by Emma Nichols
That brought a hint of relief…for this particular stressor of the day, at least. Was it weird that hot guys stressed me out? Probably. But it had always been this way. To be fair, a lot of things stressed me out that didn’t seem to bother normal people. Grocery store checkouts, for example. Drive-through windows at fast food places. Really, anything that involved talking to strangers or, God forbid, making small talk.
This very special moment with my airplane neighbor? It was simultaneously ticking two items on my anxiety checklist. One being the fact that I was talking to a hottie. The other, the fact that I was making small talk. In an enclosed space, no less, where there was no possibility of escape.
Okay, scratch that. This man was singlehandedly hitting three of my panic buttons. At once. I almost wanted to give him an award or something. I just hoped that award wouldn’t be vomit in his lap. I had a weak stomach and anxiety attacks tended to make me puke.
That’s right. It was good to be me.
Seriously though, I’m making myself sound like more of a neurotic stressball than I really was. I’d spent the ten years since high school working on myself and I must say, I’d come a long way.
Of course, one wouldn’t know it to look at me now. But then again, this was a very special circumstance. I hadn’t been this much of a basketcase in ages. Well, at least not since I had to give a speech at my best friend’s wedding last summer.
Public speaking is very high up there on my list of anxieties.
Thanks to my impulsive, wine-induced decision to accept the invite to my reunion, I now knew that high school reunions ranked even higher on that list than public speaking. The only thing more terrifying would be if someone forced me to jump out of this plane. I risked a glance over at my neighbor, catching a glimpse of his dark jeans and blue button down shirt, but not risking another peek at his handsome face.
There was only so much I could take at the moment, and he had the kind of dark good looks and sexy, crinkly-eyed smile that made me hot and bothered.
Unfortunately, in my world hot and bothered was usually followed closely by panic and puke.
So, I didn’t risk another look at his face. Instead I looked at his hands. Big mistake. Big, big mistake. His hands were sexy. How? Don’t ask me, ask my hormones, which were finding everything about this guy a turn on, from the light scent of his aftershave to the lean length of his thigh, which was entirely too close to mine.
Not that it was his fault. We were thrown together in cramped seating, with barely enough room to cross my legs and definitely not enough air to breathe.
Oh shit. Now I couldn’t breathe. Just thinking about the small enclosed space and the lack of oxygen made my lungs go into overdrive. I started gulping down air but it wasn’t enough. It was too hot. Why was it so hot in here? Was the air conditioning not working? Was our air supply in jeopardy?
Or maybe it was just me.
I felt my neighbor shift beside me and watched in fascination as his leg inched closer toward me. “Are you all right?”
I nodded quickly. “Fine.” But my rapid heartrate said otherwise. After listening to my heart pound loudly in my ears for a second, I added, “No. Not really.”
“You don’t like flying?”
“Among other things,” I said. Just one of many on the list.
“Tell me about this reunion.” God, his voice was so low and soothing. It had this rumbly quality that helped put me at ease even as it made me hot all over. Oh damn. I shouldn’t have thought about the heat. It was way too hot in here. Why had I worn a sweater? I needed it off.
I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk about the reunion.”
“Is the reunion stressing you out?” I heard a hint of amusement in his voice but I didn’t really care. His voice was having a calming effect on my nerves. Despite his sexiness, he was calming me. Interesting. Maybe he didn’t make me nervous because I knew I wouldn’t see him ever again after we landed. Or maybe it was the fact that I’d been studiously avoiding looking directly into his handsome face, thereby eliminating some of his appeal.
Or maybe I’d finally found the one hot guy who didn’t make me want to puke from nerves.
I know how messed up that sounds. I’d pretty much resigned myself to the fact that if I ever wanted a real relationship I either needed to find a guy who I wasn’t attracted to or one whose personality made him repulsive to me in which case I wouldn’t be nervous around him.
Neither was a terribly enchanting option, which explained why I was still single.
Always and forever single.
Nope. No pity parties going on over here.
“Fine,” the hottie next to me said, even though I’d never responded. What had he asked? Didn’t matter. He was moving on and I tried to focus on his voice as my gaze remained fixed on the magazine in my lap.
I think I was onto something here. If I didn’t see his hotness, it wouldn’t intimidate me. His voice was all that mattered and his voice was heavenly. Low, sexy, and delicious. It was the kind of voice you’d want to hear whispering in your ear at night.
“Let’s talk about something else,” he said. “What do you do for a living?”
“Um…” I licked my lips and tried to steady my breathing enough to speak. I knew what he was doing. He was trying to distract me from thoughts of plane crashes and humiliating myself at the reunion. Honestly right now I wasn’t sure which of those was the worse scenario. Death would presumably be quick and painless. But interacting with my former classmates?
This could very well be the longest, most miserable weekend of my life.
“Um…” I started again. Focus. For the love of God, what did I do? Years of answering that question made the response tumble out on autopilot. I gave him a summary of my work as a bioengineer that sounded like I was reading my LinkedIn bio verbatim.
