Chapter Text
Kylo was so tall he had to bend over a little to look Rey in the eye.
“Alright, Skittles, is this all your stuff?” He asked, picking up her one duffel bag.
Rey felt like he was performing, pretending he saw her as a little girl so her foster parents wouldn’t be afraid to let her leave with him.
Little did he know, they didn’t give two shits what happened to her.
And what was the rush? He hadn’t even come inside and her foster parents had made her clean the house all weekend for when he came.
She wouldn’t have minded his hurry if he had looked excited or something, instead of treating it like a pit stop. Like one of those Amazon delivery guys who jogged up to the porch and straight back to their van. She had always imagined her parents coming to get her, running into their arms. A teary-eyed group hug.
“Yep, that’s it,” she replied, smiling at the nickname. Ha. Skittles. There was that at least. Maybe he was just trying to cheer her up because she looked nervous. Adults often tried to cheer her up, but no one had ever nicknamed her after her snacks before. Good tactic.
She watched Kylo shake her foster’s hands and lift the duffel over his shoulder as if it weighed nothing.
Rey just got the duffel bag yesterday, when her fosters inexplicably bought it to replace her typical trash bag. They never bought Rey anything. She gave them a half-hearted, wordless, goodbye hug.
Everyone was performing today.
Hailing a Lyft at the sidewalk--so the driver would be able to spot them amongst the row houses that all looked the same--Kylo set her bag down while they waited. They were going to a local “non-towered airfield” where he had a small plane to take her...somewhere.
Her foster parents were really bad at remembering information when it came to Rey. And she was too embarrassed to let him know she was following him with no idea where they were going. She’d gladly go anywhere as long as it was far away from Tacoma, Washington.
This seemed like a fresh start. And she didn’t want to tell him about her life before today. Here with the alcoholics, the verbal abusers before that, the religious extremists before them.
“If you’re my cousin, where have you been for the last ten years?” Rey finally asked him. Normally a guardian had to be fifteen years older than the child, but since he was family and of age, it didn’t matter.
She had expected to age out in two years, like most teenagers, not get claimed by a tall, dark, handsome, off-limits cousin who wasn’t even old enough to buy a legal drink.
“Maybe I was looking for you,” he said with a closed-lipped smile.
That could have been flirting if their parents hadn’t been related. Christ. She didn’t even know which side of her family he was from.
“Did you know me? When I was little?” She asked, watching his face closely for signs of deception.
“Nope, first time meeting you,” he said, seemingly very interested in the approaching Lyft.
“What happened to my parents?” She asked, when they were in the backseat, where he could barely fit his long legs. The driver’s eyes flashing back to look at them, surprised to hear such an important conversation taking place on his twenty minute ride.
“Um...they died. Car crash,” he said, clearly making that one up off the top of his head. He tried to make the pause seem like it was out of empathy, rather than invention.
Rey was starting to wonder if Kylo was really her cousin. But her social worker seemed to think everything checked out.
When they got to the airfield, she practically had to run to keep up with his long strides, even though he was encumbered by her duffel. He set it down gently, despite there being nothing whatsoever delicate or valuable inside.
Unlocking what looked like a huge storage unit, he lifted the door, which rolled up noisily.
Rey took a step back as he started pulling a plane out by the middle of the propeller.
“Wow, isn’t it heavy?” She asked.
“No, this one’s not bad,” he said, his voice strained, taking one well-earned step at a time until the four-person plane was out of the garage-thing.
Walking around to the co pilot/passenger side, admiring the black and red paint, Rey watched him throw the bag in through the pilot’s side and duck under the plane to help her get in, because it was very high up.
“There’s stairs in the hangar, but I’ll just-,” he said, lacing his fingers to give her a leg up. She stepped into his hands and he lifted until she practically flew into the seat, laughing.
“Thanks,” she said, excited now, despite her worry that he was awfully young for a pilot.
Kylo waited until her feet and purse were all inside, then closed the door for her. She shifted in the seat, her legs sticking to the vinyl, listening to him close the loud garage door, then appear next to her, clambering in. He put on some headphones with a microphone and handed her a pair too.
“Testing,” he said, the sound magnified, buzzing in her ears. His deep, slightly-goofy voice was somehow intimate with the headphones.
She gave him a sheepish thumbs up and buckled in, after seeing him do the same.
He started pointing out all the different parts of the dash controls, even letting her ‘taxi’ the plane with the steering wheel on her side.
“I’m lined up. I radioed so they know I’m taking off, which runway I’m on, which direction I’m flying, and all that. We did the runup, we did the mack check. Now I’m going to push on the push knob,” he said as the plane accelerated. “See, just like a car. Now when it feels like we’re going fast, like down the highway, we’re going to pull, pull on the steering wheel with me.”
Rey pulled it downwards like he was doing and felt their front wheels lift off, then they weren’t touching the ground at all.
