Plot Twist In Paradise
by IAmHerEmma

 

 

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Chapter Five: Gaslit by My Own Bestseller

 

No.

No, no, no, no, no.

This was not happening. This was absolutely, categorically not happening. I had done everything right today. I had packed my bags, gotten in the taxi, survived the curb, survived the check-in counter, survived security and a dry muffin and a café full of feral children and a man who laughed at his tablet like he was being paid by the decibel. I had earned this seat. I had earned four hours of peace in a window seat with nothing to do but stare at clouds and pretend I was a person whose life was going well. And the universe, having apparently decided that my morning had been insufficiently terrible, had sent her.

Curbside Karen. Standing in the aisle. Boarding pass in hand. Looking at me, and then at the seat next to me, and then back at me, with an expression that made it very clear she was doing the same math I was and arriving at the same answer.

"You," I said.

"You," she said.

We stared at each other. The kind of stare where neither person blinks because blinking would be a concession, and neither of us was in a conceding mood.

"This is a joke," I said. "This has to be a joke. The universe is actively, deliberately messing with me."

"With you?"

"Yes, with me. Every time I start to relax today, you appear."

"I'd say it's been mutual."

"It has not been mutual. It has been targeted. I was sitting here, I was finally — I was having a moment — and then you —"

"I what? Walked onto a plane I booked three weeks ago?"

"You showed up. Again. For the third time today. At what point does coincidence become harassment?"

"Harassment," she repeated, flatly. "You think I'm stalking you. On a commercial flight. That I paid for."

"I think the universe is stalking me and using you as the weapon."

"That might be the most self-centred thing I've ever heard."

"Self-centred? If I'm self-centred, you're the orbit."

She blinked once, quickly, and I watched the composure flicker — just for a second — before she pulled it back into place. She looked at her boarding pass, looked at the seat next to me, and looked back at the boarding pass, as if checking it again might change what was printed on it.

A blonde flight attendant with a neat ponytail and the professionally pleasant expression of someone who had handled worse appeared from a few rows up.

"Ma'am, could I help you find your seat?"

"I've found it," Curbside Karen said. "I was hoping I could switch to a different one."

"I'm sorry — is there a problem with your seat?" The flight attendant looked between us.

"Not with the seat itself," the woman said. "More with the... proximity."

"The proximity," I repeated. "Interesting word choice."

The flight attendant's expression shifted into the particular careful neutrality of someone who was not paid enough for this. "I understand. Unfortunately, this is a completely full flight, so we can't accommodate a seat change at this time."

"Nothing at all? I'm not particular."

"I'm sorry, ma'am. I really can't do anything. I do need you to take your seat so we can keep boarding moving."

"Fine," she said, and exhaled through her nose.

The flight attendant gave us both a smile that was ninety percent professional and ten percent please do not make this my problem for the rest of the flight and moved on down the aisle.

"Proximity," I said.

"Don't."

"Should I put up a sign? A little warning notice on the headrest? 'Caution: difficult seatmate'?"

"Given how this morning has gone, yes. Possibly laminated."

She sat down next to me and buckled her seatbelt.

I stared at her for a second, waiting for something clever to arrive. Nothing did. I turned to face the window. The tarmac stretched out beyond the glass, flat and grey and completely unhelpful. Neither of us spoke. The boarding shuffle continued around us — bags, elbows, the slow parade of people finding seats — and we sat in our little two-seat block like a pair of strangers who had already used up a day's worth of words on each other.

My phone buzzed.

Sasha: Update??

Me: SOS

Sasha: What

Me: Curbside Karen is in the seat next to mine

Sasha: You're joking

Me: Do I sound like I'm joking

Sasha: You sound like you're spiraling

Me: I AM spiraling. This woman is NEXT TO ME for the entire flight

Sasha: This is the greatest thing ever

Me: I hate you

Sasha: You love me. Tell Curbside Karen I say hi

"Curbside Karen?"

