and buttons continued to move in a ghostly way all around us.

“Turbulence is just air pockets. The plane will ride through it. And I’m right here if anything goes awry.”

I stood above him now, his head level with my breasts.

“Do you accept the Step?”

Handsome face, kind eyes, great smell, manly hands, but the clincher truly was his beautifully tailored shirt. Terribly shallow, I know.

“Yes, I accept.”

“Then may I help you off with your knickers?”

I almost laughed out loud at the old-fashioned British word for panties. I was wearing a pencil skirt and pumps, and a button-up pink angora sweater. The low ponytail completed my ’50s-housewife-on-an-errand look. It couldn’t be helped; planning my outfits always calmed me, and today I needed to be calm.

“Tell me more about how safe I am,” I begged, as his warm hands gently undid the back of my skirt, letting it drop to the floor.

“Well, Dauphine,” he said, inching my panties, or “knickers,” down, “takeoff is the hardest part. So much can go wrong. But we’re well past that now.”

Standing before him, I closed my eyes. I could feel his fingers unbuttoning my sweater, easing it off my shoulders. Ohh.

“Now the middle part of flight,” he said, leaning forward to nuzzle my soft line of pubic hair, kissing it. “That’s the easiest … sweetest part of the ride. But still, you never want to get complacent. Sometimes it’s deceptively easy. You still need to be careful, to watch for subtle signals.”

I stood over him, my legs trembling. He reached back to undo my pink satin bra, slid it forward and dropped it. Standing there naked, for a second I forgot the plane was flying on its own! It was black through the window. I wasn’t sure if we were flying over mountains or water, but I closed my eyes. If I couldn’t see it, it didn’t matter. I placed my hands on the ceiling again, pressing my body forward into him. He was so at ease, so in command as he gently urged my legs farther apart, reaching up to pinch and circle my nipples, like I was an instrument panel he knew exactly how to operate.

“How does the autopilot know what it’s doing?” I asked, so deeply aroused by his thumbs now expertly parting my cleft, I thought my knees would give.

“It listens to me. I tell it what to do and it follows my instructions,” he said, leaning forward to kiss my clitoris, now centered between his thumbs.

“Mmm, you taste so good, my darling,” he murmured, his fingers now joining his mouth, slowly gliding in and out, agonizing me. I felt every knuckle against my most tender parts, prodding my clitoris forward, as his mouth fully encircled me. I grabbed his head as it moved beneath me. Then I felt that rush, fast and hot, and the mounting energy as his urgent tongue fluttered and flicked, his fingers darting in and out. All I could do was shut my eyes and arch back, dying and shuddering as I exploded with a new kind of pleasure, moaning into the ceiling, his tongue lapping relentlessly at me, my hand over my mouth to muffle my cries.

“Oh my god! Oh yes … yes!” I whelped, trying to steady my legs as he urged his pants down, rolled on a condom and eased me down. Still in a daze, I felt every vein, every ridge, as I wilted onto his lap, my thighs straddling him in his captain’s chair, my feet barely touching the ground. A firm arm wrapped around my back, he moved up and into me, his brown eyes pleased as he took in my body, and I faced the fucking front of the plane and the window and, holy shit, would you look at that view! No, don’t look. Close your eyes, Dauphine. Don’t look!

“How much higher can this plane go?” I asked as he sped up his thrusts. Oh! The feeling of fullness!

“Much higher,” he whispered, as he began to grind hard beneath me, his hips gyrating, his arms weighing my hips down. “You just have to know how to drive it properly. You just have to have a feel for the plane, and its limits.”

With that, he turned fierce, and our bodies began pulsing harder on the chair. I grabbed the back to gain leverage.

“Oh god.”

“Can you feel how hard I am, Dauphine, how hard you make me?” he groaned, pumping up into me, holding me down to increase the friction of his pelvis against my clit.

“Yes! Oh yes. There,” I murmured, but he knew. He didn’t need my instructions.

I felt the heat building behind my belly button again, and again I came, falling forward as he turned the room into a blur, gripping my hips to take his own pleasure with a fierce resignation that came just after mine. He shuddered to a blissful stop, panting, my torso draping over him.

“That was incredible,” he said, breathless too, running his fingers across my back as it rose and fell. I opened my eyes to the windows again, clusters of lights below signaling sleepy towns full of people with no idea what was happening in the darkening clouds above their heads. And I was okay and the plane was okay and we were so alive.

“Better get you dressed, my darling. I’m afraid we went a little over schedule.”

He carefully lifted me off him and bent to hand me my sweater. As he stood to pull up his uniform pants and tuck and button his own shirt, I stepped into my panties and pulled my skirt up, finger-combing my hair back into its ponytail. We exchanged grins, each of us kind of proud of the other.

By the time Eileen knocked a few minutes later, the only thing that might have given us away, had Captain Nathan not snatched it from the floor and placed it under the plastic cap of an empty Styrofoam cup, was the condom. Then he reached around me for the handle to the cockpit door and pulled it open. I gave Eileen my widest, most guileless smile, my arms behind my back, my bracelet scratching the plastic wall.

“How is your visit going? A lot less stressed about flying, I hope?”

“Very much so,” I said. “Captain Nathan has taken the fear right out of me.”

“He does that well,” she said, with no hint of lasciviousness. “Let’s get you back to your seat, Dauphine. It’s rather warm in here. Here’s your Gatorade, Captain. We don’t want you dehydrated.”

She took me by the arm.

“Thank you, Captain,” I said. “Flying will never be the same for me.”

“I’m glad I could be of some help. Oh! Before you go, Dauphine,” he said, reaching into his shirt pocket, “we like to give visitors a little something. For trusting us. You’ve earned this.”

He handed me a small blue box.

“Dauphine gets her wings!” exclaimed Eileen with a little clap.

“Thank you,” I said, as Captain Nathan stood and gave me a deep bow.

By then, First Officer Friar had returned. “It was good of you to keep the captain company,” he said, squeezing past us. “It’s lonely up here sometimes.”

Eileen led me back to my seat. Was I imagining First Class eyes on me, noting my slight dishevelment, the flush in my cheeks?

Once seated and buckled up, I discreetly lifted the lid to the small blue box. Inside was a brooch shaped like wings, the airline’s logo in its center. Under the cotton puff, another gold-hued ornament, my Step Three charm, Trust written on the back. I pinned the wings to my sweater. The elderly woman seated across from me gave me a thumbs-up. What she made of the charm I then secured to my bracelet, I’ll never know. But after it was firmly in place, I pushed my seat back, slid my earphones on, closed my eyes and floated in a dream for the rest of the blessedly uneventful flight.