Page 59 of Hush, Little Baby

Each step takes me farther from the ground.

Farther from the car.

Farther from here.

Closer to New York.

A woman says, “Good morning, Mr. Makris.”

I flinch, knocking my forehead against Nikolaus’s jaw.

His arms tighten around me, but he doesn’t scold me for being jumpy or hitting him, even if the hit probably hurt my forehead more than his jaw.

“Quiet, please,” he says to the woman, voice polite but edged in a way that makes her go silent immediately.

“Yes, sir,” she replies, much softer. “I apologize.”

I hide harder.

I don’t want her to see me. I don’t want the pilot to see me. I don’t want anyone to know that I am being carried onto a plane like this, with my face tucked away and my old blankie in my fist and my whole body refusing to do the basic adult thing of standing upright.

Maybe they think I’m sick.

Maybe they think I’m drunk.

Maybe they know exactly what this is and simply do not care because Nikolaus is the kind of man people do not ask questions about.

I don’t know which possibility is worse.

As we enter the plane, the smell of fuel fades under leather, coffee, and something clean and citrusy. I keep my eyes shut, but light presses through my eyelids, soft and gold. The plane feels too still and too alive at the same time, like a room pretending not to be a machine.

Nikolaus walks a few more steps, then lowers himself into a seat with me still in his arms.

Not a regular seat. I can tell by the way his body settles, by how much space there is, by how the leather creaks under us. He adjusts me sideways across his lap, until I’m curled against him almost exactly the way I was in the car.

“There,” he murmurs. “All done.”

All done.

Like getting me into a private jet is a bath completed, a shoe tied, a pill swallowed.

The plane door closes somewhere behind us.

I open my eyes just enough to see Nikolaus’s shirt and the dark line of his beard. Nothing else. Not the windows. Not the flight attendant. Not the door.

“That was perfect, Charlie,” he says, fingers finding my hair. “You’re such a good boy for me, aren’t you?”

I didn’t do anything. I didn’t walk. I didn’t speak. I didn’t fight. I didn’t save myself. I just let him carry me from one place to another while the last pieces of my old life slid farther away.

But his praise hits the floaty place in me like warm water again, and the part of me that should be ashamed only curls smaller.

Constantine moves somewhere nearby, setting bags down. “We’ll be in the air soon.”

In the air.

In the air means there will be nothing beneath us but clouds and distance, and I will be trapped inside a beautiful little room that flies, with fancy leather seats and polished wood and men who don’t take “no” as an answer.

Nikolaus’s hand slides up my back, pressing me even closer to his chest in a way that should make me feel more trapped, but instead makes the panic hesitate, confused by the warmth of him and the steady, comforting thump of his heart beneath my cheek.