“And what would you like to drink?”
Mei woke up with a confused start, her face smashed against the headrest, her body curled into a ball facing the window. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but she’d been up late into the night packing and looking for an apartment just in case her parents were serious about kicking her out. On a good night’s sleep, she would have been anxious with Miles sitting just across the aisle from her, but on not enough sleep, she must have worked herself into a frenzy and crashed before the flight was even finished boarding — a small blessing, at least.
She uncurled her body and started to stretch before recoiling, worried about the person next to her, but the aisle seat was empty. On the one hand, she was happy to be able to stretch out far more than the basic economy seat she would have bought for herself if this trip had been on her dime.
“Thanks, Ezra,” she mumbled under her breath.
And then the proverbial ‘on the other hand’ glanced in her direction, and she looked quickly away before relaxing back into her seat. Hiding. She started looking for her phone. Last she’d seen it, it was in her lap, but now that she was awake, she bent over, searching the floor. The seatbelt buckle she didn’t remember latching in place dug into her stomach and she sat back up to undo it, but her elbow knocked the water bottle on the small table between the seats. Mei sighed in frustration, feeling like a failure.
“Whoops, I got it,” the flight attendant said, bending over to grab the water bottle to place it back on the table. Right next to Mei’s cell phone.
“Thanks. Thank you.” Mei sighed again.
“Not a problem. It’s my job. What would you like for dinner, Mrs. Jefferson?”
Mei’s entire body froze, and her mouth fell open. It had been years since someone had called her that. “I— Um… Wh-what are my options?”
She didn’t pay attention to whatever the flight attendant said — she couldn’t — she was too busy trying to see if Miles had heard what the flight attendant called her as a feeling of panic took over.
“Um…the pasta sounds good,” Mei said, bullshitting for her life.
“Perfect, I have you down for the vegetable pasta. And what would you like to drink?”
“Red wine,” she said immediately. “In fact, can I get a glass right now?”
The woman laughed at her. “Definitely. Let me just finish up the dinner orders.”
Mei nodded. “Thanks.”
The flight attendant turned to the row across the aisle, giving Mei a clear view of Miles’s ear and hair over the top of the seats. He ran his palm over his head, from the crown up to his forehead in one direction, smoothing out the fade he didn’t have right now. It was a nervous tic and she used to live for it — watching him from across the room at parties while he talked with his boys, smoothing his hand over his head. She knew she was head over heels in love with Miles when something so simple started to make her wet.
And apparently, that feeling hadn’t gone away.
Mei unbuckled her seatbelt, grabbed her phone, and stepped into the aisle. She walked determinedly — tilting her head just to the left to hide him from her peripheral vision — and ducked into the first-class bathroom. She looked at her reflection in the mirror and groaned at what she saw there. “Yikes.”
Right after the divorce, Mei had been vigilant about making sure that on the rare occasion she left the house, she never did so without a full face of makeup, not because she was worried Miles would see her looking not at her best but because she didn’t want anyone, including him, to see exactly what she saw now: sallow skin, prominent eye bags, and just…a weariness she couldn’t escape.
She scrubbed her hands over her face and ground the heels of her hands into her eyes. She refused to cry, especially not so early in the flight. She still looked a mess, but at least there was a little blood in her face, she guessed.
She grabbed her phone, about to text Candace, when she remembered she was in the air. “Does this flight have Wi-Fi?” she mumbled.
“Yeah.”
She jumped at the sound of the voice on the other side of the door and stared at it. “M-Miles?” she whispered. It had been too long since she’d said that name outside of pained, whispered groans in bed, her fingers working inside her panties.
He cleared his throat. “Yeah.”
“I—” She wasn’t speechless; there was a lot Mei could say to Miles — three years’ worth of pathetic, angry, heartfelt monologues she’d been drafting on her soul — but to what end? That was the question she always arrived at whenever she hit rock bottom. What would be the point of telling him about the depth of her sadness when they were already over? “Hold on. I’ll be quick,” she said.
“Take your time,” he said in a low voice that made her shiver. He used to whisper that to her in the middle of the night while he moved inside her, unhurried and deep, his finger strumming at her clit, without a care for how early he had to be up the next morning for work.
When she looked back at her reflection, her face was flushed.
For the next few minutes, she went through the motions of a bathroom visit, trying to get herself to focus. She sat down and peed, just in case there was turbulence, and then washed her hands as quickly as she could. She grabbed her phone, turned toward the door, and pulled it open, quick and dirty. Sometimes it was better to rip the Band-Aid off.
The worst thing about Miles was how beautiful he was, no matter if he needed a haircut or just woke up or had broken her heart — she still loved looking into his eyes. He was leaning against the wall across from the toilet, arms behind his back.
