I close the door to the first class bathroom and practically collapse against the sink.
I’m surprised the attendants didn’t stop me on my way here. My entire body is buzzing. There’s got to be some outward physical evidence of what Aleks and I just did. A giant neon sign hanging above my head, advertising what we’re about to do next.
Because there’s only one thing he could want to do with me in this bathroom.
But when I turn towards the mirror, I look mostly the same. A little more animated than usual, perhaps. More color on my cheeks. But otherwise, the same.
“What are you doing, Olivia?” I ask my reflection.
I’m not naive; I’m a realist. It’s abundantly clear to me that all Aleks wants is the thrill of a quick hookup with a girl he never has to see again.
I try to tell myself that’s what I want, too. Or at least, I try to tell myself that it’s possible for me to plausibly be the kind of person who wants something like that.
But I can already see Future Olivia, twirling her hair and staring into the distance as she entertains daydreams of the handsome stranger she met at the airport.
That’s okay. That’s fine. Everyone needs a wild story from their youth that they can live off of for the rest of their life, right?
The thought is comforting for approximately zero point two seconds before it falls flat.
Do I really want to be the type of woman who spends her golden years reminiscing about “that one time way back when…?” Have I already resigned myself to a life of mundane boredom at the ripe old age of twenty-five?
I’m still trying to talk myself down when the bathroom door opens and he steps inside.
He consumes the entire space instantly. And it isn’t just about his size—which is, to put it mildly, a lot. It’s his presence. His confidence. His aura.
Aleks locks the door and turns to me. I’m already backed up in the furthest corner of the bathroom with my hands clutching the edges of the sink.
One step—that’s all it takes for him to be right in front of me.
His hands find my hips while his eyes explore my body. Despite the big shirt and the oversized woolen sweater I’m wearing, he still manages to make me feel… desired. Craved. Like there isn’t enough money or violence in the world to make him tear his gaze off of me.
When was the last time I felt like that?
Have I ever?
Just like the rest of my scattered thoughts, those questions vanish when he grabs the hem of the sweater and pulls it off. He discards it on what is probably a not-so-clean bathroom floor. Even though it’s my favorite sweater, I let him.
I’m pretty sure I’d let him do whatever he wanted right now. God knows I have so far.
He peels the clothes off me, layer by layer. We don’t speak. I don’t think I could make my mouth form words, anyway. But when he approaches my bra, I tense up. My hands fall over my breasts self-consciously.
“I… I can do this part,” I mumble through awkward lips.
His eyes flash. “Why?”
“I dunno. I guess I’ve always done it myself.”
He runs a hand through his hair, completely bewildered. “How could any man let you deny him that pleasure?”
My body floods with heat the moment he says it. That feeling of being wanted again, so hot and insistent and all-consuming. And just like that, I drop my hands. He undoes my bra so fast that I don’t have any time to feel self-conscious.
My breasts spill free. Aleks’s eyes glow.
He leans in, cupping my right breast while his lips trail my face and neck, leaving a hot singe everywhere they go. Then he pulls my panties halfway down my thighs, finds my wetness, and plunges two fingers into me.
“Oh, God,” I gasp.
It feels like he’s touching me everywhere. Every inch of me is sparking, coming alive. And yet I’m frozen. I stand there, pressed against the cold sink, incapable of doing anything except taking the pleasure he’s giving me.
His fingers piston in and out of me until I’m dripping down his knuckles. I know that only because he raises his hand so I can see.
Then he brings his fingers to his mouth and sucks them clean.
My hands itch to touch him. To peel his clothes off the way he undressed me. But I can’t summon the confidence.
Aleks has plenty of that to spare, fortunately. Seeming to know what I want, he unbuttons his shirt and strips out of it.
I inhale sharply. I was right before: he has the most glorious body I’ve ever seen. And definitely the first I’ve seen up close and personal like this.
You could wash clothes on his abs. You could grate cheese on his abs. You could hurt yourself on his abs—which, coincidentally, is exactly what I’m about to do.
