"Honey, look," I said playfully about the news story I had discovered on my iPad as I shoved it right into her face. "We're missing!"
"Oh my god, Jim, get that out of my face," she said, instinctively brushing the iPad aside. She smacked me in the shoulder for good measure. "Don't do that, god, you're so annoying!"
I laughed, closing the cover on the iPad and setting it away in the seatback pocket in front of me. "Fine. What are you reading anyway? Did someone get a boob job in Hollywood this week?"
"You ass," she said, eyes batting and a half-smile emerging against her will, "It's a fashion magazine, these aren't gossip columns. This is what I do for a living, I need to know what's trending upward. You know this."
I leaned in closely. "My dick is trending upward, why don't you do that for a living?" She was already smacking me away before I finished the sentence.
"God," she rolled her eyes, "what else is new? And I already do that for a living; for over 10 years now," she said, holding up her ring finger. I grabbed her hand and kissed the ring.
"My lucky ring," I said. "Not sure how it got on your finger, but I'm sure glad it's stuck there." She smiled, as genuinely as anyone ever has, and planted a big fat kiss on my lips.
"I love you," she said, "You're way too horny all the time but I love you."
I nodded in agreement as I made the most romantic jerkoff motion in history.
She laughed. I laughed with her. We held hands.
After a moment she went back to reading her magazine, and I picked up the iPad out of the seatback pocket in front of me. Opening the cover, I was met once again with the headline of the news story I had discovered earlier:
"FLIGHT 5434 MISSING."
That was our flight.
I looked around the cabin. Everything seemed normal. Flight crew was chatting. Plane was stable. Passengers doing what passengers do.
I looked down at the headline again: "FLIGHT 5434 MISSING."
I glanced over at my wife, who was buried in her magazine once more. I took her hand to hold again, and as I did she looked at me. I used my free hand to do another jerkoff motion.
We laughed as she pulled her hand away, shook her head, and returned to her reading.
I looked back down at the headline:
"FLIGHT 5434 MISSING."
I closed my eyes for a moment, drawing a deep breath, and then hit the refresh icon on the iPad's web browser.
It took long enough for the web page to reload for me to notice that I had been holding my breath without realizing it, and I exhaled just as the new headline appeared:
"COMMUNICATION WITH FLIGHT 5434 RE-ESTABLISHED; FLIGHT TO ARRIVE SAFELY ON SCHEDULE"
Turning to my wife, a boulder developed in my throat, and concurrently it became apparent that someone seated immediately in front of us or behind us had been cutting up a whole boatload of onions.
Before I had a chance to react on these developments, however, my wife, apparently aware that I was turned toward her, and without looking at me, gave ME a jerkoff motion.
The boulder in my throat gave way to laughter, and if someone was cutting onions in the immediate vicinity, I couldn't smell them anymore. I kissed her on the cheek, and advised her of her lackluster impression. "Your jerkoff motion is amateurish. You look like you're polishing an elephant trunk."
I turned to shut down the iPad, catching a glimpse of the most recent headline one last time as I did:
"COMMUNICATION WITH FLIGHT 5434 RE-ESTABLISHED; FLIGHT TO ARRIVE SAFELY ON SCHEDULE"
"What do you mean like polishing an elephant trunk?" she asked. "Wouldn't that look more like this?"
She did a polishing-an-elephant-trunk motion.
We had been missing, but we were never lost.