Chapter 213
[ 962 words ]
Katia’s POV
He served the food and sat across from me, and we ate in the quiet of a Sunday morning in Brooklyn with the city doing its thing outside the window and neither of us saying anything because apparently we had arrived at the kind of place where silence was not uncomfortable.
The eggs were good.
I did not tell him that. I ate them, and he drank his coffee, and we sat in the particular peace of two people who had decided, without quite saying it out loud, that this was where they were.
“What are your plans today?” Julian asked.
“Office,” I said. “I have the Meridian quarterly review, and Sam has been chasing me about the p>
“Clear your schedule,” he said.
I looked at him.
“We have a date,” he said.
I stared at him. “A date p>
“It is not as though we have never been on a date before, Kitten.” He picked up his coffee. “I want you to teach me something p>
“Teach you what p>
“How to fly a jet,” he said. “Since you are apparently a woman of many talents p>
I looked at him across my kitchen table.
He looked back at me steadily.
“You know,” I said.
“I know,” he said. Simply. Without elaboration. Without the hundred questions that should have followed it.
I held his gaze for a moment.
“Okay,” I said.
We showered together.
It was not the urgent kind — it was the unhurried, ordinary kind, the kind that happened between people who had decided they were comfortable in each other’s space. We did not perform it. We just showered, passing the shampoo, moving around each other in the small space without difficulty, like we had been doing it for years.
We got dressed.
We left together.
Julian’s hangar was at a private airstrip forty minutes from the city. I had known he had one—men like Julian Windsor had private jets the way other men had cars—but I had not known the scale of it until the car pulled through the gate and I saw what was waiting.
Three jets.
The middle one stopped me.
A Gulfstream G700. Matte white with a single dark stripe along the fuselage. The newest configuration, the extended cabin, the range to cross any ocean without stopping. I had seen one at a race event in Dubai and had spent twenty minutes walking around it while the owner explained its details to someone who was not listening as carefully as I was.
“Choose,” Julian said.
I looked at the three jets.
I walked to the G700.
I put my hand on the fuselage the way I put my hand on a car before a race—feeling the material of it, the quality, the particular solidity of something built to a very high standard.
“This one,” I said.
Julian looked at it. Then at me. “That is the most expensive aircraft I own p>
“I know,” I said.
He almost smiled. “Of course you do p>
He followed me up the stairs.
The cockpit was exactly what I expected — two seats, dual controls, the G700’s updated avionics suite with the touch-screen panels and the heads-up display that made everything cleaner than the older configurations. I sat in the left seat. Julian sat to the right. He looked at the instrument panel with the expression of a man who was intelligent enough to know how much he did not know.
“Walk me through it,” he said.
I walked him through it.
Pre-flight checks first—systematic, thorough, the way my racing instructor had taught me to do vehicle checks before I was allowed near a circuit. Julian followed everything. He asked questions that were good questions, the kind that came from someone who was paying genuine attention rather than feigning interest.
We taxied.
Then we were in the air.
The G700 climbed at a rate that pressed you back into the seat in a way I had never stopped enjoying. Julian felt it too—I saw his hands on the co-pilot controls tighten slightly and then deliberately loosen as he absorbed the sensation and decided it was something he was going to be comfortable with.
“Altitude,” I said. “Keep your eyes on it. You want to level at thirty-five thousand p>
“Thirty-five,” he said.
“Watch the horizon indicator, not the window. The indicator p>
He watched the indicator.
We levelled.
I gave him the controls.
He took them with the careful, focused attention of a man who understood that what he was holding was significant and was not going to be casual about it. He made mistakes—small ones, the kind that beginners made, overcorrecting, responding a half-second late—and I corrected him each time without comment.
“You are fighting it,” I said. “Stop fighting it. The aircraft wants to fly. You just guide it p>
He adjusted his grip.
“Better,” I said.
We flew for two hours. He improved faster than I expected — which I should have expected, because Julian Windsor improved at everything faster than expected. By the second hour, he was holding a steady course and adjusting for the wind without being told and asking questions about instrument landing systems that were considerably more advanced than a first lesson required.
I answered all of them.
At some point over the Atlantic, he looked across at me from the right seat.
“You are good at this,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“How long p>
“Six years,” I said.
He looked at me for a moment. Then he looked back at the horizon indicator.
“You are full of surprises, Katia,” he said.
I did not answer.
But somewhere over the ocean, with Julian Windsor in my right seat learning to fly and the sky enormous around us, I thought that the same thing was probably true of him.
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