“Hey,” he said.
She flattened her lips into a grimace and nodded her head.
“Is…is everything okay?”
“Yeah, why wouldn’t it be?” she blurted out, feeling like she was hanging just at the edge of a thousand-foot fall — except technically, she’d tumbled over years ago.
It had been three years and he shouldn’t have been able to affect her this way.
Miles’s mouth flattened into a grimace similar to Mei’s, and he shook his head. “Yeah…got it.”
Mei started nodding as he spoke, her own nervous tics presenting themselves. When he was done speaking, she stepped out of the bathroom, which she immediately realized was a mistake.
The bathroom was set next to the cockpit with a narrow passage that opened up to the first-class galley and the exit door. What little space they had was barely enough room for Miles, so it clearly wasn’t enough when Mei was in the mix or, as it happened, in Miles’s arms.
They’d lived thousands of days with these kinds of touches — him picking her up in celebration when the A’s managed to get a run, him pressing her back against the wall and lifting her up until she could wrap her legs around his waist. And even though stumbling into Miles wasn’t nearly the same, her body didn’t know or care about the difference. As soon as her breasts brushed against his chest, she felt like she was some other version of herself — the version where Miles had never left her and she hadn’t withered without him for three years. But once their bodies brushed together, Mei felt like a thirsty plant set out in the rain.
Pressed against Miles’s body would never cease to feel like home to her.
* * *
Miles used to be able to tell when Mei was upset with an almost eerie accuracy. It was an awareness of her body and moods that built slowly over time, years and years and years of learning Mei as a sign of his love and devotion. Few things could erase that wealth of knowledge, and divorce, Miles had learned, was not one, especially not his divorce. The only real difference between now and three years ago was that he didn’t have an appropriate outlet for all this knowledge.
When her birthday came along, he wondered who would get her flowers and take her out to dinner and make her laugh, but he didn’t have the right to do those things anymore. When her mother put her to work making noodles on Lunar New Year, he worried who would be there to help her, or when the party got too loud and she needed a moment to breathe, of course Miles wondered who would make her come until she was relaxed enough to get back to the festivities. Not him, which was the entire point of the divorce — Miles making room for someone else to fill those roles in Mei’s life.
But there was no one else in their first-class cabin who would spot the red blush spreading up Mei’s neck and know what it meant. And maybe no one would even bother looking at her so closely, but Miles couldn’t look away. Jorge had stood quickly to allow Miles to follow behind her, and if he had any judgments, Miles hoped he would keep them to his private group chat with Candace.
He felt slightly exposed standing at the front of the first-class cabin, trying desperately to stay out of the way of the flight attendant as she went about her business but close enough, just in case. Just in case. Once upon a time, Miles had been Mei’s first line of defense, but now he was the backup. The person that apparently showed up when there was no one left. The thing is, he’d left hoping that she would never be without the support she deserved. It stung to even think in this moment that he’d failed.
“Got it,” he breathed, looking away as soon as her eyes started to fill with tears.
He would have let her brush past him dramatically if that would have made her feel better, but there wasn’t enough space to do that. There wasn’t enough space for him to move out of the way even if he wanted to, and so she ended up in his arms, pressed against him like she’d been so many times over the years — but not. She only let herself relax for a second before she stiffened in his loose hold. He couldn’t help but miss the way she’d always melted into him, as if she was trying to fuse their bodies together so they never had to be apart. He missed so much about his life with Mei.
His heart started pumping in his chest, hard and painful, moving a torrent of blood to places that had seemed to atrophy without her. She opened her mouth on a soft gasp, and that sound activated a cluster of neurons that had gone silent since the last time they were together. He wondered if she felt something similar. He wondered if she was getting wet the same way he was getting hard just being this close to her. He wondered if she remembered that flight to Hong Kong all those years ago.
He settled his hands on her waist out of familiarity and desire. It had been years since Miles had held Mei.
She gasped again and tilted her head back, but she wasn’t looking him in the eyes; she was staring at his mouth. And then she licked her lips.
“Mei,” he said, just as the airplane stuttered to the left.
His back hit the wall behind him, which was fine, and Mei was pushed fully into his body, which was even better.
A bell dinged, and Miles thought he’d conjured that up from nowhere until the flight attendant picked up the receiver. “The captain has turned on the seat belt sign…”
Miles and Mei blinked a few times before she stepped out of his arms.
He swallowed the lump of grief in his throat and looked away before he did or said something he shouldn’t.
Mei took another step away from him and waited for the flight attendant to finish her announcement. She hung up the receiver and turned to them with a bright smile, motioning for them to step into the aisle.
Mei took a step and stopped, turning to Miles with a furrowed brow. They didn’t make eye contact. “Didn’t you have to go to the bathroom?” she asked, looking at the open toilet door.
