Chapter 6 #2
Arjun is sitting on the left in the window seat.
I am on the right. He is wearing dark, slim-fit trousers, a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow (the forearms, God, the forearms, lean and corded and perfect), and a lightweight charcoal jacket folded with museum-quality precision in the overhead compartment.
He smells like that citrus soap. He has a leather messenger bag at his feet containing, I know, his laptop, two medical journals, a novel he will not admit to reading (I caught the cover when he opened the bag at the gate: it is a Harlequin romance called “The Duke's Forbidden Desire” featuring a shirtless man clutching a woman in a windswept field.
I nearly bit through my own tongue keeping a straight face, because Dr. Arjun Kapoor, the Dread Prince of Paediatrics, apparently reads bodice-rippers, and this is the greatest discovery of my life), and a small toiletry bag organized with the kind of pathological neatness that makes me want to sneak a loose cough drop into it just to see what happens.
I am wearing jeans, a henley, and the quiet, full-body panic of someone who just handed his precious goldendoodle to his neighbour Mrs. Kasparian with a handwritten, three-page dog care instruction manual and a freezer bag of Oliver's favourite treats.
All the while Oliver pressed his nose to the window and watched me leave with an expression of such operatic betrayal that I almost didn't get in the cab.
The plane taxis. Lifts. Toronto drops away below us, a grey grid of frozen streets and lake-effect cloud cover, and then we're above it, punching through the overcast into a sky that's going pink and gold at the edges.
Arjun has not spoken to me since we sat down. I know what this is. I've been studying the language of Arjun Kapoor's discomfort for two years, and right now, every fluency I've built is screaming the same translation: he is terrified.
Not of flying. Arjun flies constantly, conferences and consultations and visits to the family he's about to throw me at like a six-foot-three Canadian grenade.
He's terrified of what's on the other end.
And he's terrified of the fourteen hours of proximity in between, because proximity is the thing Arjun controls most ruthlessly, and right now, in this intimate pod with the four-inch armrest and the angled seats, he cannot control it at all.
“So,” I say, because someone has to break this silence before it develops its own gravitational field. “Did you bring anything to watch, or are you just going to stare at the safety card for fourteen hours? Because I'll be honest, it's a bold entertainment choice, but I respect the commitment.”
His jaw tightens. Then, very slightly, the corner of his mouth moves. It's not a smile. Arjun Kapoor does not smile casually. It is a micro-expression, a seismic event registering at approximately 0.3 on the Richter scale, and I feel it in my chest like a bass drum.
“I have reading material,” he says. “Two journal articles on advances in minimally invasive posterior fossa decompression, and a monograph on intraoperative neuromonitoring protocols.”
“Fun.”
“They are professionally critical.”
“I brought Jurassic Park on my iPad.”
He turns his head and looks at me. He has that specific expression, the one where his green eyes narrow and his sculpted eyebrows draw together by approximately two millimetres and his entire face communicates, with devastating aristocratic clarity, that he is silently re-evaluating every decision that led him to this moment.
“The film?” he asks.
“The book. Crichton. Although I've also got the film downloaded as a backup, because some situations call for Jeff Goldblum.”
“I have never seen Jurassic Park.”
I stare at him. I stare at him long enough that the flight attendant pauses mid-aisle to check if I'm doing okay.
“You've never seen Jurassic Park.”
“It did not seem necessary.”
“It has dinosaurs, Arjun. Dinosaurs that eat people. And a chaos theory mathematician in a leather jacket. It is necessary to the human experience.”
“It was never available on any streaming platform I used, and I was not going to seek it out independently. I had a surgical caseload.”
“You had a surgical caseload. That's your excuse. You were too busy saving brains to watch a dinosaur eat a lawyer.”
“Apparently, yes.”
“Your priorities are completely messed up.” I reach into my bag, pull out my iPad, and hold it up. “We're fixing this. Right now. Fourteen hours, with nowhere to run. You're watching Jurassic Park.”
He looks at the iPad. He looks at me. He looks back at the iPad.
A war is happening behind his eyes, a war between the part of him that wants to read about posterior fossa decompression and the part of him that is, despite his best efforts, a human being who is trapped in a pressurized tube with a man holding an iPad and radiating weaponized enthusiasm.
