I’m watching the other passengers board the plane and counting every pair of Lululemon leggings I see. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s true-Lulu and what’s a knockoff, but I have a good eye.
One, two, three young women file in, each wearing her Lulu in a slightly different shade of greige. My airport look is usually some rendition of the classic: breathable wide-legged pants with a comfy tee-shirt and light jacket or sweater. I’m not against leggings, not even against leggings-as-pants. I just think it’s hilarious that, nowadays, travel means leggings. At least for the girls.
A pair of starched, Boomer-looking jeans breaks up the legging parade. The man wearing them stops short of my aisle and careens his neck. I can’t help the sound as it slips from my throat.
“Hey you.”
“Pardon?”
“H-how’re you doing today?”
“Oh, not too bad. How about yourself?”
The tall, clean-cut man in jeans and a black Nike quarter-zip hoists a matching black duffel bag into the overhead compartment with practiced ease. Almost no visible effort. He wears a ball cap pulled low around his head, making the longer strands of his hair curl up around the hat’s perimeter. He gestures past me to the window seat.
“22A–that’s me right there.”
I jump up to accommodate him, folding my body into the aisle.
“Thank you, appreciate it,” he mutters as I fall back into the middle seat.
I reach ahead for my backpack, trying to dig through it in the smallest way possible. My thumb and forefinger locate the thick, glossy copy of Vogue I’d purchased during my layover in Dallas. The flight to Newark was at least three hours and the Vogue had at least three hundred pages. One hundred images per hour, that could work. The brim of Ball Cap’s ball cap haunts my peripheral vision, but he’s totally still. No digging inside a bag, no looking out the window or even at a phone. Ball Cap sits there straight-backed, eyes fixed on the seat in front of him.
I feel a tremor shoot up my torso from my crotch, nice at first, but sharp. I wonder if this is a pleasure response or something else. By something else I mean this: I masturbate with my hand though I never finish. Too broke or cheap for quality sex toys. And I’ve been doing it a lot lately, raw-handing it, and for the first time in my life I’ve developed a pimple on my vagina. The front, right side of my clitoral hood aches with a masturbation-induced zit and I wonder if I should say any of this to the man, to Ball Cap.
Or maybe he’d like to know I fisted four days’ worth of missed birth control pills last night, the second time I’ve lost track this month. This, the month I finally left Bruce. My vagina is so confused, frazzled, I need to take my mind off–
“Where’re you headed?” I cock my head to the side at Ball Cap. He returns my smile.
“Newark, right?” When he shifts in his seat to meet my gaze, I see a strong vein pronounce itself on the side of his neck.
“Well, yeah. But are you actually going to Newark? Or the city? Maybe somewhere else in Jersey?”
Ball Cap is incredulous. “I’m headed to the city.” He lets a moment pass before tossing the question back at me.
“I’m going to the city, too” I lie. But if I were to unpack the lie, it’s nowhere near my most egregious. My parents live in Edison, a city (suburb) in Jersey popular among commuters. The NJ Transit train from MetroPark station to Port Authority is about ninety minutes. I plan to throw myself on their mercy, tell them I’m lost and sad and need help. Less than two hours outside of New York is still New York, in the world of the lie.
A flight attendant’s voice chirps from the cabin speakers, announcing that boarding is complete and the cabin doors are shut. No one has come to claim 22C, the aisle seat. I notice this but don’t move over. The flight attendant’s bright voice gives way to a huskier, lower tone as the captain chimes in “from the cockpit” to announce our flight time of three hours, twenty-five minutes. Thankfully, we’re just second in line to take off.
I bring my focus back to Ball Cap, his utter lack of a traveling personality. Black clothes, black duffel kept out of his reach, no reading material or even a phone. What kind of psychopath doesn’t look at their phone in the run-up to flying in an airplane?
“Business or pleasure?” I try to angle my upper body toward him in a way that’s friendly, that says we are now friends. At least for three more hours.
“Hm?”
“Going to New York for business or pleasure?” This question surprises him. Maybe he expects young women travelers just want to be left alone, yet here I am chatting him up. But something about him–some weirdo aspect of his coding, sat here on this plane to Newark–sets sirens off in my mind. Dog with a bone, and so forth. He’s not bad looking, either. He’s like a stock character in the Sims computer game universe. I try to imagine how I’d build his character in the game as he puzzles over my question.
“Oh, uh. Business. I go to New York on business from time to time,” he says.
