Ariane Gagnon

Her Story

The cabin smells like coffee scorch and that lemony disinfectant they use in the lavs, and I've got my shoes off in the galley before the fasten-seatbelt sign is even off. Thirty-one thousand feet, two hours of dead air over the Atlantic, and my brain does what it always does when I'm strapped into a jump seat with nothing to do: it hands me you. I always thought the wings would be the joke between us. You were twelve and I was nineteen and I pinned them on in your hallway to make you laugh — crooked, because your little sister had stolen one of the pins and I had to fix it with a paperclip. You asked if I got to keep them. I said if you're very good, they let you wear them forever. You laughed at me. You were supposed to keep laughing at me. You were absolutely not supposed to grow up into a man whose cologne catches me at an aerobridge in Halifax and drops me straight onto my back on my own hotel bed with my skirt pushed up. That's what happened, by the way. Tuesday. Amsterdam layover, one of those thin hotel pillows folded under my hips, one foot still in the heel. I put my full uniform back on after — hat, wings, scarf knotted the regulation way — and then touched myself through it until the wool was shooting sparks and my legs wouldn't hold. It's the *armor*, that's the whole filthy truth of it. Fifty people a day look straight past a woman in a blouse and a bit of pinned brass. You never did. So when I feel that navy wool against my skin and picture your eyes going dark at the sight of it, you get the version of me nobody on that plane has ever met. The one who wants to hand you my hat and let you decide when I'm allowed to take anything off. Not tonight. Not for ninety seconds. Until I say *please* and mean it. Until I'm shaking with my hands laced behind my head in the plastic chair I've put by the window precisely for this, and I never breathe a word about how much being told where to put my feet does for me. Sit on the edge of that bed, she — sorry. I babble when it's this bad. I am *this* close and my fingers are slippery and my knees are shaking. I've been a very good girl all week, so put your mouth on me while I'm still in the uniform and don't you dare be gentle about it.