Probably because it was my LinkedIn summary that I was spouting. I’d learned a long time ago that small talk was easier if you knew the answers to some of the more obvious questions by rote. What do you do? That was always one of the first things people asked so I’d memorized the answer.
Trust me, I know exactly how weird that sounds.
“What do you do?” I asked when I’d finished. Not because I was really all that interested but because I loved the sound of his voice. I wanted to focus on that and forget everything that was to come—the welcome party at the bar tonight, the actual reunion tomorrow, and all the people I’d see when I was there. I’d made the mistake of checking the reunion’s Facebook page before getting on the plane so now I knew exactly who would be there. Oh, maybe not everyone had replied to the Facebook event page, but enough had.
Alex Jones had. So now I knew without a doubt that my high school crush would be there. And he probably wouldn’t recognize me. Not because I’d changed but because he’d never noticed me. Most people hadn’t. Which was why it was ludicrous that I’d agreed to go to this thing in the first place. No one would care if I was there or not. No one had cared about my existence, why would they care now?
Oh God. What had I been thinking? Stupid wine. I was never drinking again. Except, of course, to make it through this weekend without losing my mind. But after this weekend I was going sober. Stone cold sober.
Luckily hottie-the-kindhearted-passenger started talking about the app he’d developed, which had been bought by a bigger company. It was interesting enough to distract me nicely from my self-flagellation and new promises of sobriety. He told me about how he’d moved to the Silicon Valley, what the company he works for now creates. It was fascinating and it didn’t hurt that his voice was lovely. I could listen to him talk all night.
He seemed to understand that his talking was helping because he kept going. Telling me all about his life in California. Asking me about where I lived and all that good stuff. I kept my answers brief and turned the conversation back to him.
I was boring, this guy was not. He was funny in a dry, self-deprecating kind of way that made me smi
le despite the fact that I was sitting hunched over with my face buried in an unread magazine.
Also, his voice. Have I mentioned that voice? It was a freakin’ dreamy voice.
He waited until I was sufficiently lulled to bring up the reunion again, and this time I wasn’t such a crazyface. I’d been breathing normally for some time now and I only felt a mild spike of adrenaline at the mention of the dreaded reunion that was to come.
“So, why are you so nervous about a reunion?” he asked. He managed to imbue the word “reunion” with enough disgust that it made me laugh.
I shrugged. I was feeling nice and tranquil for the first time in weeks, I so did not want to think about it.
“Were you bullied or something?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No, not bullied. Just…invisible.”
“Ahh.” His ahh told me he understood. He got it. Not everyone did. My best friend from college who’d just gotten married, for example. She tried to understand. She said she got it, but she just didn’t. She’d been popular and she was an extrovert to the nth degree. People like her never really got it.
“So why are you going back then?”
Good question. Nay, excellent question. It was the question I’d been asking myself ever since I’d bought my flights in a fit of drunken courage gone horribly awry.
Why? Why had I done it? And once I’d sobered up, the question became why hadn’t I canceled? Why hadn’t I gone back to that stupid Facebook event page and changed my response to I don’t know or even just outright no?
Why, why, why?
When I opened my mouth, I found myself telling him the answer as much as myself. “I guess I just wanted to be seen for once.”
He was quiet for a moment. “So you’re going back because you have something to prove?”
I frowned at the magazine. “No. Yes.” I scrunched my nose up in self-disgust. “When you say it like that it sounds pathetic.”
“Not pathetic,” he said softly, kindly. “Just human.”
I let out a huff of air that I hoped passed for a laugh. “Human, huh? To me it sounds like I’m still hung up on some issues I should have gotten over ten years ago.”
I felt his shrug when his arm brushed against mine. “Maybe this is your chance. Maybe you need this reunion for closure.”
“Maybe.”
He was quiet for a moment and I got lost in thought. I’d been seeing a therapist for years. I’d been meditating regularly for ages. I’d been keeping a journal since birth. How was it that talking to this random hot guy suddenly gave me the “aha” moment I’d been searching for?
Then it occurred to me that the silence was lasting too long. I’d been crazy self-absorbed ever since we started talking. The flight was nearly over and it was only now that I thought to ask. “What about you? What brings you to Pennsylvania?”
His silence lasted a heartbeat too long. “My high school reunion.”
I stopped breathing. He was teasing. Joking. He couldn’t mean… I finally lifted my head and glanced over in his direction, meeting his gaze head on for the first time since I’d boarded.
The guy was still hot. He still had that crinkly-awesome smile. But when I looked closer, when I looked past the five o’clock shadow and the killer smile, I recognized him. I saw the dorky kid I’d been friends with—well, as much as I was friends with anyone back then. I saw the guy who was nice to me, who studied with me and ate lunch with me. I saw the one guy who’d noticed my existence at Linwood High.
And he was here, next to me. Listening to me ramble on about high school reunions and watching me lose my mind.
Fucking hell.
I blinked a couple of times, watching in fascination and horror as my memory of him gelled with the hottie sitting next to me. It was like watching a kaleidoscope shift into focus, changing the geek into the hottie and then back again until they were one and the same. Yup, there was no doubt about it. “Noah?”
