After being awake most of the night, preparing for this whirlwind trip, Lou began to doze in her seat just minutes after takeoff. Sometime later, she opened her eyes, realized she had laid her head on Randall's shoulder, and jerked upright.

"Omigosh!" She looked around sheepishly and drew back into her own seat, away from him.

Randall brushed at the shoulder on which she had been lying.

"I'm sorry," Lou said. "I know it's rude to drool on strangers."

"You didn't mean to," he said. "You're just one of the lucky ones who can sleep on airplanes.

"And what were you doing?"

Randall gestured toward the nearest window. "Keeping watch. I promise you: one spark, one puff of smoke, one irregular vibration from those engines, and you'll be the second to know." He never took his eyes off the window, but concentrated on his duty as Safety Officer.

Lou felt sympathy for him. He was really scared, probably had a phobia he just couldn't shake. She tried again to distract him. "So, ah, Randall, what do you do when you're not guarding airplanes?"

"I'm in publishing. Is that seatbelt sign lit? It was off a minute ago!"

"No, that's just the glare from the window," she said.

The boy with the toy airplane popped his head over the seat in front of Randall.

"Coward," said the boy.

"Juvenile delinquent," said Randall.

"Candy pants."

"Mucous wad."

A flight attendant passed down the aisle, and the boy disappeared into his seat.

"Publishing," said Lou. "So, when I write my next steamy, sexy novel full of every sin known to man and a few I just made up - like involving Siamese twins and a dwarf with a pool cue - I could call you and you could publish it?"

Okay, that got his eyes off the window. He slowly turned to look more closely at Lou.

"Is that what you do?"

"No, of course not. But if I did, would you publish it?"

"No, of course not. But if you did, I'd sure like to read it."

"You shouldn't rot your mind reading that kinda trash," Lou scolded.

"Well, you were going to write it!"

"Only hypothetically."

"Then that's how I'll read it. Hypothetically." He didn't turn back to the window, which was a good sign. "So," he mused, "since you don't write, y'know, porn, I guess, you probably live a fairly normal life?"

"Who the heck knows what a normal life is, these days?" She met his gaze, which had fixed on her face. He seemed to be in some sort of trance. She thought she must have gone into a trance, too, because she lost track of how much time she spent just looking at him looking at her.

She shook herself and broke the eye contact, then dove for her backpack and pulled out the PhotoWorld magazine on Utah. Randall's eyes widened slightly at the sight of his own magazine in this stranger's lap.

"Are you a photographer?" he asked.

"I'd like to be," said Lou. "I'm not cut out for office work, that's for sure. But if I can't get some great pictures on this trip, I'll have to go back to working in my pop's tattoo parlor for the rest of my life."

"Would that be so bad?"

Lou shot him a look that answered him a loud YES.

"How much do you know about the tattoo business?" she asked him.

"Not much, I guess."

"You can't possibly even imagine that world. You have a normal life. In publishing. Now, there's a real nine-to-five, suit-and-tie, clean-hands kind of business."

Randall, drew a breath as if to speak, opened his mouth, then closed it as he discarded what he would have said. Instead, he asked, "What kind of camera do you use?"

Minutes later, the two of them huddled over Lou's open camera bag, examining the contents with mutual interest. Beneath the camera bag, the PhotoWorld magazine lay open to the Utah article. The open periodical spread across the knees of both people.

"It's just an old manual Pentax," Lou was saying of her camera. "No fancy automatic focus or light meter or anything."

"Hey, don't apologize! This is a respectable camera. I g- ... Guys have gotten published in National Geographic using an old Pentax just like this one."

"I sure hope you're right."

Randall dug gently through Lou's camera bag, scarcely aware of the boy from 68B now running up and down the aisle making motor noises and holding his toy plane above his head.

"I can't find any filters in here; where do you keep 'em?" Randall said.

"Can't afford any," said Lou. "Sometimes I stretch pantyhose over the lens. And once I used Vaseline around the outside to make the edges of the picture look foggy. Sounds silly, but it works.

Randall stopped digging and looked at Lou.