I turned.

"Are you reading my messages?"

"You're holding your phone three inches from my arm. It's not reading, it's unavoidable."

"It's private."

"Then close your eyes."

"For the record," she said, "my name isn't Karen."

My face felt warm. I turned back to the window.

Neither of us said anything. The cabin noise filled the gap — bags being stowed, the low murmur of a hundred conversations bleeding into one. I watched her from the corner of my eye. Her jaw was still tight, arms folded, but after a few seconds her shoulders loosened and she leaned back in her seat with her eyes half-closed. Hours. We had hours of this.

The PA system crackled.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the doors have been closed and we are preparing for departure. Please ensure your seatbelts are fastened and all electronic devices are switched to airplane mode."

I put my phone in my lap, leaned back against the headrest, and closed my eyes.

The plane began to move. A slow, heavy roll backward, then a wide turn that pressed me gently into the window. The taxiing was fine. Taxiing was just driving with more optimism. I kept my eyes closed and let the hum of the engines fill the space where conversation used to be, and for about ninety seconds it was almost peaceful. Two strangers sitting in mutual silence, pretending the last twenty minutes hadn't happened. I could do this. I could sit here for an entire flight and simply not engage. I was an adult. I had self-control. I had —

The engines pitched up. The plane surged forward, pressing me back into the seat, and I felt the acceleration in my stomach before I heard it in the cabin. That was normal. That was fine. That was just physics doing its job.

Then the plane shook.

Not gently. Not the polite little rattle you got on most flights, the one that lasted two seconds and made the overhead bins creak. This was a full-body tremor that ran through the fuselage like the aircraft had just remembered it was held together with rivets and optimism. The cabin lights flickered. My hand shot out and grabbed the window ledge with a grip that could have cracked a walnut.

"You can use the armrest if you want," she said.

"I'm fine."

"You're holding the window ledge like it owes you money."

"It does."

"What did it do?"

"Provided insufficient emotional support during takeoff."

She pressed her lips together.

"Do you always fly like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like the plane is personally trying to kill you."

"It shook."

"They all shake."

"This one shook aggressively."

"It shook the normal amount. You grabbed the window like you were trying to take it with you."

The plane levelled out, the engines settled into a steady hum, and the seatbelt sign dinged overhead as if nothing had happened. I released the window ledge, flexed my fingers, and placed my hands in my lap.

Outside the window, the ground was already shrinking away.

The first twenty minutes passed in loaded silence. The engines hummed. The cabin settled into the low, steady rhythm of a flight in progress.

The armrest started it.

Neither of us had claimed it. It had been sitting there between us, neutral territory, since she sat down. But as the flight wore on and we both shifted and resettled, elbows started drifting. Mine found the armrest first. Then hers bumped it — lightly, just enough to register. I held my position. She adjusted. Our elbows touched again. I moved mine forward. She moved hers back. I moved mine back. We collided.

We didn't speak, didn't look at each other — just kept making micro-adjustments, shifting angles, reclaiming half-inches, in complete silence, like two people playing chess without a board.

The drinks cart saved us from whatever that was becoming.

It rolled up the aisle with the slow, inevitable approach of something that couldn't be avoided. The flight attendant, a man with a neat beard and a practiced smile, stopped at our row.

"Can I get you ladies anything?"

"Apple juice, please."

Of course. Decisive, efficient, no browsing. She probably knew what she was ordering before she got on the plane. She probably had a spreadsheet.

"And for you?"

"Coffee, please."

He poured it, handed it to her, and nodded for her to pass it along. She turned toward me and held it out. I reached for it — and the plane jolted. Just a small bump, nothing dramatic, but enough. The coffee lurched in the cup. A few drops spilled over the rim onto her hand.

She looked at me like I'd done it on purpose. Like I had summoned a pocket of turbulence through sheer force of will just to inconvenience her.

"That wasn't me," I said.

"I didn't say it was."