The flight attendant started to speak, but Miles cut her off by closing the door. Mei’s eyes lifted to his. “No,” he said definitively, motioning for her to precede him to her seat.
* * *
As soon as Mei got back to her row and ducked into her seat, Jorge stood from his to allow Miles to scoot past him.
‘Oh my god,’ Jorge mouthed at her, making it very clear he’d seen…whatever that was between her and Miles. How could he have missed it?
But the real question was how she could have let it happen. No, actually, that was a stupid question — of course, she’d let it happen because Mei still loved Miles. No one in her life had ever been led to believe otherwise, including him. The question was how had he let it happen? They hadn’t gotten divorced because she’d wanted it, they’d gotten divorced because he came home one day and told her that things had changed and he couldn’t see himself with her for the rest of her life. If she let herself think about that day, she’d never stop crying, and she’d never get out of bed because she remembered every detail. What he was wearing. The sound of his voice cracking as he spoke. The way she held onto that small thing, hoping it meant that there was a way to fix them. The sound of her own heart trying to beat a path out of her chest. The way her eyes and throat hurt from crying so hard. The way none of it seemed to get through to him in the end.
And that was the part that made her sink down into her chair where she hoped no one — especially Miles — could see her. Unfortunately, the empty aisle seat left her feeling exposed. She pulled her phone from her pocket and focused her attention on connecting to the in-flight Wi-Fi so she could text Candace, but as soon as she was connected, Candace’s reply to her last text came through.
Mei didn’t know how to feel, there were too many emotions swirling inside her gut at once.
Candace’s text made Mei laugh but the laughter made her cry, the mix of happiness and sadness in unequal measures the most painful part of life as far as she could tell.
She pulled her sleeve down over her hand and wiped at her cheek while she read Candace’s text over and over again. Her fingers kept moving over the screen as she started typing various responses but deleted them one by one, unable to find the right words to adequately express the mixture of devastation and hope and love swirling in her chest. It was very normal in her and Candace’s friendship for one or both of them to be at a loss for words, and over the long years of their relationship, the silence had become as comforting as anything else. But this silence didn’t soothe the ache in her chest because that was outside of Candace’s hands. She was probably asleep by now, but even if she wasn’t, what could she tell Mei now about Miles she hadn’t told her before?
Nothing.
She opened a new message and tentatively started typing his name. She only needed to type three letters before his contact appeared.
She’d seriously considered deleting and blocking him thousands of times over the years but never managed to get up the nerve. There were always reasons why she needed to keep this channel open. What if something happened to his mother and he needed to inform her? What if something happened to her parents and she needed to tell him? What if there was an emergency? What if? What if? What if? She wasn’t ready to snip that thread yet, and she might never be.
But seeing his last message from February 2017 hurt, and it wasn’t even special, just a happy birthday message like so many he’d sent before. She remembered getting that message and being too sad to cry. She also remembered crying the next year when he hadn’t reached out on her birthday at all.
She used to open this chat for hours back when the wound of the divorce was still raw, waiting to see if he would text her. Waiting for him to want her back. Sometimes she thought about sending her own message, but she didn’t have anything new to say, and it was too late to change the past.
She thought she was ready to talk.
The problem with texting was the waiting, but it had been three years of nothing but silence, so she was used to it. She dropped her phone on the table and noticed the glass of wine that had arrived while she was in the toilet. She picked it up and took a deep sip. Her eyes moved to the back of Miles’s seat, and just in the space between his and Jorge’s, she could see a sliver of his ear. She didn’t know how long he would take to text back, assuming he did, so she took another sip of her drink and prepared to ride out the turbulence of this flight and the rest of this trip.
A few minutes and half a glass of wine later, her phone vibrated, and she saw his name on the screen. Her heart lurched in her chest like it had when she was eighteen.
Those two words weren’t the ones she’d been desperate for all this time, but Mei was ready.
They’d just gotten into a groove of back and forth when he fucked it up. The next text took long enough to come, but Mei did finally get to see the thing she’d been waiting for. While she stared at her screen, the gray bubble of him writing to a text appeared and disappeared three times. She felt like her stomach was tying itself into knots, but when it came, she felt like the ground dropped out from underneath her.
She read those sentences five times in a row, getting angrier with every pass. She sat straight up in her chair and reached above her to turn on the light over her seat, needing to be absolutely sure she was reading what she thought she was. Needing to be clear if he’d really had the audacity to send this message to her. When she confirmed his words, her fingers flew across the phone screen as her pulse pounded in frustration.
“And here’s your vegetable pasta, Mrs. Jefferson. Enjoy,” the flight attendant said, sounding about as happy as Mei was angry.