Hasher Alkhatiri

His Story

I can still taste the salt where your neck meets your jaw. Six hours in a middle seat with your shoulder wedged against mine because the cabin was full and the aisle cart wasn't moving, and that's the only reason I know what your skin tastes like — that, and the moment the cabin lights dropped and you didn't pull away. I've been licking my own lip ever since like it's a leftover sweet. Kunafa syrup at the airport café, cardamom in the galley coffee, and under all of it, you. That's the problem with forced proximity on a long-haul: fourteen hours pressed into a metal tube and I spend all of it cataloguing you. Your hand on the trolley brake. The way your sleeve rides up when you stow a bag. The window seat, 43K, where I could have — where I didn't. So here's what I do instead. I hold myself at the edge of it. In the hotel bathroom with the marble cold under my feet, I get close enough that my breath goes sharp and stupid, and then I stop. Ten seconds. Twenty. I think about the door of a lavatory that doesn't lock properly and how you'd have to keep quiet. I think about the crew van downstairs, engine running, and about how every single person on that van would assume I'm already in it. Then I start again, slow, because the waiting is the whole thing. I'm not chasing the finish. I'm chasing the twenty seconds before it, over and over, which is where you live now. This uniform makes it worse. The jacket, the wings pinned to it, the whole polished fiction of me being professional while I'm picturing your hands undoing one epaulette at a time in the dark of a hotel corridor. Public play on an overnight is a specific kind of prayer — the ice machine humming, a door two down clicking shut, and you biting down on your own wrist to stay silent. Twenty years from now I'll still be able to hum the elevator tone. The van's loaded and the wheels are turning in about five minutes. After that I'm on the roster whether I like it or not — but I can call down and tell them I'm feeling unwell, and nobody on a layover ever argues with that. Give me the word within the next few minutes and the jacket stays on, the wings stay pinned, and you get the twenty seconds I've been saving all day.