"Your face said it."

She shook her hand once, then held the cup out again. I took it with both hands.

"You're welcome," she said flatly.

I took a sip of coffee. Not great, not worth complaining about, and at this point in the day I'd take any small victory that came in a cup.

The coffee ran out before the silence did. I stared at the seat back in front of me for a while, then at the window, then at my hands, then at the seat back again, and then I ran out of things to stare at.

I still had hours left in this seat and I could either spend them doing nothing or I could do the thing I'd come on this trip to fix in the first place.

I pulled the laptop out of my tote, opened it on the tray table, and started typing before I could talk myself out of it.

She walked into the —

Into the what? The room? The bar? The void of my creative bankruptcy? Delete.

The morning light caught —

Caught what? Her face? Her attention? A bus? Delete.

There was something about the way —

There was something about the way I kept starting sentences I couldn't finish. Very meta. Very unhelpful. Delete.

I tried again. Slower this time.

The hotel room was smaller than the photos had promised. She dropped her bag by the door and stood there for a moment, taking in the bed that swallowed most of the floor, the window that faced a brick wall, and the bathroom that was optimistically described as "ensuite" but was really just a shower with ambitions.

I stopped. Read it back. That was... not horrible. I kept going.

She hadn't planned on being here. The trip had been someone else's idea — her sister's, or her therapist's, or possibly both, she couldn't remember whose voice had said "you need to get away" first because everyone in her life had apparently formed a committee about it.

Two paragraphs. A voice. A character. Something that almost had a pulse. I typed faster, leaning into it, chasing whatever thread had appeared before it disappeared again —

I read the whole thing from the top.

Garbage. Complete, irredeemable garbage. The character was flat, the hotel room could have been in any book written by anyone, and the voice I thought I'd found was just a bad impression of myself.

I highlighted everything. All of it.

Delete.

"Is it supposed to do that?"

I turned.

"Do what?"

"The typing and then the deleting. Over and over. Is that — is something wrong with it?"

"Nothing's wrong with it."

"You've been doing the same thing for ten minutes. You type, you stop, you erase it all. Then you start again. It's like watching someone fill a glass and pour it out."

"It's a process."

"It sounds like a process. A loud one."

"I don't type that loud."

"You type like you're punishing the keyboard for something it did to you personally."

"And you breathe like you're being paid by the inhale, but you don't see me filing a complaint."

I closed the laptop. Firmly. With feeling.

The laptop went back into the tote. The tray table went up. And I was back to having nothing to do, which was becoming the theme of this flight and possibly my entire creative career.

I leaned back in my seat. The cabin had settled into that mid-flight lull where half the passengers were asleep and the other half were staring at screens with the glazed focus of people trying to make time move faster.

I watched the clouds for a while. They were doing nothing interesting but they were better company than the woman next to me.

Then my body made an announcement.

I needed the bathroom.

I looked at the aisle. I looked at the woman between me and the aisle. I weighed my options. There were no options. There was only one way out of a window seat and it went directly through her.

"Excuse me."

She looked up.

"I need to —" I gestured toward the aisle.

She unbuckled her seatbelt and stood up without a word. Efficient. No fuss. She stepped into the aisle and pressed herself flat against the seat in front to give me room, which was generous of her in theory and completely insufficient in practice. The gap between her and the seat was designed for a person roughly the width of a broomstick, and I was not, despite my best efforts in life, a broomstick.

I squeezed through. There was a moment — brief, awful — where we were facing each other in the gap and I could smell whatever she was wearing. Something clean and faintly warm. I did not want to notice that. I filed it under things that were irrelevant and moved on.

"Thanks," I muttered, already walking.

The bathroom was at the back of the plane. Three rows. Then four. Then the little curtained area where the flight attendants kept the cart, and then the door with the green VACANT sign that was the most beautiful word in the English language.

I locked the door behind me and stood there for a second in the tiny fluorescent box that airlines had the audacity to call a lavatory.

