Which makes him a prime target for seat switching. After all, who in their right mind would turn down an aisle seat in a row of two, with a possible empty fucking seat next to it, to stay in an row of four, in the middle of the plane, stuck between a mother and a daughter on one side and a stranger on the other?
No one. That’s who.
Rather than striding right up the aisle and making myself known to Amy, I turn around, head towards the back of the plane as if I’m going to the bathroom behind me. But instead of going to the bathroom, I cross over to the other aisle, and work my way up towards Amy’s row, apologizing for every bag and body and baby I have to squeeze by as I work against traffic. When I get to Amy’s row after a minute of this, I reach one of my long, albatross arms out and tap the man with the newspaper on the shoulder. The mom and carrot-top daughter look a little annoyed at me for reaching over their heads, but I’m sure they’ll get over it.
“Excuse me, sir?” I start, and at the sound of my voice, Amy’s head whips around. I see her eyes go wide with surprise, then narrow with anger a nanosecond later. “I was wondering if you would like to switch seats with me so I can sit to my friend?”
Amy shakes her head vigorously, but the man’s facing me and doesn’t see her frantic hell-no signals. Mom and carrot-top do, though. They look from the man, to Amy’s violently shaking head, to me with open curiosity.
The man seems like he doesn’t know what to say, so I help him out.
“It’s an aisle seat,” I say. “About four rows back from where you are now.” I gaze over the heads of the passengers seated in the middle rows. “And the window seat is still empty, so far.”
“Anika…” Amy says, a warning tone in her voice.
“I’d be really grateful,” I say to the man.
The man folds up his newspaper, spares Amy a quick glance over his shoulder, looks back at me. “Of course,” he says.
From his spot next to my previous seat, Marty McFly gives me a double thumbs-up.
It takes newspaper guy a minute to gather all his things and scoot past Mom and carrot-top, but he finally untangles himself from the row of seats and steps into the aisle. Once he’s clear, I squeeze past the mother and daughter with several apologies for my enormous girth, and at last drop down into the seat beside Amy.
She won’t look at me. Her arms are crossed tight against her chest; her mouth is pressed into a thin, white line. The Mom on my right gives us a quick look, but then turns back to her daughter. She can tell that something’s up, but doesn’t say anything about it.
Which is actually one of the best qualities of the British: They absolutely hate it when people cause scenes, and they’re generally really good at minding their own fucking business.
I adjust my knees for a second, trying to get as comfortable as I can while squashed between Amy on my left and the Mom (mum, really) on my right.
“Hi,” I say to Amy.
She gives no indication that she’s heard me.
“So, uh, are you flying back to Basel, too? Crazy that we ended up on the same plane again. Right?”
“Anika,” she says in a low voice between clenched teeth. “I am trying really, really hard not to have a panic attack right now. So if you want to help with that, you can stop speaking right now and leave me alone.”
Chapter 46: Snakes on a plane. Again.
The mom on my other side catches Amy’s comment and suddenly becomes even more absorbed in whatever she’s looking at with her daughter.
“Okay,” I tell Amy. “If you need me to be quiet for a while, I can be quiet.”
A beat passes. Amy doesn’t turn to look at me. I get the message, reach in front of me and go back to reading the article in the airline magazine about the football player who likes traveling to Asia.
Soon enough, we’re taxiing down the runway, and the little monitor above my tray starts playing a safety video populated by little British cartoon people showing me things like how to buckle my seatbelt, how to use the floatation cushion beneath my seat, which exit to use if we have to evacuate.
I let my eyes slide to the left to see if Amy’s watching the video or doing something else. She makes a good show of watching it; her eyes are glued to the small screen, but her posture is stiff, almost rigid, with her arms still folded tightly against her chest and her lips still pressed into their thin line.
But I can see her pulse vibrating in an artery up her neck, and it seems to me it’s much faster than it should be.
