Or in my case, both.
I decided to tuck the syringe into the little inside pocket of my carry-on bag, which made me feel slightly better until I realized that if I were going to search for contraband items in somebody’s carry-on, that’s the first goddamn place I would look.
I relocated it about fifteen more times before it was my turn to drop my bag on the conveyor belt, settling on the inside of my makeup bag, right under a tube of lip gloss that was a similar size and shape in an attempt to throw off the X-ray machine.
Keep in mind that Ken was watching me the entire time with one eyebrow raised and an amused half-smirk on his usually stoic face. He didn’t say a word, but he didn’t have to. I knew what he was thinking.
He was thinking that I was about to get my sex prop taken away and that he wouldn’t have to go through with my stupid plan in a few hours, but Ken Easton doesn’t know who the fuck he’s married to because when that TSA agent pulled my suitcase out of the X-ray machine, waved me over, unzipped my makeup bag, and produced a single hypodermic needle wrapped in plastic, I was overcome with the serenity of a Tibetan monk and the acting skills of, well, maybe an extra on the show Monk. With a chuckle, I lifted a single finger, reached out, and pressed the retractable needle down, showing that it was spring-loaded and couldn’t stab its way through a plastic bag, let alone a jugular.
“It’s for a skit.” I laughed. “I’m a pharmaceutical rep, on the way to our annual convention, and my team put together a comedy routine for the awards ceremony.”
When the brick shithouse across from me didn’t join in on my laughter, I switched tactics. “Sorry.” I dropped my eyes. “It’s in bad taste, I know. People in the medical field have a dark sense of humor.”
The TSA agent, who was twice my size but only possessed about half my tolerance for bullshit, cut his beady eyes over to Ken, who simply shrugged in response. The agent took his lack of concern as evidence that I was telling the truth when, really, it was just proof that Ken is a stone-cold gangsta who is perfectly happy to watch me go down in flames if it meant that he could watch a movie and fall asleep on the plane in peace.
After testing the needle a few times on his own finger, Johnny TSA reluctantly dropped it back into my makeup bag and handed me my suitcase. A wave of relief and victory washed over me as I accepted my belongings and cut Ken an eat shit, muthafucka grin.
Phase one of Operation: Mile High Club—smuggle sex prop through security—was complete!
Now, it was time to celebrate.
Ken doesn’t usually let me buy anything at the airport because he’s an accountant and the most annoyingly frugal man in America. Paying regular price for something causes him physical pain, so you can only imagine the anguish that shelling out fifteen dollars for a bagel that he could get at home for a buck seventy-five would cause him.
In fact, he usually makes us food at home—sandwiches and chips and baby carrots that he got on sale because they were nearing their expiration date and starting to get a little slimy—and packages it all up in reusable Tupperware (because disposable bags cost money and are bad for the environment), thus requiring us to carry around empty food containers for the remainder of our trip.
But this time, I insisted that we eat at a fancy sit-down restaurant while we waited for our transatlantic sex chariot to begin boarding, and Ken begrudgingly accompanied me.
Of course, his stubborn ass still insisted on eating his homemade PB&J and slimy carrots, but the fact that he looked the other way while I ordered an eighty-seven-dollar salad and glass of champagne to toast our impending initiation into the MHC was practically foreplay.
I hadn’t realized how long it had been since our last real date until we were finally alone together at a restaurant that didn’t have an attached playground. We talked. We laughed. I drank. Ken tried not to glance at the Braves game on the TV above the bar unless he thought I wasn’t looking. And by the time our flight began boarding, we were practically newlyweds again.
Newlyweds with a plan.
Operation: Mile High Club phase two was underway.
I didn’t even need to glance at my boarding pass to find our seats on the plane. I’d chosen them myself—they were in the last row, on the right-hand side of the plane, and most importantly, they were right in front of the restrooms.
Please refer to Exhibit A below.
Exhibit A: Seating Chart
Not only was the location perfect, but the fact that this section only had two seats in it made it almost too good to be true. I began to worry that these seats had been put there specifically for Mile High Club profiling purposes. No one would intentionally choose the two seats directly in front of the restroom on a five-hundred-passenger plane unless they wanted to duck in there and do bad things when no one was looking.
Unless, of course, it was someone who gets violent motion sickness on planes and might need his wife to give him a shot in the ass at the drop of a hat! Bam! Best alibi EVER.
I gave the back of the plane and the restroom area a quick once-over—committing every detail to memory—before slipping the fake syringe from my carry-on into my jacket pocket and sliding into the window seat. Ken rolled his eyes as he hoisted my bag into the overhead compartment.
As soon as my ass hit the cushion, my heart began to pound.
This is really happening!
Phase two!
Oh God. I feel nauseous.
How long are we going to have to wait?
During my extensive how to get away with having sex on a plane research, I’d learned that for the highest chance of success, it was best to wait until the cabin reached cruising altitude, the lights were turned off, and most of the passengers were asleep and thus wouldn’t need to use the restroom.
That could take hours!
The plane wasn’t even off the ground yet, and I was already a restless, anxious wreck.
Ken gave me his patented side-eye. “Everything okay over there?”
“No,” I groaned, shifting in my seat for the hundredth time. “The suspense is killing me.”
“You know …” Ken reached into his pocket and produced two white, oval-shaped pills. “Your mom gave me some Ambien on our way out the door to help us sleep on the flight. We could take them now and wake up in Rome.”
My eyebrows slammed together. “First of all, you don’t even drink caffeine. What are you doing, accepting unsolicited drugs from my mother?” I went to snatch the contraband out of Ken’s hand, but he closed his fist around the pills before I could grab them. “And second of all, I didn’t come this far to only come this far.”
“I’m gonna take one.”
“The hell you are! Ken, you can’t go to sleep. You have a job to do.”
“It’s ten o’clock. Bedtime.”
“What about my plan?!” I looked around and lowered my voice to a whisper. “What about my plan?”
“Brooke …”
Shit.
I knew what was coming. The next words out of his mouth were going to be, I am not having sex on a plane full of people, and once Ken I’m-So-Stubborn-I-Will-Eat-a-Peanut-Butter-and-Jelly-Sandwich-in-a-Four-Star-Restaurant-Because-I-Swore-I’d-Never-Pay-Airport-Prices Easton declared something, it was written in stone. Period. Forever.
When the earth is finally scorched barren from our expanding red giant of a sun, the only survivors will be cockroaches and Ken’s rigid, restrictive, self-imposed rules.