Airport Pretzels and Second Chances

*This one came from thinking about the particular ache of wanting someone you barely know, and the terror of being clumsy with something sacred. If you're here for the heat, it's in the spaces between the words too. Thanks for reading.*

The departure board at Gate 14 flipped over one more time and settled on CANCELLED, in red, like it was proud of itself. Corinne Franks stared at it and did the math again in her head. Five hours and forty minutes until the next flight to Phoenix, if that one even went. Six hours in a bar that smelled like stale beer and floor cleaner, with nothing ahead of her but her mother's seventieth birthday and three days of her sister asking why she was still waiting tables at twenty-three.

Cancelled flights always felt like a dare she hadn't asked for. Nobody ever dared her to do anything good, either. Nobody ever said, Corinne, we dare you to take a nap. It was always we dare you to sit in an uncomfortable chair and think about your life until the boarding group gets called.

She was twenty-three, she had a carry-on with a wrapped gift in it that had already gotten patted down twice, and she had a debit card with enough on it for maybe four glasses of the airport wine. So she sat down at the bar and ordered the pinot grigio that cost nine dollars and tasted like a punishment.

The bar was almost empty. A man in a suit two rows back was watching golf on mute. The fluorescent light over the plastic ficus tree flickered in a rhythm that was almost a pattern, which was worse than a clean flicker somehow. Corinne got out her phone, looked at it, put it away, and got it out again. She knew that trick for passing time, and it never worked.

That was when the woman sat down two stools to her left and ordered a whiskey, neat, from the bartender, who looked surprised anyone in this state drank whiskey.

Corinne knew the voice before she turned her head.

She knew it the way you know a song from a car that passes your street once a year. Low, a little rough at the end of words, like the person speaking always had somewhere better to be. Corinne's stomach did the thing. Not butterflies. More like an elevator dropping one floor with her in it.

She turned her head anyway.

Suzette Grimes. Sitting at an airport bar in Denver, in a jean jacket over a black top, hair short now, jaw soft, hands wrapped around the whiskey glass. Suzette Grimes who had kissed her at a New Year's party two years ago and then transferred schools and never answered a single text. Corinne would know her anywhere. She had spent enough nights knowing her anywhere.

Suzette looked over, because apparently Corinne had been staring long enough to generate heat. Then she blinked. Then she grinned, and the grin was the same one, crooked, too fast, like it had jumped ahead of whatever she was about to say.

"No way," Suzette said. "Corinne. Corinne Franks. Get out of here."

"Hi," Corinne said, which was the best she could do on short notice. Her wine sat there like a prop nobody had written lines for.

"What are the odds. What are the actual odds." Suzette picked up her glass and moved one stool closer, and Corinne's heart was doing something embarrassing that she hoped did not show in her neck. "You flying somewhere great?"

"Phoenix. My mom's birthday." Corinne paused. "You?"

"Minneapolis. Work thing. I'm a nurse now, I travel between hospitals they can't staff." She said it lightly, like people say things they've decided not to have feelings about. "Flight died, obviously."

"Obviously."

"So we're both stuck here for the apocalypse of layovers." Suzette tapped her glass against the bar edge, not Corinne's wine, and Corinne noticed she'd left room, like she wasn't sure yet how close she was allowed. That was new. The Suzette from the party had never left room for anything.

They did the catch-up. It was awkward in the specific way that catching up with someone you'd once had your mouth on is awkward. Suzette had done nursing school after they lost touch, then worked in Albuquerque, then started traveling. Corinne said she waited tables at a place called Fettuccine's near campus and hated it in a comfortable way, the way you hate a shoe you've worn so long your foot has given up arguing. Suzette laughed at that, a real laugh, and Corinne felt stupid for being pleased about it.

Somewhere in there Corinne's second glass of wine arrived, and she hadn't ordered it. "On me," Suzette said, and the bartender shrugged like that happened all the time at Gate 14, which maybe it did.

It was around the second glass that Suzette said it. Not dramatically. She said it the way you'd say you'd changed your phone number.

