Before she could ask more, the aircraft shuddered lightly as it turned. Claire’s hand landed on the armrest. Jack’s landed on top of hers a second later when a sharper bump rolled through the cabin. They both froze.
Neither moved. Claire looked down at their hands and then at him. “Sorry,” she said softly. Jack’s eyes stayed on hers. “I wasn’t complaining.”
The turbulence stopped. Their hands did not.
For several seconds the flirtation remained suspended there, almost embarrassingly visible. Claire should have moved first. She knew that. She had spent enough of her adult life maintaining boundaries to recognize exactly when one became porous. Yet Jack’s hand was warm, and the entire afternoon had already gone so badly that the small impropriety felt less like danger than mercy.
Then the captain’s voice came over the speaker. “Ladies and gentlemen, due to worsening weather and a ground closure at our destination, this flight has been canceled. We’ll be returning to the gate.” A collective groan rose through the cabin.
Claire closed her eyes. Jack looked at her. She opened them again and smiled despite the disaster, glancing once toward their still-touching hands. “Well,” he said.
“Eight hours went fast.” The airline returned them to the same gate they had fought to reach twenty-six minutes earlier.
The terminal was worse now. Travelers stood in lines twenty people deep beneath flickering departure monitors. Gate agents held stacks of forms. Children cried. Someone near the payphones shouted that he had been on hold with reservations for forty minutes. Outside, snow continued falling with the determined indifference of weather that has already won.
Claire and Jack stepped aside near a closed newsstand so they would not be swallowed by the crowd. She stared at the rebooking line. “My sister is going to kill me.” “Not if the weather does it first.”