“Aleks, I… I don’t think I can stay up here the entire flight,” she whispers with a glance over her shoulder like the Peasant Removal SWAT team she joked about earlier has been tailing her, ready to pounce as soon as she steps one toe out of line.
“Sit,” I say again. “You’re blocking the path.”
Olivia mumbles another apology to nobody in particular and squeezes close to my armrest, letting a cranky old woman waddle through to the bathroom. Across the aisle, another first-class passenger wearing a mink coat and a nasty expression eyes Olivia venomously over the rim of her glass of champagne like a cheap Cruella de Ville impersonator.
If it were me she was glaring at, I’d tell her to redirect her gaze elsewhere or I’d rip her eyes right out of their sockets.
Olivia, on the other hand, is ever-so-slightly less confrontational. Instead of standing up for herself, she ducks into the seat next to mine.
“I don’t belong here,” she says, still in that cowed whisper.
“That’s the second time today you’ve said that,” I remind her icily. “I don’t want to hear it a third.”
She gulps and stares at me, wondering if I’m serious. I am. She’ll soon learn just how serious. “I just… I mean, I can’t accept this, Aleks. First class is expensive. I can’t afford it.”
“I can. In any case, it didn’t cost me a thing,” I say. “There was an empty seat. I called in a favor.”
“A favor?”
I nod. “The pilot’s an old friend of mine.”
She sits back in her seat and stares at me with unfiltered bewilderment. “Who are you?”
Smiling, I pick up my glass of whiskey and take a sip. “I’ll let you decide.”
Before she can figure out how to respond to that, the Fasten Seatbelts light dings on and the pilot launches into his spiel over the intercom. Beneath us, the engines roar to life.
We taxi towards the runway. The attendants move through the aisles and seal off the first class from the rest of the seating. Olivia takes note of all this with pursed lips, but she doesn’t say anything.
Until something occurs to her. She curses and grabs for her phone. “Shit! I forgot to let Mia know that we’re about to take off.”
She types out a quick message and hits send. It doesn’t escape my notice that her hands are trembling hard enough that she can barely type. Her breath comes in shuddering gasps.
“Nervous flyer?” I ask.
“Not usually.” She tosses me a glance that tells me I might be the cause of her sudden anxiety.
I smile and take another sip of my whiskey. “You ought to get yourself a drink. Calm your nerves.”
“I don’t…” she starts to mumble, then corrects herself. “Okay. One drink. But it’s medicine. For my nerves, like you said.”
She’s about to reach for the help button when I stop her. “No need,” I say. “The stewardess has her eyes on us.”
I signal to her to bring us a bottle, and she disappears immediately to do as instructed. Olivia watches the exchange with mild fascination.
When the bright blond woman returns, she puts a sparkling clean wine glass down in front of Olivia, uncorks the bottle, and leaves it for us. The moment she walks away, Olivia looks at me with raised eyebrows.
“The whole bottle?”
I shrug. “Why not?”
She examines the label and her eyes widen. “This wine has to be a thousand dollars, at least.”
“You’re off by a couple zeroes,” I say with a pleasant chuckle. “But don’t think about that. Just relax and enjoy it.”
“What makes you think I’m not relaxed?”
I gesture to her stiff posture and her clenched fist. “You mean, aside from everything about you?”
She makes a forceful effort to unclench and melt back into her seat. “I’m just… I’m not used to this kind of thing. First class, expensive wine…” She glances at me out of the corner of her eye. “Handsome strangers who clearly don’t want to tell me too much about themselves.”
“Oh, so you think I’m handsome?”
She tries to cover her blush behind an eye roll. “Please. You know you are.”
I shrug. “I don’t think about it.”
“Riiight,” she scoffs. “You probably assume women are at your beck and call because of your great fashion sense.”
“I always assumed it was my charming personality,” I sigh, feigning disappointment.
“That doesn’t hurt,” she mutters.
I glance over and take the time to really look at her. Her eyes are a deep, rich brown. Warm chocolate, melted amber, shot through with those bolts of green. When she smiles, dimples appear in both cheeks.
I understand the appeal of the girl-next-door quality, in an intellectual sense if nothing else. I just never thought it was a quality I would find appealing.
“How long will you be staying with your family?” I ask. She looks like she needs a few softball questions to relax while the wine does its magic on her.
“Just over the holidays,” she says. “Christmas and New Years’， then I’m flying back on the 2nd.”
“Why the hustle back to the city? I thought you made your own hours.”
“Well, typically, I do,” she admits. “But there is this job I want to start prepping for.”
“Do tell.”
“It’s not really a job yet,” she corrects hastily. “More like I’m trying to prepare a portfolio to submit in the hopes it’ll get me an interview.”
“Sounds like a lot of work for a maybe.”
She shrugs. “It’s not easy being a cartoonist these days.”
“How did you find yourself on that path in the first place?”
“By accident,” she admits. “I was a quiet kid. Mom called me shy; Dad was nice and went with ‘introspective.’ My siblings preferred ‘hermit.’” She chuckles. “The truth is probably all of the above. But either way, I wasn’t great at expressing myself. I thought I was gonna go crazy for a little while. All these thoughts and feelings and no way to channel them. Then I found art. I started drawing, sketching, painting. I did it all. But caricatures came naturally to me. Just observing people. Memorializing them. Showing themselves to them as the world sees them. It felt like an accomplishment. Like… the kind of thing that could be important, maybe. If I put my mind to it.”
“Hence the people watching,” I say, remembering her earlier comment that she was an observer.
“Exactly.” She nods enthusiastically. “I guess, as I got older, that never really changed. Kids my own age never interested me. I think it was because I had siblings who were so much older.”
“It must have been hard when they moved out.”
Her eyes brighten just a little. It’s that feeling she’s describing—being seen by another. Recognized. Understood.
For her, capturing that feeling is art.
For me, it’s nothing but business.
“You have no idea. I was six when Rob went off to college. Eight when it was Mia’s turn. I turned to drawing even more then. Pretty sure I kept the art supply store in business for, like, a decade.”