He smiles. “You sound different when you’re talking to your mother.”
“You mean I sound more Indian.”
It’s something Allegra and her family notice about themselves: their accent subtly shifts depending on their audience. “Listen to Dad doing his Aussie voice,” her brother will chuckle. It happens naturally. Allegra can’t fake it.
“Do you speak…any other languages?”
“I understand Hindi pretty well,” says Allegra brusquely. “But I’m not fluent.”
She doesn’t want to talk to him about her family, her background, her culture. It’s too personal. She’s happy to be called “insanely beautiful” but not if what he really means is “exotic.”
She picks up her phone again, begins to scroll. “Shall I order us takeout?”
“Nope. I’m cooking,” he says.
“You’re cooking?” She puts down her phone. “You don’t need to do that.”
“For your birthday,” he says. “I felt bad when I turned up to work and saw your friend with the balloon and realized it was your birthday, I didn’t know—”
“Why should you have?” She wants to make it very clear she has no misapprehensions about what is going on here. She kicks his calf with her foot. “Speaking of which, what was that performance with the doughnut? My friend…”
She catches herself. Mockery is the basis of their relationship, but there are surely limits. She can’t tell him Anders said he’d never love anyone as much as he hated that man, in the same way that she can’t tell her friends that she occasionally hooks up with First Officer Jonathan Summers.
They would be appalled. More disapproving than her mother. Please not a pilot, Allegra, and okay, fine, if it has to be a pilot, why him? He’s the worst.
“I don’t know why I did that.” He puts his hand over his face and looks at her between his fingers. “I was thinking, Play it cool, play it cool, Jonny, because I know you don’t want anyone at work knowing about us, and then I…don’t know, I behaved like a jackass. I love those doughnuts.”
“You should be good in a crisis,” says Allegra. “You’re a pilot. Our lives are in your hands.”
“I’m excellent in a crisis,” he says. “I’m just a terrible actor.”
“It’s fine,” she says. “But you really don’t need to cook for me. That’s not necessary. That’s not…what we do.”
What they usually do is have astonishingly good sex, followed by fairly nice Vietnamese or quite good pizza from local takeouts and an expensive bottle of wine at his place. Never at her place. They never go out to dinner. Then she leaves his apartment in an Uber, satiated and a little drunk, and she promises herself that it won’t happen again.
It has the feeling of an affair, but he’s not married or in a relationship with anyone else, as far as she knows. No woman makes an appearance on his Instagram account.
There is no ban on work relationships. This happens all the time. They could go public with it, but it seems unnecessary to risk the humiliation and the gossip when it’s not going anywhere.
“I’ve made you a pie,” he says.
There is a beat.
A long beat.
“You’ve made me a pie?” She doesn’t know why the word “pie” is suddenly so funny.
“Yes,” he says. He’s laughing a bit too. “I’ve made you a pie, Allegra. It’s my signature dish. I make good pies. I make the pastry from scratch. It’s chicken and vegetables with a lattice top. It will be ready in twenty minutes. I’ve also made a green salad.”
“Well, that’s all very, gosh, domestic…a lattice top, I’m not even sure what that means.”
“Like a basket weave.” He demonstrates by crisscrossing his fingers.
“Oh, yes, of course, I know.” She takes a big mouthful of wine and avoids his eyes. She feels embarrassed. His cooking for her feels more intimate than what they just did, the moment she walked in the door, which was very intimate.
Something is not right. He seems unsure, when Jonny’s defining characteristic is arrogance.
They ran into each other outside of work six months ago, when Allegra and a group of schoolfriends went to see a band. She recognized him right away, standing at the bar next to her: that conceited, good-looking pilot. She looked away fast, but he caught her eye.
He said, “How do I know you?”
She looks different outside of work. No makeup, hair down, jeans, nose ring, tank top, tattoo on her shoulder. (A tiny abstract Ganesha. She and her cousin got them together when they turned eighteen. Her mother said, You will regret that. So far: no regret.)
He worked out who she was with a snap of his fingers: “Allegra!”
“First Officer Jonathan Summers.” She tipped a finger to her forehead.
He flirted. She mocked. He took it with good grace. They danced. He could dance. Of course he could. She went back to his apartment because she was just the right level of drunk, because it felt wicked but technically was not wicked, because of the way she felt when he looked at her, because she’d been single for two years and her body said, That’s enough celibacy, Allegra, thanks very much.
This is the fifth time it’s happened since then. The sex, unfortunately, is only getting better.
He says, “When you were talking to your mother, I overheard—sorry if you don’t want to talk about it—but did that passenger give you a prediction that day?”
He knows about the lady because, as is normal practice, the flight crew all waited for one another on the aerobridge and left the airport together, so there was plenty of time to fill one another in on what had happened. Even the captain was intrigued and acted less like an aristocrat talking to his servants and more like a regular workmate.
“I wouldn’t want to know,” he said as the staff bus jolted its way toward the car park. “My wife found this website called the Death Clock, where you enter your date of birth, your BMI—that sort of thing—and it predicts the date of your death. I told her, do not enter my data!”
Bet she did, thought Allegra.
