Be quiet
If you want off this plane quickly
If this disturbance carries on
But in the roughly twenty-five hours since he had first seen the woman he now knew as Layla Bailey, he had not managed to practice anything when speaking directly to her. He said things like,Get up from thereorAre you the exorI’m not afraid of flying.He did not like the way she looked at him, keen and curious. He did not like the way she blanked her eyes and smiled when she looked at everyone else.
He did not want to knock on this door.
But then he remembered Michael this morning: four a.m., tears in his eyes, elbows on his knees, every part of him sagging.
“I don’t know how this could have happened,” he’d said, and Griffin’s entire body flared with white-hot pain.
How could this have happened?Michael had cried to him once, and Griffin hadn’t been able to say anything.
Hadn’t been able todoanything.
He could not do that again. He would never do that again.
So, he knocked.
Even though he had no plan.
Only after, as he waited, did he consider how this might look to her: a strange man at her hotel room door, a man who had been rude to her by all normal standards of human behavior, a man who only knew her room number because they’d checked in at the same time, both at the mercy of desk clerks who didn’t speak quietly enough for his comfort.
How could this have happened?
He did notcarehow it would look to her. He cared about Michael.
He stared accusingly at the pale gray paneled door. Why weren’t there peepholes on the doors of these rooms? Did the French think they were too good for peepholes?
Well, if Layla Bailey was smart, she wouldn’t answer.
He heard a soft thud and a few rustling movements.
She opened the door.
And for a few seconds, he forgot what he came for.
She was wearing the same robe that hung, unused, inside his hotel room’s closet, a fluffy white thing that he bet felt the right sort of soft to her. Her dark brown hair still had traces of the waves she’d worn last night on the elevator, flatter and more uneven.Makeup smudged beneath her eyes, a pillow crease on her cheek. Her full pink lips parted in surprise.
“I thought you were the paper,” she said.
“They don’t knock for the paper,” he said. “You shouldn’t answer this door.”
He thought they might’ve blinked at each other in perfect sync.
“Why are you here?” she finally said, which was the more appropriate first thing to say. An opportunity to reset the entire exchange.
Unfortunately, as she said it, she raised her hand to the front of her robe, clutching it closed tighter, not that it was gaping. Now, though, there was her hand, right there, and that distracted him, because it was her hands he’d noticed first. The girl had fainted, and the flight attendant had called for a doctor, and then she’d come, walking by his seat, and it was such an old habit, to look first at a doctor’s hands, at any medical professional’s hands. He didn’t think it made sense, but a lot of things about the habits he’d developed over the last decade didn’t make sense.
She had nice hands, he’d thought then. Long fingers, short nails. When she knelt to talk to the girl, she pressed her palms together, occasionally twisting one against the other, re-clasping her fingers. She was warming them up, he realized, before she started her exam. Temperature was very important, in his experience. She was probably very good at her job.
Now, she cleared her throat. Loudly.
Pointedly.
He snapped his eyes back up to hers. Her eyebrows—she had thick eyebrows, a shade darker than her hair—were lowered accusingly. He should somehow indicate that he hadn’t been looking ather breasts, which he could not even see in the robe, but it wouldn’t be less strange to say he had been staring at her hand, probably.
