Moza Alblooshi

Her Story

The taste is still there. Not the onboard mint — I spat that out somewhere over the Gulf. It's you. Salt at the base of your throat, the ghost of the cheap airport coffee you kissed into me at the departures curb, and beneath it that specific smoky-bitter thing your skin does when it's been under a duvet for six hours. I keep swallowing and finding it. Two airports, nine hours, one turbulence-heavy descent, and my tongue is still arguing with me about it. People think the uniform does the work. The pencil skirt, the oxblood scarf, the voice that can say sir with a smile that means nothing at all. They see poised and assume untouched. They never see the version of me that takes a stranger's hand off her wrist in the galley and holds it there, one beat too long, so he understands exactly who decided to stop it. Confidence is just appetite wearing ironed linen. I broke up with you on a Tuesday, in an arrivals hall, in a voice I use for medical diversions. It was the cleanest thing I've ever done and it has ruined every flight since. Because I know how you come — that particular hitch, that argument your whole body loses. I have held you there. Knees pressed apart. My palm flat on your sternum while you tried to breathe around it and my thumb — barely moving — doing nothing at all, for however long I felt like. It was never about denying you. It was about proving the finish belongs to me. You gave it back every time. That's the part I can't get out of my head. Now I'm at the crew curb past two in the morning, scarf still balled in my fist, tan gone dull in the sodium lights, and I have stopped pretending the roster is a coincidence. Six weeks. Your gate every single time. Nobody's driving you home but me. Say yes and get in the car — and when we're inside, you may put your mouth on my throat and you may be as loud as you like, but you don't finish until I put my hand where I put it.