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A nervous knot moves halfway down the center of my throat and it takes me a moment longer to answer him because it wedges there stubbornly.
“I’ve never sat by the window,” I confess, “or looked out of one while the plane was in the air.”
Luke’s left brow rises just a little and he looks at me in a searching sidelong glance.
“Never? Not once?”
I shake my head slowly and switch my big orange purse onto the opposite shoulder.
“Then today will be your first time,” he says.
My heart falls into the pit of my empty stomach, and now I feel more nauseous than ever.
“No, Luke, I really can’t do that.” I take a step back and sit down on a nearby plastic chair to catch my breath. “I-I can get on the plane and fly over to the other island with you, but”—my head is still shaking, I realize—“but there’s no way I can sit in the window seat or look out … That’s a really bad idea.”
He sits on the edge of the empty seat beside me, his body turned at an angle so he can face me, our knees touching.
“Why is it a bad idea?” He looks thoughtful, concerned.
“Because, seriously … it’s just … Luke, really, I draw the line right there. I’m sorry.”
He peers in at me, ensnaring my unsteady gaze; his eyes are so sincere and comforting and I want to give in to him, but I know that this time I can’t. I just can’t.
His hand cups my knee.
“Sienna, you can do this,” he says in a quiet voice so as not to draw the attention of anyone walking nearby. “Fear is an illusion. A hallucination. And all you have to do is make yourself believe that by defying it once”—he holds up the index finger from the hand on my knee and then lets it drop back down—“just once, and after that first time, you’ll start to see that all along you’ve been lied to, and then you’ll begin to take control of your own life.”
“That’s not entirely true,” I tell him right away. “The first time I got on an airplane, I was so terrified. But I forced myself on that plane anyway, and I sat in that seat and cried for two hours, my hands gripping the armrests until the bones in my fingers ached. And when that plane landed, I couldn’t get off it fast enough. That was about”—I count in my head briefly—“oh, maybe fifteen flights ago. And since then, I’ve been afraid of every flight I’ve taken.”
Luke regards me quietly for a moment, his hand smoothing the top of my knee in consolation, and then he says, “That’s because you weren’t telling the fear to piss off.” His hand slides away and he rests his back against the seat, stretching his arm behind me over the top of mine. “You got on that plane that day because you forced yourself. And I bet”—he nods at me once—“you told yourself that you just had to get it over with, didn’t you?”
I think back on it, but I don’t have to for long because those particular words had run through my head a hundred times in preparation of that first flight and it’s not easy to forget.
“Yeah, I did say that,” I admit.
“That’s not fighting the fear,” he tells me. “That’s being submissive to it, accepting it as a part of your life that you can’t control. And I’m sorry, but I just don’t take you for the type.” He shakes his head, a teasing look hidden behind his eyes.
“What type would that be?”
He shrugs and leans farther back in his seat, bringing his arms up and interlocking his fingers behind his golden-brown head, his long legs, bent at the knees, fallen open before him. I turn around on my seat, dropping my purse in the space between us, and just look at him, waiting for his answer as I chew on the inside of my mouth.
“I just think you’re stronger than that,” he says and then turns his head to lock eyes with me. “Everything I know about you so far tells me that although sweet, you’re a no-nonsense kind of girl. You’re set in your ways and you don’t want your life dictated by anything you can’t control—why else would you work so hard at your job?” His eyes smile at me, but the smile only faintly touches his mouth. “You work your ass off because you want to secure your financial life. You don’t want not having money to control any part of it.”
Is that truly the answer? Control?
Luke’s comforting smile pulls me back in; I think maybe he knows I’ve taken the first step to understanding a deeper part of myself.
Suddenly he pushes his body forward and away from the back of the seat, leaning over with his elbows resting on his legs. “But that’s getting off the subject,” he says. “Look, I’m just saying that you’re stronger than you give yourself credit.”
He stands up and reaches out his hand to me. Hesitantly I take it.
“Just try it,” he says as he helps me to my feet, “this one time—if you step off that plane on Kauai and don’t feel even the slightest bit liberated, then I’ll leave you alone about it and eat my words.”
After turning it over and over inside my mind, a long moment that feels like forever, I swallow down the rejection I had prepared and I give in.
“OK.”
Luke shakes his head as if I were already making a mistake and he needs to quickly correct it.
