Page 18 of Hold On to Me
She said it calmly, serving his coffee at forty thousand feet, as though confirming a dietary preference.
He took the cup. His fingers arrived before hers: the exclusion zone, reinstated, fortified, the two centimetres of air between their skin that he now maintained with the rigour of a man patrolling a border he had almost allowed to fall. Since Istanbul, since the rain and the stairs and the kiss and the phone call she had overheard, Andrei Almazov had retreated into a version of himself so controlled it was almost mechanical. He sat. He worked. He drank coffee she poured and water she refilled and he didn’t look at her for longer than the transaction required.
She had decided this was intolerable.
“The call to Alexei,” she continued, setting the pot back on the warmer with the unhurried precision of a woman who had all day and nowhere else to be. “Accelerate the search. Candidates. Now. Those were your words. I’m not fluent in Russian, but I’m very fluent in French, and you switched languages at exactly the point where it mattered.”
His jaw tightened. One millimetre. She measured it the way she measured everything about him, involuntarily, compulsively, with the part of her brain that had been tracking his body since the first night in 1A.
“That was a private conversation.”
“You said that in Geneva. I’m beginning to think ‘private’ is your word for things you don’t want to explain.”
She leaned against the bulkhead across from his seat. Arms crossed. Weight on one hip. The posture of a woman who wasn’t leaving until she had an answer or he ran out of ways to avoid giving one.
“So. A husband. Tell me about him. Is he tall? Does he like dogs? Does he have a favourite airline, or is that flexible?”
He said nothing. His hand, the scarred one, the one that had framed her face in the rain, rested on the armrest. Still. Controlled. The knuckles were white.
She noticed.
She was going to make him notice that she noticed.
She had decided, somewhere over the Adriatic, that direct confrontation was insufficient. He could survive confrontation. He had been built for it, armoured, braced, the kind of man who absorbed impact the way mountains absorbed weather, eroding imperceptibly over decades rather than cracking under a single blow. She had kissed him on the tarmac and he had kissed her back and he had still called his brother forty minutes later. Words weren’t enough. Questions weren’t enough. Presence was enough.
Presence was enough.
She spent the next three hours being present in a way that was technically professional and functionally devastating.
She lingered when she poured. Not dramatically, she didn’t lean close or let her hand drift or do any of the obvious, cinematicthings that would have allowed him to name what she was doing and dismiss it. She simply took one second longer than necessary. One beat. The pour that should have been three seconds lasted four. The clearance that should have been a brisk pass became a pause: her hand on the back of the seat in front of his, her hip turned toward him, the angle of her body an open parenthesis that included him whether he wanted to be included or not.
She brushed past him in the aisle. The cabin was narrow but not so narrow that contact was unavoidable, and they had navigated it for weeks without touching. Now she let the space close. Her shoulder grazed his as she passed. Her sleeve caught on the edge of his armrest and she didn’t adjust. The fabric of her blouse touched the fabric of his shirt for one-quarter of a second and she felt him go rigid, every muscle locking, the way they had locked on the tarmac stairs, as though contact with her body required a full-system emergency response.
She held eye contact one beat too long. Every time she entered his field of vision, she met his eyes and didn’t look away first. She held the gaze for one count past professional, one count into personal, one count that said I know what you’re doing and I’m not going to let you do it.
He endured. She watched his control fray, thread by thread, the way you watch weather systems build: the tightening jaw, the white-knuckled armrest, the slight forward lean when she passed as though his body was tracking her against his will. He turned pages in his folio without reading them. He drank coffee without tasting it. He shifted in his seat, once, twice, a third time, with the restlessness of a man who couldn’t find a position that didn’t include her in his peripheral vision.
By the fourth hour, his pen hadn’t moved in twenty minutes.
She was winning. She didn’t know what she was winning, exactly, or what the prize was, or whether winning was even the right word for what was happening between them. But his stillness had acquired a vibration, a sub-audible hum, like a wire pulled too tight, and she could feel it from the galley, through the curtain, across the impossibly small cabin that was becoming, hour by hour, less like an aircraft and more like a sealed room in which two people were conducting an experiment in how close you could stand to a fire without admitting you were warm.
Night.
The cabin was dark. The flight had turned westward, chasing the sun that had already set behind them, and the windows showed nothing but black sky and the faint green pulse of the wingtip navigation light. The overhead panels were dimmed to their lowest setting. The reading light over his seat was off.
She brought him a drink he hadn’t ordered.
Scotch. Single malt. She had found it in the drinks cabinet, a bottle of something amber and old that had probably cost more than her first month’s rent. She poured two fingers into a crystal tumbler and carried it to his table and set it down and didn’t leave.
He looked at the glass. Then at her.
“I didn’t order this.”
“I know.”
She sat. In the seat across from him, the one that faced his across the low walnut table, the configuration designed for meetings ornegotiations or whatever business a man like Andrei Almazov conducted at altitude. She crossed her legs. Folded her hands in her lap. Looked at him with the steady, unblinking patience of a woman who had spent twenty-four years learning how to wait and had decided, for the first time in her life, to stop.
“You kissed me back.”
