CAPTIVE LOVE

by Suzy Devere

The plane was supposed to be landing and instead it was burning.  She felt her fear dry her mouth up from the inside; so many more things she wanted to say.  She imagined dry leaves being stitched to her lips and scalp with an upholstery needle, the kind her father used to use.

They had been sitting together for hours, she and this odd man, this stranger, nothing like her father.  She’d seen him first at check in, which seemed now a hundred years ago; had peeked at him ever-so-cautiously over the height of a woman’s red luggage in the early-morning line. 

He’d noticed her, too, but pretended he hadn’t.

He liked a hot cup of coffee before speaking to anyone in the morning—it was one of his “ways”–but he hadn’t been able to manage making a pot before his drive to the airport.  Now he’d broken his own rule, superstition almost, and spoken before coffee, developed a crush on a complete stranger before coffee, even had an unwanted erection before coffee.  He didn’t dare say hello to her, not with his cock on display.  Instead he just stared.

He watched her all the way through Security.  She had to take off items and stack them in dreary gray rubber buckets for the x-ray machine.  First she stripped off her belt, then her watch, then the rest of her jewelry and boots.  After this, and nearly naked from all the undressing involved, she yelled at a Security guard, then apologized profusely for being short with him.  She seemed crazy. Then she lost her cell phone while trying to reassemble herself at the x-ray machine, then found it again, etc.  “A tired bitch, on the edge of decompensating,” he thought.  But it didn’t matter.  He was spell-bound by the hair, yet it wasn’t the first thing he’d noticed about her.  That had been her hands.

She had man hands; curiously large, huge, basketball-palming man hands.  Emasculating monstrosities!  When she’d put her necklace back on after Security, he’d seen that her gigantic man hands were in weird contrast to her delicate collar bones.  In fact, he decided, with the aid of his embarrassing hard-on, that these strange features gave her an erotic look.  She was built to grab a man.  Her body parts were clearly mismatched, put together at random, but a man could find unusual pleasure, he suspected, in the way she looked like she could finger an ass while getting fucked at the same time.  Her arms were that long, her hands that big and…and…

so it was in the middle of this ass-fingering thought that he had noticed the intricacy of her hair, a pretty and youthful brown, braided haphazardly and wound round the top of her egg-shaped skull.  She was definately half black, had to be..  Blue eyes and dark skin, but the hair…he could imagine her pulling it high into a knot in front of a mirror naked, a knot he now imagined he wanted to see her loose and unwind. 

It was mesmerizing; soft brown locks so womanly and unexpected with the rest of her features.  Something about it reminded him of a sloppy punctuation mark.  Why?  He didn’t know but her hair seemed a slovenly comma, penned at the end of a long, long letter; handwriting growing ever more fluid, commas, periods, punctuation of any sort appearing less and less…an overall sense of something being on the verge of breaking free, of structure breaking down…It amazed him that he could focus on the texture of her hair, but miss her name completely?  Who cared about the name of this mis-proportioned, frazzled wo-man? It also occurred to him that if he fixated on her hair or anything else about her any longer he would have to check himself in.  He looked away, embarrassed at his curious attraction and aware of his shallow and shameless objectification, especially as he had someone at home sleeping who loved him.

She thought again of a lawn bag stuffed with dried leaves.  She was being sewn shut by time and heat.  She could not get the image out of her mind. The landing was bumpy and she wondered what her last thoughts would be if she were really to die, right then, on that plane.  Surely that wouldn’t happen?  But if it did, she guessed she would be thinking of her mother.  Only because he’d asked her about her mother’s hair.  He’d brought up all sorts of uncomfortable memories without even knowing it.  Of all the people she did not want to die thinking about…oh, my.  Yet he’d brought it up, this stranger, once they’d relaxed, maybe four or five hours in to the nine hour flight?  They’d both had several drinks by that time and were engaged in that out-of-time-no-context bond that happens on airplanes and trains and busses; something special though common.  “Captive love,” she thought.  He had reached over and touched her shoulder, then said “I bet you have your mother’s hair.  You should thank her.”

It was an odd statement at best, bizarre at worst.  Immediately she’d imagined him sizing her up by her attributes and those of her mother; that’s how it always worked.  Crazy mother, crazy baby.  Fat mother, fat baby, and so on, or so the stories go.

Nevertheless, she’d answered him honestly, even though she’d learned not to after all these years.  Perhaps because of having lied all these years?

“No” she’d said sharply, matter of factly, with a pointed chin and tinge of salty reality to her voice. “My mother’s hair is black.  And short.  And a bit thin, if you must know.”  She knew it sounded fantastically unappealing even as she was saying it, but she didn’t care.  Now she wished she hadn’t been so honest.  Now she’d grown fond of him, but imagined she’d given him a big red flag to stay away.  She put her hands back under her legs, between the seat and her jeans.  He’d been staring at them the whole flight.  And though she found herself liking him, she could sense the motivation of his gaze was solely sexual and it made her uncomfortable.

“Give the lady another drink!” he’d said earlier, a little too loudly she thought, but the stewardess had paid attention and for the whole flight, the two of them had exchanged flirtatious chatter, shared secrets of no importance, and never had an empty glass.  She liked him, but didn’t understand anything about him.  His story was disorienting.  She knew he was leaving out big chunks of critical information.  He lived with someone, that was clear, and he was very handsome, that was clear, too.  Was he gay?  Was that why he was so evasive when she asked who he lived with?  Was he married?  If he was married, wouldn’t he have just said he was married?  She didn’t know.  Should she give him her phone number?

As the plane started to shake, this time for real, he looked at her face and said “I love you.”  He reached over and took her big hands and placed them both in his lap, pushing them softly onto his cock.  She didn’t flinch, just let her arms go slack.  He said “Do you love me?”

She said nothing but kept her hands where he’d put them.  She leaned in to him, put her nose in his hair, her lips near his ear.  When the heat came, she found her teeth biting.  His ear was between them and she was clenching so hard they were touching themselves through his flesh.

It became impossible to separate her body from his once the fire hit the cabin.  They melted together, and as it happened it could have looked like the last mark on that earlier imagined handwritten page, the pen now without an author, ink simply drifting.

 
 

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~ This piece was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 and was filed under Writing, Short Story. You can make comments on it below. ~