Mind Over Matter

All it takes is a blizzard and one cancelled flight to make Felicity decide that she really doesn’t like airports. The chairs are hard, there’s no room to relax, and the constant cacophony of sound makes it difficult to concentrate on her book. Of course, it could also be that she’s already read it twice during the layover and she doesn’t think it will be as appealing the third time, but she prefers to blame the noise and the airport boarding lounge.

Giving up the fight, she starts looking around the lounge, wondering if anything exciting is happening. Nothing. The most fascinating thing is the room is a guy in the back, digging through some of the garbage bins. He looks up at Felicity, and she thinks he looks creepy. And not the normal kind of creepy, either, like the weird homeless guy who tells her she has “good birthing hips” when he sees her, whatever the hell that means. She’s talking about a more sinister level of creepy with malicious intent, like I-have-a-white-panel-van-and-give-out-free-candy-to-children creepy.

A cough in the background reminds her that she’s been staring, so she finds her eyes wandering elsewhere. There’s a woman with long, black hair and an unpleasant disposition off to one side, and the badge draped across her briefcase identifies her as a Stellmoor International employee. Even though she’s reading through The Wall-Street Journal, she’s frowning way too much to be that unhappy. Seriously, Felicity thinks that someone wasn’t loved enough as a child. Ms. Grumpygills looks like someone stuck a pile of dog excrement under her nose, and her face froze that way. She’d be tempted to give the woman a hug, if she didn’t think Ms. Grumpygills didn’t have a knife concealed on her person for that exact reason—to ward off potential huggers. Sure, they might have had to go through a metal detector, but still, you can make knives out of things other than metal. (She saw something like that on a crime drama once—the one with the guy who has to stand side-profile all the time and does the weird thing with the sunglasses and the horrible puns.)

There’s another soft cough somewhere in the background, and then Ms. Grumpygills looks up. Felicity’s mind immediately screams, “Abort mission!” and then she examines the rest of the lounge. A guy in the back corner is reading the Journal of Forensic Sciences, which would be fine, if he wasn’t smiling. She had to read a few journals in her freshman biology class, and she’s pretty sure she cried afterward, so she has no idea why he’s so happy about it. His smile is a different style of creepy than Dumpster-Diving Creeper’s—like he’s secretly plotting the demise of the world. Or maybe just his ex-girlfriend’s death—his girlfriend who left him because he talked about death all the time. (Which she notes would be an interesting turn of events.) Either way, Felicity would not leave that man alone with an abandoned building, a knife, and a shrink-wrap machine. Especially since he reminds her of that so-called “nice” neighbor who asked to borrow her car and brought it back smelling like a herd of goats and an entire league of dirty, sweaty football players had been transported in it.

This time the cough sounds again, and she realizes it’s been the same guy all three times. She rounds on him, expecting Sir Coughs-a-Lot—he coughs again, a poorly contained smile stretching across his face—to be old and senile, but what she sees is exactly the opposite. He’s stretched across the row of seating directly in front of her, looking snazzy in a suit that’s probably tailor-made to fit him. Black suit, cufflinks—the whole works. The suit jacket is draped over the back of one of the chairs and his silk tie over it, and he’s casually perusing a well-worn book of sorts. Clearly he’s heard the old ZZ Top song because he dresses like he thinks that every girl is crazy about a sharp-dressed man.

Now that she’s actually looking at him, she’s struck by how handsome he is—sharp jawline, short-cropped brown hair, stunning blue eyes, and just the beginnings of a beard. Not to mention she could stare at him in that white dress shirt and those suspenders all day long. Yes, she decides, the higher powers that be have been good to her; if she has to be stuck in an airport at two a.m., let it be with her sitting across from a man who looks like that.