The ground is all little atoms of lights in vast voids. Traveling at five hundred miles an hour, you would think they would shoot past as if we were on the ground. But they don't. You just see more of them up here, sliding past like the minute hand on a clock. I can feel the spark between him and me. It doesn't pass anymore than the towns do, but seems to gather in the space between us, in the sticky skin touching on the armrest.
My tray table is open, a book open on top of it. The first paragraph is something about seventeenth century slang. I've read it three times, but find that my eyes only slip over the words. I'm thinking about him, what I'd say if he said something.
A note folded in thirds lands on the book. "What are you wearing under those clothes?"
Our flight was delayed. We sat in a bar of a town we'd never been to, and now still wouldn't be able to say we had. The conversation turned quickly, and we ignored our blushes, becoming each other's anthropology projects and confessors.
"It's been forever. My last girlfriend held out on me and I've just been too depressed to get back in there."
"How long?" I asked him.
"Two years."
He laughed and so did I, but it was forced. I was supposed to buck him up, tell him it's only a matter of time, that he was good-looking enough. Should be fighting them off.
"How many times do you jerk off a day?"
"Three. I'll blow a hole through my next condom, I know it."
I smile at the note, begin to look for a pen, but just as I lean forward, one drops into the fold of the book. I write, "The usual. Skin, tits and naughty triangle. You?"
"What about you?" he continued, stirring his drink. Every seat in the bar was filled, the spaces between them with tall, black suitcases all Tetrised together.
"It's um...," it had been a year, "a few months, I guess."
He looked me over, a quick size-up in a slow blink, his straw folded over the lip of his glass. He held his breath for just a second and inhaled before looking away.
"I'm thinking about you," the note reads. "It shows."
My blush is overwhelming and beams from my forehead to my neck, pure boil. No matter what I write back, he knows. He takes the note back before I can respond, writes more and replaces it on my book. "Can I touch you?"
The whine of the plane measures a few seconds, the towns replacing one another underneath us. I can hear myself breathe, feel the air nozzle above my face flit my bangs against my face. I pick up the pen and begin to write. I only get to the Y before his knuckles are brushing the inside of my knee. I don't flinch, but inside, my body jolts. Heat pours up my skin, mixing with the blush on my face.
Our thighs are touching and I can feel him inch forward in his seat. I lean forward to check the seats opposite. One empty, two asleep. His lips flip and pinch my earlobe. My heart thuds against my breastbone. I want to feel him, the reason he had to inch forward in his seat. I check again across the aisle and move his hand up. I hear him now, a bang of an exhale. And my body, sensing the force of someone's else's hand, blacks out the periphery and hooks itself onto him.
I shut the lights off over us and look for a moment out of the window. The moon, in the shape of a spinach pie, is blinding and quiet. Our lights flash back at it, like the wing is frantically waving hello. His fingers press into me. I reach across and lay my palm on his abdomen. He reaches up and lowers his tray, then raises the armrest between us. I follow down under the plastic board and find him, a frustrated, caged erection in a tight pair of jeans. I pick apart the button between my ring finger and pinkie and unzip him against the flat of my hand, the zipper teeth pointed into my skin. He jolts and scoots up more.
My body falls into its tense concentration, his hand going above my skirt before it falls again under the material. Its fingers slip and lose themselves in me. I think I must be imagining that he's there. But he must be. I'm shaking.
My hand wraps around his cock and straightens him out so that it rests against the bottom of his tray. He's breathing quickly through his nose, alternately shallow and deep. I look at his face for a moment and find him open-mouthed, watching my chest pump. His fingers snake against me, twist and flutter. My toes bend in my socks, crush into the legs of the seat in front of me.
We work each other for a few minutes, our bodies flying along with the plane, the force of gravity against our weights changing here and there, the blood confused and shifting. My neck bends and grinds into my seatback. My mouth opens and I force back everything but a single gasping inhale. Time stops for a while, unmeasured by towns or clocks or the hiss of the airplane.
His arm pulls around my neck and when he comes, he only says, "I miss you," and pumps shots against the bottom of the tray. In my ecstasy, the continuing high of the orgasm, I know immediately what he means.
"I miss you too."
We sleep, a man and a woman alone in the crowded plane, our heads bent into each other, our hands across our empty laps.
