Blue squeezed down the narrow aisle with his carry-on above the level of the seats, the only place there was any extra space. They didn’t build airplanes for big guys like Blue. The flight was eight-plus hours. The quarters would be cramped but at least he’d be cramped with Lucy.

Her flight from Albuquerque had arrived early in L.A. and Blue’s had arrived late, so she’d gone ahead and boarded. He couldn’t wait to see her again and he pinballed off each seat as he hurried down the aisle to her.

“Slow down there, Hulk,” said Dax from behind him. “You damage half the seats on this plane and they’ll have to ground it. She’s back there, don’t worry.”

Blue apologized to the woman in the seat he’d just bumped and slowed down a little. Since he’d boarded, he’d been scanning ahead, watching for her and finally he caught sight of a pair of dark eyes peeking between two headrests. If he didn’t feel like a rhino trying to squeeze into a Volkswagen Bug, he’d run to where she was.

Just when he was ready to finally get to her, a short man in front of him found his row and was trying unsuccessfully to get his carry-on into an already full overhead compartment. There was no way it was going in there, but the guy was insistent. Maybe from his low vantage point he couldn’t tell there wasn’t enough room to fit a football, much less a carry-on that was probably too big to be allowed.

Calm down, Blue, he told himself. You’ve waited a month, you can wait one more minute.

The guy looked back, and up, at Blue and said, “It’ll be just a sec. I’ve almost got it here.” He kept shoving and making no progress.

As calmly as he could manage, Blue said, “There’s some space back here in this other compartment. Can I give you a hand?” He reached for the bag.

The guy leaned away from Blue and almost tipped over under the weight of his bag. “No, thank you. I’m going to need it in flight. It’s eight hours and eighteen minutes. I’m going to need to change out books.”

Blue saw that he had a thriller novel sitting on his seat already. He went back to shoving his carry-on.

What now? Ask if he could squeeze by? Tell the guy he should invest in an eReader?

Blue looked past the spatially-challenged gentleman. Lucy was leaning into the aisle to see what the holdup was. Even though he could only see half of her face, he was blown away by how gorgeous she was. Lucy waved and tapped her watch. Blue just shrugged.

“I almost got it,” said the guy with the bag, but he was no closer to fitting the bag. At this rate it was going to be an eighteen-hour flight.

Solution? There had to be something Blue could do to speed things up. The overhead across the aisle was full, so no luck there.

The airplane had two aisles. Maybe he could cut over to the other aisle then cut back after getting past this traffic jam. But the plane was about three-quarters full already and cutting across would require climbing over passengers who were already seated. He wanted to see Lucy bad enough to do it, but didn’t think creating a scene on the plane was a good idea.

The row where the gentleman was working had a young couple in the window and center seat. Maybe he could rearrange the baggage.

“Do you have carry-ons up here?” he asked the couple.

The man answered, “Yeah, a Dillards bag and a maroon bag with wheels.”

“Would you mind if I moved the maroon one up to this compartment?”

“Not at all,” said the man with a sideways glance at his seatmate, who was still trying to cram his bag into too small of a space.

“Hold on there,” said Blue, putting a hand on the shoulder of the guy in the aisle. “I’ll make some space.” With his free hand he pulled the maroon bag out and slid it into the next compartment up. “There you go.”

There was plenty of space for the guy to slide his library in and finally Blue was on his way. He thanked the middle-seat passenger as he passed. Forget Dax and the other two behind him, Blue pushed ahead, keeping his hips and shoulders turned at an angle so he didn’t clip any seats.

“Hi,” said Lucy, as Blue put his own bag into the compartment over her head. “I thought you’d never make it.” She was sitting in the center seat. The window seat in their row was still open.

“It was a challenge but I pushed through.” He took his seat and realized there was even less space here than in the aisle. The armrest between him and Lucy was up and it was a good thing because he didn’t know if he’d fit otherwise. “I feel like I’m practically in your lap. It’s a good thing we like each other, huh?”

“Yeah,” said Lucy, giving him a smile that made him just want to stare at her for eight hours and eighteen minutes. “Here, try this.” She adjusted, and rather than Blue feeling like he was overflowing his seat onto her, she was sort of perched on his side. “Better?”