I did what I came to do, which took about thirty seconds and involved a flush mechanism that sounded like the plane was swallowing something it disagreed with.

The sink was approximately the size of a cereal bowl. The soap dispenser required the kind of precise hand-eye coordination that should not be expected of anyone at thirty-five thousand feet. I washed my hands, dried them on a paper towel the thickness of a promise, and checked my reflection in the mirror. It was the size of a hardcover book and lit from above with the kind of lighting that made everyone look like they were recovering from something. My makeup was holding up, which felt like a small personal victory given the day I was having.

Still here. Still trapped on a plane with a woman who had opinions about my typing volume.

I unlocked the door and headed back up the aisle. A man in the middle section had fallen asleep with his mouth open and his head tilted back at an angle that was going to cost him his neck for the next three days. A woman near the front was reading to a small child in a whisper that carried further than she probably realised.

I reached my row. Curbside Karen was reading something. She looked up when I stopped, stood without being asked this time, and stepped into the aisle.

I squeezed past again, dropped into my seat, and buckled my seatbelt.

A minute passed. Maybe two. Then I glanced over.

She was deep in the book now. Holding it with one hand, the other resting on the armrest — which she had apparently claimed while I was gone, but that was a battle for another time. Her eyes were moving across the page at a steady pace, and there was something on her face I hadn't seen before. Focus, but a specific kind of focus. The kind where you forgot where you were because the page had pulled you somewhere else.

I looked at the cover.

I looked at it again.

I looked at it a third time because my brain was refusing to process what my eyes were telling it.

She was reading My Husband, My Bride.

My book. This annoying woman was sitting next to me reading my book.

I stared at the cover. The striking image that my publisher had actually invested in. My name — ADRIANNA MOORE — printed across the bottom in clean white letters.

My eyes kept sliding back to the book, to her hands holding it, to the page she was on — which, from the thickness of what she'd already read, looked like she was maybe a third of the way through. Chapter six or seven. Before the good stuff but past the point where most people decided whether they were going to keep going.

She was still going.

I glanced at her again. Then again. I was leaning slightly toward her now, watching her read, and I could feel my face doing something I hadn't authorised. Something smug and satisfied and probably deeply weird-looking from the outside.

"What?"

I blinked. She was looking at me. The book was still open in her hand but her eyes were on my face and her expression had shifted from reading-focus to something more like suspicion.

"Nothing."

"You're staring at me."

"I'm not staring."

"You're smiling and staring. You've been doing it for the last two minutes."

I adjusted in my seat and tried to look normal, but the grin kept creeping back.

"Is that a good book?" I asked, aiming for casual and landing somewhere around transparent.

She looked down at the cover, then back at me. "Why?"

"Just asking. Making conversation. That's what people do on planes."

"We haven't made conversation this entire flight. We've argued."

"Right. And now I'm trying something new. Is it good?"

She studied me for a second. I could see her trying to figure out what I was doing and not liking that she couldn't.

"It's fine," she said.

"Fine?"

"I'm reading it, aren't I?"

"You don't seem that enthusiastic."

"I don't perform enthusiasm for strangers on planes."

"Fair enough." I paused. Then, because I apparently had no self-control: "I wrote that."

She looked at me.

"That book," I said. "I wrote it."

She looked at the cover. She looked at me. She looked at the cover again.

"You wrote this."

"Yes."

"You."

"Me."

"You're telling me you're Adrianna Moore."

"That is what I'm telling you, yes."

She closed the book, keeping her finger in the page, and turned to face me fully. Her expression was something between amused and unconvinced, like I'd just told her I was secretly a duchess and she was waiting for the punchline.

"You're Adrianna Moore. The author of this book."

"The very same."

"The book that's been on every bestseller list for the past four months."

"That's the one."

"And you just happen to be sitting next to me. On this flight. In this seat."

"The universe works in mysterious and deeply irritating ways."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she opened the book again, found her page, and settled back in her seat.

