The Pilot and the Professor (Collins Avenue Confidential Book 3) by Milton Steve

Author:Milton, Steve [Milton, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-12-14T23:00:00+00:00

Six

James decided he would start driving himself to class rather than always relying on Alissa for a ride. It had been long enough since the accident. He needed to stop being a baby, and having met Alissa and Claude was a big part of him realizing that. “It’s been making me feel like a ten-year-old,” he’d told her.

That was true. What he hadn’t told her was that when he first arrived in Miami, as in the first hours and days and weeks after the crash, he was too scared to even drive a car. He had walked away from the crash, without even any scrapes or bruises, as had almost all his passengers. But when offered a lift to his airport-parked car by United’s emergency response team, he instead asked to be driven directly home, and had a friend deliver his car to his house later. He hadn’t demonstratively abandoned or sold his car, but he hadn’t driven it since the crash, other than moving it in and out of the garage sometimes just for show -- which too already gave him jitters. He’d been Ubering around Chicago, his fear of flying extended into a fear of driving. If he could now, in Miami, start working on the fear of driving, maybe the effects would eventually reach his fear of flying.

Driving to class alone had reminded James of how much Alissa had been part of his partial emotional recovery. When he was with her, he felt ready to drive, maybe eventually even ready to fly. Without Alissa, he felt slightly strengthened by his escapade with Ben, and perhaps by a blossoming bloom of interest from Claude, but without Alissa as his companion, he still felt powerless and emasculated to drive, his wings clipped.

Of course he wasn’t turning straight. He had not even a remote desire for anything romantic or sexual with Alissa. She was a comfortably supportive younger sister to keep around, but James was still unabashedly gay. The crash hadn’t changed that much, even if it had -- perhaps temporarily -- changed his desire to act upon his homosexuality. But comparing car rides with and without Alissa reminded him of the importance of companionship. Perhaps he’d been awakened to it. When riding with Alissa, he had often thought to himself, “I could be driving now.” When driving himself to class, his impulse to drive wasn’t that strong. In fact, he had a mild impulse to call Alissa, or request an Uber, but he calmed himself down and drove all the way to campus.

He and Alissa parked in the same lot and coordinated by texting so they would walk into class together, as always. They were a few minutes early, as always. And the lumberjack strutted up on stage exactly on time, as always. The sleeves of his flannel shirt were pulled back; James wondered whether he’d gotten sweaty, and in fact wondered exactly how this man could stand to have the grooming and attire of a lumberjack in ninety-degree

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