I wanted it to be a bitter drink.  Let him taste how he made me feel.

Just the thought of getting him good and drunk had me in high spirits, recovered from the debilitating round earlier and determined again to play this game.

I handed him his glass of bitter with a bright smile.

He eyed it warily.  “What’s this?”

“Your gin and tonic.  Drink up.”

He tipped it at me in a toast and took a drink.  His eyes stayed on me while he did it, so I got to watch them scrunch up as he got a proper taste.

“Not to your liking?” I asked him archly.  “Too strong for you?  Need something weaker?”

He shook his head.  “No, it’s fine.  I’ll drink it.  Almost forgot how much you loved to get me drunk for no good reason.”

“If you’re determined to have that talk about God knows what that you mentioned, then yes, I’d rather deal with you drunk.  You’re more pleasant.”

“Fair enough.”

“And clever.”

“Really?”

No.  It was an insult, you ass.

I hated it when he didn’t play along.

“Absolutely.  You’re actually funny when you’re drunk.  Hell, inebriated you is almost human.”

He winced.  That one had gotten to him.

Hit scored.  Point for me.

I made another sweep through first class, and a quicker one through coach.

Dinner flights were nonstop busy, and I’d never been more happy about it than I was on that one.

I passed him again on my way up to the front galley.  He was nursing his glass of gin and nothing.

That wouldn’t do.

I made him another, delivering it to him with a smile that was all teeth.

I set the second drink next to the first.

He glanced at them, then at me.

“Oh I’m sorry.  Did you need me to put a nipple on that?”

He laughed.

“You used to drink like a man,” I told him, undeterred.

He finished off the first one, eyes on me all the while.

That was another thing about him.  He rarely backed down from a challenge.

I wish I could say it was one of the many things about him that I hated, but frustratingly it wasn’t.  It had saved me when we were kids.  Who knows what added hell I’d have gone through without his cursed stubbornness.

I took the empty glass away, intending to refill it immediately.

When I returned, the second drink was nearly finished.

I set down a third without a word.

I kept an eye on him, delivering a fourth as he was finishing up the third.  And then a fifth.  And so on.

“You did this on purpose,” Dante said to me.  Even when he was blitzed, his speech was barely slurred.  But I knew the signs.  He was trashed in the extreme.

Hit scored.  Another point for me.

I stayed busy for the duration of the flight, and Dante stayed drunk.

We were deplaning when I realized he might not even be able to make it off unassisted.

Everyone had deplaned and he was still swaying in his chair.

“What should we do with him?” Demi, the youngest of our crew, asked.  She was a sweet little thing, and somehow on her, sweet didn’t annoy me.

The cabin crew was up near the door, ready to go, the pilots waiting for us in the jet bridge.

All that was keeping us was The Bastard.

“He’s hot,”  Farrah, who worked the back galley, added.  “Like, fuckhot hot.”

“He’s too drunk,” Demi pointed out.  “That’d be rape.”

“I wasn’t being literal,” Farrah said wryly.

“Should we call a paramedic?” Leona asked, eyeing him.  “That’s the protocol for this level of inebriation on the ground.”

I rolled my eyes.  “No.  I’ll handle the fucker.”

With an annoyed sigh I headed toward him.  “Flight’s over,” I told him, voice stern.  “You need to get your drunk ass off this plane.”

At that he staggered to his feet.

“We still need to talk,” he pronounced slowly.

“If you can’t get yourself off this plane unassisted, we’re calling a paramedic for you,” I told him coldly.

Yes, I had done this to him.  Didn’t mean I’d help him.

He nodded jerkily and started to move past me.

I stiffened as he squeezed by me in the aisle.

He put his drunk face into my hair and inhaled.

My hands clenched into fists, but he moved away before I could do anything productive, like, say, punch him in the face.

I grabbed his things out of the overhead bin.  At least he hadn’t brought much.  One small carryon that didn’t weigh a thing.

“We divided up your bags,” Leona called out to me.  “You get that, and we’ve got your stuff covered.”

The girls were starting to file off the plane directly behind Dante the Drunk.

I was the last out of the jet way.  Dante was already parked in a chair by the time I caught up to the rest of them.

“What should we do with him?” the captain asked me.  As the lead flight attendant, he was my responsibility.

I rolled Dante’s bag over to him, perching it beside him.  He was staring at me, but I never even glanced at him directly.

I turned back to my expectant crew.  “We leave him.  He’s a big boy.  He can fend for himself.”

I got some strange looks, but everyone was ready to be done for the day, so no one argued.

“You won this round!” Dante called to my retreating back.  “But I’ll find you again!”