"Sure you are," she said, and went back to reading.

"I — excuse me?"

"Mm-hm."

"You don't believe me."

"I believe you believe it."

"That's — that is the most condescending thing anyone has ever said to me."

"It's a popular book. I'm sure you're a big fan."

"I'm not a fan. I didn't read it. I wrote it."

"Mm-hm."

"Stop saying 'mm-hm' like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you're humouring me."

"I'm not humouring you. I'm reading." She turned a page. "Or trying to."

I stared at her. She didn't look up. She was already back in the book, turning a page with the calm indifference of someone who had just ended a conversation and felt no need to revisit it.

I sat there for a moment, jaw tight, fingers drumming on the armrest — the armrest she'd claimed while I was in the bathroom, which I was now too irritated to fight over. She was reading my words. Right there. Right next to me. Words I had agonised over, rewritten four times, stayed up until three in the morning getting right. And she had just "mm-hm"ed me like I'd told her I once met a celebrity at a grocery store.

I thought about spoiling the ending. Just casually dropping what happened in chapter twenty-two, watching the words register, watching the book close. But I wasn't that person. I was petty, sure, but I wasn't a monster.

I turned away from her.

Fine. She didn't believe me. That was fine. I didn't need the validation of a woman whose name I didn't even know. I didn't need her to look at me with sudden respect or awe or any of the things that would have been nice but were absolutely not necessary for my continued existence as a human being.

It was fine.

It was completely, absolutely fine.

Neither of us spoke for the rest of the flight. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and let the hum of the engines fill the space where the argument had been.

At some point the seatbelt sign dinged. The captain's voice crackled through the PA — something about beginning the descent, local weather, thanking us for flying with them as if we'd had a say in it. I opened my eyes. The land below had changed — greener, flatter, broken up by rivers and the occasional cluster of buildings that got smaller and more spread apart the further south we'd gone.

The plane began its descent, and I felt the pressure shift in my ears as the ground got closer.

The landing was not gentle. The wheels hit the tarmac with a jolt that sent my stomach somewhere it didn't belong, and everything roared and shuddered as the plane fought to slow down. My hand found the armrest and gripped it. Her arm wasn't there anymore — at some point during the flight she'd given it up, though I doubted it was out of generosity. When the shaking stopped I let go.

We taxied for what felt like longer than the flight itself, rolling past terminals and parked aircraft and ground crew waving orange batons, and then finally the plane stopped and the seatbelt sign dinged off.

The cabin erupted. Every single person stood up at exactly the same time as if a starting pistol had gone off. Overhead bins opened. Bags appeared. A man three rows ahead was already wrestling his suitcase out of the bin like his life depended on it, even though the door was still closed.

I stayed in my seat, and so did Curbside Karen.

She was still reading. The chaos of a hundred and seventy people scrambling to stand in an aisle they couldn't walk down yet, and this woman had found another paragraph she wanted to finish. She turned a page, adjusted the book in her hand, and kept going as if the plane hadn't landed, as if the bins weren't slamming, as if the man three rows up wasn't now holding his suitcase over his head like a trophy he'd earned in combat.

Eventually the crowd thinned and the aisle started to move. Passengers shuffled forward in the slow, stop-start procession of deplaning, and Curbside Karen closed the book, slid it into the bag at her feet, and stood. She stepped into the aisle and merged into the shuffle without looking back. I grabbed my tote, pulled my carry-on from the overhead bin, and followed the stream toward the front of the cabin.

The jet bridge smelled like fuel and warm concrete. I followed the stream of passengers into the terminal, which was smaller than the one I'd left — lower ceilings, fewer gates, the particular energy of a regional airport that knew it wasn't anyone's final destination. Signs pointed toward baggage claim and I followed them.

I found my carousel in baggage claim and joined the crowd already gathered around it, staring at an empty belt with the collective patience of people who had nowhere else to be but would very much like to be there sooner.

