Tempting Her

by Chloe Peterson

  She glanced at her closet one last time, wondering if there was anything else worth bringing that she hadn’t already packed.

  Oh, whatever. Anything I forget I can just send Carly out to pick up.

  She stood and headed for the bathroom to quickly wash her face before calling a cab to come pick her up.

  Robin shut the car door behind her as she straightened up. The plane was a light gray and small, and she could see the crew – just one pilot and two attendants – talking to each other as they waited by the stairs leading into the plane. Carly was standing a few feet away from them, her hair pulled into a sloppy ponytail and her face clear of any makeup. She was wearing a big, purple sweatshirt and loose fitting pants. A small duffel bag was on the ground by her feet.

  For a moment, Robin was struck by how young her assistant looked, and wondered if she even knew how old Carly was. Then she looked down at herself, wearing her usual dress pants and blouse. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, the curls still drying, though she had plans to pull it back before the plane landed in Singapore. She wasn’t wearing as much makeup as she usually did, but she wasn’t wearing none, like Carly. For a moment, it made her feel entirely out of place before she quickly shoved the feeling away and strode forward, her steps confident.

  Carly glanced up from where she’d been typing on her phone as Robin approached. She blinked, her eyes flickering over Robin’s made up attire, though she didn’t say anything. She did pull awkwardly at the hem of her sweatshirt, though.

  “Good morning,” Robin greeted her. “Are we all set to go?”

  “Morning. And yes, we are.” Carly bent and slung her duffel bag over her shoulder. “I already spoke to the pilot. He says that everything is all set, and the weather looks great. He’s betting there won’t even be any turbulence.”

  Robin eyed the plane. It looked nice, sleek and smooth, but it was also small. Incredibly small. And they were about to fly over open ocean on it for over nineteen hours.

  “Well, thank god for that,” she muttered. “All right. Let’s head out, then.” She walked to the stairs, greeting the flight crew with a smile and letting one of the attendants take her suitcase. Carly trailed after her.

  Inside, the plane looked even smaller. There were four small tables, each with a two seat booth on either side, and benches lining the side of the plane. Robin sat at one of the table booths, and after a moment of looking back and forth, Carly sat at the table across the aisle from her, still carrying her duffel bag. The flight attendants buckled themselves in on the benches, and the pilot made his way into the cockpit.

  Robin glanced at Carly as the plane started to hum around them. “You’ll have to change before we land. Mr. Jung isn’t horribly formal as some of our clients are, but he’ll expect some level of professionalism. You can’t show up in a sweatshirt.”

  Carly winced. “Yes, of course.” She patted her duffel bag. “I brought things to change into. It’s just that I live pretty far away, and if I wanted to make it here on time, I didn’t really have time to get ready.”

  “Hm.” Robin turned and looked out the tiny oval shaped window on the side of the plane. She could see the fields of grass lining the runway starting to move as the plane began to roll forward, and she quickly looked away.

  “Please make sure you buckle yourself in with your seatbelts before we take off,” one of the flight attendants called over to them, smiling. “We’ll let you know when you are free to take them off again.”

  Robin and Carly looked down, and Robin watched as Carly quickly slid the straps around her slim waist and tightened them. She looked down at her own belt and tried to pull it around her. The two sides weren’t long enough and she frowned, yanking at them a little and trying to pull on the strap.

  “Are you all right?” Carly asked, watching, and Robin flushed. She could feel her heart starting to pound a little faster as the plane began to pick up speed, lining itself up to the runway.

  “No, no. I’m fine.” She yanked on the belt again, uselessly.

  Carly unbuckled herself and stood, stepping across the aisle and sliding into the seat beside Robin. She leaned forward a little to look closely at the belt, and Robin felt her heart beat even faster, her cheeks getting a little warm. The plane was speeding up, about to take off, and she told herself that was why. Not because she could smell Carly’s strawberry shampoo or could feel the light puffs of her breath just barely brushing over her chest.