"You probably noticed things look different on me," she said, turning the glass in a slow circle on the coaster. "I transitioned. About a year and a half ago now. Started hormones the winter after we lost touch, went full time the next spring." She said it all in one piece, like she'd practiced the paragraph in airport bars before. "So. There's that. In case you were going to be polite and not ask."

Corinne's mind went blank in a way she found almost restful. Every reply she could think of was terrible. Congratulations felt like the wrong sport. Good for you sounded like a certificate. She had a dozen questions and no idea which ones she was allowed.

"I noticed," she said finally. "I mean, I didn't want to assume, but. Yeah, I noticed. You look good." Then, because the wine had voted and she'd lost, she added, "You looked good before, too. You always looked good. That's not what I..."

She trailed off because Suzette was laughing, and the laugh didn't sound mean.

"That's okay," Suzette said. "That was a fumble, but it was a sweet fumble. A-plus fumble. I've gotten worse from people I've known my whole life."

"I'm not usually this much of an idiot."

"You're a little bit of an idiot."

"Fair," Corinne said, and drank.

Here was the thing Corinne was not saying, sitting on the vinyl stool with her knees pressed together under the bar. Two years ago, at that party, in a hallway that smelled like someone's vape, Suzette had kissed her and Corinne had kissed her back for maybe four seconds before she panicked and did the world's worst fake laugh and said something about finding her roommate. And Suzette had said sure, sure, and walked off toward the drinks, and that had been the entire relationship. Four seconds. Corinne had thought about four seconds for two years, off and on, mostly in the shower, sometimes at work between table six and table seven when she should have been thinking about table six.

And now Suzette was a woman. Fully, plainly a woman, sitting there with whiskey and short hair and a jawline Corinne kept looking at by accident. And Corinne realized, with a slow drop like the elevator again, that she had no idea what she was doing. Not in the vague way nobody knows what they're doing. In the specific way. She had never been with a woman. She had never even thought past the kiss, past the wanting, into the actual territory. Her one and only reference was four seconds in a hallway and a fake laugh she was still ashamed of.

"You got quiet," Suzette said.

"I'm doing math."

"Bad sign. Math is always a bad sign."

"It's not about you," Corinne said, and then heard it, and Suzette heard it too, and they both cracked up at the same time like a couple of drunks, which they were not, only one and a half glasses of nine-dollar wine deep. The golf man glanced over. The flickering light kept flickering.

"Okay," Suzette said, when they'd settled. She swiveled on her stool so she was facing Corinne, elbow on the bar. "I'm going to say one honest thing and then we can go back to small talk about pretzels, deal?"

"Deal."

"That kiss, at the party. I have thought about it more than is reasonable for four seconds of anything." She said it steady, looking right at Corinne, no grin this time. "I've had two years to be a different person. I still think about it."

The airport noise filled in around the silence. Somebody's rolling bag clicked past. The bartender restocked a row of glasses that didn't need restocking, which meant he was listening, which Corinne decided not to care about.

"I think about it too," Corinne said. "Obviously. I just told you I do math about it."

"That's not math."

"It's close enough." Corinne picked up her wine because her hands wanted a job. "Why did you never call? You had my number. You texted me a thumbs up in February two years ago and then nothing. A thumbs up. I got dumped by a thumbs up."

Suzette winced. "That was... there's a version of that story that makes me look like a coward, and it's the true version."

"Great. I love those."

"I panicked," Suzette said. "You laughed. At me. I know now it was panic laughing, you just told me you do that, but at the time I was nineteen months into figuring out my whole deal and I read that laugh the worst possible way, and I left, and then it got easier every month to keep leaving. That's it. That's the coward version."

Corinne sat with that. Six hours, she thought. Six whole hours on a dare she hadn't asked for.

"Okay," she said. "Buy me the pretzels. The big soft one. And then you can tell me the rest of it, because I have opinions about the thumbs up, and I've been saving them since February."

Suzette flagged the bartender with her whole arm, grinning again, the fast one.

"Two pretzels," she said. "We're going to need two."

