The Werewolf on Flight 237

Seat 14A

I stop half a second longer than is socially acceptable.

The man in the window seat is reading his phone with his whole body angled toward the window, like he's hoping to achieve invisibility through commitment to the pose.

He's tall. I can tell even seated, because his knees are doing something complicated against the seat in front of him and his shoulders are broad enough that he's claimed both armrests like a man who has never once been told no.

Dark hair, cut short. Stubble, several days deep.

A scar through his right eyebrow, the kind that suggests he lost an argument with something sharp and then got up and kept going.

Grey-green eyes that lift to me once when I stop beside the row, register me, and drop back to his phone with an efficiency that borders on professional.

Okay. So.

I'm exhausted down to my marrow. I've eaten nothing but a sad airport salad since breakfast. I'm about to spend four hours in a middle seat beside the most irritatingly attractive man I've seen in roughly three years, and natural selection has really dropped the ball by letting a man like that exist in a world where I have to sit next to him.

I buckle my seatbelt and watch him ignore me with the intensity of a man being paid by the hour.

The plane fills. The man beside me doesn't look up.

A flight attendant works the aisle with a tray of pre-departure beverages, and he says no, thank you, and that's the first thing I hear him say.

Six words in eight minutes. I count them.

I don't know why I count them. I've been awake for nineteen hours and apparently my brain has decided that tallying a stranger's vocabulary is a productive use of its remaining capacity.

We push back. The engines wind up, that familiar vibration working its way through the floor and up through my spine, and I watch Seattle slide away through the gap between his shoulder and the window.

The sun is already low. February light, thin and gold, and there's a bank of clouds building over the Cascades that the pilot will probably claim we're flying above.

The man beside me has said eleven words in twenty minutes, six of which were no, thank you to the flight attendant.

Normally I'd take the hint. Unfortunately he's six-foot-three, built like somebody's questionable life decision, and we're somewhere over Idaho with another three hours to kill.

I've been staring at the seatback screen in front of me for the last ten minutes without turning it on, and my phone has nothing left to offer me, and the silence between us is starting to develop a texture.

I turn to him. "You know, most people on this flight are at least pretending to be happy about it."

He looks at me. Grey-green eyes, and I get the full weight of them for a second before he goes back to his phone. "I'm not unhappy."

"You could've fooled me."

"I'm making an effort."

I blink at him. "That's you making an effort?"

"I'm talking to you, aren't I?"

I open my mouth to respond and come up empty, which is a first. I have something for every occasion.

I have something for funerals. I have something for the venue manager who tried to blame me for the fire alarm.

But this man has said four sentences to me, all of them deadpan, and I'm sitting here with nothing.

"Jesus," I say. "I'd hate to see you relax."

Something happens at the corner of his mouth.

Not quite a smile. The ghost of one, the idea of a smile, the expression a man wears when he's decided you're slightly less annoying than the alternative.

I decide, right then, that I'm going to get a real one out of him before this flight lands.

I don't know why I decide this. I'm not in the habit of collecting smiles from strangers.

But I decide it, and I tuck it away like a project.

The seatbelt sign pings off. The man in 14C, who has been asleep since before takeoff, wakes long enough to pull a travel pillow out of his bag, wedge it against the window side of his seat, and go back under.

Which leaves me and the wall of silence in 14A.

Fine. I have headphones. I have three movies downloaded.

I have the last of my energy and a terrible snack situation, and I am not going to spend four hours trying to charm a man who has the conversational warmth of a parking garage.

I put my headphones in and open a movie.

I make it eleven minutes before I pause it, because the man beside me has stopped reading his phone and is staring at the window, and I can see the moon through the glass above the cloud layer.

It's huge. Full, or nearly, a pale gold coin sitting on the horizon, and he's watching it with an expression I can't name.

Not wonder. Something closer to dread, held very still.

"Pretty, isn't it?" I say.

He doesn't answer for a long moment. Then he turns back to his phone like he's wrenching himself away from something. "Yeah."

That's the whole conversation. I go back to my movie. Twenty minutes later I catch him looking at the moon again.

