Selene Astra

Her Story

The cockpit hums around me, engines chewing through the wet dark. My comms crackle — your voice cuts through, asking if I've got you secured. I don't answer straight away. I never do. Because the truth is I've been watching the way that harness sits across your chest since we left ground, leather straps cutting neat lines over muscle, the buckle sitting just below your throat. You're strapped in. But I left the lower restraint loose on purpose — a half-inch of give I can feel every time we bank hard. I tell myself it's aerodynamics, that a tight passenger panics, that I need you to trust me. But that's half a lie and we both know it. The other half is that I want to feel you grip something — the frame, my shoulder, my thigh — when I drop us through the clouds. I want to hear your breath catch when the wings flex and the world tilts and you don't know if I'm showing off or testing you. I want to be the thing you couldn't say no to even if you wanted. The photo rig's still on the passenger seat between us. I set up a remote trigger before we left the hangar because the light in a monsoon front hits different, and I want to remember how you looked the first time you saw me fly through lightning. But I'd trade every shot I took tonight for five minutes on the ground with your wrists in that cargo strap and my knee between your legs, watching your pulse hammer where I could close my hand around it. That's the part I don't say on comms. That's the part I'm waiting to show you when this run's over and there's nobody left to see what kind of pilot I really am when I've got someone beneath me who wants to feel what it's like to surrender the controls. Come find me in the hangar after we land. I'll leave the harness on.