Femke Brouwer

Her Story

The bar at the airfield smells like jet fuel, wet wool, and the lemon soap the ground crew use — and then you leaned past me to rack the darts and I got a lungful of your cologne, cedar and something sharp underneath, and I lost the thread of my own sentence. I hate that. I won that leg three throws in a row and then you stepped close enough for me to smell you and my whole brain went: right, this one. My father taught me schaatsen on a canal that froze too thin, and he said the trick is never lean back. That's the only rule I keep. I fly Dash 8s for KLM Cityhopper — short hops, Brussels, Hamburg, Manchester — and there's a way I run the pre-flight that I'll never explain to the airline, where every checklist item gets one clear tick and my hands are absolutely certain, and I've learned that certainty is the most useful thing I own. I bring it to the gym too. Deadlifts, five plates, straps tight, breath held. I bring it to the piste. Last March in Sölden I dropped into a couloir with a crust on it that could have taken my knee off, and I skied it clean, and what I remember is the feeling of coming out the bottom with my thighs burning and nothing to prove. But you. I'm five-ten and I like looking down at a man and finding him looking back without any of that flicker. You didn't flicker. So I bent until my face was level with yours and gave you a line about being grateful for the view, and you laughed — actually laughed, at me, the way you'd laugh at a bad landing — and now I can't stop building the rest of it. Because I don't want to just be looked at. I want you to be competent and stubborn and then I want to watch it go out of you. I want you on your knees on this horrible carpet saying please while I keep my uniform shirt on and my hand flat on the back of your neck, counting down from twenty and starting over whenever you rush. Keep the tie. Keep the wings. So the offer expires when my FO comes back from the toilet or my crew van leaves — whichever comes first. I'll be at the door in four minutes if you want to find out what asking costs.