Layover Treat

The flight to Lisbon got canceled at four in the afternoon on a Thursday, and I found out the way you find out everything at airports, which is an old woman behind a counter telling you with real sympathy that the plane has a mechanical issue and the next one leaves tomorrow at noon. I am thirty-four years old, I bake bread for a living, and I had been standing in that line for forty minutes, so honestly the news landed softer than it should have. I had a night to kill and a bag full of pastries I could not sell and, tucked in a side pocket of my carryon, a little silicone vibrator that goes everywhere I go and that had acquired a new meaning three weeks ago, when a stranger on an app and I had started trading messages that got braver the longer we traded them.

His name was Ambrose, he was thirty-six, he designed graphics for a living and lived two hours from this airport, and in three weeks of texting he had never once asked me for anything, which is rarer than you would think. We had talked about meeting a dozen times and always found a reason not to, and when I saw his last message that morning, the one where he said he wished he knew what my laugh looked like, I sat in my car in the bakery parking lot and grinned at my phone like an idiot. So when the gate agent handed me the hotel voucher and the rebooking slip, I did the math fast, because for exactly one night I was stranded within driving distance of him, and I texted him before I even found a seat.

I told him my flight died, I told him I was stuck until tomorrow noon, and I told him gate twenty three if he wanted to finally put a face to all those paragraphs, no pressure, and then I turned my phone face down on my knee because I could not stand to watch the typing dots. It took him four minutes to answer, which felt like four years, and all he said was that he was already in his car and to order him something sweet because he was buying whatever I baked. I had two almond croissants left from the morning batch and I honestly think that man has no idea yet what he signed up for.

I spotted him before he spotted me, which felt like winning something. He was tall in a rumpled way, dark curly hair pushed back by hands that had clearly been through it, carrying a laptop bag like it had personally wronged him, and when he scanned the gate rows and his eyes landed on me he did this little stop, like his feet needed a second to agree with his brain. I stood up and we did the awkward shuffle where you cannot tell if the meeting is a hug or a handshake, and we solved it by doing both at once, badly, laughing, and his hand at my back was warm even through my jacket.

"You look exactly like your pictures and nothing like them at the same time," he said, holding me at arm's length as if to check his own work, and I told him that was the nicest way anyone had ever said I looked better in person, and he turned a little pink, which I filed away immediately as a thing I could make happen again.

We sat in the corner chairs by the window with the croissants between us and talked for two hours like we had known each other for ten years, which is a thing people say all the time but this time it was just true, and somewhere in there the sun went down and the hall got that blue evening light and I stopped pretending I was not thinking about the toy in my bag. I had been thinking about it since the cancelation, honestly, some small bad angel on my shoulder doing arithmetic about single occupancy restrooms and long nights and a man who blushed when I complimented him. I had flown with that little vibrator more times than I could count and it had never once made it out of the bag, and tonight it felt like the whole airport was daring me.

I asked him, plain and simple, if he wanted to get out of the gate area for a bit, said there was a game I had in mind and that all he had to do was say no and we would go back to croissants and I would never bring it up again. He put his laptop bag down very carefully, the way you set down something when your hands are not totally steady, and said he had been trying to think of a graceful way to suggest the exact same thing for the last hour, and that I had beaten him to it, and that yes, please, obviously yes. Nobody had pushed anybody. That mattered to me then and it matters to me now, telling this.

The accessible restroom near gate twenty three was empty, big, and tiled in that pale green that old airports have, and it echoed when the door shut behind us. I turned the lock, heard it clunk, and turned around, and Ambrose was standing there with his back against the counter looking at me like I was a magic trick he could not work out. I reached into my bag and pulled the vibrator out, small thing, peach colored, curved at the tip, quiet enough for public, and held it up between two fingers where he could see it.

His eyebrows went up and his voice came out lower than before. "You flew with that."

"I fly with that everywhere," I told him, "it's a long story I'm not telling tonight," and I set it in his palm and closed his fingers around it, and told him the rules of the game, which were simple. The door stays locked. He uses the toy on me, only where I put his hand, and the second either of us says the word