“Took you long enough!” Jill said as I walked through the open main doors of the hanger.
I laughed, then gave a long, appreciative wolf-whistle.
She was sitting in the left-hand seat of Margaret, my dad’s old Bell-47 helicopter, the one my brother Steve and I had spent three of our teenage years helping dad refurbish and bring back to life. She was mine now, and I’d flown her over twenty-five hundred hours over the years. Jill had somewhere north of six or seven hundred herself, having earned her pilot’s license with my dad instructing her back when we’d first gotten together.
She was wearing a short baby blue gingham sundress, showing a lot of leg. What really grabbed my attention was on her feet. Her legs were crossed, one foot dangling out of the cockpit showing off a pair of powder blue, patent leather Mary Jane’s with three inch heels that matched her dress, and white ankle socks with a lace ruffle that turned down with a blue satin ribbon along the edge. She knew my weakness.
“Where did you get those?!” I asked.
“What, the shoes? Or the socks?”
“They’re both hot as hell, but those socks are identical to the ones I got you the first week we were together. I thought they’d worn out years ago.”
“Oh they did. Took me a while to find a perfect match online. The shoes came from that vintage clothing store in Adams Morgan.” She gracefully pointed the toe of one shoe towards me. “They were a perfect fit, how could I not get them?”
“No complaints here.”
“Me either. You look yummy, baby!”
I looked down at myself.
“I guess. Sorry my leg doesn’t match.” The sleeve over my knee that held my prosthetic onto my calf stump was boring gray neoprene.
“I don’t care, I love that outfit. Gets my rotor turning.”
I grinned to hear her using the same expression I’d used to myself minutes ago.
“So what am I doing in it?”
“Climb on up here and we’ll talk.”
“As you wish.”
We’d done a rewatch of the classic movie The Princess Bride a few weeks ago and had been endlessly quoting that line to each other to the irritation of our son ever since.
I walked around to the other side and climbed into the command seat. The moment I sat down, Jill held up a small remote, hit a button and the helicopter started sliding out of the hanger on its low electric sled.
“Whoa, hang on. You want to go flying? With me in this outfit?”
“My hot CrossFit babe is going to chauffeur me around on a morning joyride. The wildflowers are popping out all over and I thought it’d be nice to take the old girl for a spin.”
“But–”
“French maid outfit.”
I narrowed my eyes at her as the sled came to a halt, the sun streaming in the canopy warming my (mostly) bare skin.
“Fair, I suppose.”
She grinned and handed me a pair of aviator sunglasses.
“I’ve already pre-flighted her. She’s good to go.”
I bit the inside of my cheek to suppress my own grin.
Miles better than painting the barn.
“As you wish. Just hang on a sec.” I hopped down from the cockpit and went back to the locker in the hanger and retrieved the coveralls I wore to keep grease and oil off me when I was doing engine maintenance. I hurried back to the chopper, stuffed my overalls under the seat then jumped up into the cockpit. An arched eyebrow greeted me.
“In the highly unlikely event of an unscheduled landing somewhere, I’m not to be sitting there waiting for a mechanic in this get-up.”
“Fair enough,” she agreed.
I trusted that Jill had actually done a full preflight, but I’d been a pilot too long to not do my own. I didn’t do a full walk-around, but I still did a short preflight checklist. I turned on the master power switch and put on my headset while I waited for the instrument needles to settle.
Three quarters of a tank of gas, battery voltage is green.
I moved the controls around, looking up as I manipulated the blades.
Stick linkages good, cyclic is good.
I held down the start switch and the engine roared to life behind us, the rotor slowly starting to turn, then I checked the control panel once more.
Oil pressure is good.
“Ready, your Highness?”
She adopted an air of royalty and leaned casually back in her seat, waving her hand imperiously at the windscreen, crossing her legs again.
“Take us away, Wesley.”
I chuckled, then twisted the throttle. The engine went from a dull roar to deafening. Our noise canceling headsets compensated, but we could still feel the sound vibrations in our chests. The Bell-47 was not a sophisticated machine. She was closer in spirit to the tractor in the barn than one of the high-tech passenger helicopters my brother’s aviation company chartered.
I pulled up on the cyclic and the old girl leapt off the sled. After circling the farm a couple times to make sure she wasn’t going to develop any kind of hiccup, I spoke into my mic.
“Where to, your Highness?” Might as well get into the spirit.
“The Shenandoah usually has a lot of wildflowers along the banks.”
“On it.”
I banked away from the farm and ten minutes later we were cruising five hundred feet above the mighty river, as it twisted and turned through western Virginia. In my younger years I’d have been down on the deck, a couple dozen feet off the water. Age and having a kid had mellowed me.
I spared a few glances to appreciate the colorful flora along the riverbank, but most of the attention I could spare from flying was spent looking over at the other side of the cockpit. Jill had secured the lap belt on her four-point harness as high as she could. The Bell-47 had no doors and her dress was blowing around wildly, alternating between totally obscuring my view of her legs and flying up to give me brief peeks of a white triangle of lace at the top of them.
“Enjoying the ride babe?” I asked. We’d been riding in comfortable silence for the last ten miles.
“I am.”
“Good call on the wildflowers. Not sure I’ve seen so many in a long time.”
“Oh, there’s flowers? I hadn’t noticed. My attention’s been elsewhere.”
I could hear the smile in her voice and looked over. Her gaze was fixed on my chest. I looked down.
While it was a warm June day, the sixty-knot slipstream was still coolish. Between Jill’s dress playing peek-a-boo with her panties for me and the breeze coming in the doors, my nipples were hard, and the thin sports bra was hiding absolutely nothing.
“Enjoying the view?” I asked her. I was sure my face had turned red.
“Quite! I miss going to your competitions. The outfits are worth the price of admission. Especially on you.”
“I meant the flowers. Isn’t that why we’re up here?”
“Yes and no. I just wanted to see you get a little out of your comfort zone.”
I looked down at my nipples poking through my sports bra. “I’m not sure being out of my comfort zone is what this means.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s nice to look at.”
She sat up straighter and put her sexy shoes on the pedals, then grabbed the stick and cyclic on her side of the cockpit and gave the stick a shake.
“My aircraft.”
“Yes ma’am, you’ve got the aircraft.” I let go of the controls and sat back.
Jill immediately put us into a steep diving one-hundred-eighty degree turn towards the river. She leveled out about a hundred feet above the water, racing back the way we came. We passed over quite a few people floating along the banks in boats or kayaks. Jill started rocking the helicopter’s rotor disc back and forth as we roared down the river, the universal sign of a pilot waving at the people on the ground. One of the fishermen looked up at us and did a double take when he saw me through the door. I smirked.