"Three weeks," Raven said.
"Don’t."
"Three weeks, Ci. Same seat. Same flight. Same look on his face like he’s running long division in his head and you’re the remainder that won’t resolve."
Ciana pulled a bottle of still water from the drawer and cracked the seal. "He’s a frequent flyer. We’ve several."
“We’ve several who fly this route. We don’t have several who watch you like you’re a problem they’re trying to solve.” Raven uncrossed her arms and reached for a packet of shortbread, tearing it open with her teeth. “I’m not saying it’s sinister. I’m saying it’s something. And you—” She pointed the shortbread at Ciana. “—are pretending it’s nothing because the alternative would require you to have a feeling, and we both know how you’re about those.”
"I’ve feelings."
"Name one."
"Irritation. With you. Right now."
Raven grinned, wide, unrepentant, the kind of smile that had gotten her out of trouble and into it in roughly equal measure since they’d met in training four years ago. She was Ciana’s closest friend, which wasn’t the same thing as saying they were alike. Raven had opinions the way weather systems had wind: constantly, forcefully, and with no regard for whether you’d brought an umbrella. She dated with cheerful recklessness, had a tattoo she’d gotten in Lisbon that she refused to explain, and kept a running spreadsheet of every airline she intended to fly for before she turned thirty. She wasn’t, in any meaningfulsense, a safe harbour. She was a dare. Ciana loved her for it, mostly because Raven never once tried to be anything else.
"His hands," Raven said, quieter now.
Ciana stilled. "What about them?"
"You were looking at his hands when you poured. Not at the glass. At his hands."
That was true, and Ciana hated that it was true, and she hated even more that Raven had seen it. His hands were... she didn’t have the right word. Large, obviously. Scarred across the knuckles the way hands got scarred when they’d met hard surfaces repeatedly and without gloves. But what had stopped her, what had made her pour go unsteady for a fraction of a second, was the way he held the champagne flute. Delicately. With a precision that didn’t match the rest of him, as though the glass were something he could break without noticing and he had decided, with great private discipline, not to.
"I was looking at the glass," Ciana said.
"Liar." Raven ate the shortbread in two bites. "It’s fine. You don’t have to tell me anything. But I’m putting it on the record: that man isn’t flying this route for the inflight menu."
Ciana said nothing. She straightened her vest, checked her chignon in the polished steel of the coffee urn, and went back into the cabin.
The redeye from Nice to Monaco was a short-haul by any standard, fifty-five minutes gate to gate, though the first-class cabin of Côte d’Azur Atlantic turned it into something that felt longer. The airline was boutique, the fleet small, the routes limited to a constellation of Mediterranean cities that catered topassengers who wanted discretion more than speed. Ciana had chosen it for the same reason she had chosen Nice, and the small flat with the view of other people’s laundry lines, and the life that required no one’s participation but her own: it was manageable. It was hers. It didn’t depend on anyone staying.
She moved through service the way she always did, anticipating, adjusting, invisible where invisibility was the kindest thing she could offer. The cabin was half-empty tonight. A German couple in 2A and 2B who had fallen asleep before she’d finished the first round. A woman in 3A reading something on her tablet with the focused stillness of a person who didn’t want to be spoken to. And 1A.
He wasn’t reading. He wasn’t sleeping. He sat with his hands on the armrests and looked at nothing. No. Not nothing. He looked at the space in front of him with the kind of attention other men gave spreadsheets or sunsets, as though the middle distance contained information he was still processing.
Ciana cleared his untouched flute. He had taken one sip, she noted, the way she noted everything, and replaced it with water. He acknowledged the exchange with a nod so slight it could have been breathing.
She should have moved on. She always moved on. Service was a rhythm, and the rhythm protected her: task, task, task, and no space in between for the kind of noticing that made her chest feel tight. But tonight the cabin was quiet and the lighting was low and the German couple were snoring in soft tandem, and for three entire seconds, Ciana stood at the edge of his row and let herself look.
His jaw. The scar. The way the overhead reading light carved the planes of his face into something that belonged on a cathedralwall. Not a saint, not a gargoyle, something in between. A figure placed high and out of reach, meant to be admired from below and never, under any circumstances, touched.
He turned his head. Looked at her.
She counted. It was what she did when she was afraid. Not of him, never quite of him, but of the sensation that bloomed behind her sternum when his eyes met hers. One. Two. Thr—
She turned away. Walked to the galley. Set the empty flute in the rack and pressed her fingertips to the counter until the tremor passed.
Three seconds. That was how long she had let herself look, and it was already too long.
Nice Côte d’Azur at one-seventeen in the morning was a particular kind of quiet. The terminal lights had that sickly fluorescent quality that made everyone look like they were recovering from something, and Ciana moved through the corridor with the efficient, slightly dissociative stride of a woman who had done this walk several hundred times and could navigate it while thinking about something else entirely.
She was thinking about his hands.
Stop it.
She was thinking about the way the scar changed when he turned his head, the silver line catching the light like a—