Her breath hitches at the sound of the engines revving; the pulse in her neck looks like it’s getting even faster. She squeezes her eyes shut.
“Amy,” I say softly, turning so that only she can hear me. “Aren’t you supposed to try to relax when a panic attack comes on? It doesn’t help to get stiffer with an attack… does it?”
“Of course I’m trying to relax,” Amy snaps. “What did you think I was trying to do? Panic more?”
I want to say, “Well, you have a weird fucking way of trying to relax,” but that doesn’t seem like it’s going to help the situation.
The engines rev again; we’re starting down the runway now.
“Oh, God,” Amy says, and she moves her hands onto each armrest, white knuckling against plastic and metal as the plane gathers speed.
“Breathe, Amy,” I say when it looks like she isn’t. Then I say something I heard in a movie one time: “Just focus on your breathing, okay? Big, deep breaths, into your belly.”
But instead of breathing, Amy literally fucking stops breathing the moment I feel the plane leave the earth. I pry the hand closest to me from its place on the armrest and put it inside my own big paw. I close my fingers around Amy’s hand.
“If you can’t focus on your breathing, focus on my voice, okay?” I say. I’m still speaking softly, but with the background noise of the plane, I could probably yell and the woman on my other side still wouldn’t hear me. “Listen, Amy. This is a big, bad monster of an airplane. The fucking height of human engineering. It wants to fly. More than anything, that’s what this plane wants to do. It wants to stay in the air and ride the currents. It’s fine; we’re safe.” Amy closes her eyes, seems to relax by about one millimeter. The plane banks; she squeezes my hand harder. “Focus on my voice, Amy, not the plane. Just focus on me. I’ve got you. We’re okay.”
It goes on like this for about five more minutes — Amy squeezing my hand every time the plane turns or its engines change, me rubbing my thumb on the back of her hand and telling her that everything’s going to be fine.
At the end of five minutes, the plane starts to level out, shifts and changes get less dramatic. Amy extracts her hand from mine, lets out a breath.
“Thank you,” she says without looking at me.
“You’re welcome,” I say. “Are you… Does this mean we can talk?”
“No. Not at all.”
This might end up being a long fucking flight.
#
Two hours pass like.
Damn Marty McFly. Why do I ever listen to anything he says? “Talk to her,” he’d said. “She wants you to try harder,” he’d said.
Amy refuses to look at me; she puts in earbuds and begins watching a bad chick flick comedy I’ve never heard of before. When it becomes obvious she really doesn’t plan to acknowledge my presence again, I give up trying to read the airline magazine and turn the entertainment system on myself. I end up picking a cooking show, hoping I can find something I can tweak as a special for Soul Mountain. At one point I think I see Amy glance at my screen in surprise, but if she’s going to ignore me, then I’m more than fucking capable of ignoring her.
At the end of two hours, though, I can’t ignore the urge that I’ve been fighting against any longer. I take my earbuds out, tap Amy on the shoulder.
She ignores me.
I sigh in frustration, tap her on the shoulder again. “I have to pee,” I say, pointing at the aisle at the same time in case she truly can’t hear me with the earbuds
in.
She nods curtly, gets out of her seat long enough for me to squeeze past her place and into the aisle.
You think the economy section is bad when you’re almost six-four? Let me tell you what’s even worse: fucking airplane toilets.
Anyway, I wait in line for the bathroom for a while, use the facilities, make my way back up the aisle. I pass the guy I’d swapped seats with on my way back, and sure enough, the window seat never got filled, so he has the whole damned row to himself.
Fucking Marty McFly.
When I get back to my row, Amy gets up again to let me back in. I settle into my seat, doing my best to get my legs comfortable in the cramped space, reaching for my earbuds.
But before I can put them back into my ears, Amy touches my forearm and asks, “How’s your mom? Did the surgery go alright?”
I shake my head. “It didn’t go so well. Turns out her cancer had metastasized, which means it spread to other parts of her body and needs radiation therapy and more chemo.”