My fingers twitch towards him, but I’m still not ready to make a move. Then he starts unbuttoning his pants, and my heart rate speeds up.
I might as well be getting ready to parachute off this plane for the amount of adrenaline crashing through my body right now. I’ve never been more alive, more present, more unconcerned with the past or the future or anything but what’s happening right-in-fucking-front-of-me.
He drops his pants, and I suck in another breath. His cock is like a hammer, thick as my forearm and nearly as long.
He inches closer. Drops his lips to my neck and kisses me there until my nipples are poking his chest.
I can feel his dick pressing between my thighs. Hot. Powerful. I’m suddenly desperate to feel what it’s like to have him inside me.
I open my legs and gently tip my hips forward, inviting him in. But just when I think he’s about to enter me, he twists me around so that I’m facing the mirror.
“Look at me,” he commands.
I glance at the mirror, hating the thought of watching myself like this. Sex, for me, has always meant lying down horizontally, always in a bed, always with the lights off, and sure as hell never with any mirrors in sight.
I’m not sure how to be this person. This reckless. This carefree. I blink at my reflection, trying to summon up the courage to do what he wants…
But I can’t. My head falls. That’s just not me.
Except Aleks doesn’t like that reaction.
“No,” he growls ferally. “I said, Look at me.”
He reaches around and grabs my chin. It’s not gentle, either. It’s aggressive, to put it kindly. Night and day different from the suave, charming man I’ve seen so far.
But if I’m being honest, I suspected from the beginning that there was another side to him.
If I’m being really honest, I was dying to see it all along.
With his strong fingers squeezing my jaw, I meet his gaze. It’s intense, dark. Dangerous. Aleks nods, satisfied.
Then he thrusts inside of me.
My body is ready for him, but my mind isn’t. I cry out in surprise, forgetting we’re in a public bathroom surrounded by other passengers, hurtling through the sky at five hundred miles per hour.
I bite my lip hard enough to draw blood when he pulls out slightly, only to thrust right back in.
I’ve never been filled like this before. So fully. Stretched to my absolute limit.
Aleks has one arm wrapped around my chest and his other hand around my throat, a reminder that he asked something of me and he expects me to obey. When he starts ramming into me, it feels like he’s trying to split me apart at the seams.
No man has ever touched me like this.
No man has ever possessed me like this.
No man has ever made me feel more alive.
His hand curves down my spine as I arch my back instinctively, giving him more access to me, asking for more with my body.
The entire time, I obey him: I keep my eyes fixed on the mirror. On him. His jaw flexes with each thrust. One line of tension thrums in his cheek like a steel wire. His whole body strains with exertion.
My breasts bounce wildly, but any embarrassment is long gone. The unfamiliarity of it takes a back seat to the new range of sensations ripping through me.
When he slaps my ass, I cry out.
When he licks the back of my shoulder, I moan.
When he grips my hips and spears me onto him with every thrust, I wonder if there’s not some fated reason he came into my life.
Maybe this isn’t just some random hookup. Maybe this is meant to be much more than that.
The orgasm builds quickly and there’s no chance I can delay it or deny it. My body is at his mercy, and there’s nothing merciful about the way he is fucking me. We left all those niceties on the ground.
“Oh, God,” I groan desperately, gripping the sink so hard that my knuckles turn white. “Fuck.”
He’s still fucking me hard when I come, moisture breaking over his cock, writhing like he electrocuted me.
And just like that, I turn into an idealist. Realism is for the birds, anyway. This doesn’t have to start and end as a simple in-flight hookup. Maybe I’ll see Aleks again after we land.
You don’t share something as intense as this and just walk away from it…
Right?
Before I can come all the way down from my high, Aleks grips the back of my neck and bends me further over the sink. My breasts press against the cool countertop, in stark contrast to the heat building between us.
He grabs my waist and slams our bodies together. My still-sensitive center clenches hard, and I cry out. I can’t even hear the engines over the sound of our bodies slapping together.
