The Co-Pilot Swap

I was twenty-four years old and I was storming through the crew break room at Midlands Regional like a woman with a grudge and a legal case. Which, in a way, I was. Somebody had parked in my spot. Not an official spot, mind you, Midlands didn't have assigned parking, but the shaded space by the fence under the big sycamore had been mine for two years, and everybody knew it, and that morning it had a gray Subaru wagon sitting in it with a bumper sticker that said ASK ME ABOUT MY LANDING.

I knew that bumper sticker. Everybody knew that bumper sticker.

"That's Magda's car," I said, dropping my flight bag on the battered couch like it had insulted my mother.

Asher was already there, still in his uniform from the red-eye, feet up on the coffee table, and he grinned at me the way he grinned when he smelled drama coming. My husband is twenty-six and thinks he is the funniest man in aviation, and the worst part is he's usually right. "Magda Voss? Stole your spot?"

"Stole MY spot, Asher. On a Thursday. On the one day I fly the early rotation."

"So this is war."

"This is not funny."

"It's a little funny." He sat up and stretched, and I noticed he looked way too pleased about the whole thing. He'd flown regional routes with Magda a couple years back, before I was in the picture in any real way, and I knew there was history there. Nothing huge. A kiss at a layover bar, one time, back when they were both younger and stupider. He'd told me about it on our third date like he was clearing customs, honest to a fault, and I'd decided it was funny. Mostly. It had stopped being completely funny somewhere in the last year, when Magda transferred to our airport and started appearing everywhere I went with her captain's bars and her easy smile, like the universe had decided I needed a nemesis.

She was twenty-five, a full year older than me, already a commercial pilot, already flying the routes I was serving pretzels on. That's the part that got under my skin, honestly. We'd known each other since ground school. I met Asher there when I was twenty-one, and Magda was in the same cohort, and she used to answer questions two seconds before I could. Three years of being outpaced by one woman, and now she had my parking spot too.

"Asher. What are you smiling about."

"Nothing. Babe. Nothing."

He was lying. I let it go because my shift had gone long and all I wanted was eggs and coffee at the diner across the tarmac, the one that stayed open around the clock for the dead-eyed red-eye crews. I told him to drive since I'd earned the passenger seat, and he drove, still looking smug in a way I couldn't pin down yet.

* * *

The diner was half empty at ten a.m., which meant it was full of people like us, sun-faded and running on coffee and grievance. We took a booth by the window and I was maybe three sips into my first cup when the bell over the door jingled and I heard a voice I'd know anywhere.

"Well, look who's here. The pretzel queen."

Magda slid into the booth across from us with her mechanic husband in tow, Don, twenty-eight, built like a toolbox and easygoing in a way that seemed immune to her. He nodded at Asher like they were old bowling buddies. She'd married him two years ago when she was twenty-three and he was twenty-six, and somehow the four of us had never actually ended up at the same table before, which felt like a statistical crime in an airport this small.

The point is, we ended up sharing a booth. It happened naturally, the way it does, Magda announcing there was plenty of room and Don already scooting in before anyone could vote. Asher made room. I made a face. The waitress brought more coffee. The whole thing had a pleasant, terrible momentum to it.

And then, over eggs, Magda brought up the party.

"You remember that holiday party, three years ago," she said, winding her straw wrapper around her finger, "the one at Deno's place. Spin the bottle."

I did not want to remember it. I remembered it anyway, in detail, because my brain is cruel that way. I was twenty-one, brand new, terrified of everybody, and when the bottle landed on her, of all people, I froze. Just sat there like a parked car while the whole room counted down. She'd waited a polite five seconds, laughed, and turned the bottle herself. It landed on some first officer. She kissed him like she was signing a form. The room moved on. I never lived it down.

"I remember," I said, in a voice I hoped ended the conversation.

"She climbed into the coat closet, Mel. I'm not exaggerating. Don, she climbed into a coat closet to avoid kissing me."

Don laughed into his pancakes. "She's told me that story. She tells it on herself, which I always thought was charming."

"She tells it on herself," Magda agreed, "because she knows I'll tell it first."