Her face scrunches in sympathy. “I’m really sorry to hear that. Truly.”
I shrug. “It’s…” I mean to say “It’s alright,” but obviously it’s fucking not alright. Instead, I say, “It’s like Momma always told us. ‘Getting old definitely ain’t for sissies.’ But she’s definitely not a sissy, so I’m sure she’ll make it out of this.”
“I’m sure she probably will,” Amy says sympathetically.
I hesitate, not sure if I should push my luck, but also not wanting to miss the opportunity to open up a conversation. “So… how was the rest of your trip?”
“It was alright,” she says, looking away from me.
“Did you get to see your dad and your step-mom?”
“Yeah. My dad’s a little like your mom — struggling with health stuff. It’s hard to watch him starting to decline like this.”
“But your dad sounds like he’s as tough as my mom.” I pause, and then add — against my better fucking judgment, “You’ve got to get your stubbornness from somewhere, right?”
“Mmm,” she says noncommittally. She puts the earbuds back in, turns to face her screen.
Oops.
I guess our conversation’s over.
The rest of the flight goes basically in the same way — long periods of silence with occasional strained small-talk. By the time we’re beginning our descent into Heathrow, I’ve only managed to draw about a paragraph’s worth of conversation from her. I tell myself that part of the reason we didn’t talk is that it was an overnight flight, and Amy spent a good third of it either sleeping or pretending to sleep.
I tell myself that. I don’t really believe it, though.
When we land and the fasten seatbelt light goes off for the last time and everyone starts deplaning, I grab her carry-on out of the overhead bin and hand it to her.
“Are you flying to Basel today?” I ask her.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we’ll be on the same flight again. Funny how that works with us, right? Wacky fucking coincidence.” She doesn’t respond. “Hey — do you want to grab some breakfast? I’m buying.”
“No.”
“Are you sure? You know, the English breakfasts they have are pretty — ”
“I said no, Anika.”
“Alright,” I say, and I’m planning to say more, but the line moves, and Amy turns her back to me, heading towards the front of the plane.
Chapter 47: It’s not exactly Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but it still counts for something.
We do end up on the same flight, of course. London Heathrow might be one of the most important airports in the world, but there are only so many flights from there to Basel on any given weekday morning.
Which means I see Amy sitting in the DMV-style airport waiting area not far from one of the breakfast places. I grab stuff for both of us, including a coffee each (and I still fucking hate drinking coffee in Britain, that hasn’t changed any), and head over to where she sits, flopping down into the seat next to her without dropping all the breakfast goodies I’m cradling in my arms.
“I got you some food,” I say. I unbend an arm carefully, dropping a container of scrambled eggs and sautéed tomato into my lap, and try to hand her one of the coffees. “And a coffee. Even though I can’t vouch for the quality.”
The way Amy looks at me…
Okay — are you familiar with cats at all? Cats are the single snootiest domesticated animal you’d ever care to meet. When they aren’t in the mood to be playful or bratty, they look at you like you’re lower than the dirt attached to the bottom of a sandal.
That look, that superior Cat Master of the Fucking Universe Look, is the look that Amy gives me.
But my hands are full and my lap is full and she has to take the fucking coffee if I’m going to be able to grab the plastic silverware and start to eat, and somehow she realizes that, so she sighs and relieves me of one of the two coffees.
“I told you I didn’t want any food. Or coffee, for that matter,” she says, but she pops the plastic lid off at the same time and sticks her nose close, inhaling its earthy smell.
I set the remaining coffee down between my feet and start to sort through my lapful of breakfast goodies.
“I’ve got some sausage here, plus two containers of scrambled eggs, some tomatoes — you know they love their tomatoes here — and some toast.”
“I don’t need anything to eat. They fed us on the plane.”
“You called that food?” I snort. “That cheesy, doughy, stale imitation of pizza and the two green apple slices? I don’t know what that was, but I would not call it breakfast.”
