What a run. It’s been an up-and-down airline since Linda took over. It’s been an erratic time since Rick came into her life. She’s thinking she needs a break from both MainePlanes and Rick Jenssen.

Linda likes anagrams. She tells her friends that athletic Rick introduced her to exercise: sex, ice and Re. Re is Rick’s cat. He’s named for the purr tone he made when he was a fluffy yellow kitten. After his alteration, Re sounded more like a Do, but by then Rick was used to calling him Re.

Linda had sex before Rick but it wasn’t good sex. Rick orchestrates the event, erotic and elaborate. It involves making or watching video tapes, mirrors or silk ties or costumes or champagnes or dancing. He talks up fantasies. He asks her to go without underwear. He caresses her in dark places.

He loves ice. He chews it so much his molars are worn. He likes to trace lines on her with an ice cube. He brings her faceted gems. He taught Linda to treat her aching knee with a baggie of frozen peas. He showed her how to chill her stiff neck with water frozen in a styrofoam cup: an ice stick with an insulated tear-away handle. He used ice as a dildo in her during the record-breaking heat wave, and brought both of them to a memorable hot-sweat/cold-water frenzy.

She met Rick when she moved to Portland for her new job. MainePlanes is a boutique airline but even so it was a coup for Linda to land the job of CEO at the age of forty-two. No other air carrier had a female in charge. It was definitely worth the move across country.

She tried to find dinner the night she moved into her condominium. She’d only been in town three days and had been meeting so many people that she hadn’t had time to get her bearings. She walked out of her new complex toward what she understood was the good neighborhood bistro, but she went the wrong way. She knew she wasn’t where she wanted to be when she reached the corner with the two sleazy bars and the view of a block of manufacturing-type buildings, and she must have had a look of confusion on her face because a man approached her from the nicer looking of the two bars and asked if he could help. It didn’t occur to her to wonder why he was there.

She liked his look: tall, dark hair shot with silvery gray, ropy forearm muscles, good teeth and clear blue eyes.

Rick liked what he saw too: a firm figure on a medium-height frame, brown hair that bounced around her shoulders, chocolate brown eyes big and lash-fringed, golden skin with a scatter of freckles across a small nose above a full mouth. He wanted to suck on her curving upper lip. He wanted to nuzzle from her armpit to the underside of each breast.

He smiled and asked if he could help her. Soon he was standing too close, hand braced on the brick building she leaned against, but she didn’t mind. Later they went to the bistro together. Later yet, he almost grabbed her at her door. She almost invited him to stay the night.

She told herself she would go slowly, but there was heat when they were together that needed more than ice. She came home from her new office the next day to find him waiting at the entrance to her building. Sitting on a lawn sign, long legs stretched out before him, grin widening his face as he took in the sight of her, bottom to top and down again. She looked him up-and-down too, but more discreetly. She opened the door and held it for him.

“I don’t have food for dinner,” she explained as she preceded him up the stairs.

“I don’t want food,” he replied huskily.

She turned at that and he continued up to her, arms going around her, face moving into hers. His lips pressed against her mouth, flattening moistly and into her, moving her face back as his hips and shoulders pushed her slowly down on the stairs beneath him. Somehow he managed to have her down and yet hold her to him so the edges of the steps didn’t press into her. Rick pressed into her, and she almost didn’t stop him.

He kept a hand on the small of her back while they walked the rest of the way to her door. He was gently insistent there and inside. Linda who always made the decisions liked his masterful attitude. She didn’t deny him. He ravished her over her own new living room couch.