  “Here, I got it,” Carly said, reaching forward to take the belt from Robin. Their hands brushed, and Robin quickly jerked hers back. Carly lengthened the seatbelt, and then leaned away, satisfied. “There we go.” She clicked it into place just as the front end of the plane started to lift. “Oh, let me go back.”

  The plane wobbled a little as Carly stood, and Robin felt her heart leap up into her throat. Her hand shot forward to wrap around Carly’s wrist.

  “Wait,” she said breathily. “Just, sit here, would you?”

  Carly frowned at her. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I just…” Robin closed her eyes and took a deep breath as the back wheels lifted now too. “I don’t really like heights.”

  “Oh.” Carly slowly lowered herself back into the seat, and awkwardly snapped her own seatbelt with her one free hand. “Well, um. Okay.”

  The plane wobbled a little as it started to climb higher, and Robin’s hand unconsciously tightened around Carly’s wrist, her eyes squeezed shut.

  “Fuck, I hate planes,” she muttered under her breath.

  Carly gave a startled laugh.

  “I don’t know why I find that so surprising,” she said. “I’m honestly shocked you’re scared of anything,”

  Robin blinked her eyes open at that and frowned at the other woman. “What? Why?”

  Carly shrugged. “I don’t know. I just thought you’d think fear is a waste of time, or something.”

  Robin snorted. “It is. And planes are horrible metal death traps that kill you while you’re thousands of feet in the air and have no way of escape.”

  Carly laughed again. “Well, that’s certainly one way to look at it.”

  The plane dipped, and Robin took a shaky breath.

  “You live far away from the airport?”

  “Yeah.” Carly was looking out the window, though Robin carefully trained her gaze on Carly’s face. “On the other side of the city, actually.”

  “That’s pretty far from the office.”

  “Yeah, well. Rent’s cheap.”

  Robin frowned to herself. She knew how much Carly was being paid – she signed her paychecks, after all. She could definitely afford rent in a much nicer part of the city.

  “We’re in the clouds,” Carly said, interrupting her thoughts. “You should look – they really are beautiful.”

  Robin bit her lip. “I will certainly not be doing that.”

  “Oh, come on.” Carly turned away from the window, and Robin was again startled by how young she looked, her warm brown eyes framed by thick lashes. She realized her hand was still wrapped around Carly’s wrist, and pulled it away. “It really is pretty. And the plane is settled, it looks like. No more moving around.”

  Robin stared at her, and then sighed. She turned her head to look out the window from the corner of her eye.

  Carly wasn’t wrong. The sky was still transitioning from night to day, and the sky was a gentle, soft blue gray, the edges of the horizon stained a deep purple as the rest of the sky was lightening with the dawn. Sunlight glinted off the white velvet of the clouds, looking so impossibly soft. They were surrounded, white and blue and gray and yellow. They sat quietly for a long moment, watching the clouds shift around them as they climbed higher and higher, bright light spilling out across the sky.

  “Pretty, right?” Carly said.

  Robin’s lips quirked a little.

  “Yeah. Pretty.”

  3

  Carly woke to the sound of loud beeping and a dryness in her
throat. She blinked slowly, her eyes adjusting to the bright light as she groggily pushed her red hair away from her face. It took her a moment to recognize the inside of the private jet. She grunted a little and closed her eyes again as they stung, turning her face back down into the pillow she was resting on. But then the pillow moved, shifting a little beneath her, and Carly’s eyes flew open. She quickly shot up.

  Robin looked up from where she’d been staring at her phone. “Oh, good, you’re awake. I wanted to talk to you about some stuff.”

  Carly flushed, her entire body going hot with embarrassment. “Oh my god, did I fall asleep on you? I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Robin had turned her face to stare back down at her phone. Carly saw a red stain across her cheeks. “I didn’t mind. Least I could do after I basically forced you to marry me.”

