(Divya's Perspective)
🌟 Scene 1: Lounge – First Sight of the New Jasmine
The lounge smelled of stale coffee, cheap sanitizer, and the faint exhaustion that always hung around flight crews.
I stirred my paper cup absently, the plastic stirrer scraping a hollow, rhythmic circle inside. It was a comforting sound, almost meditative. Familiar. Mechanical.
My mind wasn't even on the upcoming flight briefing.
"I was thinking about home — about the rent overdue, about the crushing student loan interest payments that swallowed most of my current income, about the endless delays in our monthly paycheck deposits and the continuous shortage of allowance money, about the lies I spun daily to my mother and family about piloting flights I would never fly."
My family had no idea.
No idea that I wasn't flying planes but serving orange juice on them. That I hadn't made it as a pilot. That I was wearing a red jacket, skirt, and heels instead of a captain's stripes and suit.
She still called me "Captain Divya" in front of relatives.
I hated that it made me feel good.
And then the air shifted.
It wasn't dramatic, not a gust or a gasp. But I felt it. Like static before a storm. Every hair on my arm stood on edge.
I didn't notice the conversation fading around me until the air changed.
I didn't notice the way the nearby stewardesses stiffened, how the pilots glanced up from their tablets — until my skin tingled like the room had charged with static electricity.
Then I smelled it.
Not the coffee.
Not the chemical floor polish.
Something floral. Rich. Bold. Vanilla and spice and something deeper — something darker.
And when I turned — half-curious, half-dreading — my heart stopped.
Jasmine.
Except... not.
She walked through the lounge entrance like she was stepping onto a red carpet — heels clicking confidently, hips swinging in a rhythm too smooth to be accidental.
Her posture wasn't the friendly, chipper one we all wore like armor for the passengers.
It was predatory.
Hungry.
She wasn't looking around for a seat. She wasn't checking her phone, or adjusting her scarf, or brushing her hair back like she used to do a hundred times a day.
No.
She was aware. Completely. Of her effect, of our silence, of the eyes she pulled like gravity.
She owned it.
My fingers clenched around my coffee cup.
The uniform was the same: crisp red jacket, pencil skirt, prim white bluish-white shirt.
But it wore her differently now.
The skirt hugged her hips tighter, clinging like a lover desperate not to let go. The fabric shimmered subtly, and I couldn't tell if it was new or if her walk had changed the way I saw it.
The blouse molded against her breasts, buttons strained faintly across curves that had always been there — but never so proudly displayed.
Even the way she moved — slow, almost lazy — made the uniform look indecent, like lingerie masquerading as workwear.
She was dressed for duty.
But she looked like a goddess walking into a temple built for her worship.
And then I saw it.
She tilted her head, adjusting her scarf with one graceful hand, and the flutter of black ink danced across her skin.
Tiny butterflies.
Delicate, flowing from the hollow of her left collarbone, winding up toward the soft curve below her ear.
I blinked hard.
Tattoos.On Jasmine.
Not a tiny hidden ankle mark, not something shy.
Visible. Intimate. Daring.
My Jasmine?
Not quite mine — we weren't that much close friends. But we'd shared long flights, quiet gossip, late-night instant noodles in layover lounges. I'd once seen her cry silently in the galley on a return flight from Frankfurt.
And now here she was.
Ink on her skin. A smirk on her lips. Eyes like sin incarnate.
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry as sandpaper.
The Jasmine I had known would have done anything for money and for social appearance. But I never expected this.
This Jasmine... smirked when she caught me staring.
A slow, deliberate smirk that curled her lips into something dangerous. Something that said: I know exactly what you're thinking. And yes, I want you to think it.
I tore my gaze away, cheeks burning.
But it didn't help.
Because the next moment, Jasmine bent — to grab a bottle of water from the cooler — and her skirt rode down just a fraction.
Enough to reveal the curved tip of something dark and intricate, inked into the small of her back.
A pair of wings.
Sleek, black, tribal in design, arching up from somewhere forbidden below her waistband.
I gripped the table so hard that the cheap plastic edge dug into my palms.
Jesus Christ.
I shifted in my seat, squeezing my thighs together against the traitorous throb beginning between them.
I wasn't the only one who noticed.
One of the junior pilots — Pranav — almost dropped his phone watching her walk past, his jaw slack.
Another stewardess whispered sharply under her breath to a colleague, eyes wide.
But Jasmine didn't react.
She moved through the stares like a queen through a court of peasants — unbothered, untouchable, exultant.
She slid into a chair two tables away, crossed one smooth leg over the other with a casual flash of her thigh.
No visible tattoo there — yet — but I could imagine them hidden higher, waiting.
As she leaned forward to check her briefing papers, the peony tattoo — I'd later learn its name was "Bloom of Temptation" — peeked from the deep dip of her blouse neckline, an explosion of dark petals curling upward on the swell of her right breast.
I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't look away.
Every shift of her body, every toss of her hair, every subtle adjustment of her blouse or skirt — it was all a performance.
And I was the front-row audience.
My throat felt tight.
I wanted to look away.
To focus on my tablet.
On my coffee.
On anything.
But my traitorous eyes kept dragging back —
—to the bold spread of the butterflies tracing her neck,
—to the barely-there black wing teasing at her lower back,
—to the swell of peony petals along the soft curve of breast, visible only when she shifted just right.
A hot, sick coil of something twisted low in my belly.
Not just envy.
Not just anger.
Want.
Sharp and filthy.
My thighs squeezed tighter.
A bead of sweat slid between my shoulder blades.
I was breathing too hard.
I was thinking too fast.
This wasn't right.
This wasn't fair.
She was everything I was pretending to be.
Confident. Bold. Sexual. Free.
She had stepped out of her cocoon and emerged as something glorious, and I was still lying to my family and hiding under long sleeves and modest cuts.
I was jealous.
And I was aroused.
God help me, I was soaking my panties just watching her exist.
"You're staring," a voice whispered near my ear.
I jumped, nearly spilling coffee down my blouse.
It was Nisha, another hostess.
She smirked, biting her lip.
"Careful," she said, voice low, teasing. "You might fall for her."
I forced a laugh, shaking my head like it was a joke.
But inside...
Inside, I was unraveling.
Because I already had.