“Do you need help?”

José felt himself start to sweat, his eyes widening. He glanced sharply left and right, searching for an escape route, but there was none. So he focused instead on the papers and taskcards laid out in front of him, along with the components. Rammstein blared from the little speaker he always carried, loud enough to deafen him.

“Can I help with something?”

This time he came and stood right in front of him, at the bench they’d set up outside for the mechanics. All the poor guy wanted was to replace an escape slide* in peace, why did this have to happen now?

José lowered “Ausländer” and lifted his head to look at the short man standing across from him. His gaze wandered slowly before reaching his colleague’s face, starting from his hands, moving up to the blue company T-shirt he wore under his open high-vis jacket, tight enough on him, and finally landing on his face. He would’ve preferred to avoid that last step, but he had to. He had some dignity and respect for the other man.

This time, Carlos didn’t flash one of his usual smiles. Not the big ones, not the abrupt ones. José felt… strange.

“No, thanks. I just have this escape slide to install,” he said, gesturing to the component on his left, on the floow next to the large table.

“Carlos!”

Carlos turned. A gray-haired man was heading toward him, having just come out of the bulk cargo*.

“Vítor!”

“If you’re free, can you come give me a hand?” the older man called out.

“Coming, got it!” Carlos shouted back.

Then he turned again and broke into one of those wide smiles of his.

“We’ll talk later, José.” He lightly tapped his shoulder and headed toward the aircraft.

José watched him walk away for a moment.

The way he said “José” echoed in his ears, for some reason.

It was the second time he hadn’t called him “Fidalgo.”

The week passed smoothly. He hadn’t said anything. Hadn’t mentioned anything. And he treated him normally, just like before. Not more distant, but not any closer either.

And yet, José felt like he had started noticing things about his colleague now. Things he hadn’t known or paid attention to before. Like how he probably went to the gym, because he was clearly well-built. Or how he had flashed those smiles of his nine times today, and six of them had been directed at him—or at people near him. Or how he sometimes chewed with his mouth open when he ate. Or that, in the end, he wasn’t as close to Michael as he’d thought.

Since when had he started noticing all this?

Throughout the week, his ears seemed to perk up at the sound of his voice, and he’d catch himself turning toward it automatically, as if just to see him. He saw him every day. So what was this now? What kind of nonsense was this?

His ears perked up once again. He was sitting in the office, looking at something in the manual on the computer in front of him. When he turned instinctively toward the voice, he saw Carlos’s back as he walked out through the red office door. His gaze lingered there for a moment before returning to the manual on the screen in front of him.

It didn’t mean anything. Anything. His mind just wasn’t working right. Maybe he was sick. No—he was definitely sick. He needed a vacation.

Why had he looked at his ass as he walked out the door?

And why had he never noticed before how...

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered to himself, trying to refocus on the manual.

This week, after that incident, José realized he had started noticing Carlos. And more than that, he realized he’d been doing it long before, he just hadn’t understood it. Or hadn’t named it.

Lately, everything revolved around Carlos. His thoughts, his words, everything. Day and night, images of him filled his head. At one point during the week, he even looked him up on social media. All these years, they had never exchanged socials, only phone numbers on WhatsApp. He couldn’t find him on Instagram, but he did find him on LinkedIn. His profile picture showed him in the cockpit of an A330, wearing those large headphones, seated in the co-pilot’s seat. He looked serious. The one sitting in the captain’s seat must’ve taken the photo. Who had been sitting there, he wondered?

It was as if someone had put a damn spell on him. Those eyes, that look, that night—they were still etched into his memory.

Carlos had a hold of him, somehow mentally. He should’ve been ashamed. How had he ended up like this? How was his own mind playing these games on him? If Carlos ever found out—if he even got a hint of it—he was the kind of person who’d puff up even more than he already did. Only this time, it’d be from pride.

There were two things he had realized over the course of the week.

One: lately, everything seemed to be him. Or he thought it was. That had to stop. He needed to get a grip. He knew what he liked, and it wasn’t Carlos. He had probably just been startled, or mistaken simple attention for something else.

Two: all of this was madness. The one thinking and feeling these things was someone else. Not José.

But as the days went by, José found himself less and less.

Two eyes from his right, however, had already seen something they perhaps shouldn’t have seen or understood.

*Escape slide: Aircraft escape or evacuation slides are single or dual-lane inflatable slides kept tucked inside cabin doors and external fuselage compartments to provide an alternate aircraft escape method. These devices are used when standard exits are deemed unusable due to water, fire or other safety hazards.