“Better.” It was better than better. He loved the contact along her arm, side, and athletic leg.

Dax, Nikola, and Stone said hi to Lucy as they passed, then took the row behind them. If Blue had been thinking, he would have put those jokers in front of him and Lucy, rather than behind where it would be easier to eavesdrop or play pranks. There were only a handful of people in the aisle who still needed to be seated. He hoped one of them would come and share the row with him and Lucy so they wouldn’t have an excuse to spread out.

“Thanks again for making this happen,” she told him. “I’m so excited I could do cartwheels all the way down the aisle, but I’m afraid they’d think I was too drunk to fly.”

“I’d just tell them you were a UNM Lobo and they’d get it.”

“Oh,” said Lucy, elbowing him. “You’re going to start that already?”

“We haven’t talked about it since Pineapple’s,” said Blue. “Figured we’d get it out of the way.”

“I googled you,” said Lucy.

Good, she’d know that he’d sweated and bled for his school.

“Big time college quarterback,” she said.

New Mexico State wasn’t big time. Even a college sports fan from his rival school didn’t recognize him until asking google who he was. And that was perfectly fine. Football was in the past; that wasn’t his current identity. But the same didn’t hold true for his dad and brother who couldn’t separate college sports from real life.

He said, “Talk about a Romeo and Juliet story, huh?”

Lucy chuckled and said, “And the star quarterback thing isn’t even the worst of it.”

“So you found out about my dad and my brother too?”

“No.” She looked sincerely confused. “What about them?”

“My dad is Jeff Reed.”

Still no comprehension on Lucy’s face.

“He’s the Athletic Director for New Mexico State.”

“Oh, so the crimson and white really do run deep in your blood. Wait, what about your brother?”

“He’s a lawyer, but his firm’s biggest client is NMSU. I was raised to love New Mexico State like a soldier’s kid loves America. Like a fireman’s kid loves fire trucks.”

“Like a piglet loves a sty,” said Lucy with a wink.

“That might be taking it a little far,” he said. There was a different feel to the banter than there had been when their college allegiances had first come out. After a month to let it sink in, he’d realized he might like this woman more than he hated the University of New Mexico. “Wait, you said there was more, but you weren’t talking about my family.”

“No, I didn’t know about them. It was my family I was talking about. I doubt you’ve spent much time on the UNM campus. As in the Rhoades Biological Complex. And R. L. Rhoades Physical Sciences Building.”

It meant nothing to Blue. “But your last name is Avila.”

“My mom's maiden name was Rhoades.”

Blue understood. Her family went even deeper with UNM than his did with New Mexico State. "Oh.”

“Yeah.”

For a few seconds they stared at each other. Blue wondered if it really changed anything between them. She was still incredibly attractive, fun to be around, and in general he couldn't help but think of her all the time when they were apart.

“Well it worked for Romeo and Juliet, right?”

She chuckled, but when he just looked at her with a blank face, she leaned back as far as the seat would let her and raised one eyebrow. "Are you being serious? Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy.”

“Oh yeah, that's right. Literature isn't really my thing.”

“I guess that's what I would expect from a New Mexico State graduate.”

Blue groaned. "I walked right into that one. So does that change anything?”

Lucy leaned into him. “That I bleed Silver and Cherry Red and you bleed white and regular red?”

“Crimson,” he corrected. “My family might not welcome you for Thanksgiving dinner, but it sounds like your family might shoot me before I even got to the front door.”

“It almost worked for Romeo and Juliet,” she said. "We just have to make sure neither of us drinks poison or stabs ourselves.”

Blue nodded. “Those are two things I generally tend to avoid, so it shouldn't be a big deal.”

He took Lucy's hand, loving the way her long athletic fingers felt intertwined with his. She squeezed his hand and settled into her seat in a way that brought her even closer and in more contact with him. In the aisle of the airplane a stewardess had begun to make final checks and close all of the overhead compartments.

"It looks like everybody’s seated,” said Blue. “I'm fine with you sitting where you're at, but if you want more space it looks like that seat by the window is going to be open.” He hoped she didn’t move.

Lucy looked over at the seat then looked at Blue. "I'm good right here where I can get to know you better. To be honest, I've never really gotten to know an Aggie.”

“A Lobo is new for me too,” he said.