I open one of the containers of scrambled eggs, and when the steamy smell hits my nostrils, my mouth waters immediately.
“You ate the ‘stale imitation of pizza,’” Amy says.
I gesture at myself. “Do you see this, Amy? It’s six feet, three-and-a-half inches of mostly muscle. I haven’t hit the court much since I’ve been back in Ohio, but I’m willing to bet that I still have a body fat percentage of less than eighteen percent. All that means it takes a lot of fucking calories to keep this machine moving. So yes, I ate the goddamned imitation pizza.”
Is that a smile? Just like on the plane, she won’t look at me, but nevertheless, I can see her mouth twitch around the corners. It doesn’t quite transform into a real smile, but it’s a good start.
“See?” McFly says on my other side, because of course he would choose now to re-materialize. “What did I tell you about her just wanting you to try a little harder?”
She sips her coffee.
“Have some eggs,” I say, sticking a plastic fork in the open container and setting it on her lap. “You say they fed us on the plane, but you seem to be forgetting that I sat right next to you. You took two bites of that nasty fake pizza and gave up on it. Don’t tell me you didn’t.”
She sighs, balances the coffee between her knees so that she can start eating eggs. Satisfied for now, I pop open the other container and start eating my own.
We go on like this, eating in silence, watching businessmen and families with little kids walk by, rolling their suitcases behind them, when, without any fucking warning whatsoever, Amy sets her fork down, wipes her mouth, and asks me,
“How could you do that to me, Anika?”
It takes me about two point thirty-seven seconds to understand what she’s talking about. For two full seconds, I think she’s referring to the coffee and it’s actually worse than I could’ve anticipated. For point three seconds, I think she might mean the sausage that I’m in the middle of chewing, the sausage I didn’t offer to share with her. But during the final seven-hundredths of a second, my sleep-deprived, jet-lagged brain realizes she’s talking about what happened at Grace Adler’s wedding reception.
I swallow my sausage quickly, turn in my seat to face her. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I regret it more than…”
— and the image that pops up in my head is Rhianna Fucking Jerkin
s, naked and looming over me. Could I possibly regret kissing Jenny more than sleeping with Rhianna? It didn’t really compute — I’d been with Jenny for years when I cheated on her; I’d barely even call what Amy and I had “dating.”
But it’s true — I regretted that kiss even more than Rhianna.
Because I’d looked at Amy and I’d seen the possibility of a new life, of an entire future, and then, somehow, my past waltzed into the bathroom and ruined everything.
“I regret it more than I’ve ever regretted anything in my entire life,” I tell Amy. “And that’s the honest fucking truth.”
“Do you know how it felt, Anika? To walk into that bathroom to find you — to find you with her…” She closes her eyes, shakes her head, lets out a breath. “I should’ve known better,” she says, almost like she’s talking to herself. “I should’ve known. The first time I saw you two together, I knew there was something there. Even if you couldn’t see it, I could. It was clear as day — is clear as day.”
“No. You were right the first time. Was clear as day. Jenny and I talked. We both know that kiss never should’ve happened. Things with her are done. Once and for all, done.”
She opens her eyes, turns to look at me. “How am I supposed to believe you? You told me she was in the rearview mirror. Those were your exact words — ‘Jenny’s been in the rearview mirror for a long fucking time.’ So either you lied to me, or you lied to yourself. I don’t even know which one is worse, but either way, I can’t trust you.”
“Give me a chance to earn your trust back. What happened with Jenny — that’s not who I am.”
“It’s not? But you told me yourself about the time you cheated on her.”
“Amy. I’ve been alive almost four fucking decades. I cheated one time. One time! And I felt horrible about myself afterward.”
Amy meets my eyes. “Twice.”
“What?”
Anika takes the long way home up soul mountain: A lesbian romance (Rosemont Duology Book 2) Page 29
