Never or Forever (from 3rd book in the Year of the Chick series)

Chapter One

(These chapters are from the third book in a series, and takes place in exciting Paris! ) If you'd like to begin with the first book in the series, it's available for free in its entirety on Wattpad! It's call "Year of the Chick" and here's the link: http://www.wattpad.com/story/1568271-year-of-the-chick )

Please don’t let me die.

Not here.

Not like this.

I gripped the armrests, hoping the plane would survive this “turbulence gone wild.”

Next time I’m taking a boat.

We were somewhere over the Atlantic in the middle of the night, still hours away from Paris and the start of my new existence.

When the plane did its latest dramatic drop, a lady in the back screamed, which made someone else vomit, which made a small child cry out; it was a chain reaction of horror, that ended with my nails digging into the armrests.

Now was the time to clutch the strong hand of the burly man seated beside me. He would save me from this aircraft catastrophe, of course he would.

In reality there was no man, nor any person at all I could use as a human shield. Instead the seat beside me was the one and only empty spot on the entire plane. This one vacant seat clearly symbolized my journey of leaving behind everything to move to a continent I’d never been to.

Paris, the city of love, where I, for one, would be totally alone.

Who even does things like that?! Twenty-two-year-olds, that’s who.

If age was just a number, I felt myself aging far beyond my thirty-one years as the plane kept bumping along.

I shifted my attention to the flight attendant across from me, safely buckled up in her special pull-down chair. Her plastered-on smile was the very same one she’d used when explaining how to convert the bottom of the seat into a flotation device, in the seconds before the plane crashed into the ocean.

The plane bumped aggressively now, but her smile didn’t crack a single bit.

What a pro.

She was a rather attractive flight attendant, probably in her thirties. Her alleged age made the absence of a wedding ring all the more noticeable, while her face showed signs of fatigue she’d tried to hide with cheery blush and mascara. I wondered if she was lonely. Correction: I hoped that she was lonely, so I didn’t have to be the only one without a welcome wagon in Paris, or even a single soul to say hello to.

Just as my brain started over-analyzing what the tightness of her ponytail must mean in terms of her sense of adventure, I realized the plane wasn’t shaking anymore. Moments later the seatbelt sign turned off, and the attractive but potentially lonely flight attendant quickly disappeared into the back.

“Thank god,” I muttered, my hands now dislodged from the armrests at last.

A woman two seats over clapped her hands. “Now I can finally read again!” She was an older lady, and her voice carried the distinctive crackle that comes from a life of chain-smoking. The voice however was not her biggest offense; neither were her hollowed out eyes, yellowed teeth, or the loud smacking sounds she’d made an hour earlier, when devouring the airplane version of “chicken parmesan.” Even her tiny shorts weren’t the most horrid thing of all (though the forecasted weather in Paris was only twelve degrees Celsius).

She could’ve been wearing a thong bikini for all I cared, but how she spent her time on the plane was unfathomable, illogical, and just plain disturbing.