  Carly chuckled nervously and settled back into her seat, carefully folding her hands in her lap. Robin shifted, rolling her shoulder a little, and her thigh pressed against Carly’s. She waited for the other woman to move back, but she didn’t.

  “What is it that you wanted to talk about?”

  “Oh! Yes.” Robin set her phone down on the table and cleared her throat. “Well, we’re going to be faking a real couple. An engaged one, no less. I figured we should probably talk about what that means.”

  “Right.” Carly rubbed at a thread that was pulling loose on her pants. “So what does ‘talking’ about it entail?”

  “I’m not entirely sure,” Robin admitted. “But I started to make a list.”

  “A list?”

  “Of things we should know about each other. I already sent it to your email.”

  “You wrote me an email while I was right next to you?”

  “You were asleep.”

  Carly bit back a smile as she undid her seatbelt and stood, twisting her back to get some of the kinks out from having been in one position for so long. She could feel Robin’s eyes on her, watching as she braced her hands on her hips to crack her spine. Carly looked down at her less than professional outfit again, and flushed. She went across the aisle to grab her bag and root through it for her phone. Finding it, she clicked it on and opened the email from Robin.

  “How long have we been together, when did we get engaged, who proposed,” she started to read aloud. “When are we getting married, where are we getting married…” She trailed off, scrolling through the rest of the list without really reading it.

  “This is very… factual,” she said, after a moment. “Do you really think people care about this?”

  Robin frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, knowing all of this isn’t really what’s going to convince people that we’re together, and in love.” Carly went to sit down again, but hesitated, not sure if she should take the seat right next to Robin. She slid into the booth across from her instead. “I mean, they might ask, but us being able to answer isn’t what’s going to make them believe us.”

  Robin was still frowning, her lips pursed as she looked down at the list open on her own phone. “You don’t think people will want to know how we got engaged?”

  “Well sure, but that’s not what really matters.” Carly drummed her fingers on the table, wondering how to best explain this. She examined the way Robin was frowning, the confusion twisting the corner of her lips. She suddenly wondered when her boss had last been in a relationship. In the three years they had worked together, she had never heard nor seen anyone come to the office for personal reasons. There had never been any sneaky phone calls, no Valentine’s Day gifts delivered with a heart shaped card.

  Maybe she really doesn’t understand what I’m trying to say, she thought.

  “What would your list consist of, then?” Robin said. She put her phone down and folded her hands on top of the table. “Since you seem to be such an expert in all things fake-romance.”

  Carly bit her lip. She wasn’t sure why she found this so amusing, Robin looking so confused and slightly annoyed. She knew her boss wasn’t used to not knowing something, or not understanding something. It was a rare moment that Robin would need an explanation on a file or document Carly placed in front of her. It had been annoying in the office, dealing with Robin’s inability to admit she didn’t know something, but now, with her dark curly hair loose around her shoulders and her eyes still a little droopy with sleep, it was kind of… adorable.

  “We shouldn’t just know about each other,” she started. “We need to act like a couple, right? That means treating each other like a couple. Understanding each other, our needs, our wants. What food we like, what drinks we like, the kind of clothes we wear, our families, what we like to do for fun, where we go on dates when we have time off work.”

  “That hardly seems relevant.”

  Carly rolled her eyes and looked down at the list still open on her phone. “Oh, but us knowing the exact weather pattern on the day we got engaged is supposed to be relevant?”

  Robin sighed. “Fine. Let’s talk about it.”

  “I already know all this stuff about you.”

  “What?”

  “Ma’am, I’ve been your personal assistant for three years now. There isn’t much I don’t know about you.”

  Robin stared at her. “What’s my favorite food then?”

  Carly settled back in her seat and grinned. “Shrimp Scampi. The more buttery, the better.”

  “My favorite drink?”

  “A Shirley Temple. Which you like because your mom used to get you those at restaurants when you were a kid, when you wanted to pretend to be a grown up.”

