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All flight attendants cry during a flight at least once. Definitely more than once. It was a hazard of the job. Being stuck in a metal cylinder with hundreds of cranky people crammed together and confined to their seats for hours at a time bred the worst kind of human behavior. But Candace had always found the most frustrating part, and the reason she usually broke down in tears, was pent-up anger. When passengers were at their worst, flight attendants had to be at their best; that was the AeroPlan party line. She always imagined that the responsibility and frustration of a regular flight — or many flights — built up in flight attendants’ systems and had to be released one way or another. Sometimes, flight attendants lost their cool — and usually their jobs — by being... not at their best. Other people managed to work through the angst by having lots of casual sex with each other, passengers, whoever; stress relief was stress relief. Some people walked right off the plane to the airport bar. But they all cried at some point.
Candace wouldn’t have considered herself a crier before she got the job at AeroPlan, but she’d cried more non-Ezra related tears in her first year than ever before. The point was that crying was a hazard of her job. But this cry was the worst. She’d squeezed herself into the forward galley tears leaking down her face, swallowing years of frustrated sobs, but not because a passenger had been shitty to her or because the plane had been buffeted in the air in the middle of a storm and everyone had been strapped down for hours snapping at each other and afraid for their lives. She was desperately trying to staunch the flow of tears falling from her eyes because Ezra was engaged to someone who wasn’t her. She pressed her body as close to the wall as she could get to make sure none of the First Class passengers saw her, and she cried as silently as she could, feeling shattered. This moment felt like rock bottom. It had to be. What could be worse than the fact that she’d been crying about Ezra Posner for almost two decades and he’d found someone else?
The sound of Mark’s voice made her jump.
“Good evening, everyone. We’ll be starting the dinner service soon. We have a selection of meal options...”
Candace couldn’t add getting written up to this flight; she wouldn’t be able to bear that, so she wiped her tears away and took a series of deep breaths, collecting herself as Mark ran through the announcement. She checked her supplies and tried to ground herself in the job. The familiar movements weren’t as comforting as she’d hoped, but she eventually got herself together enough to dart into the bathroom, wipe her face with some water and put some eye drops in her eyes. She felt almost back to normal as she went to the first row and began the dinner service.
She could feel Ezra’s eyes on her as she moved from each aisle to the front galley and back and she felt uncomfortable that even after four years and finding out that he was with someone else, his gaze still felt like electricity on her skin.
When they were younger, she liked to imagine that he’d never tire of staring at her. She used to fantasize that he was storing up every glimpse of her to tide him over while they were apart. She used to love flitting around Miles and Mei’s New Year’s parties, knowing that he was watching her, waiting for her, waiting for the party to reach full swing. Waiting for her to turn to him, pin him with a look and then disappear upstairs where he would slowly and surely strip her naked. He still stared then, but his gaze was followed by his touch, his tongue, his entire body. She’d always wanted more from those nights; declarations of love, a stammered invitation to dinner and a movie, some sign that this wasn’t just sex. She never got it, but for years she convinced herself that he just wasn’t ready; maybe next year. But the familiarity of his gaze now was the final clue she needed that she’d always been wrong about what his attention meant.
“I’m engaged, actually.”
Ezra’s eyes on her hadn’t been the early seeds of love; it was just lust. She knew what he felt like inside her; how gravelly his voice sounded first thing in the morning. She knew what it felt like to let herself dream of a future with him in the hours between three and dawn wrapped in his arms, her fingers playing in the hair on his chest; decades of the two of them together just like that. But she didn’t know what it felt like for Ezra to pick her up and take her to a fancy dinner, for them to hang out in her kitchen and cook dinner or fall asleep on his couch watching a movie.
It was one thing to feel eighteen or twenty or twenty-five again; pathetically in love with Ezra and afraid he couldn’t love her back. But knowing that he’d only ever thought she was good enough to fuck ripped her to shreds. She had only ever been a fantasy to him. Not good enough to marry.
Candace had never felt so small.
