Four Hours Of Torture
863 Words
Elyn had a rule about airplane seats.
No talking. No eye contact. No acknowledging that the person beside her was a person and not furniture.
It was a good rule.
A solid rule.
A rule that had served her perfectly for eleven years of business travel.
Rhys Calder dismantled it in four minutes.
“You’re doing the thing,” he said.
She didn’t look up from her laptop. “What thing.”
“The thing where you’re so aggressively focused on your screen that you’re actually thinking about nothing on your screen.”
Elyn’s fingers stopped moving.
“I’m reading a forty page acquisition brief,” she said.
“You’ve been on the same page for twelve minutes.”
She turned to look at him slowly.
He was looking straight ahead. Completely unbothered. Like he hadn’t just admitted to watching her for twelve minutes and found nothing remarkable about that fact whatsoever.
“Are you timing me,” she said.
“I noticed,” he said. “There’s a difference.”
“There really isn’t.”
He smiled at the seat in front of him. “How’s the brief.”
“Fascinating.”
“What’s it about.”
“None of your business.”
“So you don’t actually know.”
Elyn closed her laptop. Turned to face him fully. “Mr. Calder I want you to look at me very carefully.”
He turned. Those dark unhurried eyes landing on her face like he had all the time in the world and nowhere better to point them.
It was deeply inconvenient how unbothered he looked.
“I am looking,” he said.
“I run a company with four hundred employees. I have ended business partnerships worth nine figures with a single phone call. I once made a man cry in a boardroom and felt nothing.”
“Impressive.”
“So understand me when I say this politely.” She held his gaze. “Leave me alone.”
Rhys was quiet for a moment.
Then, “Was that the polite version?”
“The impolite version involves HR.”
“We don’t work together.”
“Yet,” she said without thinking.
Something shifted in his eyes. Barely. A fraction. Gone before she could name it.
She faced forward.
Yet. Why had she said yet. That was not information he needed. That was not information anyone needed. She pressed her fingers against her laptop and breathed once through her nose and decided that word had never happened.
The flight attendant appeared with drinks. Elyn took water. Rhys took nothing and the attendant looked mildly devastated about it.
Silence settled.
Real silence this time.
Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. The hum of the engine. The distant sound of someone’s headphones two rows back.
Elyn’s shoulders dropped half an inch.
She was fine. This was fine. Four hours was nothing. She had sat through seven hour board meetings with men who talked exclusively about their golf handicaps. She could.
“Tell me something,” Rhys said.
She exhaled. “I just told you to leave me alone.”
“You told me to leave you alone. You didn’t say stop talking.”
“Those are the same thing.”
“Are they.”
She turned to look at him and immediately regretted it because he was already looking at her and the distance between seat 2A and seat 2B was not a distance that had ever bothered her before on any flight in her life.
It bothered her now.
“What,” she said flatly.
“Why don’t you like men.”
The question landed without warning. Clean and direct like he had been holding it the entire time and simply decided now was the moment.
Elyn stared at him.
“Excuse me.”
“You heard me.”
“That is an extraordinarily personal question from someone I met forty minutes ago.”
“You said yet,” he said simply. “People who hate men don’t say yet. They say never. So I’m curious.”
Her jaw tightened. “I don’t hate men.”
“No?”
“I find them largely unnecessary.”
“Largely,” he repeated. Like the word amused him deeply.
“Don’t read into it.”
“Already did.”
Elyn picked up her water. Took a slow sip. Set it down. Every movement deliberate. Controlled.
“Mr. Calder,” she said.
“Rhys.”
“Mr. Calder.” She faced forward. “The next person who speaks in this row is going to be the flight attendant offering us lunch. Are we clear.”
He said nothing.
Good.
Perfect.
She opened her laptop.
Closed it again.
Opened it.
The card was still under her thigh. She could feel the edge of it. Sharp and small and completely ignorable.
She was ignoring it.
Completely.
“Rhys,” she said quietly. Testing it. Feeling how it sat in her mouth.
She immediately wished she hadn’t done that.
Beside her Rhys Calder said absolutely nothing.
But she heard him smile.
She actually heard it.
And that was somehow the most infuriating thing that had happened to her all morning.
- Writer
