5. Kira
Kira
I'd flown private twice before, both times as somebody's guest, and both times I'd been aware of exactly how much room I was allowed to take up.
This one was smaller than I expected. It had eight seats, cream leather, a table between the facing pairs that would hold a laptop and a coffee, and not much else. The wood was real and the fittings were understated, which told me more about the two men who owned it than a gold fixture would have.
Ian met me at the airfield with a printed itinerary I didn't need and a bottle of the sparkling water I liked, which I hadn't told him about. That meant he'd noticed at some point during the week and remembered. He was good at his job in the way that made you stop noticing him doing it.
"Refuel in Shannon," he said, running down the sheet. "Ninety minutes on the ground. Wheels down at Luton just after eight local, car to the hotel, and Mr. Weston has you in the venue at nine tomorrow for the walkthrough."
"Evan."
"He's Mr. Weston on the itinerary." Ian's mouth moved a fraction. "Habit."
Evan came up the stairs behind him, and the cabin got noticeably smaller.
Eight hours, that was the math I'd been avoiding since Friday.
Eight hours in a cylinder the width of a hallway with a man I'd already seen undressed.
Both of us sat with laptops open, doing the most important work of my professional life while I pretended the width of the aisle wasn't a measurement my body would keep noticing.
He sat across from me because there was nowhere else that made sense, and he did it without a word, which I appreciated. It also removed my last chance to make a joke that would have let some air out of it.
We took off, and we both worked. That was a mercy.
Ninety minutes in, the work had absorbed the discomfort the way the work absorbed everything.
We had gone deep into the committee's likely objections, trading them back and forth across the table.
He'd give me the objection, I'd give him the answer.
He'd find the hole in the answer, and I'd close the hole.
Somewhere over Idaho we found a weakness in a slide that neither of us had seen in the conference room. He looked up at me with something loose and pleased in his face and said, "there it is." I understood, uncomfortably, that this was the most fun I'd had in a year.
Around Greenland he stopped talking and started reading, and I made the mistake of looking at him.
He read the way some people pray. Head down, one hand flat on the page, absolutely still, the whole of the man narrowed to the page in front of him.
His sleeves were pushed up, and noticing his forearms became a problem.
Too many things about him were becoming problems and I couldn't stop them.
He turned a page and his watch caught the cabin light, a plain steel thing, old, the strap worn soft at the buckle from years of the same wrist. It snagged my attention because it didn't fit.
Every other object this man owned had been carefully coordinated and selected.
That watch had been a gift or something meaningful.
He glanced up and caught me looking, not at the page, at him. "What?"
"Your watch is wrong," I said; the truth was worse.
He looked down at it like he'd forgotten it existed. "It's twenty-two years old."
"That's what I mean. Everything else you wear was chosen by somebody with a big budget and a plan. That thing was a gift."
Something changed in his face, and he covered it by turning his wrist over, thumb finding the buckle in a gesture that had clearly worn that leather soft.
"Knox," he said. "At our first valuation that meant anything. He bought two, made me put mine on in the parking lot of a Bellevue office park." One side of his mouth lifted. "He still wears his. Neither of us has ever mentioned it again."
"Men are astonishing."
"We're efficient."
"You're avoidant. It's not the same thing, it's just quieter," I said lightly, though underneath it we both went very still because it had come too close to something real.
He went back to his reading. I went back to mine, and read the same paragraph four times.
We put down at Shannon into the gray that was characteristically Ireland, rain coming sideways across the apron. Ian went off to sort the fuel and the filings and left us in a private terminal lounge that smelled like old carpet and coffee.
The coffee was terrible. Evan drank his without complaint, which was somehow more information about him than the watch had been.
"You've flown this route before," I said.
"Forty, fifty times. Shannon or Keflavík. Sentris had a client in Cork and for a while I was here every six weeks."
"Do you ever go into the country?"
"I've been as far as this room and a short drive to their local offices, five minutes from here, max."
"That's tragic."
"It's efficient," he said deadpan, giving me my own word back with interest.
I laughed and he watched me, then the quiet held for a second. He asked me when I'd last flown somewhere for a deal this size, and the question was casual but the answer wasn't. I felt like I'd walked into a room without checking the exits.
The last time was Lennox.
Six years ago. A different jet, somebody else's, and I'd been all ambition in a good suit, sure that the firm I was in was a solid place, and that if you told the truth to the right person the right thing happened. I'd flown home from that deal believing I had a career.
Eighteen months later, I was clearing out an office nobody had asked me to clear out, and the man who'd told me to drop what I had come to know about things I wasn't supposed to know had walked me to the elevator with his hand between my shoulder blades like he was doing me a kindness.
"A while," I said. "The firm I was at then didn't work out. Or I didn't. Depends who's describing it."
He didn't ask the follow-up. I'd braced for it, had two deflections ready, and he just watched me with those deep-set eyes and let the silence be the question.
"Someday you'll tell me the rest of that," he said. Not pushing, taking the note.
"Someday I'll decide whether you've earned it."
"Fair."
Ian came back through the doors with the fuel sorted, and we were airborne again inside twenty minutes. I spent the second leg with my laptop open and my head lost somewhere over a Bellevue parking lot, watching two young men put on identical watches and never speak of it again.
He fell asleep somewhere over the Irish Sea. It happened without ceremony. The book went slack against his chest, his head tipped toward the window, and every guarded thing in his face let go at once.
I'd never seen it in October. In October he hadn't stayed long enough to sleep.
In conference rooms he was reserved and locked down.
Asleep, his shoulders came down; that was the only way I could describe it.
All week I'd watched them square up whenever a question got too close, and I hadn't understood that I was watching him tell something until they dropped. Now I couldn't stop seeing it.
I looked at him for longer than a professional would have. I thought about the terrace, and what he'd said, and how he'd said it like it was important to him. I thought about the two watches and about how the man across from me had spent seven months not existing, and how much easier that had been.
Then he shifted and I looked back at my screen so fast the laptop slid.
Eight hours across a table from a man I'd spent seven months not thinking about, and it turned out the dangerous part wasn't the memory of his body. It was that I was starting to want the rest of him, and there wasn't a deal in the world I could build to keep that from costing me.