Never Too Late to Play: Layovers 1

Thanksgiving was a good way to recharge, but unfortunately I didn't get as much writing done as I'd intended. My other job (also known as my main income) has ramped up quite significantly in the last two weeks, and heading into the holidays, I think it's going to be pretty intense. I didn't want to leave you fine folks completely hanging, though, so here's the first chapter of Layovers. This one's not been edited yet, so there may be typos. Apologies in advance!

Oh, and this cover tile is mostly a placeholder. I wiped it up super quickly this morning, although I don't hate it either.

Chapter 1

Her stomach kept dropping, long after the plane touched down along the rain-slick runway. It kept dropping as she gathered her roller bag, as she deboarded through the long gangway and past the lines of imminent travelers, lined up and ready to board. It kept dropping even as her heels finally met solid ground. 

“It was nice to meet you, Julianna,” said the man who had been sitting beside her on the flight.

“Thanks. You, too.” Julianna couldn’t remember his name, despite having spent the last four hours chatting with him. She felt bad about that, but her mind was far more preoccupied with other things.

The last month had somehow felt like a lifetime and the blink of an eye all at once. After her birthday surprise, she’d kept in touch with a few of the guys, chatting sometimes throughout the day with one or two.

Cole seemed the most eager to message and meet her. If she’d given him her home address and invited him over, she was pretty sure that he would have jumped at the opportunity.

That did give her a bit of a pause, but she enjoyed the flattery and the back and forth. There was something wild about exchanging messages with another man. Mostly, they discussed mundane things—what kind of food did she like or what movies he’d seen lately. He liked to share things about himself—he’d been married, but divorced for ten years. He had a teenage daughter who lived with her mother in Florida. He never asked for personal information about her, though, and she was grateful for that.

When she’d agreed to meet Cole for a drink, it had felt abstract, the way making plans in the future always felt abstract—“Sure, I can write a report next spring” or “the wedding is next year.” But like all commitments, as the day grew closer, all the nervousness and pressure started to build.

What if Cole was a psycho? What if he was a fake? She’d never actually even spoken to him on the phone or heard his voice. He could be a kid. He could be an AI!

She wheeled her bag to a quiet spot, away from the other travelers, and pulled out her phone. The air carried that recycled taste that all airports had, but it was fresh and beautiful after being on a plane for so long.

Shaking out her long, dark hair, she called home.

“A phone call?” her husband, Stephen, greeted.

“I just needed to hear your voice.” Julianna played with the button at the top of her roller bag’s handle. “I just landed in Phoenix.”

She had a layover for a few hours before reaching her final destination. Looking around, it was funny how well she knew this airport now. Before, it had been just this—a short stop before moving on to her next place. Now, with Garrett living here, she’d started to know where the shops were, the bathrooms, the quickest way to get to baggage claim.

“So you going to see him?” Stephen asked. Julianna blinked, remembering that she was on the phone.

“That’s the plan.” She checked her watch. She had a little over two hours, so not a whole lot of time. That alone made her nervous. “This isn’t a good idea, you know.”

“I think it’s a great idea.” She could hear the eagerness in her husband’s voice.

“Of course you do. You’re not the one who may miss her flight.”

“And if you do, so what? There will be others. Sky Harbor is a hub. I’m sure there are plenty of flights to LA.”

“And what if I miss all of them?”

“You’re looking for an excuse to not go meet him. But Jules, this is the perfect opportunity. It’s time-bound. It’s public. It’s just coffee.”

That falling sensation was back. It wasn’t just coffee. It was coffee with another man. It was coffee with Anthony.

“What if Garrett sees me?”

Stephen’s laugh on the other end was real and genuine. “Now you’re really searching for an excuse. Next, you’re going to go on about how you ‘he’s going to take one look at me and think that I’m old.’”

“I was going to save that excuse for when I’m meeting up with Cole later.”

Stephen snorted. Julianna laughed.

“Okay, fine, I’ll go. It’s just… it’s just coffee.”

“Right. Just coffee.” She giggled to herself at his barely checked excitement. He added, “I love you so much, Julianna. You’re incredible.”

“Uh huh. I’ll text you when my connecting flight is boarding.”

“Or not if you decide to stay longer,” he said hopefully.

“That’s not going to happen, dear. I’ve got meetings in LA that I need to get to.” That was her ultimate destination—where she actually had legitimate business, and also… “And what about Cole?”

Her drink with Cole had her more nervous than her coffee date with Anthony. There were no expectations with Anthony—she had two hours and 8 minutes with him in a public space, and while she did kiss him a few months back, that felt like a lifetime ago. With Cole… well, that felt more like an actual date. With another man.

“I’m sure he’ll understand if you need to reschedule,” Stephen said. “You’ve got him wrapped around your—”

“Stephen, please stop.” She was suddenly feeling very overwhelmed. Half-a-year ago, if someone had told her that she would be meeting up with a man for a drink and plenty of ulterior motives, she would have laughed it off. Now, she was seeing two guys in the span of as many days, and it was all feeling like a lot. “You’re setting unfair expectations here. It’s just a drink. Okay?”

