Wheels Up

Bella kissed her husband goodbye at Terminal 4 of Meridian International Airport with the exact right amount of tenderness—lingering enough to look devoted, brief enough to not hold up the line of black cars behind them.

“I’ll miss you,” she said. She touched his cheek. She meant none of it.

“Three weeks,” Richard said, adjusting his carry-on. “I’ll call when I land.” He kissed her forehead—the lamp kiss, always the lamp kiss—and walked into the terminal not looking back. Bella stood at the curb and watched him disappear through the automatic doors, and then she stood there for another ten seconds because that’s what a devoted wife would do in case anyone was watching.

She got back in the car. Closed the door. Sat in the driver’s seat with her hands at ten and two, engine idling, watching a Southwest plane climb into the gray October sky.

And then she exhaled.

It came out of her like she’d been holding it underwater—long, shaky, almost obscene. Her whole body softened. Her shoulders dropped. Her spine uncurled from the rigid posture she’d been holding for the eleven days Richard had been home, and she slumped against the seat like a woman who’d just set down something impossibly heavy.

Three weeks. Twenty-one days. No chewing sounds. No gym comments. No seven-minute sex followed by three minutes of snoring. No performing. No pretending. No Mrs. Lune.

She turned up the radio. Some song she didn’t know—something with bass and a beat that had no business being on at ten in the morning. She rolled the windows down. The October air hit her face, and she pulled onto the expressway with the volume at a level that would’ve made Richard wince, and she drove.

By the time she reached Plyth Valley, she was singing along to a song she’d only heard twice, and she was smiling—not the assembled smile, not the country club smile, but an actual, involuntary, stupid grin that she could feel all the way in her chest.

Freedom tasted like highway air and bad pop music, and she wanted to swallow the whole thing.

* * *

Back at the estate, she changed into a bikini—black, simple, a bikini that didn’t try hard because it didn’t need to—grabbed a towel, a magazine she had no intention of reading, and a pair of sunglasses that cost more than a used car, and walked out to the pool.

The pool was a problem. It had been cloudy for two days, the filter was making a sound like a cat in distress, and the pH was probably off because Richard refused to let her hire a full-time maintenance service. He preferred Bella to “just call someone when it needs it.” Which was convenient, because Bella had someone to call.

She picked up her phone and dialed Ashton Valentine.

He answered on the second ring. “Mrs. Lune.” She could hear the grin in his voice. “What can I do for you?”

“The pool needs attention.”

“The pool. Right.” A pause. “Mr. Lune home?”

“London. Three weeks.”

“I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

He made it in thirty.

Ashton Valentine was twenty-six, blonde, blue-eyed, and tan in a way that suggested he’d been born on a surfboard and simply never gotten off. He pulled up to the estate in a white pickup with Pool Pros Plyth Valley on the side, climbed out carrying a testing kit and a net, and walked through the back gate like a man arriving at a party he’d been looking forward to all week.

“Mrs. Lune.” He set the kit down by the pool’s edge and looked at her—sunglasses, bikini, bare legs stretched along the lounger, magazine open to a page she hadn’t glanced at once. His eyes traveled the full length of her and he didn’t pretend they didn’t. “Pool looks rough.”

“It’s been neglected.”

“That’s a shame.” He crouched beside the water and dipped a test strip. “A pool like this should be getting regular attention.”

Bella lowered her sunglasses and looked at him over the frames. “I agree.”

This was the game they’d been playing for months. Ashton had been servicing the Lune pool since spring—showing up every other week, testing chemicals, skimming leaves, making small talk that got less small every visit. It started with eye contact that lasted a beat too long. Then it was compliments that weren’t about the pool. Then it was Bella coming outside in progressively smaller swimwear and Ashton finding reasons to stay progressively longer. They’d been circling each other like two people who both knew where this was headed but were enjoying the anticipation too much to rush it.

Today felt different. The air had a charge to it—Richard’s absence, the empty house, the way Ashton kept looking at her like she was the only thing in this entire nineteen-room estate worth paying attention to. Nobody had looked at her like that in years. Not with hunger. Not with heat. Not like they actually saw her.

“Your pH is a little high,” he said, holding up the strip.

Bella sat up on the lounger. Swung her legs over the side. “Is that so?”

Ashton stood. He was close now—close enough that she could see the sunlight catching the fine blonde hair on his forearms, close enough to smell chlorine and something warmer underneath, sunscreen maybe, or just skin. He looked down at her and she looked up at him and the game they’d been playing for months ran out of moves.

“You going to fix it?” she said.

He grinned. That wide, reckless, beautiful grin. “Yeah. I’m going to fix it.”

* * *

He kissed her first. She’d give him that.

He leaned down and caught her mouth mid-sentence—she’d been about to say something clever, something to keep the banter going, but his lips found hers and the words died on contact. He tasted like spearmint gum and recklessness, and Bella grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him down onto the lounger with a force that surprised both of them.

