I pull my gaze to the window once more, although "window" is a bit of a misnomer; seeing as the entire interior of the aircraft's cabin is some kind of giant screen, what I see as "window" to the world beyond the walls is actually just a program making it look like a window. Curious, I angle towardthe wall, hoping to hide the potentially embarrassing thing I'm about to try. The "window" looks identical to any airplane window: small, oval. There's even a 3D illusion of depth, although the illusion falls apart if you touch the wall. Glancing to make sure everyone else is occupied and not watching me act like a dingus, I put a finger at the top-right and bottom-left corners and use a “pinch and zoom” gesture to try to make the window bigger, like I would on a touchscreen. The window flickers, although that's not the right word. It…well, it blips, like it's reacting to an invalid command. I try tapping the top-right corner; it blips again, but differently—a shorter blip. Sorry, I'm not a coder, so I don't know all the technical terms. You'll just have to deal with "blip". Next, I simply tap and hold the top-right corner; the blip is sustained—meaning the outline of the window darkens and stays that way as long as I keep touching the corner. Dragging my finger on an upward diagonal—an "expand" gesture for those digital natives out there—I succeed in making the window taller. By repeating the gesture in reverse using the bottom-left corner, I make the window wider. Just for shits and giggles, I test the limits of the window size; when I've reached the extent of my arms' wingspan, I figure it's probably as good as infinite, within the confines of the available space.
This is when my experimentation draws the attention of others.
"Wait, what the fuck?" This is Saxon, and he sounds almost irate. "You can fuckin'dothat?"
And suddenly, there's a giant blond man half in my lap, leaning all up in my personal space as he plays with my "window" like a two-hundred-twenty-pound toddler.
I push my fingertips into his chest. "Do you fuckingmind, Gigantor? You have your own window. Go play with that and get out of my space."
Terra snickers, reaching out and yanking him backward by a belt loop. "Sorry, sweetheart." She addresses Saxon in the tone you'd use to address a puppy. "We're still working on respecting personal space, aren't we, baby?"
Saxon flops into his own chair and goes to town, expanding his window, minimizing it, moving it this way and that. Soon, everyone whose seat is on the window side is playing with the effect, resulting in windows of a dozen different sizes and shapes.
Jakob stares at me with an annoyed expression, and I just shrug and give him an "oops" look.
"Sorry about that," Terra says to me. "He's kind of excitable." She pats his beefy thigh. "But that's what I love about him."
Saxon, after sitting for roughly sixty seconds, is up again and across the cabin, pestering his brother Silas, who is trying to nap.
Alone with Terra for a moment, I ask a question that's been banging around my head since last night. "How long did you know Saxon before you knew you were in love with him?"
She splutters sarcastically. "Oh, fuck. Like…ten minutes?" She shakes her head, snorting. "For real, though, it was a matter of days. Granted, those days were intense, action-packed, terrifying, and absolutely bonkers. It was like two months packed into less than a week. I just…" she trails off, looking at Saxon, who has deposited himself on his brother's lap and is trying to stick a finger in Silas's nose. "God, he's impossible when he's bored."
Silas drives a thumb into a pressure point in Saxon's underarm, eliciting a howl…I tune out the now-bickering brothers and re-focus on Terra.
"I guess I just knew," Terra finishes. "I hate having to answer like that because it's a bullshit answer and I fuckin' know it. I…I wasn't looking for it, Brys. I didn't think I even wanted it. Afterwhat I'd been through, what had been done to me by men, it's a wonder I'm still straight. Like, I get it. Being with a woman would be easier, I sometimes think. Like, I just don't fuckin' understand his assat all, most days. I did experiment with girls a couple of times when I was wasted, but I just like dick too much. And Saxon?" She wiggles her eyebrows at me. "Man's hung like Priapus."
I splutter and then laugh out loud, hand over my mouth. "Terra!"
She cackles. "Oh, honey, we're a wildly inappropriate bunch. I hope you're not a prude or anything."
"I'm not a prude, I don't think, but—"
"Hey, Saxy baby!" Terra twists in her seat, yelling over her shoulder.
"Yo!" Saxon replies in kind without turning around. "What up, queen?"
"Why am I not a lesbian?"
"Because you love my cock!"
The exchange is shouted; no one else bats an eye.
"This feels…I feel like I should be offended by this conversation," I say. "Or like someone should be."
"But you're nooooooot!" Terra singsongs the last word. "Are you? Because it's all just jokes. We're all allies here."
"No, I…" I shake my head. "Can we go back to how it seems like it should be impossible to feel as strongly as I do about someone I've only known for a few days?"
As if they had all received some sort of cue or signal, the women surround me again, leaning over the backs of chairs, sitting cross-legged on the floor between seats that have been turned to face inward; Tatiana is perched on Terra's lap while Terra idly braids the other woman's hair.
"We've all had this conversation," Annika says. "I think that's part of why we're so close. I mean, we live together in closequarters, it's true, but we've all been through something no one else can understand if you haven't been through it, and the only people who have are on this jet. We all know firsthand how you can fall in love with someone you barely know. Like, I still have conversations with Chance where he tells me something about himself that I didn't know. But those are just facts, right? Like, history. That stuff is important, and I'm not saying it's not. But Chance justgetsme. We're both addicts. Like, rock-bottom, should be dead, 'there but for the grace of God go I' meth-heads. We're drastically different in a lot of ways. We disagree on some big shit. But when it comes down to brass tacks, Chance knows my fucking soul. He's inside me—who I am as a human being. I knew I loved him when I faced the prospect of going about the rest of my life alone, without him, and I just couldn't do it. He brought me to the Club and introduced me to everyone, and that was it. I knew where I belonged." She casts a look around the group of women. "And it's as much these women as Chance, in some ways. They're my support system. They get me in ways even Chance can't."
Anjalee addresses me, then, in her lilting accent. "If you are wishing for a test by which to know if Jakob is the right person for your future, try to imagine returning to your previous life without him. Try to really sit in the feelings. Waking up in bed alone. Going to bed alone. Going on dates with other men. Sleeping with someone else—and I do mean sleep, as well as sexually. If you think you can go back to your life without Jakob in it, then perhaps he is not the right person, or it is not the right time yet."
The other women continue in that vein, but my attention wanders away.
I picture myself in my condo:
