Chapter 1 — Thirty Thousand Feet
Kati Stovall was in seat 2A of a first-class cabin somewhere over the Atlantic, holding a flute of champagne she didn’t buy, in a seat she didn’t pay for.
The cabin lights had been lowered to a twilight blue that made everyone look better than they deserved. Most of the first-class cabin was unconscious beneath cashmere blankets, including the silver-haired gentleman in 2B. He’d bought the champagne and toasted “to youth” like that was a thing people actually said, and had passed out before Kati could finish thanking him. One Italian loafer dangled off his foot as the engines droned and the recycled air smelled faintly of champagne and warm wool.
Kati was wide awake.
She took a sip; the bubbles were needle-sharp on her tongue. Kati was seventeen. She was flying home from a summer backpacking across Europe, a trip her mother had pitched as “cultural enrichment.” But Kati knew it was really about Anita wanting the penthouse to herself while she finished her latest novel.
Anita Stovall, her mom, wrote literary fiction about damaged women making terrible decisions, which Kati had always found funny, given its origins. Kati’s father had manufactured his latest catastrophe from New York that spring, something involving his broker and a SoHo apartment nobody was supposed to know about. When that happened, her mother handed her a passport, pointed her at a continent, and went back to her manuscript.
Kati went; she didn’t mind being pointed.
The girl who left Miami in May had slept with one person, her boyfriend, Evan Pinnock, on prom night. It was junior prom, the one Kati had planned for three months with the single-mindedness of a field marshal. She’d bought the dress (ivory, beaded, perfect) and had her hair done at the salon Audrey’s mother used for charity galas. The hotel room was booked with Audrey’s older sister’s credit card, because Audrey’s sister was twenty-two, careless, and somehow believed her Amex statement was confidential.
Kati recalled the reality of the hotel room: the fumbling, Evan’s nervous hands, and the overhead light nobody turned off. The condom wrapper that fought him for thirty seconds while Kati studied a water stain on the ceiling. It lasted roughly four minutes, after which Evan asked if she was okay; he asked three times, and she said, “Yes,” three times. She meant no, but not in the way he thought.
Evan was sweet; he held her afterward and told her she was beautiful, and she let him. But meanwhile, she looked off into space, over his shoulder, wondering if this was the grand event that Audrey’s breathless stories had promised. For Kati, it was just four minutes, and a question that was asked three times.
She told herself first times were always like that.
Over the summer, she tested the theory.
In London, a tattoo artist named Callum with a silver lip ring pressed her against the wall of his flat above the shop and proved it wasn’t. He left a bruise on the inside of her thigh that lasted four days, and she liked looking at it under her jeans, a secret mark nobody else could see.
In Florence, a singer named Marco undressed her in a rented room overlooking a courtyard, kissing the hollow of her collarbone, the curve of her hip. He told her she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, which was almost certainly a lie. But she didn’t care; the lie felt better than any truth Evan had ever offered.
Kati left Florence without giving Marco her number. He didn’t ask; nobody asked. She packed, moved on, and didn’t look back, and the girl who boarded this plane was not the same girl who’d stood in that hotel room, staring at the ceiling.
She took another sip of champagne and glanced across the aisle.
There was the problem.
In seat 1C sat a tall, brown-haired guy who hadn’t looked up from his phone since takeoff. He had long hair that was tucked behind his ears and a tan that didn’t come from a bottle. He wore a fitted T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, as though he’d done it himself with kitchen scissors. The result showed off his arms, which were roped with the kind of muscle that came from repetition, not a gym mirror. There was something lazy about the way he sat, with one leg extended into the aisle, and the other tucked under him. His body was folded into first-class seating the way other people folded into hammocks.
His was the kind of good-looking that didn’t require effort or awareness.
Kati caught herself staring, and he caught her catching herself. He looked up from his phone, and his eyes found hers across the aisle, and he smiled.
Kati looked away too fast, which was amateur, and she knew it. She took a sip of champagne. Her neck was hot.
“Asa,” he said across the aisle, low enough that only she could hear. The accent was half-French, half something she couldn’t pin. “But everyone calls me Ace.”
Kati turned back. She’d been raised on poise the way other children were raised on vegetables: it was compulsory, and she’d stopped resisting it years ago.
“Kati.”
She left off the last name; so did he. The plane was a place where last names were optional.
“Where are you coming from?” he asked.
“London; before that, Florence, and before that, everywhere.”
“And where are you going?”
“Miami.”
“So am I.” He held up his phone, which displayed a map of South Florida with a blue pin dropped near Coral Gables. “My father’s decision, not mine.”
He shrugged. Kati knew that shrug; she’d given that shrug. It was the shrug of rich kids whose parents moved continents the way other people moved furniture.
“What’s in Miami?” she asked.
“A tennis academy, a house I’ve never seen, and a school I didn’t choose.” He tucked a strand of hair behind his ear. “My father thinks American coaching will fix my net game. I think my net game is fine.”
“Is it?”
“No, but I’d rather admit that in private.”
Kati laughed. The silver-haired gentleman in 2B didn’t stir, but two minutes later, a flight attendant came and gently woke him. She relocated him to a sleeper suite elsewhere in the cabin with the practiced ease of someone experienced in moving unconscious millionaires.
The seat beside Kati gaped open.
Ace looked at it, then looked at her, got up, crossed the aisle, and sat down in 2B as though empty chairs were invitations.
He was taller up close. He smelled clean, of soap and laundered cotton. The proximity created a pocket of warmth between them.
“So, your father just shipped you to Florida,” Kati said.
“Shipped me; good word.” He stretched out in the seat, already comfortable. “And your mother shipped you to Europe?”
“My mother handed me a passport and went back to writing about women who make terrible decisions.”
