Scandalized

One

I am great with names, terrible with faces.

But I know I’ve seen this one before.

He’s alone at the end of a row of seats and nose deep in his phone. I’ve lived in LA long enough to read his posture as respect-my-bubble rather than absorbed-in-reading, but I’ve also worked in journalism long enough to know this is a man doing his best to try to blend in.

It isn’t working. Even his haircut—precise and combed neatly off his face—looks expensive. And I know I know him from somewhere. Jawline that could cut steel, cheekbones carved like stone, and a mouth in a perfect candy pout. His face is like an itch in my brain, a teasing tickle.

I hear my mom’s voice, encouraging me to make the polite choice, to get up and say hello. But it’s the airport and I’m tired, having spent the last thirteen days in London, hounding strangers for information they don’t want to give and knowing no one except for one chain-smoking UK colleague with the alcohol tolerance of a rhino and whose bat-out-of-hell London driving had me praying to a God I don’t believe in several times a day. I’ve been on a plane for eight hours and sitting at this gate for another four, waiting out a storm, waiting on the connecting flight to LA that has been delayed and then delayed again and again.

To be fair, this man’s face doesn’t feel like one I’ve seen in the past two weeks. The feeling I get goes deeper than the hit of chase-the-story-related adrenaline that dumps into my bloodstream; this adrenaline corkscrews into my bones. The glimpse I got of his full face—when he looked up, when he squinted at the monitors and then seemed to let out a tiny grunt of frustration—was like a song that I haven’t heard in forever. Something about his posture makes my heart ache with nostalgic pain.

Paradoxically, he’s both upright and slumped, so refined in his tailored navy pants, polished brown shoes, and white button-down shirt still crisp after our long flight from London to Seattle. He’s gorgeous.

I pull my scarf up over my mouth, burying my face in it, but it smells like stale airplane and I tug it down again. The urge to scream in petulant exhaustion pulses through me. I want to teleport myself home to my bed. I want to skip all the self-care things and just crawl in unshowered, in my clothes. I don’t even care how disgusting I am: after a fourteen-hour day of tracking down an elusive nightclub bouncer who didn’t want to be found, then eight sleepless hours on a flight, I am reduced to my most feral self.

I look around and see a few people stretched out across four chairs, sleeping, while others have to find space on the floor. My skin is shouting at me to lie down somewhere, anywhere. And yet I don’t, knowing that even if we board and depart in the next five minutes, by the time I grab a cab and make the long trek home, it’ll be well past midnight, and I’ll need to get working as soon as I can. I’ve been given the chance of a lifetime with this story, and as of this minute, I only have two days to finish writing it.

Near the gate, the airline employees have carefully avoided stepping behind the podium. If they so much as hover nearby, an irritated line forms. Instead, they shift around in the background, staring gloomily at each other every time the Jetway phone rings with an update on the torrential storm outside. Finally, one bravely steps toward the intercom, and from the sag in her shoulders and the way she stares down at the monitor as if she needs to read from it, I know.

“I’m sorry to announce that United flight 2477 has been canceled. You have each been rebooked onto a flight departing tomorrow. Tickets will be reissued to the email address linked to your reservation. Please contact our customer service line or go to the customer service office in baggage claim with any questions. We will not be able to rebook you here. We’re sorry for any inconvenience.”

On instinct, I look up to watch his reaction to the news.

He’s already lifting his phone to his ear, nodding. Our eyes meet briefly as his gaze passes unseeing across the room, but his attention freezes, eyes quickly drawing back to mine, focusing with the same unknowing recognition. It’s only a beat, but in that time heat spreads through me wild and unchecked, and then he blinks away, frowning.

And now I wonder how he knows me, too.

In a perfect world, I would be home already. I would have been booked on a direct flight from London to LAX, instead of this route via Seattle. In a perfect world, I would be well rested and already at my computer, downloading the torrent of information from my brain and my phone and my notebook into a cohesive story. I would not be standing behind this perfect man in the lobby of a Seattle hotel, feeling like a run-down bridge troll.

There is a line of three people in front of me, another four behind. We all came from the same canceled flight, we all need rooms, and I have the unsettling feeling that I should have ventured out farther into the city than I have. This feels a lot like a race I didn’t know I would be running, one that I will most definitely lose.

The man whose name I still can’t remember has his neck bent as he appears to text in a flurry, but at a brief commotion at the hotel entrance—a horn honks, a woman shouts out a name—he turns in alarm, and I get a close-up view of his profile.

All at once it hits me, where I’ve seen his face.

I’ve seen a younger version of it looking back over his shoulder as he skateboarded away on a heat-warped Los Angeles street in the dead of summer. Laughing with friends on a living room couch, oblivious to me passing behind them through the room. Ducking around me in the hall at his house late at night as I went to use the restroom and he was finally heading to bed.

“Alec?” I say out loud.

He turns in alarm, eyes wide. “I’m sorry?”

“Aren’t you Alec Kim?”

A laugh works free of his throat and the smile reveals a perfect set of teeth. He has a face that continually reveals new, fascinating angles. Dimples. An Adam’s apple that moves in a masculine tease when he laughs. Skin like silk. I’ve been around beautiful people for the past two weeks but he’s something else entirely. If he isn’t a model, it’s a crime.

“Yes—I’m sorry.” He frowns, searching. “Do we know each other?” I haven’t seen him in fourteen years, and his words are wrapped up in a new, delicately complex accent.

“I’m Georgia Ross,” I prompt, and he turns to face me fully, tucking a hand into his pocket. The effect of his full attention is like having a powerful suction inside my chest, pulling air directly from my lungs. “Your sister, Sunny, and I were close in school. Your family moved to London at the end of eighth grade.”

Alec was six years older than us. My crush on him was intense almost to the point of painful. For years he’d just been my best friend’s brother. Occasionally present, always polite, mostly unremarkable. But then one night, only a couple weeks after my thirteenth birthday, I’d gone downstairs for a glass of water and caught him digging in the refrigerator for a midnight snack: nineteen years old, shirtless, and sleep rumpled. I could think of nothing but his naked torso for weeks afterward.

I think back to the muscled bodies wrestling over game controllers on the couch, the shirtless boy-man kicking at the street, pushing away on his skateboard. Halfway through his time at UCLA his family moved to London for Mr. Kim’s job, and Alec went, too. Sunny and I each sent about three letters before dropping our well-laid plans entirely. She’d been my closest friend from second to eighth grade, but once she moved, I never saw her again.

He lets his gaze move over my features, clearly trying to connect the face in front of him with the one on the kid he used to know. Good luck to him. The last time he saw me I had braces, unsupervised eyebrows, and arms as thin as toothpicks. I’m still on the petite side, but I’m not the scrawny kid I once was. Even though I was at his house nearly every day after school, I’d bet a wad of cash he won’t remember me.

Still, he’s putting in a real effort to recognize the little Gigi Ross inside the grown-up Georgia. I’ve never been particularly insecure about my appearance, but under his inspection I could not be more aware of how desperately I need a shower. Even my eyes, which are arguably my best feature—wide-set, thickly lashed, hazel green—are probably bloodshot and squinty. Let’s not even imagine my hair. It was already so greasy fifteen hours ago that I used up the final dregs of my expensive dry shampoo and twisted it into a bun. Standing in front of a man like this, looking like I do, is mortifying.