The flight attendant from the speaker is now in the middle of the aisle holding a yellow breathing mask aloft. Another attendant has come up the rear to narrate the safety demo. “Be sure to fasten your own mask before helping other passengers.” Take the splinter out of your own eye, first, or whatever the Bible says. I imagine Ball Cap helping the mask onto my face, reminding me how to breathe.
We’re told to turn all devices off or to airplane mode, which reminds me: Bruce. Had he called? And, relatedly, why did I still care if he called? We’d been done long before we actually ended. He hadn’t made me come in months. The sex was hot and kind of dirty at first, the age gap the engine of the thrill. But that was dead now. I fish my phone out of the pocket in my cardigan: no calls, no messages. At least the dog-and-pony safety show had ended, the seatbelt sign was on, and we were picking up speed.
Ball Cap shifts slightly in my peripheral, stealing a glimpse at the empty aisle seat. Over the revving of the engine, he kicks my question back over to me for the second time, a terrible conversationalist so far.
“And you? Is New York for business or pleasure?”
I swear I see his gaze drop for a millisecond to the modest cleavage created by my black V-neck. The bill of his dark cap makes it hard to be completely sure. But I’m pretty sure.
“A little bit of both for me. I’m an actress. I’ll be in town a few weeks going to auditions and seeing friends,” I lie easily. This is one of my favorites. I love the air of glamor I immediately feel in the actress persona. Ball Cap’s eyebrows arch in a boyish way and I can’t help but smile at it.
“An actress, huh? Maybe I should get your autograph before we get off in Newark. Be worth a lot of money someday.”
“Oh ha-ha. I’m not a famous actress, not yet at least. You have to pay your dues. I’m Jessica, by the way.” I don’t plan to use my real first name until I hear it tumble out of my mouth.
“Chris,” Ball Cap says before asserting a hand into my personal space. I shake it because I’m curious about his hands. They’re satisfyingly large. His shake is firm, and his hand is bone-dry.
“What do you do for business in New York, Chris?” The conversation feels like a tennis match, the rhythm of it a metronome clicking pleasantly in my head.
“Oh, a little of this and that. Odd jobs, mostly as a contractor.” His affect is friendly but still muted, like he has a legitimate digital processing delay, like his Sim is too pixelated to see clearly. Nowhere near as skilled at banter as I am, but that’s OK. Not everyone can be a beautiful, disarming Gemini.
The plane finally reaches cruising altitude, and the cabin falls into quiet calm. The process of getting the metal tube in the air feels like such a circus, every flight an isolated Rube Goldberg machine prone to error and collapse. And yet, we keep flying. A disembodied voice returns to the loud speakers to announce that beverage service would start shortly.
“Oh thank god,” I say a little too loudly. Lately it seems like no amount of alcohol can take the massive edge off my general consciousness. But that won’t stop me trying. I pull the laminated menu from the seatback pocket in front of me and peruse what chilled white wines American Airline has to offer. Buena Vista Reserve Chardonnay should do nicely.
“So,” my voice stabs into the cabin silence once again, “a contractor could be literally anything. What do you contract, or in what market?” I was always a precocious kid.
Ball Cap cuts his eyes at me and, almost as if he’d forgotten my presence, looks me up and down. This could mean one of two things: he’s either picturing me naked or trying to calculate my age. Often, these motives inform one another. And there it is–another small, involuntary crotch spasm.
“Defense. Mostly.”
My mouth cracks into a wide grin because I’ve finally put it together. It makes so much sense.
“Chris, the defense contractor,” I reply, all singsong and flirty.
“Something to drink?” A familiar voice interrupts the moment but I’m glad for it. I need my juice.
“Yes, please. I’ll do the Chardonnay. And, Chris, what’ll you have?” I throw my voice to him as if we’re on a date in a crowded restaurant, ordering cocktails and apps. He bristles.
“Just some water for me, no ice. Thanks,” he replies in that measured tone. The flight attendant prepares our drinks in ten seconds flat, hands them to us and turns her attention elsewhere.
“You’re gonna make me drink alone, huh?”
“I don’t usually drink on the–on planes. Don’t usually drink on the plane.”
I take a deep pull of my chardonnay, which isn’t chilled, but I’m too wound up to care.
“You know, I stayed up all night watching airport TikTok recently because I couldn’t fall asleep. Did you know that, before 9/11, there were only around thirty-thousand air marshals in the country? Like, that job basically didn’t exist before 9/11, or not in a way the public knew about. Now, it’s the law that an air marshal has to be on every flight. Their job duties are, like, understanding how terrorism works, knowing how to do hand-to-hand combat in tight spaces. Like an elite, James-Bond-type special agent onboard every major domestic flight. How hilarious is that?!”
