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Lukas sits in the same seat he occupied on the way here, just a few feet away from me, but mentally, we might as well be on different planes or different planets altogether. He opens his laptop before we’ve even reached cruising altitude and proceeds to ignore me completely.

I don’t know what I expected. I guess some kind of conversation, at the very least. Is that really so much for a girl to ask for?

But I don’t even get that. All I get is the steadytap-tap-tapof his keyboard and the occasional grunt when he reads something that displeases him. Not exactly “baring our hearts.”

I turn toward the window and watch France shrink into a patchwork of greens and browns, then disappear entirely beneath a blanket of clouds.

My dress has mostly dried by now, but it’s stiff and uncomfortable against my skin. The flight attendant offered me a change of clothes when we boarded, but I declined. Some perverse part of me wants Lukas to have to look at the evidence of what he did. What healmostdid, rather.

Not that he’s looking. But, like, if he does.

I squirm in my seat, and the movement sends a pulse of remembered sensation through my core. His thigh. The pressure. I ground against him like I’d lost my damn mind, like a cat in heat.

Yet I can’t bring myself to regret it.

As the Atlantic passes beneath us, I try to sleep. But every time I close my eyes, I’m back in that grotto, with Lukas’s mouth on mine, his hand in my hair, the hard heat of him pressed against my palm…

When I take you.

Not if.

When.

Somewhere over Greenland, the flight attendant brings me a blanket. I wrap it around my shoulders and stare at the back of Lukas’s head. His silver hair is still perfectly in place, not a strand out of order.

Meanwhile, I look like something the cat dragged in, drowned, took a nibble of, and then decided wasn’t worth eating.

Come to think of it, that’s exactly what happened.

The laptop screen casts blue light across his face. His brow furrows at something he’s reading. Whatever it is, it’s not good news.

Not your problem,I remind myself.He’s made that abundantly clear.

But I still can’t stop watching him.

The hours crawl by. I doze fitfully, dream of drowning, and wake with a gasp. The flight attendant brings food I can’t taste. The sun sets over the horizon. It’s pretty, but I feel absolutely nothing when I look at it.

Finally, the pilot announces our descent. Lukas closes his laptop and tucks it into his briefcase. He still hasn’t looked at me. Not one single, solitary glance since we left the grotto.

The landing is smooth. The plane taxis to a private hangar, where two black SUVs wait on the tarmac, engines running, windows tinted dark.

Lukas rises from his seat and buttons his jacket stiffly. He gathers his briefcase and checks his phone. Only when there’s nothing else for him to do does he turn in my direction.

But even so, he still doesn’tquitelook at me. His gaze settles somewhere past my left shoulder. “My driver will take you home,” he says. “I have business.”

That’s it. No explanation. No acknowledgment of what happened between us.

Once again, I am dismissed.

“Of course,” I hear myself say. My voice sounds distant, like it belongs to someone else. “Business.”

Lukas doesn’t respond. He’s already walking toward the door, phone pressed to his ear, barking something in Russian that I can’t understand.

I gather my ruined dress around me and follow.

The SUV drops me at my building just as the last light is draining from the sky. I trudge up the stairs because the elevator is broken again. By the time I reach my floor, my legs feel like they’re made of Play-Doh.

As I fumble with my keys and shoulder the door open, I’m mentally cataloguing the order of operations: shower, wine, bed, existential crisis, repeat. Can’t wait.