“Here’s your seat.” The flight attendant gestures to the seat next to mine as Olivia lingers behind her, glancing around nervously.
“Can I get you anything?” the attendant asks. “A drink, perhaps? We have an assortment of wines, beers, spirits, champagne…?”
“Oh, um… no, thank you.” Olivia shuffles around and stares down at her own feet.
The flight attendant is persistent, though. “Something to eat, then? Mixed nuts? Fruit? Perhaps a cheese platter?”
“Uh, maybe later, I think.”
“Certainly, madam,” the attendant says. “If you need anything, just press the ‘Help’ sign next to your seat. It would be my pleasure to assist you.”
Olivia mumbles something incoherent in response. Once the attendant returns to the crew area, she eyes the seat next to me like it’s going to swallow her up the second she sits down.
“Is there a reason you requested my presence?” she asks. She doesn’t sound annoyed. More like… awed. She’s speaking to me like I might be royalty.
She’s not completely wrong.
“Sit down,” I say, gesturing to the empty seat beside me.
“Aleks, I… I don’t think I can stay up here the entire flight,” she whispers with a glance over her shoulder like the Peasant Removal SWAT team she joked about earlier has been tailing her, ready to pounce as soon as she steps one toe out of line.
“Sit,” I say again. “You’re blocking the path.”
Olivia mumbles another apology to nobody in particular and squeezes close to my armrest, letting a cranky old woman waddle through to the bathroom. Across the aisle, another first-class passenger wearing a mink coat and a nasty expression eyes Olivia venomously over the rim of her glass of champagne like a cheap Cruella de Ville impersonator.
If it were me she was glaring at, I’d tell her to redirect her gaze elsewhere or I’d rip her eyes right out of their sockets.
Olivia, on the other hand, is ever-so-slightly less confrontational. Instead of standing up for herself, she ducks into the seat next to mine.
“I don’t belong here,” she says, still in that cowed whisper.
“That’s the second time today you’ve said that,” I remind her icily. “I don’t want to hear it a third.”
She gulps and stares at me, wondering if I’m serious. I am. She’ll soon learn just how serious. “I just… I mean, I can’t accept this, Aleks. First class is expensive. I can’t afford it.”
“I can. In any case, it didn’t cost me a thing,” I say. “There was an empty seat. I called in a favor.”
“A favor?”
I nod. “The pilot’s an old friend of mine.”
She sits back in her seat and stares at me with unfiltered bewilderment. “Who are you?”
Smiling, I pick up my glass of whiskey and take a sip. “I’ll let you decide.”
Before she can figure out how to respond to that, the Fasten Seatbelts light dings on and the pilot launches into his spiel over the intercom. Beneath us, the engines roar to life.
We taxi towards the runway. The attendants move through the aisles and seal off the first class from the rest of the seating. Olivia takes note of all this with pursed lips, but she doesn’t say anything.
Until something occurs to her. She curses and grabs for her phone. “Shit! I forgot to let Mia know that we’re about to take off.”
She types out a quick message and hits send. It doesn’t escape my notice that her hands are trembling hard enough that she can barely type. Her breath comes in shuddering gasps.
“Nervous flyer?” I ask.
“Not usually.” She tosses me a glance that tells me I might be the cause of her sudden anxiety.
I smile and take another sip of my whiskey. “You ought to get yourself a drink. Calm your nerves.”
“I don’t…” she starts to mumble, then corrects herself. “Okay. One drink. But it’s medicine. For my nerves, like you said.”
She’s about to reach for the help button when I stop her. “No need,” I say. “The stewardess has her eyes on us.”
I signal to her to bring us a bottle, and she disappears immediately to do as instructed. Olivia watches the exchange with mild fascination.
When the bright blond woman returns, she puts a sparkling clean wine glass down in front of Olivia, uncorks the bottle, and leaves it for us. The moment she walks away, Olivia looks at me with raised eyebrows.
