Page 10 of Every Step She Takes
“Too late for what?”
“For everything! I’m too old, too inexperienced! I’m going to die avirgin!”
Window Seat’s eyebrows spike all the way up to her widow’s peak. “Well, you know, virginity is just a construct of the patriarchy and—”
I blow a raspberry, and she laughs.Laughs!On this, the eve of our demise.
“It’s not funny! I’ve never had sex!” I blurt and quickly cover my face with my free hand.
Window Seat somehow remains eerily calm. “It’s super common for queer people to miss out on certain adolescent experiences, or to experience them later in life. Our timelines are different than our hetero peers, and many queer people experience a second adolescence when—”
I shake my head again. “I’m too late. It’s too late.”
“It’s never too late to start living as your authentic self,” says this beautifully handsome stranger.
“It is if we’re all dead!”
Something brushes my shoulder. I wonder if it’s falling luggage—preferably something heavy to knock me unconscious for this last part—but when I turn around, I see the flight attendant who snuck me the extra wine staring down at me with the distinct mark of secondhand embarrassment etched into his features. “Miss, I need you to lower your voice,” he whispers. “You’re upsetting the other passengers.”
And that’s when I notice the plane is no longer shaking. That it maybe hasn’t been shaking for a while now.
A different flight attendant is carefully readjusting the luggage from the open bin, and on the screen in front of me, Drew and Jonathan are fake-bickering again as they install a support beam.
Several things become clear all at once:
The plane isn’t going to crash.
No one is going to die.
Except maybe me. From mortification.
Because I just came out to the Beautiful/Handsome stranger who is still holding my hand.
THREESOMEWHERE OVER CANADA
Mal
“Fuck…”
The woman with the freckles slowly exhales the curse as the disgruntled flight attendant slinks away.
I expected her to apologize for the tenth time, so the shocking profanity makes me laugh. It’s probably inappropriate, given the near-death experience everyone thought we were having.
The turbulence was admittedly awful. I’d rank it right up there with landing at the Taipei airport during a typhoon, and that puddle jumper I misguidedly took in the Seychelles because the pilot let me pay him in Jif peanut butter.
But we were never going todie.
Freckles, though. She had the fear of death in those saucer-size blue-green eyes. Now, realizing death isn’t going to put her out of her misery, her pink skin turns even pinker beneath the constellations of freckles sprinkled across her face.
“I’m so sorry,” she gasps in horror.
Ah.There’s the apology.
“Sorry for frightening small children with your shouts of imminent death?” I ask with a slight cock of my head. “Or sorry for coming out to me?”
Freckles rips her hand away from mine like it burned her, but she was squeezing so tight a minute ago that there’s still a faintpressure on my palm after she lets go, like the ghost of a hand still resting in mine.
I try to recall the last time Ruth held my hand like that, but my brain quickly informs me the footage cannot be found. I spent a year with a woman whonever onceheld my hand. A year of pretending that I didn’t care, that I didn’t need that kind of innocent intimacy.
