Scissor Link Georgette Kaplan (best self help books to read .TXT) 📖

go through customs to go to Arizona, it was part of the US, technically.

Janet did it again with the flight. The plane was medium-sized, cramped but not claustrophobic, with a wide aisle and two gangly seats on either side. There were few passengers on the red-eye, and they were able to space themselves out into bubbles of privacy: a skeleton crew occupying a vast, insurgent territory.

Janet and Wendy sat in the middle, by the wing. From the aisle seat, Janet gave the wing a quick check and an approving nod through the window, as if it were a horse she were about to take for a ride.

Wendy stowed her carry-on—Janet hadn’t even taken that much, just her purse—and sat by the window. She wondered just how comfortable she should get; it was a long flight. “So, when do you want to…go to the bathroom?” she asked, glancing about at the other passengers. None of them were within earshot and she hoped it stayed that way as more boarded.

“This is an Embraer E-Jets 190,” Janet said. “You’ll be lucky if you manage to pee in the bathroom, let alone masturbate, let alone mutual…” Janet silenced herself as a flight attendant started down the aisle. “Maybe on the flight back.”

“Then maybe you should’ve taken my panties off on the flight back,” Wendy suggested. She got up, struggling past Janet’s aisle seat. “Trust me, it’ll be fine, I did gymnastics in high school.”

“High school is always farther back than you think,” Janet needled, starting her book.

Wendy paused in front of Janet, making one long step to the aisle, stretching her skirt up her thighs. “Maybe I got held back a grade.”

Janet looked up over the rim of her glasses. “It’s not me. It’s physics.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I’m gonna go have a word with physics.”

With that, Wendy went to check out the restroom. She came back in thirty seconds. “That thing is a chamber pot. Not a room with a chamber pot—an actual chamber pot.”

Janet patted her hand. “I’ll try to find us a nice 747 for the return flight.”

Wendy caught Janet’s hand in her fingers and gave it a squeeze before she let Janet pull away. She wondered if Janet had known this was an E-Jet 190 when she booked the tickets. And whether or not it was worse if Janet had known, but not thought of how much Wendy would want to touch her, kiss her. Be in love with her.

Their stopover was in Chicago and it felt like they had to wait as long as they’d been in the air for the connecting flight. All that haste, just to hurry up and wait. They had the gate all to themselves. Wendy considered coffee, considered trying to get some sleep on the chairs—curling up horizontally was an impossibility for obvious reasons—and finally settled on washing some of the grime off in the bathroom so she could at least feel clean on the flight.

Janet went with her to the restroom.

“All you’re doing is giving material to the stand-up comedians of the world,” Wendy told her.

Janet was quick but thorough, checking under the stalls, then double-checking them by nudging the doors open. Finished with that, she exited the restroom and jiggled the handle on a small door adjourning it.

“Janitors never lock these,” Janet said, and pulled out an Out Of Order sign, which she neatly slotted over the women symbol on the restroom door before pulling Wendy back through it.

And Wendy would’ve thought that if anyone in this relationship had a system for bathroom quickies, it’d be her.

“Come on. Let’s not press our luck,” Janet said, going to the line of sinks and pulling hotel-sized soap and shampoo from her purse.

Wendy took off her sweatshirt, suitably embarrassed by the fresh tank top she had on underneath that had supported her through sobering up and coming awake and had been repaid with toxic levels of sweat. But Janet didn’t appear to notice, dragging Wendy by the hand and giving her arms a quick once-over. Wendy helped out, struck by the absurdity of trying to wash one arm while Janet washed the other; by having Janet lift her tank over her shoulder blades and scrub her back, or hold it up to her breasts and wash her stomach. By the end, her tank was soaked through anyway. She’d have to put her sweatshirt back on just to avoid looking like she’d been on the set of Coyote Ugly.

“Lean your head down,” Janet told her. “Turn your head to the side. Eyes closed.”

Wendy did, forgetting she was mooning the handicapped stall until the air conditioning picked up and flicked her skirt at least once. She moaned unhappily; Janet ignored her, giving her hair a good rinse, then massaging shampoo into her scalp while Wendy hung on to the sink and concentrated on not taking a header into the linoleum.

“When I was your age, I did this every week,” Janet said. “Much easier with a second pair of hands.”

“‘When I was your age’? People actually say that?”

“When I was in my twenties,” Janet corrected. “The company had a plant in Germany, and many of the NATO countries were interested in our products, so I did demos. Troubleshooting. Taught the mechanics a thing or two about maintenance. It was all terribly exciting. And Roberta loved having me gone for weeks at a time.”

“It was your job, though,” Wendy reasoned, eyes still shut against the shampoo. She thought that was why Janet had picked now to bring it up.

“I didn’t say that so you could defend me. I said it because you were thinking it, just too polite to say so. There we are.”

She held Wendy’s head under the faucet a moment, long enough to comb through her hair one last time, then she pulled her up. Wendy straightened her skirt. That was going to become a nervous tic, she knew it.

“How do you feel?”

Wendy wrung out her hair into the sink. “Halfway human. That was