Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
“I know what I took from you,” he said. His voice was low. The kind of low that meant the words were coming from somewhere deep and not without cost. “The airline. The routes. Your friend. The life you built. I told myself it was protection. That I was keeping a promise.”
“It wasn’t.”
“No.” The word was quiet. “It wasn’t.”
He didn’t say what it was instead. He didn’t need to. The silence said it. Or rather, the silence held the space where the truth would go when one of them was brave enough to put it there.
Neither of them was brave enough yet.
It happened the way weather happens, not all at once but in a slow accumulation that you only recognise as a system when it’s already overhead.
The morning had been the conversation. The early afternoon was silence, but not the armed silence of the night before. A different kind. Companionable, almost. She worked in the galley. He read in his seat. Occasionally she brought him coffee and he took it without maintaining the exclusion zone quite as rigidly as before. Their fingers didn’t touch, but the margin had narrowed from two centimetres to something she could feel as heat rather than measure as distance. The space between them had been shrinking all morning and neither of them was doing anything to stop it.
At half past two, she was in the galley. The counter was narrow. The light was grey and soft from the snow outside, the kind of light that makes everything feel quieter and closer than it is. She was washing the cafetière because it was a task and tasks were all she had left.
She didn’t hear him come in. She felt him, the way you feel a change in air pressure when a door opens in another room. She turned, and he was there.
Not at the entrance. In the galley. One step away. Close enough that she could see the individual threads of silver in his scar, the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, the way his pupils had gone wide and dark in the dim light. His chest was nearly touching hers. The counter was behind her. There was nowhere to go and she didn’t want to go anywhere.
The space between his mouth and hers was the width of a breath.
She could feel it. Not his lips, not yet, but the warmth that preceded them, the way you feel the sun before you see it crest the horizon. His breath caressed her mouth, and it was warm and uneven and it smelled like the coffee she had made him and something underneath, something that was just him, and her entire world narrowed to the three inches of air between them.
Neither moved.
He said her name.
Once. Low. “Ciana.”
Like it cost him something. Like saying it was the first honest thing he’d done in months, and he wasn’t sure he could afford it. The way her father’s name had never sounded in anyone’s mouth: weighted, full, a word that meant more than its syllables. He said her name as though it were a confession he hadn’t meant to make, pulled from him by the proximity and the snow and the grey light and the fact that he had spent the morning telling her about his dead father and she hadn’t flinched.
She didn’t breathe. She didn’t move. She stood with her back to the counter and his breath on her mouth and his name for her still hanging in the air between them and she waited for the thing that was about to happen to happen.
He stepped back.
One step. Then another. The space between them re-opened like a wound, and the air where his breath had been went cold, and he turned and walked to the cockpit without a word and the door closed behind him and she was alone in the galley with her hands on the counter and her lungs remembering how to work.
She gripped the edge. Counted to ten.
She lost count at four.
Four. Because four was the number of seconds his breath had been on her mouth, and after four her brain had stopped tracking numbers and started tracking something else entirely: the angle of his jaw, the heat of him, the almost-unbearable nearness of a man who wanted her and wouldn’t let himself have her and had said her name like it was the last word he’d ever say.
She stood in the galley. The cafetière was still wet in the sink. The snow was still falling. And the ghost of her name in his voice was still in the room, and she knew, the way she knew the exits, the way she knew the distance between one heartbeat and the next, that she’d hear it in that voice for the rest of her life.
The snow cleared at four. Geneva approach reopened. The captain filed their new routing with the subdued relief of a man who had spent sixteen hours trapped in a cockpit that smelled like coffee and regret, and by five they were wheels-up over the Alps, climbing through a sky that had been washed clean by the storm.