“The whole bottle?”
I shrug. “Why not?”
She examines the label and her eyes widen. “This wine has to be a thousand dollars, at least.”
“You’re off by a couple zeroes,” I say with a pleasant chuckle. “But don’t think about that. Just relax and enjoy it.”
“What makes you think I’m not relaxed?”
I gesture to her stiff posture and her clenched fist. “You mean, aside from everything about you?”
She makes a forceful effort to unclench and melt back into her seat. “I’m just… I’m not used to this kind of thing. First class, expensive wine…” She glances at me out of the corner of her eye. “Handsome strangers who clearly don’t want to tell me too much about themselves.”
“Oh, so you think I’m handsome?”
She tries to cover her blush behind an eye roll. “Please. You know you are.”
I shrug. “I don’t think about it.”
“Riiight,” she scoffs. “You probably assume women are at your beck and call because of your great fashion sense.”
“I always assumed it was my charming personality,” I sigh, feigning disappointment.
“That doesn’t hurt,” she mutters.
I glance over and take the time to really look at her. Her eyes are a deep, rich brown. Warm chocolate, melted amber, shot through with those bolts of green. When she smiles, dimples appear in both cheeks.
I understand the appeal of the girl-next-door quality, in an intellectual sense if nothing else. I just never thought it was a quality I would find appealing.
“How long will you be staying with your family?” I ask. She looks like she needs a few softball questions to relax while the wine does its magic on her.
“Just over the holidays,” she says. “Christmas and New Years’, then I’m flying back on the 2nd.”
“Why the hustle back to the city? I thought you made your own hours.”
“Well, typically, I do,” she admits. “But there is this job I want to start prepping for.”
“Do tell.”
“It’s not really a job yet,” she corrects hastily. “More like I’m trying to prepare a portfolio to submit in the hopes it’ll get me an interview.”
“Sounds like a lot of work for a maybe.”
She shrugs. “It’s not easy being a cartoonist these days.”
“How did you find yourself on that path in the first place?”
“By accident,” she admits. “I was a quiet kid. Mom called me shy; Dad was nice and went with ‘introspective.’ My siblings preferred ‘hermit.’” She chuckles. “The truth is probably all of the above. But either way, I wasn’t great at expressing myself. I thought I was gonna go crazy for a little while. All these thoughts and feelings and no way to channel them. Then I found art. I started drawing, sketching, painting. I did it all. But caricatures came naturally to me. Just observing people. Memorializing them. Showing themselves to them as the world sees them. It felt like an accomplishment. Like… the kind of thing that could be important, maybe. If I put my mind to it.”
“Hence the people watching,” I say, remembering her earlier comment that she was an observer.
“Exactly.” She nods enthusiastically. “I guess, as I got older, that never really changed. Kids my own age never interested me. I think it was because I had siblings who were so much older.”
“It must have been hard when they moved out.”
Her eyes brighten just a little. It’s that feeling she’s describing—being seen by another. Recognized. Understood.
For her, capturing that feeling is art.
For me, it’s nothing but business.
“You have no idea. I was six when Rob went off to college. Eight when it was Mia’s turn. I turned to drawing even more then. Pretty sure I kept the art supply store in business for, like, a decade.”
“But you’re close to them still.”
“Yeah,” she says, but I note a subtle downshift in her tone. “Really close.”
I narrow my eyes. “You okay?”
She looks at me with a start, surprised that I picked up on the change in mood. “I’m fine,” she deflects. “Totally fine.”
It’s not even remotely convincing, but I let it go. There’s no point in pushing her for information I already know.
“Goodness,” she says, looking out my window. “I didn’t even realize we were in the air already.”
“Guess my company is effectively distracting.”
Our eyes meet, and she flushes again. I’ve never seen someone whose emotions play out so clearly on their face. Olivia turns her gaze to the bottom of her glass, avoiding mine as much as she can.