The flight attendant comes through with the drink cart. He says no, thank you. I order a glass of wine and a bag of pretzels, because it's been a three-day week and I've earned both. The wine is exactly as bad as airline wine always is. I drink it anyway.

"You're not going to eat that?"

I look at him. He's nodding at the pretzels, which I've set on the tray table and not touched.

"You want them?"

"No. I'm asking why you bought them."

"I'm working up to them. It's a commitment."

The corner of his mouth does that thing again. I file it. Two almost-smiles in an hour. The man is a fortress and I'm starting to think the siege is working.

"I'm Megan, by the way," I say. "Since we're going to be trapped in this tin can together."

"Dean."

"Just Dean?"

"Just Dean."

"Okay, Just Dean. What do you do, Just Dean?"

He looks at me for a second, and I get the sense he's deciding something. "Structural engineer."

"That sounds very serious. Do you build bridges and feel strongly about it?"

"I mostly do seismic retrofits on older buildings. Nobody feels strongly about it."

"That's a lie. Every engineer I've ever met feels strongly about everything. It's the passion of the profession."

"I'll try to contain myself."

"You're doing a spectacular job so far."

He looks at me, and this time the almost-smile has teeth in it. "Noted."

I'm not proud of how good that feels. I've had better compliments from caterers I was actively firing.

But there's something about dragging a reaction out of a man who's clearly decided to give me nothing, and I'm sitting in a middle seat at thirty thousand feet with nothing better to do than collect them.

He asks me what I do. It's the first question he's asked.

I tell him I produce corporate events, which always sounds either glamorous or deeply sad depending on who's asking, and I give him the short version of the last three days: the venue double-booking, the keynote speaker's flight getting cancelled, the moment at 2 a.m. when I discovered the audiovisual company had sent the wrong projector and I had to negotiate with a man named Gary who communicated exclusively in sighs.

"Did it work out?" Dean asks.

"Gary delivered at 6 a.m. and acted like he'd done me a personal favor. The event went off without a hitch. I'll be processing my feelings about Gary for years."

"Structural engineers deal with a lot of Garys."

"See, this is the kind of bonding I was hoping for."

He looks at me, and there it is. The corner of his mouth lifts, just barely, and his eyes do something that's almost warmth. It's not a laugh. It's not even a smile. But it's a crack in the wall, and I watch it happen like I've just witnessed a small miracle.

"Careful," I say. "You're getting dangerously close to enjoying yourself."

"I'll have to watch that."

The cabin dims. People pull blankets up, put their screens away, settle in for the long haul.

I should sleep. I've been running on fumes since Tuesday and my body is starting to file formal complaints.

But I don't sleep. I keep sneaking looks at the man beside me, at the way his hands rest on his thighs, at the scar through his eyebrow, at the tension in his jaw that I've started to notice he carries even when he's pretending to relax.

I should not be noticing his hands. I should not be noticing the way his forearm looks under his rolled sleeve, or the fact that he's wearing a watch that's seen some actual use, or the way he takes up space like he's used to being the biggest thing in any given room.

I should be thinking about my hotel in Chicago and the stack of emails I'm going to have to deal with tomorrow and the fact that I've spent the last three years building a life that doesn't require me to notice anyone this much.

Instead I'm sitting in 14B, watching the moon climb the window, and pretending I'm not aware of every inch of him.

Somewhere over Idaho, I doze off.

I wake up to the feeling of the plane shuddering through light turbulence, and to something wrong.

It takes me a second to place it. The cabin is dark.

Most of the row is asleep. But the man beside me is not asleep.

He's sitting bolt upright, both hands flat on his thighs, and he's sweating.

I can see it at his temples, a sheen of it catching the light from my screen.

His breathing is off, too. Deliberate. Measured.

Like he's counting each inhale and forcing it to obey.

"Hey," I say. "You okay?"

He doesn't turn. "Fine."

"You don't look fine. You look like you're about to be sick."

"I'm not going to be sick."

"Are you scared of flying?" It's not a crazy guess. The man who barely blinked through takeoff, who sat through turbulence without moving a muscle, is suddenly white-knuckling it at thirty thousand feet. People hide their fears in weird ways.

"No."

"Then what is it?"