Aleks angles my body ever so slightly, and suddenly, he’s hitting me in a new way, touching something inside of me I didn’t even know existed. I gasp, but before I can even exhale, a second orgasm is washing over me.
I’m so wrapped up in my own pleasure that I don’t even realize he’s finished until he pulls out of me. I feel him dripping down the insides of my thighs.
Aleks steps away and puts his clothes on, but I stay bent over the sink, too stunned to move. All I can do is stand on trembling Bambi legs and watch him dress again in the mirror.
When he’s done, he glances at me with a smirk. “You alive?”
More alive than ever, I want to say. Instead, I just nod meekly.
“I’ll meet you out there,” he says.
He slips out of the bathroom. The moment the door clicks shut, I exhale deeply. “Oh God… oh God…”
With the absence of his intoxicating presence, I can breathe a little easier. I can think a little more clearly. Although his musk lingers in this cramped space like a foreign spice.
Weirdly, all I want to do right now is call my sister and tell her what just happened. “You’d be so proud of me, Mia. I stopped thinking and followed my instincts for the first time in my life!”
“Atta girl, Livvy!” she’d say.
I smile at the imagined conversation in my head. But I’m jolted out of the fantasy when someone knocks hard against the door.
“Occupied,” I cry back, grabbing my clothes in a hurry. “Give me a minute.”
I dress in record time, shrug into my discarded sweater, and wrench open the bathroom door. The woman with the fur coat who was scowling at me earlier is now standing in front of me. The moment she sees me, her lips turn up in a knowing smile.
“I’m sorry for the, uh, delay,” I say in what is quite possibly history’s worst lie.
“Oh, honey,” she croons, her eyes flitting towards Aleks. “I don’t blame you. If I were twenty years younger…”
Welp, that escalated quickly. I have precisely nothing to say back. Flushing with embarrassment, I lower my eyes and head towards my seat next to Aleks.
“I poured you a drink,” he says as I sit, pushing a fresh glass of wine towards me.
“Thanks,” I say, reaching for it immediately. I knock back one sip that tastes good, so numbers two and three go down just as quick. A few more of those and I’m feeling drowsy enough to conk out.
Wine always makes me sleepy. But it doesn’t help that my body feels so sated already. Every muscle has the kind of comforting ache that accompanies a really good workout.
“You look tired,” Aleks observes.
“Maybe a little bit.”
He leans over, voice low, and rumbles, “Two orgasms will do that to a girl.”
My entire body floods with heat again. I drop my face in my hands. “Lord have mercy.”
“Careful,” he warns me. “You blush anymore and you might stay that color forever.”
My only response is to groan in shame again.
Aleks smirks. “Why don’t you sleep?” he suggests. “There’s a couple more hours until we land.”
No part of me actually wants to waste an hour next to him by drooling in La La Land. But in the end, that’s exactly what I do. I succumb to a dream-filled sleep.
Every dream is of him.
I wake up with a start when someone touches my arm.
“Pardon, ma’am—”
I squint up at the woman bending towards me. Her face looks familiar, but it takes me another few seconds to recognize her as the flight attendant who showed me to first class.
“We’ve landed,” she explains. “It’s time to disembark.”
“Oh.’ I jerk upright and discover that the plane is empty. I’m the last one aboard.
I turn to find Aleks, but he’s gone. I do a double-take, but sure enough, he’s nowhere to be found. Men like him can’t exactly hide in an airplane.
Which means he just… got up and left? Without so much as a goodbye?
“Did you, uh… did you happen to see the gentleman who was sitting next to me?” I ask.
“Yes, ma’am,” she confirms. “He was the first one off the plane.”
“Oh. Right.”
She raises her eyebrows, clearly wondering why I’m still buckled into my seat. I unlock the clasp, step into the aisle, and get ready to go—but I can’t let it end like that. Not with a bang but with a whimper.
Biting my lip, I turn to her again. I hate myself for asking the question even before I say it aloud.
“By any chance, did he leave a message for me?”
She smiles again. This one is laced with pure pity. “No, ma’am. He didn’t.’
And just like that, I’m a realist again.
