Cabin Pressure

I was twenty-one when I realized I might be attracted to men. And it wasn’t in the vague, harmless way I’d sometimes admitted another guy was good-looking on TV or in a movie.

It happened somewhere over Nevada. I was flying to visit my aunt — and to surf in California for the first time — for a week, wedged into an aisle seat with my backpack between my ankles and a paperback copy of The Sun Also Rises on my lap, even though I knew I wasn’t going to read it. The plane was nearly full when the man appeared in the aisle. He stopped to check the numbers above the seats, and I looked up.

He looked like he was in his late thirties, though there was also something ageless about him, like he could have stepped out of a Botticelli painting. He was tall enough that he had to duck beneath the overhead bins, too, probably around 6’3”. Thick dark hair curled around his forehead and temples, unruly in a way that looked polished and like he didn’t care, at the same time. He had a thick mustache and a little bit of dark scruff along his jaw. His face was angular, but not severe. He had a strong nose, pronounced cheekbones, and heavy eyebrows. He was objectively handsome, clearly. But I’d seen handsome men before…and he was different. He wore a navy hoodie and olive shorts, nothing remarkable, except for the fact that the shorts exposed enormous, muscular thighs covered in dark hair. His calves were thick too. Even his forearms caught my attention when he lifted his duffel into the overhead compartment above me.

Was he about to sit down?

I immediately opened my book and saw him sit across the aisle from me, in my periphery. I read the same sentence four times and swallowed. Something about him made me nervous.

Fifteen minutes later, the plane took off. Once we hit a cruising altitude, I looked again. He was on his phone, leaning back and angled toward me with his legs spread apart because there was apparently no other possible configuration for legs that size. I thought he was brave for wearing flip-flops on a plane. His thumbs moved across the phone screen, his brow furrowed in concentration. And then I looked more closely at his hands. Large, broad palms, dark hair across his knuckles.

I swallowed again. I felt ridiculous. Something about him pulled me into his orbit, an invisible gravity I couldn’t control. His hoodie stretched across his chest and shoulders when he shifted in his seat. There was something intensely masculine about him: the dark hair, the mustache, the muscular legs, the size of his hands, even the careless way he occupied the cramped airplane seat. I compared his form to mine, much more lean and lithe, and wondered if I was jealous. Maybe the magnetism I felt toward him was really a desire to be him. Or at least look like him.

And then, bizarrely, I wondered what his chest looked like under the hoodie. As soon as the thought punctuated my brain, my stomach dropped. I stared straight into my book and the letters seemed to contort and dance around the pages.

Why the fuck was I imagining him without a shirt on?

I had never let myself think about men in such a way before. Sure, there had been moments where I looked at other dudes. In locker rooms, on beaches, noticing guys at the gym for half a second too long before forcing myself to check out a girl instead — but didn’t all guys do that? Size up other men in comparison to themselves? To imagine who would win in a fight? Wasn’t it something primal that lived within the male species? Comparison. Curiosity. Admiration.

Not…desire.

But the guy on the plane stirred something different in my gut. I didn’t think I only wanted to look like him. I thought I might want to touch him, too. The thought arrived so cleanly, in fact, that I nearly laughed from panic. But when I glanced toward him again, I saw he was looking at me. My heart slammed against my ribs. His eyes dropped briefly to the book in my lap, then returned to my face.

“Good?” he asked.

I looked down. I’d been holding the book upside down. I flipped it over so quickly that he laughed.

“Wow,” I muttered.

“Long day?” he asked. His voice was so deep, I swore I could almost feel his body humming out a frequency of sound waves I could have surfed.

“You have no idea.”

His smile widened, which changed his entire face. What had seemed intimidating before melted away; suddenly there was warmth.

“I’m Chuck.” He held his hand across the aisle.

I stared at it for one mortifying second before taking his warm palm in mine. “I’m Ben.”

“Nice to meet you, Ben.”