“Fine,” he says. “But if it's scientifically inaccurate, I reserve the right to provide commentary.”
“Doc, it's a movie about a theme park full of cloned dinosaurs. The science is not the point.”
“The science is always the point.”
He is going to be the worst person to watch a movie with, and I am going to enjoy every single second of it.
I set up the iPad on the tray table between us, angling it so we can both see.
Then I pull out my old-school wired earbuds — the ones that somehow survived all of my high school and college years and continue to endure in spite of the time that has gone by — and hold one out to him.
He stares at it as if I'm offering him a live insect.
“We can't blast dinosaur carnage through the cabin, Doc. We’re going to have to share.” He takes the earbud between two fingers, examines it for approximately four seconds as if assessing its sterility, and places it in his right ear.
I put the other one in my left ear. The cord stretches between us like a tether, and now we are linked by a three-foot white cable, which means leaning in.
Which means our shoulders are approximately two inches apart.
I can feel the warmth radiating off him even through his shirt, which is remarkable because Arjun runs cold.
He is always cold. He wears extra layers under his scrubs.
He drinks his coffee scalding. He once, during an extraordinarily long surgical case, asked the OR team to raise the theatre temperature by two degrees, and three nurses nearly passed out. The man is a reptile in a lab coat.
But right now, this close, in this dim cabin with the overhead lights turned down and the pink sky fading to deep blue outside the window, he is warm. Or maybe I am warm enough for both of us. That's probably more accurate.
The movie starts. The opening sequence, the raptor crate, the arm, the screaming. Arjun watches with narrowed eyes and says nothing.
Twenty minutes in, Sam Neill finds the sick Triceratops. Arjun tilts his head. “The pupillary response is inaccurate. A genuinely ill reptile would present with more pronounced nictitating membrane dysfunction.”
“Arjun.”
“I'm providing commentary. As you may recall, I reserved the right.”
Forty minutes in, the T-Rex breaks out. The rain, the flare, the ripples in the water glass.
I'm watching Arjun's face more than I'm watching the screen, because I have seen this movie approximately thirty-seven times and the look on Arjun Kapoor's face as a Tyrannosaurus Rex flips a Ford Explorer is something I have never seen and may never see again.
His eyes widen. Not much but just enough.
His lips part by a fraction. His right hand, resting on his thigh, twitches, and for one glorious, perfect second, the Dread Prince of Paediatrics is a thirty-three-year-old man seeing a dinosaur eat a lawyer off a toilet for the first time. He is transfixed.
“The bite force is actually quite accurate,” he murmurs, and his voice is almost, almost soft with something that might be wonder. “Approximately twelve thousand eight hundred pounds per square inch. The mandibular structure is well-rendered.”
“Arjun. Are you enjoying this?”
“I am observing it with professional detachment.”
“You just complimented the dinosaur's jaw.”
“I complimented the animatronics department's anatomical research.”
“So you're enjoying it.”
He turns his head, and we are very close, close enough that I can see the individual flecks of gold in his green eyes, and he says, with tremendous dignity, “The film is... not without merit.”
I grin at him. He looks away quickly. But his hand, now resting on the armrest, has moved approximately one inch closer to the centre line, and the tips of his fingers are almost touching the edge of mine.
Almost.
We watch the rest of the film in a silence that has changed texture, gone from rigid and loaded to something softer, something that has settled in around us like the pressurized cabin air.
When the velociraptors stalk through the kitchen, Arjun's breathing changes.
When the banner drops in the rotunda and the T-Rex roars, his chin lifts slightly, and I swear I see the ghost of a smile, a real one, flickering at the edge of his mouth.
The credits roll. The cabin is dark now, the overhead lights dimmed to a blue glow. Most of the other passengers are asleep. The engines hum a deep, constant drone that vibrates through the seats.
“Verdict?” I ask.
He considers this for a long moment, staring at the frozen credit scroll on the iPad screen.
“The ethical framework regarding genetic manipulation was surprisingly nuanced. The chaos theory elements, while dramatically overstated, raised legitimate epistemological questions about scientific hubris. And the practical effects work was...” He pauses. “Remarkable.”
“So you liked it.”
“I found it intellectually stimulating.”
“You liked it.”
“Go to sleep, Dr. Welling.”