Layover Games

I was forty minutes into a four-hour layover at SFO, Terminal 3, drinking an eight-dollar coffee and watching my connecting flight to Denver get cancelled on the board, when I saw him. I'm fifty-five, a senior software architect, divorced, and I recognized his face from six months of app chats because I'd stared at that profile photo enough times to have memorized the grey at his temples. Axel. Standing at the gate counter in a leather jacket, arguing politely with an agent about the same cancelled flight I was on.

So I did what any competitive woman does and walked straight over. "You're Axel," I said, and he turned around with that easy grin I'd only ever seen in pixels.

"Marla. From the app. The one who beat you at chess in chat nine times."

"Ten," he said, shaking my hand like we were closing a deal. "You counted nine because you resigned that one in March and I'm not letting it go." He was fifty-eight, retired airline pilot turned travel blogger, and up close he smelled like coffee and some kind of cedar aftershave, and I thought, well, this layover just got interesting.

We dragged our bags to the business-class lounge because he had status left over from thirty years of flying and I had a credit card with no self-control. Saoirse, the bartender, thirty-two and quick with a smile, took our orders and said the storm had grounded half the Bay Area so we might as well settle in. Axel got bourbon, I got wine, and we grabbed the padded stools at the end of the bar by the floor-to-ceiling windows where we could watch the de-icing trucks crawl around on the wet tarmac like patient little bugs.

We talked for an hour first, about the app, about a woman named Ruth we'd both worked with at different jobs years apart, about his flying days and my code reviews, and he was charming in person the way he was charming in messages, which almost never happens. Then he swirled his bourbon and looked at me sideways and said, "I have an idea for killing four hours, and it's either brilliant or it gets us both thrown out of this lounge."

"Those are my two favorite categories," I said, and turned on my stool to face him.

"Here's the pitch. We pretend we're married. Bored married couple, stuck in an airport, and we make a game of it. First one of us gets a kiss from somebody outside our little marriage wins. Staff, strangers, anybody. We each have to actually try." He grinned over the rim of his glass. "And the other one gets to watch and heckle."

I should say I'm fifty-five and I've been married once and divorced once and I don't embarrass easy, so when he said it my first instinct wasn't to blush, it was to find the angle.

"Okay," I said, "but that game is weak. A kiss? We're adults with four hours and an open bar. I challenge you to escalate. Physical touch counts, real touch, and we add a reward tier to the prize." I sipped my wine slow so he'd have to wait for it. "Whoever wins doesn't just get bragging rights. The loser owes the winner an actual fuck before our flight boards."

Saoirse, wiping the bar three feet away, snorted into her towel. "I can hear everything, you know," she said, not looking up, and I liked her instantly.

"Is that a yes to the game or a complaint?" Axel asked her, and she shrugged and said it was California, she'd heard worse before ten a.m. And that's how the whole thing started, with the bartender half-listening and the two of us shaking on it like it was a business merger.

He went first, since it was his game. He walked over to the far end of the bar where an older man was nursing a Bloody Mary and reading a paperback, and I watched Axel lean in and say something that made the guy laugh, and two minutes later they were sharing photos on a phone and the guy gave him a quick pat on the shoulder and a peck on the cheek like Europeans do, and Axel came back to me with his arms spread like he'd won the World Cup.

"That doesn't count, he kissed you," I said. "You didn't earn it."

"You're a harsh judge, wife," he said, and ordered us another round.

Then it was my turn, and I'd already picked my target. Olaf, the lounge security guard, twenty-nine, built like a fridge and quiet as a lamp, had been drifting past our end of the bar for twenty minutes pretending he wasn't listening. I waited until he made his pass and I said, "Excuse me, sir, my husband and I are having a dispute and we need a ruling." He came over, all six-four of him, wary. "He says I can't flirt my way into a kiss from a stranger. I say I can. Would you settle it?"

Olaf looked at Axel, who raised his glass, and Olaf looked at me, and I smiled up at him from the stool and did nothing else at all, just waited.

