When a total stranger kissed me under the artificial lights of an airplane cabin somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, my first thought was of the middle-aged business man sitting to my left.
I hoped he was asleep. It was a 10 hour flight from Rome to Newark and I wanted to nap too, but how could I now?
The kiss, coming out of nowhere, had turned me into the protagonist of a bad Nifty story: heart fluttering, weak-kneed, every nerve electrified. Those fleece blue blankets had never been so sexy.
It was an overnight flight, and I had already crunched the simple arithmetic: If I slept, I'd be over the time difference by the time we landed and I'd be ready to hop back into a new semester at college. My highest hope for the trip, besides hours of sleep, had been that they would serve pizza in the in-flight dinner.
My stranger and I were returning from our respective summer bus tours of Italy. Because so many young people "do Europe," these trips are often mocked as an attempt to spark a connection with art and history through the bedroom - and plenty of that had happened to other people on my trip. But it hadn't happened to me until that moment.
I saw him for the first time as we waited to board the airplane. He was strikingly attractive but seemingly unaware of it as he texted on his phone. Then he was behind me in the jetway. And then he stopped at my row. His t-shirt lifted up a little to reveal his treasure trail as he lifted his backpack into the overhead bin. As he bended his tall frame into the window seat beside me, I marveled at my luck.
Between us sprang the kind of instant intimacy fostered by open personalities in tight quarters. We spoke in spurts about the gossip on our trips and what we had done during the days spent in Italy. I told him I was gay. He said he was straight. But we kept flirting anyway. I told him about the time when I was 14 that I had made out with a girl and felt her breasts. He admitted that he had sometimes had thoughts about guys, that he was open to someday seeing what the big deal was all about. We kissed that first time. Then we kissed again.
Splitting a pair of headphones, we listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Taylor Swift. We slept a little, poorly.
Born and raised in New York City, I found his life in North Carolina foreign and dazzling. He and his friends did things like take long hiking trips and, in preparation, dehydrated their food.
I liked how easy he was, how ready to talk. I liked his laugh and his dark eyes. He knew how to figure out where rainbows would appear in the sky and he told me about the "Door to Hell" in Turkmenistan, a crater of natural gas that has been on fire for more than 30 years.
It seemed torn from a Boy's Life short: A Southern science major from a small liberal arts school and a Northern humanities major meet in the skies over the sea. The heat between them is palpable.
But less romantic details persisted: I was a senior, about to start my second semester, with plans to head to Dallas after graduation. He was a sophomore, with the swaddling comfort of knowing where he'd be for the next few years.
But it didn't matter anyway, did it? In a few hours, we'd be back on paths that led us in opposite directions. This meeting was just a romantic interlude from our real lives. And if it did mean anything, we were college students; we knew how to pretend it didn't.
On the plane, the lights came back up and the drinks cart appeared. Reality set in as we sipped orange juice from plastic cups and, for the first time, had little to say to each other. During the bumpy landing, he distracted me by talking about famous airplane crashes.
And then with a final, jarring thump we were back on the ground. As we gathered our belongings, I wondered what would happen next.
We bought tickets at the train terminal, fumbling through the fare options. After, as we were about to board trains going in different directions, we stared at each other. He rested one arm on his rolling suitcase, bewilderment in his dark eyes.
I hugged him a brisk, no-nonsense good-bye. We didn't exchange numbers.
"Bye!" He shouted down the stairs at my back. "See you never."
I couldn't tell if he was serious or joking. Even embracing the more positive of the possibilities, it still stung.
And that should have been it: a story I told, giggling, to friends until the details faded, and he was just a boy whose name I didn't remember. But I couldn't help myself and I searched his name on Facebook. I found him. There were a bunch of public photos, some shirtless, that made me erect and I couldn't resist.
I clicked "Add Friend." And one day, he messaged me.
"Hey."
"Hey," I typed back. "How's life?"
It went like this for days. But talking to him made me feel like a time traveler, spliced between the snowy paths on my campus and the darkened airplane we had shared. I was sitting in class or at meetings at the local campus caf‚, doing my readings in the library, and then a message on the screen would tug me back. I didn't like the way it upset my balance, how far away and how powerless it made me feel.
Was my airplane interlude a special thing? Would things have been different if one of us had had the courage to say something other than goodbye before heading to our trains?
On the platform, walking away from him, I had decided that the whole affair was just one of many half-formed romantic liaisons that trail you in your youth. Sometimes a kiss is just a kiss. But maybe that attitude was part of the problem.
He and I had met on an airplane, but we were headed to different destinations, so our encounter was charged with the impossibility of things going anywhere. At the time, I had had an inexplicable comfort level with it all. I only realized later why it had been such an oddly familiar feeling: My generation - the grindr and Tinder cohort - treats every liaison as if it is happening on an airplane, as if we only have that one night and there is no tomorrow.
"There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."
I don't know what else could have happened. But I wondered what we lose as we try so hard not to care. We pretend that it doesn't matter, that because we are young, we are invulnerable.
In my head, I kept going back to that train platform. One Sunday afternoon, I couldn't stand it any longer.
"Hey," I messaged him.
"Hey," he answered, almost right away.
"I keep thinking about how we said good-bye at the train. I wish that had gone differently."
"Me too."
"What do you wish was different?" I asked.
"I wish that we had got a hotel in NYC ;)"
My heart pounded as I stared at the screen. "Can you take the train to Washington for a weekend?" My senior thesis needed a lot of work, but screw that, it could wait.
"Yeah, I guess so. What would we do?"
"We would get a hotel room. And we wouldn't leave all weekend..."
He didn't answer for several minutes. I thought that I had scared him off.
"Yeah, that sounds good. You'll have to teach me. I've never done this before."
"I think you'll get the hang of things soon enough. But it will be my pleasure to show you the ropes."
We picked a date and then he had to go. I made a reservation for a hotel in downtown DC and emailed it to him.
Three weeks later, we met in the neo-classical lobby of Washington's Union Station and walked to our hotel on 5th St NW. Finally alone, up in our room, he was nervous, with a shy smile. I hugged him, lingering. I could sense the tension and the anticipation in him.
We kissed. We kissed for a full five minutes, still with our coats on. I broke it off, took him by the hand and we moved to the bed, dropping jackets and shoes along the way.
After a sweaty half hour, we had both finished and I cuddled up to him with my head on his chest, both of us still breathing hard, neither of us saying anything. I could feel the cum and sweat drying on my skin as my hand rested on his hairy chest.
"That was a good start," I said, finally.
"Yeah, it was. It was even better than I thought it would be."
"We can do anything you want this weekend. You can fuck me if you want."
"I was kind of hoping that we would, but I wasn't sure how to bring that up."
"It's been awhile for me, so go slow and use lots of lube, but yeah, I want you to. Desperately."
He kissed me on the mouth, slowly, with tongue, and I imagined what his thick cock would feel like inside me. I didn't have to wait long to find out.