Page 52 of Fly with Me

And that wasn’t the only thing she had texted.

OLIVE

Favorite color? Seems like a gimme but then you put that your favorite color is a very specific Pantone shade of periwinkle. Thus just saying “green” seems inadequate. I really do like emerald and chartreuse? Now I have to decide which is more impressive.

Olive leaned her head on her steering wheel so hard the horn beeped, making the person who was for some reason sitting in the parked car in front of hers give her the finger out their back window.

Yeah, fuck me, indeed, thought Olive.

There was one more text. The one that ostensibly Stella had been answering in the previous two texts.

OLIVE

Biggest fear. Well, at least this one’s easy. Flying. Well, not the flying part. The crashing into a pit of fiery wreckage or an ocean abyss part or body being vaporized part. The being torn into a million parts part.

Thinking that it was too early in the morning to overdose on embarrassment, Olive stuffed the phone back into her scrubs pocket. The extra five minutes spent drowning in mortification meant she didn’t have time to get coffee from the shop on the way in, and she would, therefore, be a very angry nurse until she got a break and the caffeine gods smiled on her.

Joni was already at the desk clicking through charts when Olive set her stuff down at the nurses’ station.

“I brought coffee today. And donuts.” Joni pointed absently at the back.

“Have I told you how you’re my new favorite person and how you can never ever go back to Colorado?”

“No, you haven’t.” Joni grinned, pushing her wavy red hair out of her face. “Better not tell Derek. He’ll be mad to be usurped.”

“Derek didn’t bring me coffee today. Consider yourself notified. Tell Colorado you’re staying forever.”

“We’ll see.” Joni laughed.

Olive went to the break room. She poured herself a cup of liquid happiness and gulped it down and stood with the posture of a coke-addicted Wall Street investment banker waiting for the high to kick in.

She checked her phone again.

Still nothing.

She hoisted up her proverbial big-girl pants and then sent off one more text.

OLIVE

If those are your biggest fears, they are awfully specific and they do not align with what you wrote on the form which is the very intentionally vague “failure”

No reply. Stella was probably flying.

After four hours of patient care, the phone buzzed again. Olive ran into the supply room and grabbed it out of her pocket. Because she was apparently a freaking teenager today.

STELLA

Those are all things more likely than dying in a plane crash

Olive burst out laughing, apparently startling the resident who’d been crouching in the back corner, hiding from the attending doc—the one who was much scarier than Joni. Olive thought for a second and then began typing.

OLIVE

The Oxford English Dictionary definition for phobia: an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.

STELLA

While I do enjoy lexicology, I’m confused.