Mute

Chapter 2. Romance is undead

Iqbal was excited, he'd clocked up enough airtime to take a passenger, and his choice of maiden flight was a no-brainer: he would whisk Georgie, his girlfriend of three months, to Paris for the weekend. When Georgie heard Iqbal's breathlessly delivered news, she rejected the French capital and opted instead for the Northern Isles of Scotland. At first Iqbal felt that his romantic bonfire had been royally pissed on, but he quickly saw the attraction of spending several days in total isolation with the girl he still couldn't quite believe had agreed to sleep with him on a regular basis.

So the Northern Isles of Scotland it was.

When Georgie was seventeen, her then-boyfriend, a lad called Mark who worked in his parents' fish and chip shop in the evenings, had passed his driving test and taken her out for a spin. Georgie had found it so strange sitting in the passenger seat and watching Mark doing such a grown-up activity as driving, that she had spent the entire journey laughing hysterically. Mark's look of concentration as he monitored the road ahead, the gear-changes, the careful placement of his hands on the wheel, it was all too much for her. It was as if the boy she'd had her first awkward fumble with had been replaced with a grown-up imposter.

Ten years on and a different guy but a similar experience ten times magnified: Iqbal nosing around the outside of the plane, carrying out the safety checks, noting things on a clipboard with a serious face on, and Georgie not knowing where to look or what to say. The whole thing was just too bizarre.

Side by side in the cockpit, their headsets on and Iqbal, still wearing that earnest look, turned the key in the ignition just as Mark had done in his mum's Ford Fiesta all those years ago. Georgie's innate curiosity and eagerness to learn won over her almost Tourettic urge to laugh and she listened intently as Iqbal talked her through everything he was doing as they rumbled towards the runway. She was impressed by how much he sounded like all the airline pilots she had ever heard making their announcements on the countless flights she had taken.

Impressed, and more than a little bit aroused.

Georgie was fascinated by every word, every action as Iqbal worked the controls to power them down the runway and hoist them into the sky. It was only when they had levelled out and were cruising, the engine still rumbling away not unlike that old Ford Fiesta, that she got the giggles again.

Iqbal feigned offence at Georgie's hysteria but in truth he loved it. He was doing something he knew very few other guys could do and he enjoyed being the man. He was treated to the best blow job of his life that evening, and eagerly returned the favour once his windsock had filled out again.

They had a fine old time on the island, not that they saw much of it. The cottage was so idyllic it was a cliché. The weather was terrible but they didn't care. They saw almost nobody but each other. Their phones were off and they felt changed, rebooted.

The storm that raged all through the first full day and into the second night kept them confined to the cottage and would have kept them awake had they been trying to sleep. The rain made a percussion section of their windows, windows that afforded them ringside views of the bleak beauty of lightning flashes over open sea. If Iqbal had had a ring on him he would have proposed, and Georgie would have accepted. They both said the 'L' word repeatedly and it felt perfectly natural on their tongues. They had missed Valentine's Day by two weeks, but that didn't matter in the slightest. This wasn't the version of romance sold in greetings cards, this was the real thing.

Home time on Sunday afternoon came far too soon. To their disappointment the storm had passed and despite a rather strange three-minute downpour earlier on, the skies were clear, robbing them of the excuse of being grounded by the weather and forced to stay longer. They didn't want to leave their romantic bubble and the flight back to real-life, to work, was dreary. Iqbal followed the coastline and the view of clifftops and empty beaches, whilst striking at first, soon lost its appeal. They both became lost in thoughts of what this newly turbo-charged relationship meant for their short- and long-term futures; when they had left home they had been just a few notches up from 'casual', now they were in love.