Ruby gestures to a seat. Not next to Alexei, across from him, on the other side of a low table. A professional distance. A safe distance.
I sit.
He doesn’t look up.
I place my tablet on the table, open my notes, and pretend to read.
Four hours.
I can do four hours.
I CAN’T DO FOUR HOURS.
The problem, and I realize this approximately eleven minutes into the flight, when the seatbelt sign goes off and Ruby disappears into the forward cabin to make calls, is that there is no buffer.
In the office, there are floors. Hallways. Hundreds of employees. The entire infrastructure of a global company acting as a wall between me and the man I’ve spent three months pretending doesn’t make me feel anything.
On this plane, there is a table.
That’s it. One table. And air that smells faintly of that scent I caught once in a corridor, cool and deep, like mountain air over still water, except now it’s everywhere, because the ventilation system on a private jet is apparently very committed to circulating the scent of its owner into every molecule of breathable air.
I stare at my notes. I read the same sentence about polymer tensile strength four times without absorbing a single word.
He’s still reading.
He hasn’t looked at me since I sat down.
Which is fine. Which is correct. Which is exactly how a prince should treat a junior designer who is temporarily serving as his product development representative at an industry expo.
Except that even without looking at me, he’s...there.And the thereness of him, the gravitational weight of his existence three feet away from me, is rewiring my nervous system in ways I don’t have a technical term for.
My skin feels warm. Not flushed, not feverish, just...warm. Like standing in a patch of sunlight that only exists on my side of the table.
My heartbeat is doing this thing where it’s not exactly fast but it’s...aware. Like it’s paying attention to something I haven’t consciously registered.
And there’s this pull. Low and quiet, like a tide. Like my body knows what my mind refuses to acknowledge.
I hate it.
I hate it because I recognize it.
I felt this with Billy.
Not this intensely. Not this...wholly. With Billy, it was a flutter. A spark. A pull that made me giddy and stupid and willing to believe that a boy who kept me secret for two years actually loved me.
This isn’t a flutter. This is an undertow.
And I know, Iknow,that what I’m feeling isn’t real. It can’t be. It’s been seven months since Billy ended things, and seven months isn’t long enough for a heart to fully heal, which means my stupid, broken, still-mending heart is doing what broken things do: misfiring. Sending signals to the wrong places. Interpreting proximity as connection because it’s desperate to feel something other than the ache it’s been carrying since a boy chose money over me.
That’s all this is.
A misfire.
I just need to get through four hours without doing anything embarrassing, and then I’ll be at the Expo, surrounded by hundreds of people, with work to focus on, and this weird, inconvenient, entirely imaginary pull will dissolve back into nothing.
Right?
Right.
