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Elle fell forward against her dining table and blew out a large breath that she had inhaled the moment her ex walked through the door. Her lungs were lighter, but her heart? Not so much.
“At least I got to the bottom of that.” She sat up again, wiping something from her eye. She needed to touch up her makeup for a video meeting she was about to have with Agnes Wong. Not only was she going to bat for Arianna to stay in the company, but she wanted to personally relay their recent engagement. If nothing else, Elle would present every intention to make this relationship anything but frivolous.
She had her work cut out for her, but that’s what love did to a woman.
Six Months Later
The first anniversary since Elle and Arianna locked eyes came and went without much acknowledgment. Likewise, the first anniversary of Royal Asia’s inaugural flight passed… except that garnered the kind of media attention the company liked to see.
Profits were growing. Customer satisfaction was steady. Marketing was on fire with a new line of commercials, magazine ads, and online promotions. The only thing Arianna wasn’t privy to was the internal push and pull that occurred whenever one director wanted one thing and another objected on the grounds of money or public perception.
She had come out on top in the wake of her scandal, and that was all she pushed.
The Californian sun greeted her as she stepped out of the Santa Monica house she currently rented with Elle while they searched for a more permanent place to call home in the coming years. Arianna wasn’t in a hurry. She had a work visa that allowed her to stay in Los Angeles year-round. Hell, not just LA. All of America was her travel oyster as long as someone was around to sponsor her. Including the fiancée, who was off to a board meeting downtown.
They shared a kiss before getting into Elle’s car. A long ride awaited Elle, but she didn’t mind leaving early if it made it easier for Arianna to get to work without hiring someone to drive a woman who had never earned a license. Until moving to America, I never needed to. She missed the MRT every day, but Los Angeles was so sprawling that it didn’t matter. It was like night and day!
The drive to LAX only took forty minutes that morning. Elle saw her fiancée off with another kiss and complimented her uniform, a Westernized version of the famous Royal Asia kebaya with a white jacket and matching skirt. The purple mosaic piping complemented the scarf that made everyone’s heads turn when Arianna strolled by with her hair up, makeup perfect, and a black leather bag rolling behind her.
Even the other Royal Asia employees, many of them ground crew and flight attendants waiting for their preflight meetings to begin, looked askance at the original Queen of the Skies who called LAX her base.
“Good luck!” cried Sherry, who sat with another flight attendant before security. “Today’s the big day for the crew, right?”
Arianna didn’t have time to stay and chat, so she offered a friendly smile as she kept walking. “Yes! Thank you! Have a good flight yourself!”
Not every TSA agent recognized her by now, but many did, and the older gentlemen were likely to change their tone while the women – of every age – looked her up and down as if Arianna had descended from a fluffy cloud. The impervious fabric of her uniform had that effect on people, and she didn’t mind at all.
She flashed her Malay passport. Her American work visa. Her Singaporean credentials. She was soon in the crew-only security line, like old times.
Once she was near the gates, she flagged down a Royal Asia pilot who was also en route to the same door as her.
“Ready for today?” Riley pulled a schedule from her briefcase. “Ms. Song.”
One of the first things to tickle Arianna was going from “Miss” on her Singaporean paperwork to “Ms.” It was such a little thing, but to her, it was another sign that her life was undergoing important changes. She was twenty-nine, and closer to thirty than away from it. Her job position in Royal Asia was not the same as before – her return as a flight attendant, on any route, was non-negotiable. Instead, they had another role for her. One rallied for by not just Elle who had the biggest pull of everyone, but her numerous coworkers who insisted on taking everything to the media if Royal Asia didn’t want to avoid their first big scandal.
Turned out the union wasn’t so bad!
“I should be asking you if you’re ready.” Arianna waited for Riley to open a secure door before stepping through first. The air conditioning was more potent in the drab hallways now that it was only the two of them instead of thousands of passengers processing through LAX. “There are numerous young flight attendants about to meet you for the first time. Women you will undoubtedly try to sleep with.”
“Hey, I’ll let you know that I’ve been a very good girl since Christmas. I’ve only slept with one or two women.”
“Since Christmas?”
“You know. Since Christmas.”
Arianna avoided eye contact, lest she blush. We don’t talk about it. Her birthday was conveniently close to Christmas, a holiday she didn’t think much about until moving to Los Angeles and suddenly being surrounded by Santa Claus and Jesus. Sometimes in that order.
“Working on myself,” Riley said to chill the air between her and a flustered Arianna. “Although do put a good word in for me with your sister. She was really cute.”
“Even if she were interested, which she is not,” Arianna said, continuing to walk with such purpose that Riley struggled to keep up, “I would never let my sister date a hussy like you.”
“Oh, God, she learned another new word.”
“Because your Mandarin lessons have lapsed! Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
Arianna focused on the door before them instead of further indulging in one of her friend’s biggest pastimes. Flirting, gossip, and God knows what else. Riley was like a big sister who needed corralling by the rest of the family, otherwise she’d descend into a spiral of self-destruction. Unlike Arianna, she was still on the LAX-Singapore route that had recently celebrated its first anniversary. Soon, a new crop of flight attendants would be assigned to the burgeoning routes to Hawaii, Sydney, New York, and Jakarta.
I still wouldn’t mind doing a Hawaiian route… She still dreamed of visiting again but refused to let Elle take her until their honeymoon. Somewhere between one and two years from now. They still had yet to set a date, let alone make any plans!
