Page 1 of Give In

chapter

one

Clover

I have a system at airports.

It’s not a complicated system. It mostly involves getting to my gate with enough time to acquire a large coffee and a snack that I will feel guilty about and then eat anyway, finding a seat with a wall or a column behind it so no one can walk up on me unexpectedly, and spending the remaining time before boarding doing absolutely nothing productive.

It’s a good system. It works for me. I have refined it over years of being someone who finds airports mildly overwhelming and has learned to manage this through strategic carbohydrates and a defensible seating position.

Today the system fails at step one because the travel day from hell has already claimed my first two flights. One mechanical delay and one missed connection. By the time I reach this gate, I have approximately four minutes before boarding and zero time for coffee or snacks or walls to put my back against. I arrive breathless and mildly damp, and dragging my carry-on behind me. The wheels have been working inconsistently today. Mostly not working, so I’ve simply been pulling it on its side.

The gate agent scans my boarding pass, and I stumble down the jetway and find my seat.

I have a window seat, which is the one thing today has gotten right. I press my forehead briefly against the cool plastic of the window and breathe.

Okay. Okay. I am on the plane. The plane will take me to the island. On the island is my sister, who is getting married in two days, and I have promised myself and Juniper that I will be present and cheerful and useful this weekend. Instead of the version of me that once missed a flight because I got distracted by a bookstore in the terminal and lost track of time.

That was one time. It was a very good bookstore.

I am settling in, arranging my carry-on under the seat in front of me and locating my headphones, when I become aware of a presence in my peripheral vision.

I look up.

Oh.

The man lowering himself into the aisle seat two seats over is — there is no other word for this — enormous. Not in an alarming way. In a way that makes the airplane seat look like a piece of furniture designed for a different species. He is tall and broad-shouldered and wearing a dark Henley pushed up to the elbows in the way of a man who runs warm, and his brown hair is threaded through with grey in a way that does something very specific and unexpected to my nervous system.

He has a beard. A good one. Neat but not fussy, the kind that suggests intention without effort.

He gets settled with the economy of movement of someone who travels constantly and has long since stopped being bothered by it. Pulls out his phone. Checks something. Puts it away. He has not looked at me once.

I realize I have been staring for what is probably an impolite amount of time. I look away. I look back. He’s reading something on his phone now. I look away again.

I find my headphones and put them in without connecting them to anything, which is a move I employ when I want to appear occupied while actually doing nothing of the sort. Then I stare out the window at the tarmac and the ground crew and the luggage carts going back and forth and I think about absolutely nothing except the man two seats to my left.

He’s older. Significantly, probably. The grey in his hair isn’t a streak or a distinguished touch at the temples; it’s threaded all the way through, interwoven with the brown like something that’s been happening gradually and has now arrived. This does nothing to diminish the effect. If anything it makes it worse. Better. I don’t have a word for what it makes it.

I look at him again.

He looks at me.

I look away so fast I pull something in my neck.

This is fine. This is totally fine. He didn’t see me staring. I was just looking in that general direction. My eyes were passing through that area of space on their way to somewhere else entirely.

I count to thirty. Then I look again.

He is already looking at me, and there is something at the corner of his mouth that might be the beginning of a smile, which means he absolutely saw me the first time and is now watching me pretend that he didn’t.

I look away again. My ears are hot.

The man in the middle seat, who has been in his own world with a paperback and a neck pillow this whole time, gets up to use the restroom before takeoff. There is a brief, impossible window of unoccupied middle seat between me and the large, handsome, definitely-watching-me man in the aisle seat.

I am looking right at him when he speaks.

“Do you need something, baby girl?”