The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight(19)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

But Oliver is watching her with a look of great earnestness, and she can’t help feeling a bit uncomfortable beneath his hopeful gaze. Her voice wavers when she answers. “I’ll think about it,” she says, then adds, “I might not get there in time anyway.”

Their eyes drift to the window to chart their progress, and Hadley pushes down a wave of panic; not so much for the landing itself, but for all that begins and ends with it. Out the window, the ground is rushing up to meet them, making everything—all the blurry shapes below—suddenly clear, the churches and the fences and the fast-food restaurants, even the scattered sheep in an isolated field, and she watches it all draw closer, wrapping a hand tightly around her seat belt, bracing herself as if arriving were no better than crashing.

The wheels hit the ground with one bounce, then two, before the velocity of the landing pins them firmly to the runway and they’re shot forward like a blown cork, all wind and engines and rushing noise, and a sense of momentum so strong that Hadley wonders if they’ll be able to stop at all. But they do, of course they do, and everything goes quiet again; after traveling nearly five hundred miles per hour for almost seven hours, they now commence crawling to the gate with all the unhurried speed of an apple cart.

Their runway fans out to join others like a giant maze, until they’re all swallowed by an apron of asphalt stretching as far as Hadley can see, interrupted only by radio towers and rows of planes and the great hulking terminal, which sits bleakly beneath the low gray sky. So this is London, she thinks. Her back is still to Oliver, but she finds herself glued to the window by some invisible force, unable to turn and face him without quite knowing why.

As they pull up to the gate, she can see the ramp stretched out to meet them, and the plane slips into position gracefully, locking on with a small shudder. But even once they’re firmly anchored in place, once the engines are cut and the seat-belt lights go off with a ping, Hadley remains still. There’s a collective hum of noise at her back as the rest of the passengers stand to collect their baggage, and Oliver waits a moment before lightly touching her arm. She whirls around.

“Ready?” he asks, and she shakes her head, just barely, but enough to make him smile. “Me, neither,” he admits, standing up anyway.

Just before it’s their turn to file out of the row, Oliver reaches into his pocket and pulls out a purplish bill. He sets it on the seat he’s been occupying for the past seven hours, where it sits limply, looking a bit lost against the busy pattern of the cloth.

“What’s that for?” Hadley asks.

“The whiskey, remember?”

“Right,” she says, peering closer. “There’s no way it was worth twenty pounds, though.”

He shrugs. “Thievery surcharge.”

“What if someone takes it?”

Oliver bends down and grabs both ends of the seat belt, which he fastens over the bill so that it looks as if it’s tucked in. “There,” he says, standing back to admire his work. “Safety first.”

Ahead of them, the old woman takes a few small, birdlike steps out into the aisle before pausing to peer up at the overhead bins. Oliver moves quickly to help, ignoring the crowd of people behind them as he pulls down her battered suitcase and then waits patiently while she gets herself situated.

“Thank you,” she says, beaming at him. “You’re such a nice boy.” She moves to begin walking, then hesitates, as if she’s forgotten something, and looks back again. “You remind me of my husband,” she says to Oliver, who shakes his head in protest. But the woman has already begun to pivot around again, in a series of tiny, incremental steps, like the minute hand on a clock, and when she’s finally pointed in the right direction she begins her slow shuffle up the aisle, leaving the two of them to watch her go.

“Hope that was a compliment,” Oliver says, looking a bit sheepish.

“They’ve been married fifty-two years,” Hadley reminds him.

He gives her a sideways glance as she reaches for her suitcase. “Thought you didn’t think much of marriage.”

“I don’t,” she says, heading toward the exit.

When he catches up to her on the walkway, neither of them says a word, but Hadley feels it anyway, bearing down on them like a freight train: the moment when they’ll have to say good-bye. And for the first time in hours, she feels suddenly shy. Beside her, Oliver is craning his neck to read the signs for customs, already thinking about the next thing, already moving on. Because that’s what you do on planes. You share an armrest with someone for a few hours. You exchange stories about your life, an amusing anecdote or two, maybe even a joke. You comment on the weather and remark about the terrible food. You listen to him snore. And then you say good-bye.

So why does she feel so completely unprepared for this next part?

She should be worrying about finding a taxi and making it to the church on time, seeing her dad again and meeting Charlotte. But what she’s thinking about instead is Oliver, and this realization—this reluctance to let go—throws everything into sudden doubt. What if she’s gotten it all wrong, these last hours? What if it isn’t as she thought?

Already, everything is different. Already, Oliver feels a million miles away.

When they reach the end of the corridor they’re greeted by the tail end of a long queue, where their fellow passengers stand with bags strewn at their feet, restless and grumbling. As she drops her backpack, Hadley does a mental tally of all that she packed inside, trying to remember whether she threw in a pen that could be used to capture a phone number or an e-mail address, some scrap of information about him, an insurance policy against forgetting. But she feels frozen inside of herself, trapped by her inability to say anything that won’t come out sounding vaguely desperate.

Oliver yawns and stretches, his hands high and his back arched, then drops his elbow casually onto her shoulder, pretending to use her for support. But the weight of his arm feels like it just might be the thing to unbalance her, and she swallows hard before looking up at him, uncharacteristically flustered.

“Are you taking a cab?” she asks, and he shakes his head and reclaims his arm.

“Tube,” he says. “It’s not far from the station.”

Hadley wonders whether he’s talking about the church or his house, whether he’s heading home to shower and change or going straight to the wedding. She hates the fact that she won’t know. It feels like the last day of school, the final night at summer camp, like everything is coming to an abrupt and dizzying end.