Maggie is just trying to get home from a year spent teaching in South Korea when she’s pulled aside at Customs for Secondary Inspection. She’s not smuggling anything more incriminating than video of five year olds singing “You Are My Sunshine” so it shouldn’t be a problem. Except that it is.
Jake has been flying back and forth to Japan once a month as part of his job designing auto parts and every trip involves a stop at Secondary Inspection. He’s been hoping to see someone get busted, but so far no luck. Except today one of the agents has singled out the pretty preschool teacher in line ahead of him.
Unedited excerpt:
“They probably think you’re smuggling drugs.”
“What!?” she screeched. Clapping her hands over her mouth, she looked around. Then she sat down next to him, crossing her legs primly, or perhaps tightly. “They don’t really think I’m smuggling drugs, do they?”
“It’s a reasonable guess.” The rush of passengers had gone and a bunch of the agents were loitering around the middle inspection table waiting for the next flight. “Thailand is a big smuggling area.”
“But they had the death penalty for smuggling drugs out of Thailand. Or was that the Philippines?” She hugged herself. “I don’t remember. I think in Thailand you only got the death penalty for making fun of the king.”
“You get the death penalty for making fun of the Thai king?”
“Thrown in jail at least. It’s hard not to. Every formal picture of him, he has the end of his belt sticking out through his pants like his you-know-what.” She blushed again.
Somehow Jake doubted drug smugglers would blush and refuse to say the word ‘penis.’ This woman was a preschool teacher to the soles of her feet and that jerk Craig was barking up the wrong tree. “Let me see if I can get you into the non-jail cell bathroom.”
“Really?”
The hope in her eyes gave him a warm sensation in his chest. He could get used to a sight like that.
Yipe! Where did that come from?
Jake stood up. “Let me talk to the guys.” He crossed the room with a longer stride than normal. He needed to be away from what’s her name, the not-drug smuggler, before he did something really stupid like defend her honor. “Hi guys.”
“Hey Jake. What’s with the girl?” Jeff asked.
“I was going to ask the same question. What is Craig looking for?”
They all looked at him with varying degrees of willingness to tell versus his lack of need to know. After a couple of beats of silence, Beth asked, “Did you need something?”
“She’s just not feeling too good and needs to use the bathroom again.”
They shared some looks.
Jake ground his teeth. Guilty until proven innocent. Hadn’t he done the same thing, thinking she was a drug mule without any evidence?
Charlotte McClain 
How much of this did you take from your experience again? 🙂 Sounds good.
Just a little. LOL
Interesting excerpt! It makes me want to know more about everything going on! The last line really hooks me.