Page 21 of Hold On to Me
The cabin was small. She had navigated it for weeks without unnecessary contact: the professional choreography of a crew member who understood that the aisle belonged to the passenger and her job was to pass through it like weather, present, functional, impersonal. She abandoned the choreography.
She stood where he’d have to move around her. She paused in the aisle at the precise angle that forced him to adjust his shoulders when she passed. She reached for things, the overhead bin, the reading light panel, the curtain tie, that required her to extend her arm across his field of vision, her sleeve close enough for him to feel the displacement of air without the alibi of contact. She didn’t touch him. She didn’t need to. She made his body aware of hers in the space, and then she let the space do the work.
He navigated. That was the word, not avoided, not retreated, but navigated, the way a ship navigates a channel that has suddenly narrowed. He adjusted his shoulders when she passed. He turned his body in his seat to give her room she hadn’t asked for. He held his coffee cup closer to his chest, compressing himself, making himself smaller in a space that was already too small for a man his size and was becoming, with every pass she made, smaller still.
By the second hour, he had stopped working. The folio was open but his pen hadn’t moved. His eyes tracked her movements the way a man tracks weather he can feel building, not watching her, exactly, but aware of her with every cell, the way you’re aware of a storm front even when you’re looking at something else.
She passed him for the sixth time. Her hip turned toward his seat. The fabric of her trousers brushed the armrest, his armrest, the one his scarred hand was gripping, and the contact was so light it could have been accidental and they both knew it wasn’t.
His hand tightened on the armrest. His jaw shifted. One millimetre.
She went to the galley and allowed herself, behind the curtain, the smallest smile.
The second flight was the one that mattered.
Night. An Atlantic crossing, Monaco to a client meeting somewhere in the Americas, the routing long enough that the cabin dimmed and the sky outside went black and the world contracted to the hum of engines and the small, warm, impossible space between two people who couldn’t sleep.
She found him in the galley at two in the morning.
He was making coffee. The overhead was off, only the blue accent lighting along the floor panels, casting the galley in the kind of half-light that erased boundaries and made everything feel closer than it was. He was in shirtsleeves, collar open, his back to the curtain. She could see the breadth of his shoulders in the blue glow, the way the fabric pulled across the muscles he carried like cargo, the tension in the back of his neck that said he had been awake for hours and had come here not for coffee but for something to do with his hands.
He heard her. He must have, she wasn’t silent, not trying to be, but he didn’t turn. He stood with his hands on the counter, the kettle heating, and she could see his reflection in the polishedsteel of the coffee urn: the scar, the jaw, the eyes that were closed.
“Why won’t you let this happen?”
She said it quietly. Not a confrontation this time, not the siege, not the coward. Something else. The voice of a woman who was tired of fighting and tired of counting and tired of standing on the other side of a wall that a man she wanted was building faster than she could climb it.
He opened his eyes. In the reflection, she could see them, dark, exhausted, the eyes of a man who hadn’t slept either and whose reasons for not sleeping were standing behind him in the galley doorway.
“Because you deserve—”
“Don’t.”
The word was quiet but it stopped him. Stopped the sentence she had heard him start three times now, on the tarmac, in the dark cabin, and here. The sentence that always began with you deserve and ended with someone who isn’t me, as though her worthiness and his unworthiness were mathematical facts he had solved for and she was simply too close to the equation to see it clearly.
“Don’t tell me what I deserve. You don’t get to decide that.”
He turned.
The galley was narrow. With both of them in it, him with his back to the counter, her at the entrance, the space wasn’t a space at all. It was a room-sized version of the exclusion zone, and for the first time in weeks, neither of them was maintaining it.
“I’m not a problem you get to solve, Andrei. I’m not a promise you get to keep. I’m not a girl your father told you to look after. I’m a woman who kissed you in the rain and you kissed me back and then you kissed me again in the dark and said things in Russian I’ll hear for the rest of my life, and now you’re standing in a galley at two in the morning making coffee you don’t need because you can’t sleep because of me. And you’re still going to hand me to a stranger. So tell me why. The real reason. Not the promise. Not the deserve speech. Why.”
She watched it happen.
The exact moment his control broke, and she didn’t hesitate.
She stepped forward and closed the space between them and put her hands flat against his chest.
His shirt was half-open, he had been making coffee at two a.m. in the blue half-light and he hadn’t bothered with formality, and her palms found the edge of bare skin where the fabric parted, and the sound he made was like the air being punched from his body.
His heart slammed under her hands.
She could feel it, enormous, violent, a detonation happening in slow motion behind his ribs. The heat of him was staggering, and beneath the heat, where her fingers had slipped past the open collar, scars. Not just the one on his face. Others. Lines and ridges she couldn’t see in the blue light but could read like text, like a history written in tissue, a map of a life she was only beginning to understand.
She left her hands where they were, over his heart, and she didn’t press further. She didn’t need to. The scars beneath herfingertips were a map she wanted to learn by heart, and she would, someday, every ridge, every line, every place where his body had been broken and had healed into something harder. But not by force. Not tonight. His breathing had changed, not faster, not slower, but deeper, as though his lungs had given up on efficiency and were simply trying to survive.
He backed into the counter.