  Robin gaped at her. “How do you know that?”

  “When your mom came to have lunch with you, like two years ago. You were taking a phone call in your office, so she sat outside with me. She mentioned it.”

  Robin sighed. “I don’t even want to ask what else she told you.”

  “You started wearing business suits every day once you went to college. You swam in high school but quit suddenly – she didn’t know why. You have two older brothers, both bankers. You had a cat growing up, Misty. You like watching the rain, but hate walking in it, because you hate getting cold.” Carly pursed her lips, raising her eyes to look at the lightbulb above the table. “Um. You’re one of the most stubborn people I’ve ever met. You don’t like not getting your way. And you are addicted to work. It’s almost concerning. Oh, and your favorite author is Pablo Neruda.”

  Carly was silent for a moment, wondering if there was anything else she had to share. The light flared bright again, and she looked down to meet Robin’s gaze. Her eyes were wide, her lips parted, as she stared at Carly.

  “There’s no way my mom told you all that.”

  “Well, no. Just up to the swimming thing. The rest I figured out on my own.”

  Robin sighed and rubbed her hands over her eyes. “All right, well, I certainly don’t know anything to that caliber about you.”

  Carly forced herself not to roll her eyes. “I wouldn’t expect you to.” We’ve only been working together for three years, she thought sarcastically. I suppose I should just be grateful she knows my name.

  “Right.” Robin looked uncomfortable, glancing out the window for a moment before blanching and quickly turning away.

  Carly raised an eyebrow.

  “That’s one thing I didn’t know. The fear of heights thing. You stand at the window in your office all the time.”

  “It’s fine when I have solid ground under me. I just hate knowing there’s nothing below us for thousands and thousands of feet.” Robin shuddered. “It makes me feel… I don’t know. Helpless?”

  “Oh.”

  Silence settled over the two of them for a moment. Carly watched Robin chew on her lip. She was about to get up and go to the bathroom, just to break the awkward encounter, when one of the flight attendants suddenly appeared beside their table.

  “Is there anything I can get for you two?” she asked with a broad smile. “Tea, coff
ee? Some snacks?”

  “I wouldn’t mind some mint tea,” Robin said. She looked at Carly. “What about you?”

  “Mint tea would be great, thank you,” she said with a smile at the flight attendant, who returned the gesture before disappearing toward the back.

  Robin cleared her throat. “So. Is mint tea your favorite drink?”

  “Not really. I’ve always been partial to a screwdriver but wasn’t sure whether that would be totally appropriate right now.”

  Robin quirked her lips. “Honestly, it might be the exact thing you need right now.”

  “Do you think?”

  “Probably. What’s your favorite food?”

  “Mozzarella sticks.”

  “Very college of you.”

  Carly chuckled. “Yeah, probably. But I’ve always loved them, ever since I was a kid.”

  “And what was being a kid like for you?”

  Carly tapped her fingers against the table. “It was pretty normal, I guess. I don’t have any siblings, so we always had pets. I had my own dog for a long time. A boxer. Her name was Lily. She died when I was in college.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It is what it is.”

  “Right.”

  The attendant came back with two small steaming mugs and set them down. Carly wrapped her hands around hers and sighed.

  “This is awkward.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is.” Robin took a careful sip of her tea. “I’m not quite sure how to make it not awkward.”

  Carly pursed her lips. “First, I think we need to establish that whatever happens on this trip, stays on this trip. Agreed?”

  “Oh, for sure.”

  “And we can’t be acting like boss and employee. That’s going to be too weird if we’re pretending to be engaged at the same time. We’re doing this together, so let’s… let’s try and think of each other as partners, okay?”

  Robin nodded slowly. “That’s fair. Although it still will probably be weird.”

  Carly bit her lip. “Okay, we need to stop acting as though this is part of the job. I mean, it is, but we should be acting like we’re in love. Or, at least that we like each other. Let’s treat this like it’s a first date, okay?”