"I mean," he said slowly, "I'd hate for you to lose on a technicality." And he bent down and kissed my cheek, quick and dry and careful, and Axel groaned like a man watching his team fumble on the one-yard line while Saoirse laughed out loud and said she was getting tips on this shift like no shift she'd ever worked.

"One each," I said. "Sudden death. And since we're in a reward tier anyway, maybe we should establish the rules of the reward." I leaned in close to my fake husband, close enough that I could smell that cedar again, and said, "Because I don't kiss strangers on the mouth and walk away clean. I get worked up. You should know what you signed up for."

"What are you saying, Marla," he said, and his voice had dropped, and I knew that tone from six months of late-night messages.

"I'm saying the lounge has those family restrooms by the gates, single occupancy, and I'm saying we should test the prize before anybody wins it. Quality control. Wife's prerogative." I put money on the bar and Saoirse slid two more drinks into a corner spot without a word, because apparently she was invested now.

We walked out of the lounge side by side like a respectable married couple and I was already hot and unrespectable, and the second that bathroom door locked he had me against it with both hands on my ass and his mouth on my neck, and I got his jacket off and his shirt unbuttoned to the waist while he shoved my dress up over my hips. "God, you're wet already," he said against my throat, fingers sliding under my panties, finding my clit and rubbing slow circles that made me grab his belt with both hands.

"Less talking, more fucking, we're on a clock," I said, and I got his cock out, thick and hard and already leaking, and I stroked him twice before he turned me around and bent me over the little counter under the mirror. He pulled my panties down to my knees and pushed into my pussy in one long stroke and I watched both of us in the mirror with my mouth open, this fifty-five year old woman getting fucked in an airport bathroom by her fake husband while the real game waited outside.

He fucked me hard, hands gripping my hips, and I rubbed my clit with two fingers and came fast and loud, biting my own wrist to keep it down, and he wasn't far behind me, pulling out and coming hot across my ass with a grunt he tried to swallow. We stood there breathing at the mirror, my dress still bunched around my waist, and he started laughing first, that helpless middle-aged laugh, and I joined in.

"Okay," he said, tucking himself away. "New rule. The reward tier is confirmed as excellent. Now go win me that kiss, wife."

We cleaned up and walked back into the lounge trying to look like people who had merely checked on their bags, and Saoirse set our fresh drinks down and gave us both a slow once-over and said, "You two have a good walk," and Axel and I looked at each other and burst out laughing again, because apparently the bartender had been keeping score too.

So there we were, tie score, sudden death, both of us freshly fucked and pretending otherwise, and the thing about being fifty-five and an hour into a four-hour delay is that you stop caring who watches. Axel slid his stool around so he was facing me, put his hand on the back of my neck, and said, "For the cover story, wife, we should probably look like people who actually like each other," and then he kissed me right there at the bar, no hurry to it, his thumb resting on my jaw, and I heard Saoirse behind the bar say, "Oh, now they're just showing off," to nobody in particular. I let it go on longer than the cover story needed, because his mouth was good and because I could feel the whole lounge pretending not to look, and when I finally pulled back my lip gloss was gone and his ears had gone a little red, which for a fifty-eight year old retired pilot was honestly charming.

"You're both terrible at pretending that's new," Saoirse said, wiping down the counter in front of us even though it was already clean. She was thirty-two and quick-eyed and she'd been running our tab like a poker dealer, never once asking what the actual deal was. "Married couples don't kiss like that. Married couples kiss like they're passing a list item."

"You'd know," Axel said, and winked at her, and pointed at her empty glass. "Refill, and don't rush it. A good bartender knows the value of the slow pour."

"Is that flirting?" she asked, already reaching for the bottle. "Because I've been flirted at by passengers in a storm delay before, and this is better than average, but I want it on the record I'm scoring it."

"Don't say on the record," I told her, "it invites him," and she laughed and filled our glasses to a line higher than she'd done all day, which is how