“Shit,” he breathed against her mouth, laughing. “Okay.”

“Shut up.” She kissed him harder. Deeper. Her fingers found the hem of his t-shirt and pulled it over his head, and dear God, the body on this boy—tan, toned, a chest that belonged on a billboard or a very specific category of website. She ran her palms flat across his stomach and felt every muscle tighten under her touch.

Ashton’s hands found the tie at the back of her bikini top. He paused. “Yes?”

“If you ask me that again I’ll do it myself.”

He pulled the string. The top fell away and his mouth dropped to her neck, her collarbone, the curve of her breast, and Bella arched into him with a gasp that had absolutely nothing performative about it. This was the difference. This was the canyon between what she’d done in that dark bedroom three nights ago and what was happening right now in the broad daylight beside her own swimming pool. She was here. Present. Every nerve ending wide awake and screaming.

She pushed him back until he was sitting upright on the lounger and climbed onto his lap, straddling him. His hands gripped her hips—hard, instinctive—and she rolled against him and felt exactly how much he wanted her.

“Christ,” he muttered. His head fell back. “You’re going to kill me.”

“Not yet.”

She reached between them, undid his shorts, and took him in her hand. Ashton sucked air through his teeth and his fingers dug into her thighs. She stroked him slowly—watching his face, reading every twitch and exhale, taking her time because for the first time in longer than she could remember, time was hers to take.

“Bella—”

“Say it again.”

“Bella.” Rougher now. Almost pleading.

She slid her bikini bottoms to the side and sank onto him, and the sound that came out of her mouth was nothing she’d ever faked. Low, guttural, real. Ashton’s grip tightened on her waist as she set the pace—slow first, agonizingly slow, until his jaw clenched and his hips lifted to meet hers with a desperation that made her feel powerful in a way she’d forgotten she could.

She rode him in the afternoon sun with the water shimmering beside them and the sky wide open above and not a single thought in her head about grocery lists or landscapers or pool filters or the man on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic who thought she was home reading a magazine.

Ashton was enthusiastic and generous and vocal in a way that Richard had never been—he told her how good she felt, told her she was gorgeous, gripped her ass with both hands and watched her move above him with an expression somewhere between awe and disbelief, like he couldn’t quite believe this was happening to him on a Tuesday afternoon.

When she came, it hit her like a wave she hadn’t seen building—sudden, full-body, her back arching and her nails digging into his shoulders as the pleasure ripped through her in a way that felt almost violent after months of feeling nothing at all. She cried out—loud, unguarded—and Ashton followed seconds later, pulling her down against him, his face buried in her neck, both of them breathing like they’d sprinted the length of the estate.

They stayed like that for a long moment. Tangled, panting, the sun warm on her bare back.

Then Ashton laughed. A genuine, full-body, delighted laugh.

“What?” Bella said.

“Nothing. Just—” He leaned back, looked at her, shook his head. “That was the best house call I’ve ever made.”

She laughed. Actually laughed. A real one. The kind that comes from your stomach and catches you off guard and makes you feel, for a moment, like a person instead of a performance.

* * *

They drank beer afterward. Ashton in his shorts, Bella in his t-shirt and her bikini bottoms, sitting on the edge of the pool with their feet in the water. The light was turning golden, late-afternoon amber, and the estate was so quiet she could hear birds in the hedgerow.

“So,” Ashton said, tilting his bottle toward her. “Three weeks.”

“Three weeks.”

“That’s a lot of pool maintenance.”

Bella took a sip and looked at the water. Calm. Clear. Somebody had fixed the pH after all.

She didn’t feel guilty. She’d expected to—had braced for the wave of shame and regret that she’d been raised to believe was supposed to follow this kind of thing. Catholic school. Her mother’s voice. The entire infrastructure of You Should Feel Bad About This.

But the guilt didn’t come. What came instead was something lighter. Relief, maybe. Or just the simple, animal satisfaction of being wanted by someone who actually looked at her when she was in the room.

Ashton stood, pulled on his shirt—the one she handed back reluctantly—and gathered his testing kit. He walked to the back gate with the easy, loose-limbed stride of someone who’d nowhere urgent to be and no reason to pretend otherwise. At the gate, he turned.

“Same time next week?”

Bella leaned against the pool fence and smiled. “The pool always needs maintenance.”

He winked. The gate closed behind him. She heard the truck start, the crunch of gravel, then nothing.

She stood alone in the last of the afternoon light, barefoot on warm stone, wearing a man’s t-shirt and a bikini bottom and a grin she couldn’t seem to take off.

All she knew, standing barefoot beside her pool in the fading sun, was that she’d just felt something for the first time in two years.

And she wasn’t done feeling.