A flight attendant rushed up the aisle in hot pursuit of the little boy. A toy airplane flew through the cabin and thumped Randall on the head. The flight attendant captured the boy and dragged him, squirming, to his seat.

Randall stuffed the toy plane into a seat-back pocket while the flight attendant secured the boy in his seat.

"Where's my airplane?" shouted the boy.

"The baggage compartment," Randall said. "I suggest you go and get it."

He lifted Lou's camera bag and the PhotoWorld magazine off his knees and gently handed all of it to Lou. She piled it in her lap. Then Randall stood up to dig in the overhead compartment for his leather bag - retrieved from first class, by a flight attendant while Lou was sleeping.

As he searched through his bag, he said to Lou, "Listen, the pantyhose trick and the Vaseline are classic. I could tell you a few more that sound even sillier than those. Lots of great ideas sounded silly at first, but in the end, they worked great. ... Where is that thing? ... Like Guido da Vinci probably said to his famous brother, 'Leonardo, bubby, Mona's old man ain't never gonna pay you for dat pitcher. Da dame ain't even showing no cleavage. And I seen prettier smiles on farm animals. Youse both gotta lighten up a little, y'know what I'm sayin'?"

He looked down at the boy, now imprisoned in his seatbelt and glowering at Randall. A woman slept in the seat beside the boy.

"Did you kill her?" Randall asked casually.

"Nah, she took pills," the boy said. "Mommy hates airplanes. Like you."

"Oh, airplanes are great," said Randall, "compared to children." And he resumed searching in the overhead compartment.

Randall continued his lecture to Lou. "Missus Morse probably said, 'Come off it already, Samuel. Dots and dashes, dots and dashes all day long, and nobody understands it. What are we, spies? Like we need some kinda secret code here? Give it up and invent the telephone instead, like Missus Bell's boy, Alex. Then, at least, we could send for pizza."

With a sudden, satisfied smile, he withdrew a small pouch from the leather bag and tossed the pouch into Lou's lap. "Present for you," he said.

Lou opened the pouch, withdrew a round lens filter and held it up to the overhead light.

Randall closed and stowed his leather bag in the overhead and resumed his seat.

"It's a graduated neutral density filter," Lou whispered, as if awestruck.

"Just evens out the light a bit - when you're looking directly into the sunrise, for instance."

"I know what it does."

"Oh, good. My secretary thought 'neutral density' meant 'stupidity that doesn't take sides.'"

The boy popped up again over the seat in front of Randall. "I want my airplane."

"I'll buy you a real stealth bomber if you'll take a dozen of Mommy's pills," Randall said.

"I've been trying to save up for one of these," Lou said. "They're expensive. You can't just give it to me!"

"What? There's a law? Of course I can give it to you."

A flight attendant approached in the center aisle, and the boy disappeared into his seat. "Please put your seat backs and tray tables in their full upright positions, and make sure your seatbelts are fastened. We'll be landing in Denver shortly."

Randall began closing up Lou's camera bag, stowing it under the seat, adjusting tray tables and seat backs, triple-checking his seatbelt.

Lou sat looking from him to the filter in her hand and back again. "I can't accept an expensive gift from a man I just met. It wouldn't be respectable. I know. My roommate gets lots of expensive gifts that she shouldn't accept."

"Nonsense," said Randall. "Of course it's respectable. I respect you absolutely and without question. Well, with one question: Do you have to get off the plane in Denver?"

"Yes! I told you, my whole future depends on getting to Utah before dark today."

"Oh, that. Right."

"I'm not getting off in Denver," the boy called from the seat in front of Randall.

"Life is so unfair." Randall sighed and looked puppy-eyed at Lou.

~o~~o~~o~

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

Will Randall really let Lou get off that airplane alone? Would Meriweather really kill him if he didn't make it to Los Angeles for that gala he promised to attend? Will Lou start writing perverted sexy novels if her dreams of photography don't pan out?

Don't stop now, there's another chapter coming right up!

Thanks for reading, voting, and commenting. If you have a friend who hasn't found Lou's Tattoos yet, please tell them about it. Help Lou get discovered. :)