“Wow, that’s fascinating.” Ball Cap chuckles at me in a way that stokes both rage and lust. Of course it’s fascinating, dick. I know your secret! I down the rest of my chardonnay and its citrusy bite makes the words flow from my chest.
“Chris the defense contractor, on his way to Newark from Dallas dressed all in black with not even a phone to entertain him on a three-hour flight. Won’t drink with the cute girl chatting him up on said flight, even though he clearly has nothing else to do.”
“You think very highly of yourself, don’t you Jessica?” His nostrils flare and I know I’m getting to him. Negging is so outdated. No longer a good strategy for manipulating the modern woman, if you ask me.
“What’s your whole deal, Chris?”
“Just trying to get to Newark in one piece.”
The flight attendant with the drink cart is coming back down the aisle to take trash and hand out applications for the American Airlines mileage multiplier credit card. I flag her down for a wine refill, lifting my empty plastic cup in the air and mouthing, “One more? When you get a chance?” For the first time, Ball Cap makes contact with my body.
“Maybe you’ve had enough to drink for now, hm?” he says with his fingers lightly touching my left wrist, the one closest to him. My crotch purrs back in response, although I’m shocked by the audacity. Paternalism–perhaps more successful for manipulating the modern woman.
“Oh, fuck you. Are you my daddy now?” I snap my wrist back, feeling something inside me rev up. “You know what else I learned on airport TikTok? Well, I guess airport TikTok led to 9/11 TikTok led to air marshal TikTok. But another thing I learned is that the whole flight crew has to know which passenger is the air marshal before any given flight. But the way the law is written, only the ones who ‘need to know’ on the flight crew can be informed who it is. So, who decides that? Who gets to decide who needs to know?”
“Why are you asking me? I have no idea what you’re talking about.” His voice has a new edge to it this time, like someone who wants more than anything to get off the phone. The flight attendant with the cart is a few paces away from our row.
“Why don’t I ask her? If you’re the air marshal for this flight, then all the crew would know it, right? She could clear this up for us. Ma’am?” Ball cap touches my wrist again, not so lightly this time.
“Jessica, you need to lower your voice,” he growls at me as the flight attendant approaches our row. I realize for the first time that onlookers might think we’re a couple–why else wouldn’t a young woman scoot over to the free aisle seat, leaving space between her and a crusty stranger? I wonder about all the weird relationship dynamics this woman has probably seen on the job.
“Hi! Could I get a chardonnay refill? Is that allowed?” The flight attendant smiles at me.
“Sure, another wine is $12. We’re closing the drink service down after this, though.”
“Thank you so much,” I say, and really mean it, because the Buena Vista Reserve chardonnay is making me feel more alive than I have in months. Ball Cap watches our interaction closely, much more interested than he has been in anything since we sat down. How long has it been?
“One more thing,” I say, holding the flight attendant’s gaze. I can feel Ball Cap’s eyes boring into my back, waiting for me to make a scene.
“Actually, never mind. Thanks again.” The woman nods at me and pushes the cart back toward first class. The row is quiet for a moment. I sip my wine.
“What are you getting at with all this?” he finally offers in a small voice. “Not sure if you learned this on ‘9/11 TikTok,’ but it’s a bad idea to create scenes on planes. Especially once they’re airborne. You could put everyone in jeopardy.”
“Shh, calm down. You knew I wasn’t going to say anything to her. But she does know, right? Could she cover for us if we took this to the bathroom?” My hand dangles off the armrest dangerously close to his knee.
“Jessica, what is it you want?” His eyes are wild.
“I want you to say it to me.”
“What? Why?”
“I want you to say it because I’m right. I’m right and I want to be right, and I deserve it. So, say it or I’ll make the drink lady say it. I’ll push the button to get her back here.” My crotch is throbbing from the power.
For the first time, Ball Cap looks utterly dumbfounded. The closer I get to his confession, the stronger the pulse feels between my legs. The man is squirming because of me, panicking because of me. And it feels incredible.
“Ok. Ok! Jesus, fine. Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I’m the assigned air marshal on this flight.”
“More.”
“What?”
“Tell me more. All of it.”
“Yes, I’m the air marshal. Yes, they almost always have one of us on flights to and from New York. And yes of course it has everything to do with fucking 9/11. Are you happy now?”
The pressure in my vagina crescendos with victory, and, for the first time in recent memory, I make myself come.