“I didn't expect you to be able to communicate in sentences. I thought it would be mostly grunts and rude hand gestures.” Lucy was trying to hide her smile but he saw the smirk at one corner of her mouth.

So she wanted to play that game? “I didn't expect a Lobo to smell so good. I always associated unwashed jock strap with that particular institution.”

Lucy elbowed him again. “Maybe that's because the only Lobos you've ever seen are football players. Everybody knows football players are only one step up from Neanderthals. To them, taking a shower is akin to witchcraft.”

“Oh, I bet you smell like perfume and roses coming out of your furry wolf costume at the end of a football game on a hot day.”

Lucy winced. “You have no idea. Looking back, I think I ended up with heat exhaustion pretty much every game. I know for a fact I had heatstroke once. Totally disoriented, my skin was purple, and I wasn't sweating at all. The football players had coaches and trainers and their teammates to watch out for them and they were actually a bunch of sissies when it came to any type of injury or illness. They showed the first signs of heat exhaustion and it became national news.”

“You didn't have anyone keeping an eye on you? To make sure you stayed safe?” Up until now the mascots had always been kind of a non-person, a huge stuffed animal to Blue. And while he knew Lucy was as tough as they came, thinking of her running up and down stairs and along the sidelines in a big wolf costume in hot weather, made him gain a whole new respect for her.

“Nope. Just Lobo Louie. We have a little tunnel in the corner of the stadium where we can go to take off our head and get a drink, but no coach or medical staff or anything like that. We had, I should say. That’s behind me now. We were technically part of the cheer squad, but when it came to game time, we did our own thing, went wherever we wanted, and suffered the consequences if we weren't smart enough to come in out of the sun often enough or stay hydrated.”

“So what did you do? That time you got heatstroke?”

“Louie couldn't make any sense of what I was saying between the third and fourth quarters. He wanted to call 911 or go get the trainers or the cheer coach, but I was with it enough to know that if we handled it wrong, my identity might be compromised. And that would have been worse than dying. So he helped me walk, more like a stumble, over to student health. They cooled me off, started an IV, and made me rest for a while. Oh, and we both got a stern lecture from the doctor and then later the cheer coach, and after that the Athletic Director himself on being smarter and taking better care of ourselves.”

Blue was thinking about how tough he’d always thought he was and how much he had bled and sweated for his school, but he'd never sweated out completely for the Crimson and White.

Lucy said, “We lost that game. It was close and came down to the fourth quarter. If we would have won that, we would have gone to a bowl game that year.”

“And it's all your fault. I, as an Aggie, have you to thank that my rival didn’t go bowling that year.” He said it in a joking tone which made Lucy get all serious.

“It could have been my fault. I might have made a difference, you don’t know. One or two plays could have changed the outcome of the game. I took pride in doing an awesome job as a mascot and while there's no way to compare, I think I was one of the best ever at UNM.”

“No, you're right. I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist the chance to tease you. I know as well as anyone how much the crowd can change the outcome of a game.”

Her face relaxed and she nodded. “For a second there I thought I was going to have to take you down right here.”

As much as he liked the idea of a wrestling match with Lucy, Blue didn't love the idea of being on the opposite side of her in any fight. “So you're willing to give an Aggie a chance?”

“The right Aggie. As long as you’re willing to give a Lobo a chance.”

“The right Lobo.”

They grinned, having found the right balance of playfulness. It might take some work but they could learn to keep the claws from coming out every time one of them made a comment about the other’s school.

“Let's talk about something else,” said Lucy, resting her head on his shoulder. “Tell me more about yourself.” She knew the basics from their phone calls, but you could only get so close from so far away.

A voice came from between the headrests, high-pitched and mocking. “I like long walks on the beach and saving kittens from trees.”

“Oh good,” said Blue. “The peanut gallery is still with us.”

“That's okay,” said Lucy. She pulled him down and they settled into a sort of slumped position with their heads close together. Quietly, and so close to his ear that it made a run of tingles go down his spine, she said, “We'll just have to whisper.”

Their arms had become intertwined and her leg was draped over his knee. “This is way more fun than fighting,” he said back, talking into her ear.

Oh yes, he was going to enjoy the next eight hours and eighteen minutes.