She had to walk and stoop and serve while he watched her, her only place of respite the small galley that just barely hid her from view. Over and over again, closer to his seat each time. And then she was at his row. His gaze felt heavier here, her backside to him, as she asked the older couple what they wanted for dinner. She avoided looking his way as she walked back with the couple’s meals, but then she couldn’t.
Her training was clear; she had to look every passenger in the eye with a friendly smile when she served them. After she made sure the couple didn’t want or need anything else, she took a deep breath and turned to Ezra, putting on her best work smile. He looked shocked, as if he hadn’t been watching her. And then she second-guessed herself. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe she’d made up his attention today and their entire relationship. He smiled up at her, that grimace thing he used to do that was so accidentally charming and devastating all at once. It felt like a knife in the back.
“What would you like? Chicken or pasta?” she asked. She was on autopilot and her voice was flat, but at least it didn’t break. At least she didn’t cry in front of him. But then she frowned, her face warming with shame. “Sorry, kosher. There’s a kosher meal for you. I’m sorry,” she said, turning quickly away.
“Candace,” he called after her, and her steps faltered the tiniest bit, but she didn’t turn back.
Fuckfuckfuckfuck, she thought to herself as she pulled the kosher meal onto a tray with his salad, roll and dessert. Shitshitshitshit, she thought as she walked back down the aisle. She slid his food onto the tray in front of him. “What would you like to drink?”
“I— Water. Please.”
She nodded and cursed herself in her head back and forth again. “Enjoy,” she said and turned away.
He grabbed her arm, somehow gently circling her wrist and caressing her pulse all in a fraction of a second. “Candace,” he whispered up to her.
It was wrong — terrible actually — what his touch and his voice could do to her sex. She was soft and wet in no time. Her mouth fell open, but a garbled sound was all that escaped. She should have pulled away and reminded him that assaulting a flight attendant was a federal offense or suggested that his fiancée probably wouldn’t appreciate him touching another woman this way. But she didn’t do that, because the part of her brain that didn’t grind to a halt was currently remembering every time he’d ever touched her. That first New Year’s Eve and every one after; that time they’d all gone to see a terrible vampire movie and she’d forgotten her coat so he’d draped his over her shoulders; or that last time they’d seen each other when he’d fallen asleep with his arms around her, his face buried in the crease of her neck. And by the heated look in his eyes, she guessed that his brain had taken a similar journey. It was terrible, and yet she couldn’t look away.
“Well, well, well,” Jorge said.
Candace pulled her arm from Ezra’s grasp a little too hard and slammed her elbow into the headrest of the seat in front of the old man.
“Ow, shit,” she said. “I mean shoot. I’m sorry, sir,” she said to the man whose dinner she’d interrupted. “Can I get you another glass of wine?” It was what she always said when she made a mistake and thankfully, it worked.
Without turning back to Jorge or Ezra, she shot up the aisle to the galley. She heard Jorge’s steps behind her. Her hands shook as she pulled the drinks tray from the shelves.
“Now you’ve gotta spill,” Jorge said. “What’s going on with you and the billionaire?” he whispered. “Do you have a sugar daddy?”
“No,” Candace said forcefully. “It’s not like that at all.”
“Well girl, what is it like? And when is it gonna get like that, ‘cause that man is loaded. Don’t deny it, Mark already told me.”
Candace shook her head and circled her wrist, rubbing the skin Ezra had touched. Caressed. “He... Ezra and I were friends. We used to be friends.”
Jorge shook his head and then motioned between them with two fingers. “You and I are friends. I have lots of friends that I’ve never looked at like that and that don’t have more money than a small Midwestern state’s fiscal budget.”
Candace swallowed. “We were friends. And then we were s-something else. And now we’re nothing,” she said, even though it broke her heart to admit it. “I’m not anything to him anymore. I’m not even sure I ever was.” She couldn’t start sobbing. She wouldn’t. But she also couldn’t stop the tears from spilling from her eyes. “Are you happy now? Take this to 4B,” she hissed and then pushed past Jorge to the toilet.
Once she’d locked the door behind her, she sat on the closed seat and cried as quietly as she could. Again. This would surely go down as the worst flight of her career. Hands down. And it wasn’t even half over.