“I’ve never flown before!” Rey told him, holding the microphone still and watching him cringe at her excessive volume. “Sorry,” she laughed, looking back out the window as they went through the fog of cloud cover that lurked over Washington.
They cut through to the other side, blindingly white as the clouds reflected the sun. The cockpit lit up with light, everything looking shiny and new. She wondered how he afforded a plane like this.
After a few minutes he pointed to the screen, “We’re at four thousand now, GPS is looking good, now we’re in cruise flight.” And just like that, he took his hands off the steering wheel and relaxed in his seat, holding his phone up as if checking for service.
Rey couldn’t stop smiling and he could see her out of the corner of his eye. Every time she glanced at him, he was on the verge of a smile too. The clouds dissipated and she could see the ground: forests, roads, rivers. Little cars with people in them going about a normal day while she had this one.
Kylo plugged his phone in and music started playing in their headphones, since neither of them were talking.
The peaceful music somehow made everything even dreamier and she felt like she could sleep, but she didn’t want to. She had stayed up the better part of the night, too excited about her liberation to close her eyes. She regretted that now.
Raising his arm to rest on the window, Rey noticed that his left arm was tan, even a little red. She pulled her sunscreen out of her bag and held it up, giving him an asking look but he shook his head.
“Men are twice as likely to get skin cancer as women,” she warned him, setting it in the cup holder between them. “You’ve got pale skin and beauty marks, so you’re high risk,” she informed him, crossing her legs.
He swallowed, watching her legs, then said, “You’re not scared of flying, but you’re scared of skin cancer.”
“More than 20,000 people die of skin cancer every year. Less than a thousand die in plane crashes,” she said, uncrossing her legs, to see if he looked again. He did. She’d bet a million dollars Kylo wasn’t her cousin.
“Alright Ms. WebMD, what are you, some kind of hypochondriac?” He joked.
“You like giving me nicknames, don’t you? Is there something wrong with my name?” Rey asked, boldly.
He smiled, looking down at his phone and scrolling, as if digging through an email.
Rey waited, wondering what he was doing. He set his phone down and looked out the window for a second. “How old are you, Rey?”
“Sixteen. Wait. Did you just read an email to remember my name?” Rey asked, unbuckling her seat belt.
He grabbed his phone as she ripped her headphones off and reached for it. “No, I was just checking my email!”
“You liar! Who ARE you, because you’re definitely not my cousin!” Rey screamed, since she didn’t have the microphone anymore. The plane engines and the sound of the wind attempted to drown out her voice, so he pulled his headphones off too.
“It’s fine, it’s like, a surprise!” He said loudly. As if finding out who was going to be taking care of her was a birthday present.
Rey stumbled, still standing, looking for something to throw at him and settling on her sunscreen still sitting on the console.
Instead, she poured some in her palm and grabbed his one pink arm, applying the cream from top to bottom, using her frustration as an excuse to give him some god damn sun protection.
“You are so weird,” he laughed, watching her rubbing it in until it was invisible, his right hand steadying her leg so she didn’t fall.
The mood changed when she got to his fingers, when she slowed down and pulled on each one. More times than she needed to, both of them watching her hands move. Suggestively.
It suddenly felt like they were very alone together and his grip on her leg was tightening.
After a few seconds, she stopped, her face growing hot as she looked down at his gaze. He looked a little cross and she wasn’t expecting that. She was just trying to help him.
She felt the hand on her leg move but neither of them looked down as he skimmed his knuckles over her smooth leg, moving upwards, making her heart beat faster than the turn of the propeller.
Kylo’s right hand continued sliding toward her inner thigh, through the gap of her shorts, brushing her panties, watching her face the whole time, neither of them breathing now.
Rey’s mouth opened as his finger moved past the cotton barrier, touching her there. She was afraid to move or speak, or do anything that might break the spell, settling for blinking down at him, leaning subconsciously.
“The age of consent in Washington is 16,” Rey said, barely loud enough for him to hear her.
His eyes flicked to the dash computer. “We’re in Idaho.”
Rey didn’t know what the laws were in each state. And she didn’t care.
He slid two fingers straight into her and her mouth opened wider at the feel of them. Rough, thick, stretching and filling her where she needed it most. She’d never felt like this, down there, not even when she was alone at night. This was something...intense. With his brown eyes locked on hers and his hand on her, gentle, testing, his face confused, as if his body was doing this thing and he was just watching.
He slowly pulled his hand out of her shorts leg and she almost whined. She was swollen and hot now and needed more. But she watched as he held his fingers up between the two of them, rubbing them together, slick, glistening. She was embarrassed then, and sat down.
Kylo wiped his hand off on his blue-jeaned thigh, breathing again, and pulling his headphones up off his neck.
Rey grabbed hers too, in case he wanted to talk, buckling herself back in.
“I can’t do this,” he said, suddenly, turning the steering wheel until she realized they were heading back the way they’d come.
Was he taking her home?
“Kylo! What’s happening? Where are we going?” She said into the microphone, but he wouldn’t look at her.
“That’s not my name.”