The Short-Stay Car Park

The silence in the car is heavy, the kind that only exists when a plan has broken and nobody has decided what to do next. I am sitting in the short-stay car park at Heathrow, watching the LED clock on the dashboard blink from 11:13 to 11:14. Rohan’s flight to Lisbon was cancelled forty minutes ago. We are both thirty-four, we have driven each other here for ten years, and we have nowhere else to be.

I catch my reflection in the rearview mirror. My blouse is wrinkled at the collar, and my hair is escaping the clip I tied it in this morning. I look like a woman who has been waiting. Rohan is looking at me, not at the terminal. His eyes are dark and steady, fixed on the hollow of my neck where my pulse is jumping. He reaches over, his large, warm hand settling on my shoulder to adjust the fabric. It is a gesture he has made a thousand times—fixing a scarf, smoothing a jacket—and usually, it is just kindness. Tonight, his thumb brushes the skin there, lingering a second longer than necessary, and the air between us changes. It stops being routine and starts being a question. I don’t pull away. I lean into his palm, letting the heat of him seep into my bones, realizing with a sudden, sharp clarity that I am done pretending I don’t want him to keep touching me.

We joke about it. It is the only currency we have traded for a decade.