“Can I get you anything?” she asks, her eyes sweeping across Hadley’s stricken face, Oliver’s flushed cheeks, and the old woman still snoring with vigor at the end of the row.
“I’m okay,” Hadley manages.
“Me, too,” Oliver says. “Cheers, though.”
When the flight attendant is gone again, the cart moving safely away, Hadley stares at him openmouthed. He pulls the bottles out and hands one to her, then twists the cap off the other with a shrug.
“Sorry,” he says. “I just thought if we were going to do the whole ‘talking about our families’ thing, a bit of whiskey might be in order.”
Hadley blinks at the bottle in her hand. “You planning to work this off or something?”
Oliver cracks a smile. “Ten years’ hard labor?”
“I was thinking something more along the lines of washing dishes,” she jokes, passing the bottle back to him. “Or maybe carrying luggage.”
“I’m assuming you’ll make me do that anyway,” he says. “Don’t worry, I’ll leave a tenner on the seat when I go. I didn’t want a hassle, even though I’m eighteen and we must be closer to London than to New York at this point. You like whiskey?”
Hadley shakes her head.
“Have you ever tried it?”
“No.”
“Give it a go,” he says, offering it to her again. “Just a sip.”
She unscrews the cap and brings the bottle to her mouth, already grimacing as the smell reaches her nose, harsh and smoky and far too strong. The liquid burns her throat as it goes down, and she coughs hard, her eyes watering, then screws the cap on and hands the bottle back to him.
“It’s like licking a campfire,” she says, making a face. “That’s awful.”
Oliver laughs as he finishes off his bottle.
“Okay, so now you’ve got your whiskey,” she says. “Does that mean we get to talk about your family?”
“Why do you care?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
He sighs, a sound that comes out almost like a groan. “Let’s see,” he says eventually. “I have three older brothers—”
“Do they all still live in England?”
“Right. Three older brothers who still live in England,” he says, unscrewing the cap on the second bottle of whiskey. “What else? My dad wasn’t happy when I chose Yale over Oxford, but my mum was really pleased because she went to uni in America, too.”
“Is that why he didn’t come over with you at the start of school?”
Oliver gives her a pained look, like he’d rather be anywhere but here, then finishes off the last of the whiskey. “You ask an awful lot of questions.”
“I told you that my dad left us for another woman and that I haven’t seen him in over a year,” she says. “Come on. I’m pretty sure there’s no family drama that could top that.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” he says. “That you haven’t seen him in so long. I thought you just hadn’t met her.”
Now it’s Hadley’s turn to fidget in her seat. “We talk on the phone,” she says. “But I’m still too angry to see him.”
“Does he know that?”
“That I’m angry?”
Oliver nods.
“Of course,” she says, then tilts her head at him. “But we’re not talking about me, remember?”
“I just find it interesting,” he says, “that you’re so open about it. Everyone’s always wound up about something in my family, but nobody ever says anything.”
“Maybe you’d be better off if you did.”
“Maybe.”
Hadley realizes they’ve been whispering, leaning close in the shadows cast by the yellow reading light of the man in front of them. It almost feels as if they’re alone, as if they could be anywhere, on a park bench somewhere or in a restaurant, miles below, with their feet firmly on the ground. She’s close enough to see a small scar above his eye, the ghost of a beard along his jawline, the astonishing length of his eyelashes. Without even really meaning to, she finds herself leaning away, and Oliver looks startled by her sudden movement.
“Sorry,” he says, sitting up and pulling his hand back from the armrest. “I forgot you get claustrophobic. You must be dying.”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “Actually, it hasn’t been so bad.”
He juts his chin at the window, where the shade’s still pulled down. “I still think it would help if you could see outside. It feels small in here even to me with no windows.”
“That’s my dad’s trick,” Hadley tells him. “The first time it happened, he told me to imagine the sky. But that only helps when the sky’s above you.”
“Right,” Oliver says. “Makes sense.”
They both fall silent, studying their hands as the quiet stretches between them.
“I used to be afraid of the dark,” Oliver says after a moment. “And not just when I was little. It lasted till I was nearly eleven.”
Hadley glances over, not sure what to say. His face looks more boyish now, less angular, his eyes rounder. She has a sudden urge to put her hand over his, but she stops herself.
“My brothers teased me like mad, switching off the lights whenever I walked into a room and then howling about it. And my dad just hated it. He had absolutely no sympathy. I remember I’d go into my parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night and he’d tell me to stop being such a little girl. Or he’d tell me stories about monsters in the wardrobe, just to wind me up. His only advice was always just ‘Grow up.’ A real gem, right?”
“Parents aren’t always right about everything,” Hadley says. “Sometimes it just takes a while to figure that out.”
“But then there was this one night,” he continues, “when I woke up and he was plugging in a night-light next to my bed. I’m sure he thought I was asleep, or else he’d never be caught dead, but I didn’t say anything, just watched him plug it in and switch it on so there was this little circle of blue light.”
Hadley smiles. “So he came around.”
“In his own way, I guess,” Oliver says. “But I mean, he must’ve bought it earlier in the day, right? He could’ve given it to me when he got back from the shop, or plugged it in before I went to bed. But he had to do it when nobody was watching.” He turns to her, and she’s struck by how sad he looks. “I’m not sure why I told you that.”