He grinned. “Hey Ali.”
2
Noah
It wasn’t like I’d meant to keep my identity a secret. At first I’d been amused that Alison Marks was on my flight, and then even more amused—albeit slightly offended—that she didn’t recognize me.
I mean, I hadn’t had many friends at Linwood, but Alison was one of them. At least, she was one of the few who acknowledged my nerdy existence and always had a smile and kind word. We’d had a lot of classes together since we were both overachievers and in the top of our class.
But, while I was a little bummed that she hadn’t recognized me, I was also a little stoked. I mean, I’d changed a lot since high school.
A lot.
And on purpose. It wasn’t luck that had turned my scrawny frame into something I could be proud of. And I was still recovering from sticker shock years later after I’d let my sister go wild with my credit card one weekend when I’d gone to visit her in New York. Next thing you know I had a legit wardrobe and a hairstyle of a grown man and not a geeky little boy.
So yeah, I guess in that sense—mission accomplished.
But now Alison was staring at me and I was more than a little afraid she was going to faint. Or puke. She had a distinctly green look about her. “Are you okay?”
She shifted so she was fully facing me. “Am I okay? Are you serious?” She reached out and touched my chest as if she were making sure I was real.
Electric bolts shot through me. Jesus, I was hard in an instant. I’d always been hyper aware of her. The soft floral scent, her long blonde hair, her luscious curves and that killer smile. Everything about Alison came together to form the perfect combination that was still my own personal kryptonite. It had been like that back in high school and I’d experienced that intoxicating effect again, for the first time since I was eighteen, when she’d walked onto the plane.
It had always been like this. Always.
But this might have been the first time she’d touched me. Not like a quick brush of clothing against clothing as we passed in the hall or as we sat side by side on a plane.
No. She touched me. Alison Marks touched me. On purpose.
Shit. Here I’d been teasing her for being so bent out of shape over a high school reunion and I couldn’t seem to remember that I wasn’t a teenage dork around my high school crush.
Crush. What a dumb term. It made what I’d felt for her sound so simple and juvenile but in reality it felt anything but. And those feelings were still there. It was still hard to look at her and breathe at the same time. It was nearly impossible to speak without reaching out to touch her.
But I didn’t want to scare her away now any more than I’d wanted to scare her off all those years ago.
She frowned at me. “You’re—I mean, you—” She let out a huff of air that had her long blonde bangs flying away from her face. “You look good.”
She said it bluntly, without emotion. Like it was a fact, and not quite possibly the coolest thing anyone had ever said to me.
Alison Marks thought I looked good.
Shit, keep it together. I’d ditched that nerdy loser persona ages ago. Since high school I’d been with tons of women. I’d had girlfriends, I’d had friends with benefits, I’d even had some one night stands.
In my utter stupidity, I’d thought all that experience combined with the new look would somehow make me immune to Alison Marks, or at least keep me from turning into a lust-filled, infatuated dweeb.
It did not.
I’d thought perhaps I’d come back and show her just how much I’d changed. And I guess mission successful since she hadn’t recognized me, but inside? I was still exactly the same around her. If someone could cut me open and peer inside, they would see a giant nerd panting over the girl of his dreams.
Luckily she couldn’t see that. All that experience had helped me to at least act cool even if I didn’t feel it. I gave her a slow smile. “You look good too.”
She blushed, and I swear to God she looked exactly like she did in high school. S
o nervous and so sweet. “You look the same,” I said.
She scrunched up her nose. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.”
I laughed. She never had known how beautiful she was. I had no idea how she missed the fact that she was an angel on earth. Even more mind boggling was how no one else in our class seemed to notice.
Probably because she’d been too insecure. One thing that was true in high school and had remained true as an adult? People saw what you projected. They saw what you wanted them to see…unless they were looking closely.
I guess all the guys in our high school had just been idiots. I sure as hell hoped they still were. A wave of possessiveness swept over me so hard and fierce I found myself clutching the armrests to keep from doing something stupid. Like grabbing her and kissing her.
I shook my head, trying to shake off some of my idiocy, not to mention my selfishness. I’d heard what Alison was saying. I’d heard probably more than she’d meant to say.
She’d come back to prove herself. She’d come back to show those assholes just what they’d been missing. And she deserved that.
I forced myself to relax back against the window so I could get a better view of her now that she was facing me. Yup, she still looked exactly the same, just better, if that was even possible. Her blonde hair was still long and straight but she had long layers now that framed her heart-shaped face. Instead of her old oversized sweaters and leggings look, she was wearing a black dress—nothing fancy and probably in anticipation of tonight’s party. She, like me, was probably planning on heading straight to the bar since our flight got in on the late side. Her dress looked good on her. Form fitting without being clinging, her jewelry was tasteful.
She looked…elegant. Grown up. Classy. God, she was so fucking hot.
And she was smiling. At me.
Jesus, it was good to be me right now.
“I can’t believe you didn’t say anything earlier,” she said, her tone mildly chiding but her smile telling me I was already forgiven.