“And did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Make terrible decisions.”
“None that I regret.”
He grinned. His teeth were slightly crooked, with the left canine overlapping the adjacent tooth. This one imperfection made everything else about his face more unfair.
They talked. That was the dangerous part—not the looks, not the fact that his knee kept brushing hers, and neither of them moved away, but the conversation. Ace told her about Saint-Tropez, and about the clay courts at a club in Gassin where he’d trained since he was twelve. About a nude beach he went to every summer, dropping the word “nude” with the same casualness a Midwesterner might say “lake.”
About the Mediterranean at six in the morning.
“It’s like the sun’s apologizing for the day before it starts,” he said.
He said things like that: things that didn’t sound rehearsed, which was worse than if they had.
Kati told him about London, about Italy. The tattoo artist became a museum docent who was “very knowledgeable about the Pre-Raphaelites”; the singer became a guitar player she’d met at a café. She left in the freedom, cut the sex, and didn’t mention Evan—didn’t mention a boyfriend at all.
She said, “It was a great summer.”
Ace looked at her for a beat too long.
“The best summers always are,” he said, and moved on.
She couldn’t tell if he’d seen through it or just let it stand; either way, she wanted to tell him the truth. She wanted to say that she’d spent the summer figuring out what she wanted, and she still didn’t know, and his shoulder was touching hers, and that wasn’t helping.
More champagne arrived; Kati stopped counting glasses. She stopped counting a lot of things: the minutes, the miles to Miami, the number of times Ace’s arm pressed warm against hers. The engine noise swallowed every word beyond their two seats. The couple in row 3 stirred beneath their matching blankets and settled back down.
They laughed, too loudly for the cabin. A flight attendant glanced their way with the attuned patience of someone paid to tolerate first-class misbehavior.
“You’re going to get us in trouble,” Kati said.
“We’re in first class. You can’t get in trouble in first class; it’s in the terms and conditions.”
“You read the terms and conditions?”
“I read everything, but very slowly; that’s why my net game is bad.”
She laughed again. Ace was funny without trying, just as he was good-looking without any effort. This was starting to become a real problem, because Kati was running out of reasons to treat him like a stranger she’d forget by morning.
He asked her real questions, the kind designed to open doors, not to knock on them. And Kati, who was very good at keeping doors shut, found herself answering. She told him about Miami, her version: the heat, and the color of Biscayne Bay at dusk, when the water turned the exact shade of a bruise fading to green. She told him she was always the girl who was supposed to know what to do, and that this summer was the first time she’d let herself not know.
“I like that version of you,” Ace said.
“You don’t know any other version.”
“Exactly.”
Somewhere during the second hour, Kati’s phone buzzed in her bag. She fished it out; it showed a text from Evan, sent from Miami.
EvanP: Can’t wait to see you. I’m picking you up. Don’t argue.’
She stared at it for a moment, then put the phone back in her bag without replying.
“Boyfriend?” Ace asked because, of course, he’d seen the screen.
“Maybe,” Kati said.
“‘Maybe’ is an interesting answer.”
“Well, ‘maybe’ is the only honest one.”
Ace nodded, slowly, as though she’d said something that deserved more thought than he was going to give it right now. He picked up his champagne glass, found it empty, and set it back down.
She thought about Evan at arrivals in his collared shirt, because Evan always wore a collared shirt. He would smell like his father’s aftershave, saying, “God, I missed you, babe,” and meaning it. And she would say, “I missed you, too.” And it would be the smallest lie she’d told all summer.
◊◊◊
Outside the window, the Atlantic was invisible; the sky black below and black above, and the blue glow of the cabin between.
Ace shifted. His shoulder pressed harder against hers, and he didn’t correct the contact. The warmth radiated through the thin cotton of his butchered T-shirt. She held still; any movement might break whatever this was.
“Tell me something true,” she said, “something you haven’t told anyone.”
He thought about it.
“I’m scared of Miami,” he said. “I’ve moved six times in ten years, and I’m tired of being the new person. Don’t get me wrong; I’m good at being the new person, but that’s different from liking it.”
He said this to the seat back in front of him, not to her. She watched his profile and thought that this was the first real thing he’d said all night, and that she liked him better for it.
“I’m scared of going home,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I’m not the person who left.”
“Good,” he said, and turned to look at her. “People who come back the same weren’t paying attention.”
They were very close now. She could see the gold flecks in his brown eyes, which she hadn’t been able to see from across the aisle. She could see where he’d nicked himself shaving, a tiny red line on his jaw. He was looking at her mouth.
“There’s a sleeper suite,” he said, “two rows back. The door closes, and the bed folds flat.” He paused. “I wasn’t going to use it, but I might, if I had a reason to.”
The sentence sat between them as the engines hummed. The couple in row three had gone completely silent beneath their blankets.
Kati looked at the champagne in her glass; there was one swallow left. She thought about Evan’s text, still unanswered in her bag. She thought about Callum’s flat above the tattoo shop, the bruise she’d liked looking at for four days. Kati thought about Marco’s beautiful lie in the rented room in Florence. She thought about the girl who had lain on a polyester bedspread, staring at a water stain on the ceiling, and wondered, ‘Is this it?’
She finished the champagne and set the glass on the armrest.
“Okay,” she said.
Ace stood first and offered his hand, which she didn’t take, because she wanted to be clear that this was her decision. She stood on her own, straightened her T-shirt, and followed him down the darkened aisle. They walked past the sleeping passengers and the empty champagne glasses and the silver-haired gentleman’s abandoned Italian loafer, still lying where it had fallen between the seats.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, Kati’s phone buzzed again in her bag, but she didn’t hear it.
In Miami, Evan Pinnock was ironing a collared shirt.
◊◊◊