Forbidden plane reunion
They had agreed on the plane that nothing would follow. No names beyond the ones already spoken. No numbers. No continuation after the doors opened at the gate.
Ross held the discharge papers at his side. The staff room door shut behind Sigrid and the latch clicked once. The room measured eight feet across. A metal table stood in the center, covered with folded scrubs, open bags of kibble, and stacked clipboards. The smell of antiseptic mixed with dog hair rose from the surfaces and settled on the skin.
Sigrid moved to the far side of the table. She set her hands on the edge and aligned two folders that did not need aligning. Ross stayed near the counter. His shoulder touched the corner of the refrigerator. Neither spoke at first.
Sigrid remembered the plane. The lights had been off. The seatbelt sign had stayed lit through the turbulence. She had kept her eyes on the seatback in front of her until his hand found hers. After, she had walked through the terminal without looking back. She had deleted the flight number from her phone the same night.
Ross watched the line of her shoulders under the scrub top. He had kept the rule for five months. He had told himself the rule was sufficient. Now the room left no space to turn without brushing the table or the wall. The single frosted window let in gray light but showed nothing outside. The refrigerator hummed.
He set the papers on the counter.
“You said it ended at the airport,” he said.
Sigrid did not lift her hands from the table. Her fingers stayed flat against the folders. The pause held. The metal edge of a clipboard shifted under her palm and tapped once against the metal.
“It did,” she said.
The words came out flat, with no give in them. She kept her eyes on the folders after she spoke, as though the answer had settled the matter. The refrigerator filled the silence. Neither of them moved for a moment that stretched longer than the room could hold.
Then she lifted her hands from the table. She crossed the narrow space between them and set her palms against his shirt, the way a person reaches to take back something said in anger. The fabric was warm under her fingers. She undid the top button, then the next, without looking at his face.
Ross stayed still while her hands moved. He felt the apology in it, in the way her touch stayed light, as if she were correcting the thing she had just said and the thing she had said five months before. He raised the hem of her scrub top and held it there. The cotton bunched under her arms. Her skin met the cooler air of the room.
The refrigerator was at his shoulder. He stepped half a pace and turned them both, so the metal table came against their hips and they stood side by side along the edge of it, shoulders nearly touching, the open floor in front of them. A stack of folders shifted when his weight settled against the table, but nothing fell. He leaned there and drew her in against his side.
Sigrid kissed him. The contact was slow, the pressure uneven. Ross answered without force, his mouth adjusting to hers as if the months of silence required this exact correction. She drew back and kissed him again, lower at the corner of his mouth, then again, each one shorter than the one before, none of them finishing what the last had started. Her breath passed through her nose in a steady line. His followed the same pattern. The door had no lock. Any sound from the hallway would reach them at once, and so they kept everything small, the kisses contained, the breathing held.
She finished with the buttons. The shirt hung open. Ross brought one hand to the waistband of her scrubs and loosened the tie. He thought, distantly, that this was the part he had refused to imagine for five months, and that imagining it had been the rule and not the act. With his other hand he drew the bunched scrub top higher, and she lifted her arms enough to pin the fabric up against herself, holding it there so it would not fall. He worked the button of his jeans and then the zipper, the fabric easing open, and he reached past the band of his shorts to free himself. Then his hand found the small of her back to keep her close.
She reached for him. Her hand was cool and certain, and the silence she had built for five months broke without sound. He drew the loosened scrubs and her underwear down over her hips, no further than they needed to go, and shifted what remained aside, and she turned and pressed against him where he leaned on the table. They stayed standing. There was no other way to do it in the room and they did not look for one.
Sigrid bent her head and set her forehead near his collarbone. Her breathing was the only thing that moved freely, and even that she rationed. The refrigerator hummed against the wall. Outside, a dog barked once, then stopped, and the bark made her go still for the length of it before she moved again. The folders shifted under his weight and held. The whole act was an argument with the silence, each motion contradicting what she had said at the table, what she had said on the plane.
Her breathing changed first. It caught against his shoulder, broke the line it had been keeping, then steadied with effort, because the hallway was on the other side of the door. Her fingers tightened on his open shirt and held there. He felt it pass through her and kept still under it, his face against her hair.
His followed a moment after. He took his hand from her back and braced it flat on the table edge, and the tension in that arm held both of them upright while the rest of him let go. He made no sound. The clipboard tapped once against the metal, softer this time, and that was all.
They stepped apart at the same moment. Sigrid drew the scrubs up and retied the waistband, and the scrub top dropped back down over her as she let go of it. She began restacking the folders, squaring each edge with the one below it. Ross fastened his jeans and buttoned his shirt from the bottom upward and tucked the tails in. He moved to the far side of the table. The refrigerator continued its low sound. Neither looked toward the door.