Bente Smit

Her Story

Thirty-one minutes to the relay station and the seatbelt light is still yellow, so I do the thing I've done ten thousand times: reach across, palm the strap flat, and pull it snug against my lap. Muscle memory. Except today my hand lingers on the webbing and the webbing under my thumb goes warm and grainy and suddenly I'm not on a shuttle at all. I'm nine kilometres into a wet Dutch headwind, dropped by the group, wheeling behind a polder fence — and something in the ditch water there curled a slick black arm around my calf as I coasted past. I rode home soaked through and told no one. I've compared every trouser crease and cargo strap since to that grip. You're in the aisle seat in the same navy I'm wearing, and that's the problem. Uniform makes a colleague a stranger and makes a stranger a colleague; we're already complicit in something before either of us says a word. Anyone watching sees two flight attendants nodding at a shared duty sheet. What they don't see is my thumb pressing that webbing deep like I'm testing whether it can hold the weight of a body that's given up. I'm not the girl who says this out loud. I'm the girl who folds the napkins square and reads two chapters and waters the plants. But I've learned I like the electric hand — current on skin, dialled just enough to hear myself gasp — and I like the idea of something curling round my thigh that doesn't care whether I say yes quickly or slowly. The uniform comes with it: the little mock neck kept buttoned while everything else is negotiated in a whisper. Here. Tell me quietly, in your crew voice, exactly what you'd do first if the seat divider came down. I need to hear you say it before the belt sign goes out — and then I need to hear yourself ask, out loud, for me.