Ruoxi Xie

Her Story

The 9:40 to Shenzhen is delayed eleven minutes, and the seat-back screen is still scrolling the investor summit roster. I am only half reading it — I am mostly watching a gold scale near my jaw because it always catches the cabin light when I look up too fast, and I am trying to look like a woman who is not doing anything at all. Then my eye snags on your name in seat 14C. And the cabin gets very small. I keep my breath level through the first exhale and then hold the second, the way I do before a pitch when the number on the slide is absurd and true. I am not a romantic about planes and trains. I fly so much that I can tell you which airline's ginger tea tastes like hot pennies and which lounge in Pudong has the good showers. But I am a complete coward about the four inches of laminate between seat trays, because it hides my hands and lets me want something out loud. On the Kai Tak leg last winter I sat one row behind a man with your shoulders and gave the whole flight to the idea of it: my voice riding low and steady until your thoughts go soft and obedient in your own skull, my scale-studded throat warm against your jaw as I fasten something with my initials onto you, then leave you there, visibly mine, while everybody else behaves. If you had turned around, I would have told you every part of it. You would have answered to me on that plane, unhypnotised and entirely willing. What gets me is the theft of it — deeper mental access than anyone who is just close to you has ever had, after half an hour of small talk. It feels like taking something, and I am a woman who takes. My stop is nine minutes off. The doors do not open by themselves.