“Fuck,” I hiss. It’s been ages since I witnessed the hours between takeoff and landing. Usually, I’m well knocked out at thispoint, allergy pills working their magic. But then again, usually my pills are tucked into my carry-on, ready for me to take right before boarding, and not out of reach in the pocket of a pair of jeans I decided to wear last night only to change my mind this morning because who wears jeans on a long-haul flight?
Lewis’s long exhale reminds me to breathe. “You’re doing great,” he encourages me over the captain repeating his announcement in German. I drag my eyes up his clean-shaven jaw to his bottom lip that’s slightly larger than the top, the set of lines that brackets the corners of his mouth up to the wings of his nose. He nods as I draw in a breath and slowly let it out again.
“Did you know that it’s the lift around the wings that gets planes off the ground and keeps them in the sky?” he says. “Turbulence is really just a perturbation in the air that interferes with the lift, but the wings balance it out, see?” He nods to the window, in front of which the teenager has inexplicably fallen asleep. Behind the tinted glass, the wings are violently swinging up and down. “It won’t break the airplane apart. Turbulence is dangerous because it jostles people around, but since we’re safely strapped into our seats, we should be okay.”
I know he’s just trying to distract me, but unfortunately, throughout his speech, my mind has found a new image to latch on to: a GIF of a plane snapping in half. Rationally, I know this is very unlikely to happen, but my brain has abandoned all logic, letting panic steer my thoughts. “Our plane might break apart?” I whisper.
He tugs at my hand. “It won’t. I thought the science might comfort you, but let’s talk about something else.”
The plane shudders, and my stomach decides it’s time to ignore anatomy and climb into my chest. The rapid up and down reminds me of my parents’ house outside Berlin, where the last stretch of the road was paved decades ago with large and irregular cobblestones.
But unlike there, where I’d get out of the car and walk the last hundred yards to avoid motion sickness, now there’s no way out as we plummet toward earth. The seat belt digs into my thighs. Panic taps on my shoulder. I burrow my face into Lewis’s flannel, and he immediately stiffens.
“Oh god, I’m sorry.” Mortified, I pull away and press the crown of my head into the back of my seat. His scent—woodsy and warm—reminds me of that time Karo joined me after a conference and we canoed the lakes of Central Sweden. “I swear I don’t use everyone I meet as a human comfort blanket.”
He squeezes my hand. “It’s fine.” After another moment, he clears his throat. “You can use my shoulder, if you think that helps.”
I wince and press my eyes closed as another jerk goes through the plane.
“Tell me about yourself,” he prompts, his voice quietly confident. If the memory of him freezing when I nuzzled into him weren’t quite as fresh, I’d hug him in gratitude for his attempt to distract me.
“I’m a postdoc,” I tell him. Since he’s an academic, I don’t go into the usual spiel of explaining that it stands for postdoctoral researcher and describes the time of fixed-term research contracts after grad school until you finally make it into a tenured professorship—or, the more common outcome, leave academia for good.
I force myself to continue talking through the blood rushing in my ears. “I’m from Germany, but now I live in the Netherlands. Although I don’t know for how much longer.”
“Is your funding running out?”
Ouch. “Dead center, Dr. Lewis. Or is itProfessor?”
“I’m a postdoc like you, and just Lewis is fine. I’m sorry for bringing that up.”
“It’s okay.” I take a deep breath and his scent unwinds something in me. “But yeah, my funding is running out, and my labdoesn’t have money to extend my contract. Which means I’ll be out of a job soon, unless I find another open position somewhere else. I’ve applied for grants to extend the funding myself, but that’s not a guarantee. Well, you probably know the drill.”
He sounds wistful when he says, “I do. Makes me question why I don’t just leave and get a cushy job in industry.”
It’s Karo’s favorite question, whenever I tell her I’ve been working at all hours to make a paper revision deadline or when yet another one of my fixed-term contracts ends and I gear up to find another job with an expiration date. The reasons are numerous, or they were at first: Because I love working at the forefront of discovery and my mind switches off when my fingers type out lines of code. Because I have so many questions and I can’t bear to leave them unanswered. Because one day my work might help someone in this world. Because there’s nothing better than seeing a student get passionately interested in something I explained to them. But with every passing year and being nowhere closer to achieving the long-dreamed-of job stability that would allow me to fully focus on my research, it gets harder to answer Karo’s question.
I’m glad for the opportunity to be the one asking it, for once. “Well. Why don’t you?”
“I don’t like to be told what to do, so I don’t think I’d last long in a company.” He hums, low in his throat. “But no, truth is, I love it too much. I was that kid who annoyed the hell out of everyone with all my questions. I wanted to understand how everything works. That never changed, except now I get paid for it.”
It’s not only his words that trigger an immediate sense of connection, but also the way he says them. Lewis’s voice softens as he talks about being an academic, like it’s the most precious thing in the world.
“What about you?” he asks, squeezing my hand, which Iguess I should take back soon, but I can’t make myself pull away just yet. Though it does give me the courage to open my eyes and find his gaze.
“I guess… I want to make a difference,” I tell him. “And I know, don’t we all. I don’t mean it in the ‘I want to find a cure for Alzheimer’s’ way—although, don’t get me wrong, I hope we do find it at some point. But I’m working in this tiny niche of science that is sort of far away from anything that can be applied in the real world. I love my tiny niche of science. And I love chipping away at it, and maybe, somewhere, at some point it will make a difference?”
I’m surprised that I’m sharing this much with him, but he’s easy to talk to. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ll never see this stranger again, or the fact that, as a fellow academic, he understands the strong pull of those unanswered questions and doesn’t need justifications like my sister does. Or maybe it’s the fact that he hasn’t let go of my hand, either.
After a beat of silence, Lewis shifts around to face me fully, leaning his temple against the headrest. “And what brings you to New York? Summer vacation?”
I push out a laugh. “I wish. I just got done with a paper revision that took ages, so a holiday sounds tempting, but no. There’s this summer program that I’m attending. I thought it would be good for some networking, collaborations. Maybe to see if anybody would hire me if my grant application gets rejected.”
“It sounds like there’s abutthere,” he notes.
Of course there’s abut. A giant one. One that made me glad I’d missed the taxi when I woke up this morning, and tempted me to stay in bed rather than race down the quiet corridor of the country estate my sister got married in. But the dread of having to quit my research and leave all my questions unanswered got me up those stairs to the honeymoon suite,where I banged against the wooden door until Karo’s fiancé—husband—Lennart opened it with a rumpled look on his face.
It’s abutso personal that I’d usually not get into it, not even with Karo. Then again, I’ve already shown this guy my deepest irrational fear so what’s there to lose?
