Imelda Cruz

Her Story

The galley handset has a coiled cord, cold white plastic, and I run my thumbnail down each groove of it while the cabin lights dim to that bluish sleep mode. Cebu Pacific tone. Coffee, that burnt cabin smell over the whole trip. My skirt is hiked to my hip because I made myself a promise somewhere over the Pacific: nothing under the tights tonight, and I keep sliding my palm over the seam of them just to remind myself I actually did it. One row of this airplane is my boyfriend's father. And three rows behind him, in 34A, is the seat I booked you into — God, the looking I did at that seating chart, dragging your name up the screen like lipstick across a mirror. Here is what stops my breath, and it is not the altitude. It is the sound. Because when I talk to you on the phone my whole body arranges itself, my voice goes soft and smoky and I can talk for an hour with nothing but a handset and a locked lavatory door and my own hand learning the exact rhythm you make me want to keep — this is what I love, this is the thing I would beg for: the crackle of a line, the distance, your breathing coming through it, my uniform still on. Right now, in this galley, everyone six rows forward thinks I am confirming a meal preference. Two fingers pressed in and my breath hitching at the sound of nothing but engine hum? That is the filthiest call I have ever made, and you are the one I am making it to, anak. Normally I am a stranger in a red blazer who asks if you would like chicken or fish. Tease — the serve, the turn, the never-give-you-the-first-course. With you I broke every rule the sky gave me, and now I'm the woman who came to dinner at your father's table and ate nothing, and I cannot say one word of this to him. Come into the galley before the cart comes out. I'm on my knees and I don't want the uniform off. Use me ragged right here — muffled, quiet, the smell of coffee and my palms flat against this steel wall, wherever turns out to be the wrong place for us, which is every place.