When he released my hand, my skin tingled. And then we started talking. At first, about nothing in particular. Why we were both headed to San Diego (he was going home), and I told him about my aunt and how excited I was to surf the Pacific. He told me he’d been away for a few days and couldn’t wait to sleep in his own bed. Somehow five minutes became twenty.

Aside from the deepness of his voice, it was also slightly rough, and when he laughed, his whole face lit up. He teased me about the upside-down book. And then I started laughing, too. And for some reason, I really liked making him laugh. It made me feel like I had really earned something. And whenever I was rewarded with his husky laugh, something inside me felt like it was coming loose.

The next spark of curiosity that popped into my mind surprised me even more than the thought of him not wearing a shirt: I suddenly had an intense urge to know how he smelled. It felt like an insane thing to wonder. I mean, I had to admit, I had never once looked at a woman across a room and thought, I wonder what her skin smells like after she’s been outside all afternoon. But apparently it only took Chuck sitting a few feet away for my brain to investigate an entirely new chamber of novelty that lived within the catacombs of my psyche. I imagined something warm and masculine. Sandalwood soap from his shower that morning. The faint smell of laundry detergent trapped in his hoodie. And even deeper, underneath that, there would be a scent that only belonged to him; skin and hair and the subtle musk of a man who had been traveling all day.

“Jesus,” Chuck muttered as he shifted in his seat.

“What?”

“It’s hot.”

He was right. The cabin had grown stuffy after the drink service, the air stagnant despite the little vents hissing overhead. Chuck reached up to adjust the direction of his airflow, and then he stood. His hoodie rode up slightly as he stretched his arms over his head, exposing a narrow strip of stomach above his shorts. I caught the sight of dark hair beneath his navel before I averted my eyes. Or tried to. He grabbed the bottom of his hoodie and pulled it over his head to reveal a grey T-shirt.

I nearly stopped breathing. The shirt fit him much more snugly than the hoodie had. His chest was broad, his shoulders heavy, his waist surprisingly slim beneath them. The soft grey fabric clung to his shoulder blades. He lifted his arms to shove the hoodie into the overhead bin directly above my seat. As he seemed to loom over me, my eyes drifted upward and I saw dark, damp patches under both his arms, spreading slightly into the grey cotton.

Oh, come on.

I stared and something low in my stomach tightened, a sensation that traveled lower, into my groin. And then I felt it. I started getting hard.

Instinctively, embarrassedly, I slid my book over my crotch, praying to God that Chuck, nor the pudgy fifty-year-old lady next to me, saw it.

Chuck dropped back into his seat and glanced over. “You okay?”

“Yep,” my voice cracked. I avoided eye contact and looked resolutely into my book, almost starting to sweat. It was absurd. Sweat wasn’t sexy. Sweat was something you showered off! It was deodorant commercials and sticky gym clothes and oppressive summer heat.

Except, apparently, Chuck’s sweat was different. I closed my eyes and suddenly my imagination supplied an entire scene I hadn’t asked for…

Chuck was outside on a brutally hot afternoon, working in a yard. Why a yard? No idea. But there he was, in short denim shorts, barefoot, his same grey t-shirt darker down the spine and with even bigger splotches beneath his arms. His curls were damp as they stuck to temples. His mustache was wet. And then, feeling the heat, he dragged the bottom of his shirt across his forehead, accidentally exposing his hard stomach, and that same patch of dark hair that disappeared into his waistband.

His arms were slick with sweat, too, and his chest was so damp beneath the cotton tee, he decide to pull the shirt off altogether, in slow motion, because, ya know, of course.

I could feel myself become even harder.

I imagined the broad chest underneath his shirt, dark hair flattened by sweat. Sunlight caught the moisture across his shoulders, his skin flushed from exertion. There was dirt on his hands. His breathing was heavy after flopping down a heavy sack of mulch.

And somehow, in my fantasy, I was there, too. I walked outside carrying a glass of lemonade, because evidently discovering I was attracted to men immediately transformed me into a 1950s housewife.

“Thought you might need this.” I said.