Turbulence Protocol

I'd been flying with Lucinda for two years, and in that time I don't think we'd agreed on a single thing. I'm Olga, thirty-four, first officer, and Lucinda is thirty-six and my captain, which is a polite way of saying she outranks me and never lets me forget it. We argued about approach patterns, about which coffee brand went in the crew thermos, about whether the autopilot was a tool or a crutch, about de-icing protocol, about whether Denver drivers or Seattle drivers were worse. Once we argued for forty minutes about whether a particular cloud layer was stratocumulus or altocumulus, and we were both right, which made it worse.

The strange thing was that we were good together in the cockpit. Three thousand hours of shared flying will do that. She'd call out a flaps setting and my hand was already moving. I'd spot traffic and she'd already started her scan. We were a machine, and we hated each other a little for it, or at least I told myself it was hate.

Then came the night everything changed. It was a Tuesday, ordinary in every way, no weather, no drama, just the hum of the city below us as we came into Denver. We'd had a vicious argument in the cockpit over some nothing item, a checklist flow or a radio call, and it had gotten personal, the way our arguments did. In the parking lot afterward, still in uniform, she stopped me by her car and looked at me with that expression she had, the one that made junior flight attendants walk faster.

She said I physically could not go seven days without winning an argument. She said she'd bet her good thermos on it. And then, because she was Lucinda and never did anything halfway, she raised the stakes. If I wanted to prove her wrong, I'd do it properly. A full week where she was in charge of everything, where I followed every order without talking back, no loopholes, no snark. She said the word submission out loud in that parking garage like it was a maneuver we were briefing.

I said yes before I knew what it meant. That's the honest truth of it. The word was out of my mouth before my brain finished processing the sentence, and by the time I got home to my condo I'd already texted her, because a verbal yes with Lucinda would never hold, she'd find a loophole in my own dare. She texted me the terms and I texted back a single thumbs up, and I lay awake half the night wondering what I'd just agreed to.

Her answer to that question arrived Wednesday morning at 6:47, while I was still in bed. My phone buzzed on the nightstand and it was a text from her. Kneel by the front door, eyes down, when I get home tonight. That was the entire message. No signature, no emoji, nothing. I stared at it for a long time while my coffee went cold, and I told myself I could refuse, that this was all a game and games could be quit. But I'd said yes, and more to the point, some part of me that I'd been ignoring for three years was already awake and listening.

She got home to my place a little after six that evening, because of course she'd decided we'd do this at my condo, my two-bedroom high-rise with the floor-to-ceiling windows and the minimalist furniture I'd bought to impress nobody in particular. At ten past six I walked to the front door and knelt on the hardwood. Eyes down. I could see the toes of my own shoes and nothing else, and I could hear my own pulse in my ears, which was ridiculous, since I fly aircraft for a living and I don't rattle.

The lock turned at 6:19. I heard her come in, set her bag down, and stand there. She let me kneel there for what felt like a geological age but was probably forty seconds, and then she crouched in front of me and put one finger under my chin.

She didn't say anything. She just looked at me, and I saw something in her face I'd never seen before, or maybe I'd seen it and filed it under something else. I was shaking, and not from fear, and the shaking felt natural in a way that scared me more than anything she could have done. She stood up and told me to get up and make her a drink, and I did, without one single word of backtalk, and she smiled like she'd won the lottery.

After dinner she sat me down at my own kitchen table and produced a legal pad. I should have known. Lucinda briefs everything. She wrote while I watched, and then she slid the pad across the table so I could read it. It was a contract, actually written out, dated Tuesday, with a start time and an end time seven days later. At the top, underlined twice, was the safeword: Mayday. She'd picked the one word from our world that stops everything, the word no pilot ever wants to say, and I understood immediately why she'd chosen it. It meant I could always be heard.

The rules were simple and brutal. I would not speak first. I would not make eye contact without her permission. I would wear no underwear unless she said otherwise. And I would follow every instruction she gave, from the smallest to whatever else she had in mind, without argument, without editorial, without the running commentary I'd been providing for three years. I read it twice and my face was hot and something low in my stomach was doing things it had no business doing over a legal pad. I signed it. She signed under me and kept the page, and I went to bed that night understanding that I had handed over the keys to something and couldn't take them back until the week ran out.

Thursday I flew a turn to Phoenix and back, and I thought about the rules the entire time, which is not ideal from an aviation standpoint, but the flying was rote and my mind was elsewhere. I wasn't wearing underwear. Nobody knew. Every time I shifted in my seat in the cockpit I knew, and at cruise I caught Lucinda looking at me with a face of pure professional calm, and I understood that she knew I knew, and that this was all part of it.

After work she came back to my place and did not let me speak. She pointed at the living-room rug, then pointed at my clothes. I stripped where I stood, folded everything onto the arm of the sofa because folding felt like the only control I had left, and then I knelt on the rug, naked, while she sat in my reading chair with a folder she'd brought.

It was the in-flight manual. Our manual, the one we both had memorized, and she read it aloud. Page by page, in her captain's voice, the flat competent voice she used on the radio, starting with normal procedures and working into the abnormal ones. She read about engine-out profiles and pressurization and go-around criteria, and I knelt on the rug and tried not to move. My knees ached on the wool. The city glowed orange and white behind her through the windows, forty floors down, and the room was quiet except for her voice.

She had a riding crop. I didn't ask where she got it or how long she'd had it, and I didn't ask, because asking was speaking. Every so often she'd stop reading, look up, and tap me with it, a light flick on my thigh or my shoulder or under my chin to tilt my head back up or straighten my spine. Posture correction, one tap at a time. Chin up. Shoulders back. Knees wider. Each tap landed soft but exact, like she'd been doing it for years, and each one went through me like a static shock. By the time she closed the manual my skin was humming and I was wet, actually wet, kneeling on my own living-room rug being corrected like a