“Okay, yes. I’m sorry, Jules.

“I love you, honey, silly fantasies and all.”

“I love you, Julianna. Have fun. Bye.”

When the line went dead, she felt untethered once again. Life moved about her, serious people in a rush to get to the next place. That’s what airports were all about these days—no one lingered here, no one enjoyed these experiences. They were waiting places between one adventure and the next.

Only not for Julianna. Not today. Today, the layover was the adventure.

***

It had been four months since Stephen had first confessed his fantasy to her the last time they were in Phoenix. In that time, they’d created a profile for her on a questionable dating service named Debauch, she’d started messaging strange men, and was now, for the first time in her life, considering actually sleeping with someone else.

Any question that Stephen was game for this was gone, though. She no longer doubted that he had the “hotwife” fantasy, as he called it. After the confession, it was like the cap of a geyser had been twisted off. He’d sent her a boatload of literature on the fantasy—essays and articles were first, but later came the books of hotwife erotica that he’d apparently been reading for years. She was floored.

He’d done most of the crafting of the Debauch profile, but given her ultimate executive oversight. He’d taken photos of her, edited them, cropped them, posted them. It was wild, but also… fun. Really fun. Dizzyingly fun, at times, when she wasn’t worried about the reality of it all.

She was a 55-year-old woman, after all, and while she acknowledged that she looked great, and she enjoyed the attention that she got in a pair of tight jeans and heels, she still couldn’t compete with girls in their twenties.

They had a system going. Stephen would screen all the messages coming through on Debauch through some complex system of his own design, reaching out to those who passed like an erotic recruiter. If they passed the first “interview,” he would pass them her contact information on Kik, and they’d reach out.

Even with all of that work, most of the guys that got through just didn’t do it for her. They were either boring or pushy or arrogant or just… something. By this point in her life, she wasn’t going to settle for just anyone. It was a liberating realization, actually. In this digital age, she could just ignore the account and that was that.

She did have a regular chat thing going on with a few guys, though, and even now, she felt a giddy flutter in her stomach when she checked her messages and saw that she had some from her “gentlemen suitors.”

Of them all, though, it was Anthony who got her heart racing the most. Maybe it was because she’d actually met him before, had actually already been charmed by him, had a drink with him, kissed him. She squirmed every time she recalled that moment, as close to a real life guilty pleasure as she’d ever had.

In the beginning, after he’d reached out on her birthday, their exchanges had come fast and furious. Then he’d dropped off the face of the earth for a week, completely non-communicative. During that time, she’d vow that she was done with him… until he showed back up and apologized for his absence. Julianna was used to being pursued, for people to work to get into her life, and Anthony’s refusal to do that only made her more intrigued.

That’s what led her to this moment, pulling her bag down the one-way corridor of the terminal’s exit as her stomach, once again, plummeted. When she’d booked her flight to LA and saw that it happened to stop in Phoenix, she debated even telling him. Stephen encouraged her to, and when she had, he’d made the offer—“There’s a coffee shop close to the airport. Come meet me and I’ll buy you a drink.”

The two weeks leading up to this trip had been fun, to say the least. Stephen had been so cute. He was like a kid trying to hide his anticipation for Christmas. She’d done her best to tease him, making sure that he saw her texting Anthony or Cole on her phone—even though she wasn’t always texting the men.

Their sex life had been amazing ever since her last trip to Phoenix, but over the last two weeks, Stephen was insatiable—and, honestly, so was Julianna. Probably nothing was going to happen, but even still, that “nothing” was going to happen with men who wanted to have sex with her, and who, she only ever admitted in the darkest part of the night, she wanted to have sex with, too. She blushed every time she even thought about it.

Stephen helped her pick out what to wear for the trip. She was spending hours on a plane, so it wasn’t like she was going to wear a minidress or something more appropriate for a nightclub.

They’d settled on her favorite pair of jeans—tight with a bit of elasticity to show off her butt and legs—and a sleeveless, black blouse. Stephen wanted her to leave an absurd number of buttons undone. She’d settled on three—which was already more than she was comfortable with. The guy on the plane beside her couldn’t stop staring into the deep cleavage presented by the Victoria’s Secret Miracle bra that Stephen had bought her. 

She fidgeted with the third button on her Uber ride to the coffee shop. Was this too desperate? Was all of this too desperate? Something about this man was different from the other guys she’d been messaging, and as the rideshare pulled up to the hole-in-the-wall coffee shop on the outskirts of Phoenix, she realized why—she knew that he was real.

The air was hot as she stepped out and thanked her driver. Her fingers shook as she retrieved her phone and gave him his tip and rating. “5 stars, thanks for facilitating my affair.”

Deep breath now. Maybe he wouldn’t even be there. She hoped that he wasn’t. She anticipated her own disappointed relief.

“Julianna, you came.”

No, he was definitely here.

Chapter 2 will maybe post Friday, but no guarantees. I've got some big deadlines between now and then.