No.
I go back to the delegate list.
But my skin is warm again. That sunlight-patch feeling. And my heartbeat is doing its aware thing, its paying-attention thing, and I’m having an extremely firm conversation with myself about how a man like him doesn’t just lose his composure because a twenty-two-year-old human in borrowed heels happens to be sitting across from him.
He wasn’t staring at me.
He was looking in my general direction while thinking about trade policy or Atlantean politics or whatever it is that princes think about.
That’s all.
That is all.
Except.
Twenty minutes later, I glance up again, and his eyes are on me again. And this time, he doesn’t look away immediately. This time, there’s a beat, half a second, maybe less, where our gazeshold, and the air does something that air should not be able to do.
It thickens.
Like the molecules themselves are conspiring against me, rearranging into something heavier, warmer, harder to breathe. And in that half-second, the pull I’ve been fighting since I sat down goes from undertow to riptide, and I can feel it in my stomach, in my throat, in the space behind my ribs.
Then he looks down, and the moment passes, and I’m left sitting there wondering if I’m losing my mind.
Because this is what heartbreak does.
Right?
This is what happens when someone breaks your heart and you spend seven months putting yourself back together with duct tape and determination and an aggressive reading habit. The cracks don’t actually heal. They just...wait. And then your body decides to develop a fixation on the most unattainable man on the planet, because apparently my survival instincts have the self-preservation skills of a lemming with a death wish.
It’s not real. It’s the emotional equivalent of a phantom limb, my heart grasping at sensation because the alternative is the numbness I’ve been living in since Billy’s text. Four sentences. No apology. Seven months ago, and I’m apparently still so broken that sitting across from a beautiful man on a plane makes me invent chemistry out of thin air.
And that’s what this is.
Invention.
Fiction.
Because the alternative, the idea that something real and mutual and terrifying is humming in the space between me and the Prince of Atlantis, is so far beyond the realm of possibility that entertaining it would require a level of delusion I’m not currently capable of.
I steal one more look at him, because apparently I’m a glutton for punishment.
He’s reading again. His profile is sharp against the oval window, backlit by clouds, and the light catches the blue-black sheen of his hair and he looks like something out of a painting. Not a modern painting. Something old. Something from a time when artists believed beauty was evidence of divinity.
He doesn’t look up.
See?
Fiction.
It’s not real, Zia.
It can’t be.
RUBY RETURNS TO BRIEFus on arrival logistics, and her presence breaks the strange, charged atmosphere of the cabin like a window opening in a stuffy room. I breathe easier. I focus on her words. I take notes. I am poised and attentive and fine.
Ruby finishes and retreats again, and then it’s just us, and the descent has begun, and I can feel the plane losing altitude in the slight pressure against my ears.
I’m putting my notes into the shared file when I realize I’ve been staring at the same page for three minutes without saving it. I tap save, and the tablet makes a small chime, and I look up to check if the sound disturbed him.