Bags were already coming through and people were stepping forward to claim them, one by one, with the satisfied efficiency of passengers whose luggage had not betrayed them. Mine was not among them. The crowd around the carousel thinned as everyone else collected their things and headed for the exit, and I stood there watching the same few unclaimed bags make their slow, sad loop, wondering what I had done to personally offend the baggage handling system.

I spotted her across the carousel. Curbside Karen, standing on the opposite side. Her bag appeared just as I noticed her — because of course it did — and she stepped forward, lifted it off the belt, set it on its wheels, and turned to leave.

She glanced across the carousel, saw me still standing there bagless, and something crossed her face — dry, unreadable, an expression I was starting to associate specifically with her. Then she turned and walked away.

The carousel hummed its way through the last few unclaimed bags, and then finally my navy blue suitcase appeared through the rubber flaps like a student arriving late to class and hoping no one would notice.

I grabbed it, set it on its wheels, and headed for the exit.

The pre-arrival checklist had mentioned a transfer desk inside the terminal. I scanned the signs — car rental, taxi rank, ground transportation — and then spotted it. A small desk near the far wall with a printed sign that read THE WHISPERING PALMS — GUEST TRANSFERS in the same turquoise font that had been haunting me since the brochure.

And standing in front of it, roller bag at her side, was her.

I stopped walking. Because at what point does a reasonable person accept that the universe has a personal vendetta against them? Three encounters at the airport. A four-hour flight. A baggage carousel. And now this woman was standing at my resort's transfer desk like she'd been placed there specifically to test whether I was capable of committing a crime in a public terminal.

I considered turning around. I considered going to the bathroom, hiding for ten minutes, and hoping she'd be gone by the time I came back. I considered emigrating.

Instead I walked up to the desk and set my bag down next to hers, because I was a grown-ass adult and I was not going to be chased out of a transfer desk by a person who thought "proximity" was a valid complaint.

She turned her head. Saw me. Her expression went through three stages in about two seconds — recognition, disbelief, and something that settled into a flat, resigned irritation that I found deeply satisfying.

"Oh, Jesus Christ, not you again," she said.

"Trust me, I'm not thrilled either."

"This is ridiculous."

"The universe is doing this. Take it up with management."

She opened her mouth to respond but before she could get a word out, a young man appeared from a door behind the desk wearing a resort polo in — what else — turquoise, with a name tag that read JASON. He had the tanned, slightly rushed look of someone who'd been doing three things at once and was about to start a fourth.

"Hi there! Sorry for the wait," he said, setting down a clipboard and a set of keys. "My name is Jason. Are you both here for The Whispering Palms transfer?"

"Apparently," I said, at the same moment she said, "Yes."

Jason looked between us, picked up his clipboard, and clicked his pen. "Great. I just need to check you in. Can I get your names?"

"Renee Miller."

Renee Miller. So Curbside Karen had a real name. And it was annoyingly elegant. The universe couldn't even give me the satisfaction of her being called something ridiculous — a Gertrude, a Bernice, anything I could hold over her in my head. No. She had to be a Renee. Smooth, French-sounding, the kind of name that looked good on a wine list. I hated it immediately.

Jason checked something on his clipboard and nodded, then turned to me. "And you must be Ms. Adrianna Moore?"

"That's me."

I looked at her. She was already looking at me — and then at the clipboard, and then at me again. I could practically hear the gears turning.

"Wait," she said. "You're —"

"Mm-hm," I said.

Jason checked something on his clipboard. "Perfect. If you'd both like to follow me, the shuttle is just outside. It'll take us to the marina and then we'll get you on the boat over to Coral Key."

I gave Renee one long look, slid my sunglasses down from the top of my head, and turned to Jason.

"Lead the way," I said, and walked ahead without looking back.

After a moment, I heard the reluctant click of a roller bag behind me.

For the first time all day, the universe and I were on the same page.