The pretzels came in a paper basket, both of them, steaming a little, which was the single best thing that had happened at Gate 14 all night. Corinne tore the end off one and dipped it in the little plastic cup of mustard and thought about how her mother was going to ask her three separate times if she was eating enough, and how she would trade all seventy birthdays of that woman for one more hour at this bar.

"So," Suzette said. She tore her own pretzel in half with a clean snap. "The rest of it."

"The rest of it."

"You want the whole coward arc? There's Albuquerque in it. There's nursing school. It's mostly boring."

"I have a canceled flight and a gift bag with a ceramic thing in it that I already know my mom is going to regift. I have nothing but time."

So Suzette told it. Transferred schools the fall after the party, because the school suddenly felt small in a way she couldn't explain. Worked through nursing. Started hormones the first winter after they lost touch, alone, in an apartment with a broken radiator, telling nobody for months. Went full time the next spring. Got a job in Albuquerque because it was far from everyone who had known her before, and then discovered that being far from everyone who had known her before was its own kind of lonely, and came back, and now she flew between hospitals like a woman with no address, which she said she mostly was.

Corinne listened and ate pretzel and did not interrupt once, which for her was a personal record.

"And meanwhile you," Suzette said. "Fettuccine's. Table six."

"Table six through table nine, some nights. I carry a tray with six drinks on it. I want you to appreciate that."

"I appreciate it."

"Also I moved out here at twenty-one because I wanted to be a person who had moved somewhere. That is the complete story of me. I've been here two years and I know four people and one of them is my landlord."

Suzette laughed. "And your mom turns seventy this week."

"Tomorrow, actually. Which is why I'm flying to Phoenix to sit in her house and be told my job is cute."

"Is it cute?"

"It's a job. It's a job where a man named Darryl eats the crayons."

And Suzette laughed so hard she had to set the whiskey down, and the bartender did his glasses thing again, and Corinne felt something loosen in her chest that had been tight for two years, which was ridiculous, she knew it was ridiculous, nothing had actually changed. But it loosened anyway.

Then the quiet came back. Not the bad quiet. A different one. Suzette finished the whiskey and turned the glass slowly on the bar like she was reading something off the bottom of it, and Corinne watched her do it and felt the wanting come back, the old one, the shower one, except it wasn't in the shower now. It was sitting right next to her in a jean jacket.

"Can I ask you something," Corinne said, before she could stop herself. "And you can not answer it."

"Probably."

"Have you done this before. This. Sitting at a bar with a woman who knew you before. Is this something you've done."

"Once," Suzette said. "It went badly. Different person, different reasons. Why."

"Because I'm going to say something now and I need you to know I've been building up to it for ten minutes and I might get it wrong."

"Okay."

Corinne put the pretzel down. Wiped her fingers on the napkin. Wiped them again, because the first time didn't count apparently. "I've never been with a woman. Like, at all. That part isn't new, you probably guessed. But it's more than that, with you. I've never been with a trans woman. I don't know anything. I don't know what words are right, I don't know what touches are right, I've been sitting here for an hour trying to think of how to ask without sounding like an idiot and I have failed at that, this is me failing at that." She took a breath. "And I'm scared of doing it wrong. Saying the wrong thing. Touching the wrong way. You waited two years on a four-second kiss and I could tell you're, I don't know, you're real about this, you're serious, and I'm back here with zero experience and a fake laugh I do when I panic, and I don't want to be the person who does that to you twice."

There. It was out. Ugly and honest and much longer than she'd planned. She looked at the mustard cup.

Suzette didn't laugh. That was the first thing Corinne noticed. No fast grin, no joke about it. She turned her whole body on the stool again, the way she had before, elbow on the bar, and she looked at Corinne with a face that had gone quiet and sure.

"You're not gonna hurt me, Corinne," she said. "I know what I want."

"I just, I could mess it up. I've messed up easier things than this. I once microwaved a burrito so badly the fire department knew my name."

"You're not gonna hurt me." She said it again, slower, like she was setting it down somewhere it would stay. "You know what hurts? The thumbs up hurts. Laughing and walking off hurts. Nobody's done that in two years. You, sitting here, saying I don't know how to do this right? That's the opposite of hurt. That's somebody