The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight(10)
“Hadley,” Mom said, jumping out on the other side and looking at her from across the hood. “Don’t just—”
“I’ll call you when I get there,” Hadley said, already heading toward the terminal. She could feel Mom watching her the whole way, but some fragile instinct, some mistaken sense of pride, made her refuse to turn around again.
Now, sitting in the little airport café, her thumb hovers over the button on her phone. She takes a deep breath before pressing it, her heart pounding in the quiet spaces between rings.
The words she spoke earlier are still echoing in her mind; Hadley isn’t superstitious by nature, but that she so thoughtlessly invoked the possibility of a plane crash right before her flight is nearly enough to make her sick. She thinks about the plane she was supposed to take, already well on its way across the ocean by now, and she feels a sharp sting of regret, hoping that she didn’t somehow mess with the mysterious workings of timing and chance.
A part of her is relieved when she gets her mom’s voice mail. As she starts to leave a message about the change in plans, she sees Oliver approaching again. For a moment she thinks she recognizes something in the look on his face, the same tortured worry she can feel in herself right now, but when he spots her something shifts, and he’s back again, looking unruffled and almost cheerful, an easy smile lighting his eyes.
Hadley has trailed off in the middle of her message, and Oliver points to her phone as he grabs his bag, then jerks his thumb in the direction of the gate. She opens her mouth to tell him she’ll only be a minute, but he’s already off, and so she finishes the message hastily.
“So I’ll call when I get there tomorrow,” she says into the phone, her voice wavering slightly. “And Mom? I’m sorry about before, okay? I didn’t mean it.”
Afterward, when she heads back to the gate, she scans the area for Oliver’s blue shirt, but he’s nowhere in sight. Rather than wait for him amid the crowd of restless travelers, she circles back to use the bathroom, then pokes around the gift shops and bookstores and newspaper stands, wandering the terminal until it’s finally time to board.
As she falls into line, Hadley realizes she’s almost too tired to even be anxious at this point. It feels like she’s been here for days now, and there’s so much more ahead of her to worry about, too: the closeness of the cabin, the panicky feeling that comes with no escape route. There’s the wedding and the reception, meeting Charlotte, and seeing Dad for the first time in more than a year. But for now, she just wants to put on her headphones, close her eyes, and sleep. To be set in motion, sent careening across the ocean without any effort on her part, seems almost like a miracle.
When it’s her turn to hand over her ticket, the flight attendant smiles from beneath his mustache. “Scared of flying?”
Hadley forces herself to unclench her hand, where she’s been gripping the handle of her suitcase with white knuckles. She smiles ruefully.
“Scared of landing,” she says, then steps onto the plane anyway.
4
9:58 PM Eastern Standard Time
2:58 AM Greenwich Mean Time
By the time Oliver appears at the top of the aisle, Hadley is already sitting by the window with her seat belt fastened and her bag stowed safely in the overhead bin. She’s spent the past seven minutes pretending she wasn’t interested in his arrival, counting planes out the window and examining the pattern on the back of the seat in front of her. But really, she’s just been waiting for him, and when he finally arrives at their row she finds herself blushing for no good reason other than that he’s quite suddenly looming over her with that tilted grin of his. There’s a kind of unfamiliar electricity that goes through her at the nearness of him, and she can’t help wondering if he feels it, too.
“Lost you in there,” he says, and she manages a nod, happy to be found again.
He hefts his hanging bag up above before scooting into the middle seat beside her, awkwardly arranging his too-long legs in front of him and situating the rest of himself between the unforgiving armrests. Hadley glances at him, her heart thudding at his sudden proximity, at the casual way he’s positioned himself so close to her.
“I’ll just stay for a minute,” he says, leaning back. “Till somebody else comes.”
She realizes that a part of her is already composing the story for the benefit of her friends: the one about how she met a cute guy with a great accent on a plane and they spent the whole time talking. But the other part of her, the more practical part, is worried about arriving in London tomorrow morning for her father’s wedding without having slept. Because how could she possibly go to sleep with him beside her like this? His elbow is brushing against hers and their kneecaps are nearly touching; there’s a dizzying smell to him, too, a wonderfully boyish mixture of deodorant and shampoo.
He pulls a few things from his pocket, thumbing through a pile of change until he eventually finds a lint-covered piece of wrapped candy, which he offers her first, then pops into his mouth.
“How old is that thing?” she asks, her nose wrinkled.
“Ancient. I’m pretty sure I dug it out of a sweet bowl the last time I was home.”
“Let me guess,” she says. “It was part of a study on the effects of sugar over time.”
He grins. “Something like that.”
“What are you really studying?”