Page 96 of Act Three
Dean raised his sunglasses to give her a wink, and she practically swooned.
It was the same story going through security — we had our own separate entrance — and instead of sitting at the gate with the other passengers, the guys took me into an exclusive lounge area, which was fully stocked with all the food, drinks, and entertainment that anyone could want. The buffet was self-serve, but there was also a menu where you could order freshly cooked meals and my mouth watered as I read it.Slow-cooked beef ragu.Marinated lobster with caviar. Rack of lamb. Deep ocean sea perch.
“Order whatever you like,” Isaac said. “Our treat.”
The menu didn’t include prices, so I figured the meals must have been insanely expensive. I didn’t want to make the guys pay that much for my food, so I stuck to the buffet instead, selecting salads, snacks, and a glass of orange juice. The guys ordered their lunches from the menu and when the waiters brought the meals out, insisted that I try a bit of everything.
“You’re not a vegetarian, are you?” Wyatt asked, looking at my plate full of salads and nibbles with concern.
I laughed.
“Even if I was, I’d make an exception for this food.”
The lobster melted in my mouth. The sea perch tasted like nothing I’d ever tried before: it was satisfyingly meaty and seasoned to bring out the most incredible taste. The slow-cooked beef tasted like heaven. I was pleasantly full when Dean’s phone rang. He answered it, said, “Uh-huh,” a few times, hung up and told us the plane was ready.
We left the restaurant and walked through the airport, past the boarding gates that were numbered consecutively with large blue and white signs.
“Where’s our gate?” I asked as I double-checked my ticket. There was no gate number, just a destination code: LAX.
“We have our own private gate,” Isaac said. An airline staffer met us at one end of the terminal and led us through a locked door and down a spiral staircase. Another locked door at the bottom opened out on the tarmac and the four of us followed her out to a plane that was smaller than the jumbo jets that were parked along the main gates.
“You have aprivate jet?” I said aloud as I realized where we were being led.
“I don’t own it,” Dean said. “I hired it for this trip. It saves us from being recognized and mobbed by fans when we’re trying to get from one place to another.”
We climbed the steps to the wide door at the top. The front of the plane looked exactly how I’d expected from seeing them in movies: equipment, locked storage compartments, a locked door to the cockpit. But when we passed through the curtain-covered second door, my eyes widened. Where there would normally be rows of seats, we instead faced open space that contained only a few reclining leather chairs.
“This looks so comfortable!” I ran my hand over the back of one of the chairs. It was as soft as butter and filled with a stuffing so pillowy that if there were springs within the frame, I’d never be able to feel them.
“Welcome to the life of a movie star,” Wyatt said with a wink.
I sank into the chair and closed my eyes, already feeling like I could drift off to sleep in an instant. Dean sat in the chair next to mine, and Isaac and Wyatt sat on the opposite side of the plane.
I could get used to this, I thought.
Before I could, though, the pilot announced that we needed to fasten our seatbelts for takeoff, and I found mine in a compartment behind my lower back. I copied the guys as they slipped the mechanism into place. Someone bigger than me had used in this chair on its last flight, so I pulled the excess length through the buckle until it felt snug.
I heard a noise like an industrial-sized hairdryer as the plane rolled down the runway and turned to the right. Through the windows, I could see the long strip of grass next to the runway and beyond it, the cars on the highway looked like they were moving faster than we were.
The plane stopped moving, and I craned my neck to look out the window behind me, to see if there was something wrong. But then the engine roared even louder than before and the plane moved again. This time, instead of meandering at the speed of a car, it shot forward like a rocket, gaining speed until it felt like we were about to break through the fabric of space and time. Everything in the cabin rumbled, and it sounded like the luggage within the locked cabinets was about to shoot out of the metal and hit us.
I squeezed the armrests on my chair, half expecting the plane to explode.
“Is this normal?”
Isaac stared at me.
“Have you… never been on a plane before?”
“No, I haven’t.”
The plane’s nose lifted off the runway and gravity pushed me against the back of my seat. For a moment, all my internal organs felt weightless as the plane became airborne and I felt a strange twitch inside my body. It was almost like a small orgasm, and it made me crave the real thing.
“Not even as a kid?” Our conversation had grabbed Wyatt’s attention, and his eyebrows had risen so high that they were almost up to his hairline. “Australia’s so far away from the rest of the world. How did you travel?”
“Not everyone grew up with money,” Dean grumbled and gave me a sympathetic look, which I was grateful for. I knew that I didn’t have the same kind of privileged upbringing as theseguys, but I didn’t want to remind them how much I didn’t fit into their lives.
Outside the window, the grass and highways became smaller and further away. Buildings came into my view, and then the sparkling blue harbor. The pilot announced that we could unfasten our seatbelts, and a hostess brought a trolley that was loaded with drinks and snacks into the cabin and left it with us, disappearing into the rear compartment of the plane without saying a word.
