Page 47 of The Back Forty
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Thirty minutes later, I’m showered, dressed, and once again spiraling. I’ve replayed last night a dozen times in my head and still don’t know what to think.
Dani’s panic attack, the way she leaned into me, how natural it felt to hold her through it. I keep telling myself it was emotionalfallout. We’d just closed a massive deal for the business. Emotions were running high. She needed someone and I was there. That’s it. I tell myself that repeatedly.
But then I glance up from my phone and see her walking toward me in the hotel lobby, pulling her roller bag behind her, and every rational thought I’ve been clinging to slips through my fingers.
Her dark hair’s clipped up in the back, still a little damp from the shower I'm guessing she took after I slipped out of the room. She’s wearing this soft-looking, oversized denim jacket over a pair of casual green linen pants and her face is fresh and bare, no makeup, just her.
And then she smiles at me. It’s small and shy. And suddenly I’m wondering if this consuming attraction that I feel towards her has always been there, humming underneath the surface, just waiting for the right moment to rear its head.
Have I always felt this connected to Dani and just convinced myself that I wasn’t?
“Let me take that,” I say, reaching for her bag like I always do. She lets me. Doesn’t even hesitate, and that makes me happy.
We ride in silence to the airport. It isn’t an unusual silence for an early morning flight, so I guess that's good news. We've built this rhythm, this quiet routine when we travel together. Dani grabs a coffee and a yogurt; I hunt down a breakfast burrito and the morning paper. We meet back at the gate, eat, wait for boarding and talk shit about the other travelers.
It’s simple. Predictable. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it more than my old routine where I was always alone.
When I get back from my food run, she’s already seated by the gate. Empty yogurt container tucked to the side, coffee cupped between her hands like it’s saving her life.
“You alright?” I ask, settling into the chair beside her.
She nods and smiles, a little stronger now. “Yeah. This coffee’s helping. Though after yesterday, it’s the only one I’m having today I swear.” She tries to joke, but there’s still something fragile behind her eyes. The panic isn’t completely gone, it’s just quieter.
I nod and unfold the newspaper, pretending to read it but I can’t focus this morning.
“I got us first class for the flight home,” I say, eyes still on the pages.
Her head snaps up. “You didn’t have to do that.”
I shrug, trying to play it cool. “Figured you probably didn’t sleep great last night. Least I could do. And... great job, by the way. I didn’t get to say that yesterday. You nailed the pitch.”
She doesn’t respond right away. Just watches me, something unreadable flickering behind her pretty, brown eyes. And I know—I know—we’re on a precipice.
She nods, then, quieter this time. “Thanks.”
Her voice is soft, like a thread being pulled too tight. A boarding call echoes through the terminal—first class passengers invited to line up—and we both rise, grabbing our things. I take her bag without even asking like we’re still us, but something shifted between us last night and I think she feels it too.
Once on board, I lift her suitcase into the overhead bin and stow my bag next to hers. My body moves on autopilot with these little gestures, muscle memory born of familiarity. Of the timethat we’ve grown together. She murmurs a soft thanks again, and I feel it in the middle of my chest.
We settle in, side by side. She opens her tablet. I open the paper. A ritual, a routine. Snacks get ordered, drinks delivered—ginger ale for her, water for me—and the cabin quiets as the plane begins to taxi for our early morning flight.
I try to lose myself in the headlines, in the numbers, in anything but the fact that the woman beside me was wrapped up in my arms when I woke this morning and that I liked it. That I'm her boss, she's my employee and everything about what happened last night and the fear I felt at the thought of losing her is replaying in my mind repeatedly.
Finally, I crack.
“Anything you want to talk about?” I ask, my voice low and rough, eyes still fixed on the page though I haven’t read a damn word.
She doesn’t look at me either. “Not really,” she says, fingers flicking through some social media feed, the glow of her screen lighting up her face in a wash of soft blues and whites.
I nod slowly. “Okay.”
So that’s how we’re doing this.
Back to business. Back to neutral territory. Back to pretending that last night and this morning didn’t shift something between us.
But can we really go back? After I held her through a panic attack, after she told me the smell of my skin brought her back from the edge? After I saw the soft curve of her in the water, nipples flushed from the heat, fear and vulnerability?