A shiver works through her. I can see goosebumps along her wrist. I pull out the soft silk blanket from the seat pocket and toss it over her lap.
“Thank you,” she says, sounding unnecessarily flattered for so simple a gesture.
“You’re not used to this, are you?” I ask.
“Used to what?”
“Having a man pay attention to you.”
She rears back, equal parts surprised and offended. “You don’t know me,” she snaps, more aggressively than she’s said anything else.
“Okay, when’s the last time a man took you by surprise?” I ask bluntly.
“My ex-boyfriend,” she replies. “Tons of times.”
“Name one.”
She gives it some thought, but before she can speak, I interrupt. “If you have to think so hard, then it didn’t happen.”
Her face falls. “They were just little things. Small gestures. I don’t remember them all.”
“A woman like you deserves the world to be handed to her on a silver platter,” I murmur.
She wrinkles her nose. “I don’t think I’m the type to inspire that kind of devotion.”
I lean in close, my lips brushing across the shell of her ear. “Oh, kiska, I disagree.”
My fingers dance along her thigh. She turns to look at me, wide-eyed. But all that does is put our lips within kissing distance.
It would be so easy to reach out and take her. Like plucking a ripe fruit off the vine. She’s practically begging me to do it. To devour her. To show her the ecstasy that comes from consuming something so flawless.
But I don’t. Not yet.
First, I want to watch the way she reacts when I tease her.
I slip my hand under the blanket and brush up towards where her thighs meet. Her eyelashes flutter. “What are you doing?” she says in a husky voice very unlike her own.
“I’m finishing what we started,” I reply. As I say it, I’m undoing the button with a flick of my fingers before dragging the zipper of her jeans down slowly.
She swallows. “We can’t. Not here. There are—”
I dip into her panties and press my fingers against her warm lips.
She chokes on her wine, eyes wide in panic. “Aleks, there are people everywhere…!”
“I fucking dare them to stop me.”
She stares at me, lips trembling, searching my face to see if I’m serious. Her body is rigid with tension. Her thighs are squeezed so tightly together I can barely reach her.
But she doesn’t push me away. She wants to be the kind of girl who allows herself to be wild.
I intend to give her that opportunity. She deserves it.
After all, it won’t be long before I’m ripping everything else away.
I glide my fingers down her slit. Her lips part and the panic begins to give way to reckless pleasure. Her legs open ever-so-slightly.
“Is this really happening?” she whispers, more to herself than to me.
I answer her by sliding a finger inside her, revealing how soaking wet she is. I slip in a second, move my fingers in and out, letting her adjust to me slowly. The blanket mimics my movements, rippling like the surface of the ocean and betraying what I’m doing to her underneath it.
She seems to be aware of the same thing, because she glances over her shoulder every few minutes. But no one looks. No one cares. No one knows.
No one but us.
I slide deeper inside her and add my thumb in slow circles over her clit. She braces herself against the seat as her eyes flutter shut. Her body rolls with new waves of sensation and she bites down on her bottom lip to keep the moan from escaping into the sterile hum of the air around us.
I drink in the look on her face. Her jaw is clenched and her eyelashes tremor violently as she tries to maintain control of herself. It’s beautiful to watch: a woman truly coming undone for the first time.
I circle her clit with my fingers and another tortured moan escapes her lips. Her eyes fly open and she looks at me with horror. “Oh God, that was loud…”
“Do it again,” I urge her with a wicked grin. “Louder.”
“Aleks…” she whispers, but I prevent her from saying anything more by pressing my lips against hers.
I only pull away when she’s limp and breathless in her seat. She’s melted already. Pliable. Moldable.
I pull my fingers out from inside her and withdraw my hand. “Go to the bathroom,” I order. “And wait for me.”
She looks terrified, but I have no doubt she’ll do exactly as I say.
She’s hooked now.
Soon enough, I’ll reel her in.
