30 in 30 Drabble Challenge, November 2021
Air Force One is always cold.
From elbow deep in her enormous tote, Donna unearths a family-size bottle of ibuprofen — “So that’s why you were rattling!” — then produces her cardigan sweater and a fuzzy sleep mask and tosses them both in the general direction of Josh’s lap.
“What else you got in there, Mary Poppins?”
She yanks out a clean shirt, one of his, in a dry cleaning sleeve, wire hanger and all, hooking it over the seat in front of her, where Toby is slouched low and faintly snoring, and then adds a travel iron to the pile of rubble on Josh’s lap. “Don’t you dare make fun of my very practical carry-on bag, Josh, or my genius for anticipating your every need, for that matter, or I won’t let you share my blanket. Here, hold these.”
She blithely passes Josh a large bag of peanut M&Ms, a pair of reading glasses in a leather case, and a mini Mag-lite.
He shakes his head. “Are you even allowed to have this here? Doesn’t this qualify as a weapon or something?”
Donna shrugs. “Oh, Ron knows I’m not a threat.”
“Yeah, well, Ron clearly doesn’t know your nefarious ways.”
She holds a pair of over-sized noise-canceling headphones just out of his reach, her lips quirking. “If you want these, then play nice.”
Josh does want them, and Donna knows it; C.J., having put a full lid on the in-air press conference over an hour ago, is tipsy on Irish coffee and currently conducting a one-woman dance party to classic R&B on the other side of the aisle, even though it’s past one am.
“Remind me why we ever got a CD player on here?” He groans and reaches for the headphones, but Donna pulls them back, displaying her toothiest, taunting-est smile.
“Oh yes, I can see now that you’re clearly not malevolent in any way,” he deadpans.
C.J. begins singing along to Boyz II Men, and Josh shoots Donna a desperate look, but she just stares at him, sparkling wickedly and refusing to yield.
“Fiiiine,” he whines. “You, the one and only Donnatella Moss, are a paragon of virtue, as proven by Special Agent Ron Butterfield allowing you to travel with a flashlight with which you could easily bludgeon me in my sleep, and your ridiculous level of over-preparedness is regularly beneficial to me.”
Donna grins, finally finding and shaking out her fleece-y light blue travel blanket, sending several pens flying in all directions in the process. “See, now, was that so hard?” She produces the headphones and drapes them gently around his neck, pausing to fuss with his collar. Then, with truly astonishing speed, she whisks all of the sundry items she’d tossed on his lap back into her bag, save the cardigan, which she pulls on, and the eye mask, which she fastens across her forehead like a furry headband. Then she tucks one edge of the blanket over Josh’s shoulder, pulling the rest of it over herself.
“Good night, Josh.” She yawns, pulling her mask down over her eyes.
“You’re really something else, Donna, you know that?” But his voice is fond, almost reverent, and he lets himself lean into her slightly under the blanket.
She leans back into him, too, yawning again. Her head slips down onto his shoulder, and her voice is almost a whisper. “Good something else or bad something else?”
“The best something else,” he says softly. Beneath the blanket, his pinky brushes hers, tentatively enough that it could pass for an accident, even though it isn’t one.
She can’t see him, what with the top half of her face being covered with fake fur, but he can see her, absolutely cannot miss her radiant smile as she wraps her pinky around his under the privacy shield of the blanket.
He realizes too late that the headphones are still around his neck and not over his ears, but there’s no way on earth he’s moving now.
