Chapter 20: Sleeping Companion

When we walked into the FBO office, I could hear Jack heave a sigh of relief. Apparently he had been afraid that Nadja would have come to give us a ride. Both Fred and Jack had regaled us with stories about that lady’s rather enthusiastic driving style.

Our designated driver was Meri Daxter, another one of Mark’s numerous ladies. It was too late in the day for someone from Emden to come and collect us, so we would normally have booked into a hotel, but Mark had insisted several times in the past that there was always space for us at their place and since we now lived in the age of mobile phones, a quick SMS was enough to make arrangements on short notice.

Apparently Mark wasn’t around as he and some of his entourage were at the Nürburgring, because Nadja was trying to acquire a national racing license. That had to be the least surprising news ever, at least if Fred’s recollections of her driving were anything to go by.

The ride was relatively short and we soon arrived in Senftenberg. It was a good thing that Jack had been here before, although he probably didn’t remember too much of it. Last year he and Fred had spent the night here and they had gotten themselves hogwashly bladdered, celebrating the birth of Mark and Nadja’s baby. At least he wouldn’t be shocked to encounter naked women. That Mark’s complex family had no understanding for the concept of wearing clothing in temperatures above twenty degrees centigrade was a detail he was still able to recall.

Completely unsurprisingly, we encountered Lydia without any clothing, and Meri got rid of hers as soon as she had entered home territory. I did the same, but I had to wait a few moments, because encountering Lydia with the memories of my birthday still fresh in my mind threatened to cause a predictable manifestation of male arousal. I started to recite checklists in my head before I finally took my clothes off, now safe from blatantly showing my excitement.

We congregated around the pool and nobody said a thing that Jack only ditched the shirt. Not everyone was as free-spirited as Mark’s gang or I – since my last visit in Hungary – and I knew, nobody would try to talk him into anything. Apparently he didn’t mind to be surrounded by naked people though.

“That was some big plane,” Meri said as she handed each of us a beer. “Aren’t you usually flying smaller ones? I thought you were doing these topless flights with rich business types?”

I chuckled. “That was the initial plan, but we’re starting to move into regular airline services more and more. We still do the ‘special flights’ and we make out like bandits on those, but realistically it’s only a very small niche. We have like one or two of those in a week.”

“I fly a lot,” Lydia said. “You can’t go anywhere without seeing a Lufthansa plane. How do you want to compete with them?”

“There’s a lot of places they don’t go to,” I explained. “We’re not looking at airbussing hoards of tourists to Gran Canaria. That particular field is already ploughed to death. Our plan is flying the affluent types into St. Moritz or Courchevel. That are places Lufthansa and most other airlines can’t fly into. They don’t have the planes for that.”

“Aren’t there a lot of companies already doing that?” Meri argued. “A couple years back I booked a ticket for Regina to Los Angeles on short notice and I got a whole laundry list of available charter companies.”

I nodded. “That’s true, but then you’ve also seen the prices, right? Let’s say you are a well-off dentist or you own a small business. You have more than enough money to afford a vacation in St. Moritz or other posh locations, but what you can’t afford is paying nine grand an hour to get there. Basically we are targeting the well-off, not necessarily the super rich. They have their own planes to begin with.”

“People like us, you mean,” Lydia said with a chuckle.

“Not really,” I answered with a grin. “You guys didn’t buy that plane because you didn’t know what to do with your cash. You bought it because you’re constantly on the move due to your sport. And don’t get me wrong, you might earn a lot of money, but compared to some of our customers you don’t even register as ‘rich’, and neither do I for that matter.”

“Basically the upper middle class,” Meri summarised and I nodded.

“The biggest selling point is being able to fly into some of these places with fifty people in the back,” I explained. “The Austrians had that market all to themselves until a few years ago and nobody filled the void when they abandoned it.”