Asher was watching me across the table with that same expression from the break room, the pleased one, and now I finally understood it. He thought this was going to be fun. He'd known Magda was going to be there, or he'd hoped, and he'd been waiting all morning to watch me get needled.

"You'd pay to see it, wouldn't you," I said to him. It wasn't a question.

"Pay to see what," Don asked, eyebrow up, game as always.

"Pay to see Mel actually go through with it," Asher said, sipping his coffee, casual as a man discussing weather. "The kiss. Three years late. I'd throw in twenty bucks."

"I'd watch that," Don said, and shrugged when his wife turned to look at him. "What? I would. It's a good story either way."

And that's when something happened in my chest that I can only describe as combustion. I was tired, I was sunburned from the morning shift, I had been out-nemesis'd for three years, and I was not going to be the girl in the coat closet one more time. My face was hot. My jaw was set. I put my coffee cup down with a click that got everyone's attention.

"Fine," I said. "Magda. I dare you. Kiss me right here, right now, in front of our husbands, and we'll see who tells the story after this."

There was a beat of silence. Don's fork stopped halfway up. Asher's grin went from pleased to fascinated, which honestly should have warned me about where this whole night was headed, but I wasn't thinking that far ahead. I was thinking about winning.

Magda looked at me, and I watched her decide, that quick flicker pilots get when they've already got the answer and are just choosing how to say it. She set down her own cup, wiped her mouth with her napkin like she was preparing for a checkride, and leaned across the table.

"Sure, Mel," she said. "About time."

She kissed me quick and laughing, one hand light on my jaw, and it lasted maybe two seconds and it was warm and she tasted like coffee and she pulled back grinning like she'd just stuck a landing in a crosswind. It was nothing. It was a dare being settled. Except my face didn't calm down afterward the way I expected it to, and my hands were flat on the table like I needed the stability, and Don was applauding with his palms, this big slow golf clap, and Asher was laughing and fishing his wallet out of his jacket.

"Twenty bucks," he said, laying it on the table. "Paid in full."

"I didn't do it for the money," I snapped, and everyone laughed, and I laughed too, eventually, because it was funny, it was actually funny, the four of us in a diner booth at ten in the morning with a twenty dollar bill on the table like a trophy.

But here's the part I didn't say out loud, the part I filed away while we argued about who ordered the hash browns. The kiss hadn't felt like nothing. It had felt like a door opening a crack, just a crack, with light coming through it, and I was sitting there in the booth thinking about that light instead of my eggs, and across the table Magda was watching me with a little tilt to her head like she could hear the gears.

"Two seconds," she said, to no one in particular. "That was longer than I've ever gotten out of you, Mel."

"It was a dare," I said.

"Mm," she said, and went back to her eggs.

Don paid the check. Asher drove us home with the radio on, and I watched the sycamore by the fence go past and thought about the Subaru in my spot and about warm fingers on my jaw, and I decided, in the stubborn way I decide things, that this wasn't over.

The diner thing should have ended there. A story, a twenty dollar bill, a laugh at the table. That's how these things are supposed to close out, with a punchline and a check. But Magda had looked at me when she said two seconds, and I had looked at her, and something had gotten agreed between us that neither of us said out loud, the way pilots agree on a plan with just a glance across the cockpit.

It took three weeks to come back around. That's airport life for you. You cross paths when the schedule says so and not a minute before, and then one Thursday you're both on a delayed red-eye turnaround and the whole world compresses back down to Midlands Regional at eleven at night.

* * *

We ended up in the crew break room after the delay, all four of us by dumb luck. Asher had come in deadheading from a cancelled leg, and Don was on nights fixing a landing light on a 175, and Magda and I had both gotten stuck with the same turnaround. The break room was its usual self, faded posters of destinations nobody flies to anymore, the battered couch with the springs that announce you, the vending machine that eats dollars. Somebody's cold coffee from yesterday sitting on the counter like a threat.

Magda was wearing her jacket with the bumper sticker's twin energy, that gray Subaru confidence, and she'd kicked her feet up on the coffee table like she owned the lease. Asher was in the armchair. Don was on the floor against the couch because he's a floor guy, always has been, he says chairs are a