Page 98 of Scars Like Wings
“Well, let’s do this shit then,” Quinn said, wrapping her arm around me.
Cody and Quinn finished getting the jet ready for departure, which took no time at all. Then Cody went up to Maisie, lifted her up, and sat her down in his lap. She looked shocked and offended, but I noticed that she didn’t pull away from him. Yep, definitely going to bang. Most likely, more than once.
Quinn led me to the cockpit then. It was tiny, most likely due to the size of the jet. There were two seats even more comfortable and larger than the passenger chairs. The control panel in front of them held a number of buttons, switches, screens, gauges, and more that I could not even begin to comprehend. But then, there was the windshield and its view stretching in front and to the sides of us.
“Guess it’s a good thing I’m a window seat girl, huh?” I joked.
Quinn smiled. “Oh, do you have any sunglasses? It can get pretty blindingly bright up here.”
She took her own pair of polarized sunglasses from a compartment and passed me a pair with orange lenses. “Always prepared, huh?”
“Oh, I never joke about preparedness and safety,” She said, dramatically putting on the sunglasses and making me laugh.
Quinn took the seat to the left, so I took the one on the right. She lifted the large headset up and over her head before she passed me mine so I could do the same. She pulled themicrophone down and spoke. “Can you hear me there, baby girl?”
“This issofreaking cool. I feel like an astronaut!”
Quinn laughed.
“Are you sure you are going to be okay without Cody here as your co-pilot?”
Quinn gave me a look. “I promise you that me telling you which buttons to flip is just as good as having him up here. Trust me.”
Quinn got to work preparing us for take-off. As I sat back in the seat, I was enamored at how she knew when and which button to press or switch to flip out of the hundreds of controls. She steered the aircraft like it was a compact car, guiding us to the runway. I tried my damnedest to not stare at how her large hands gripped the steering handles. I swear I did everything I could to stop my mind from wondering how they would look gripping other things. I could hear the Air Traffic Control Dispatcher through my headset, and Quinn was able to answer her easily in the appropriate lingo and all. Nope, her knowledge didn’t make me crush harder on her than before. Neither did her smolder and wink toward me when she caught me with my face hot from a blush.
Gods, there was no reason that driving anything should be this insanely hot.
“Ready for take-off there, sweetness?”
“My dad’s favorite movie wasTop Gun. I was born ready.”
As Quinn laughed, we moved into position on the runway. The Dispatcher said we were clear. Quinn checked a few more gauges and controls. Then she accelerated toward the horizon, taking off into the sky.
I watched through the giant windshield as we lifted higher and higher into the air, the city and land growing smaller under us. I was a (mostly) human girl who lived in a world of magic—hell, one best friend was a mermaid and the other one was a witchanda fairy, so I was surrounded by it—but I still found magic in the little normal things like this. Cruising through the sky was like sailing through a different world to me: the waves of white clouds below us, the infinite blue ahead of us, and feeling closer to the stars above than the ground below. It was one of the places where I felt the most at peace.
It reminded me of when I was a kid. On Sundays, when Mom was busy grading papers and Pops was working overtime, Uncle Everett would come over and ask if I wanted to go on one of our “road trips.” We would go on all sorts of adventures that Everett had planned out in advance. One day, it might be going to the library to get more books for me to blaze through in a single afternoon. Another day, we would go on a drive through the mountains, stopping at shops and enjoying treats from the adorable mountain towns.
Most of the time, though, we would walk through the forest until we reached one of her many summits. It was always a different cliffside, never the same one twice. Once we reached it, Everett would shift. His tan skin would fill with feathers and fur. His ever-present wings grew larger, greater than they already were. His hands became talons, his feet lion paws, his mouth a beak, and he grew a long lion’s tail. After his change, he would always shake his now-towering eight-foot frame. He used to say shifting was like how you pull on clothes to get dressed, that feeling of getting settled into something to wear and making it fit correctly over your body. Fully shifted in his griffin-form, Uncle Everett would crouch down for me. Once I was aboard, he would turn, walk back toward the forest, turn back around, and gallop toward the edge. The closer we got to the edge, the more my heart would climb into my throat, stopping any screams I might have despite how many times we had done this before.
Soon, we would run out of ground. Then we would be diving. Uncle Everett would let us dive for a while, his wings close against his body and tickling my legs with his long feathers. His head pointed straight down. His talons and paws angled backward. The trees approached fast. The wind pushed my then-black curls back and made my eyes water. My heart would sink into my stomach. But just when I wanted to scream at Uncle Everett to pull up, just before we would hit the trees, he would untuck his wings. And we would soar high?—
No, we wouldfly.
We flew above the trees, caves, waterfall, and lake. Uncle Everett took us over my house and backyard leading into the forest I knew and loved. Over houses, stores, parking lots, and parks, he flew us among the clouds and near the stars. We flew beyond the world, the only things before us were the horizon and wind.
In the skies like this, my heart fluttered at the freedom, the possibilities. Everything about me felt light and untethered. I would give into the feeling, smiling so wide my cheeks would hurt. I would release my grip on Everett’s feathery mane and raise my arms into the air. The feeling was like holding your hand outside of a car on a windy day but times a million. The air would wrap around my arms like it was lifting me, like what happened in my ballet classes. It was one of the few times I felt weightless. If I closed my eyes, I could see myself flying, my own wings flapping to keep us aloft, my own body able to shift into something powerful. In those moments, I used to want it to be true, used to wish I wasn’t just a regular human girl.
It made my heart ache.
And my whole body hurt with hunger.
Now, something stirred within me, hard, rough, and restless.
Yet, I had no idea why.
What was going on? What was happening?—?
Suddenly, Quinn reached over the middle console of the cockpit and took my hand. I looked from the windshield to our hands together. I watched them as I rotated and interlaced our fingers together. They fit so perfectly together despite the size difference. It settled something in my spirit to hold her hand. Seeing my tawny brown with her tanned, rosy skin just felt right. It recentered me. I squeezed.