Oh, my God, what am I doing?

I don’t have fifteen thousand dollars. I don’t have two thousand dollars, or at least, I don’t have two thousand dollars I could spend on a plane flight. Every last bit of this research trip was paid for with a grant from the Bright Foundation, with every penny accounted and re-accounted for.

“Your parents finally win the lottery? I used to see them always buying tickets,” Wilder says, his bright blue eyes flashing, his voice mocking.

Anger crawls through my chest, tightens my hands as my mind goes blank, just like it always does during confrontations.

“No,” I say, forcing my voice not to shake. “I got a research grant from a foundation with a lot of money.”

“I had a feeling they still hadn’t quite made it,” Wilder says. “How’s your old man, by the way? Every time I see him out there teaching a new batch of kids how to ski I’m afraid he’s gonna break a leg.”

“He’s fine,” I say, my voice brittle. “Listen, the Foundation will pay you once we get to Yellowknife, I just have to get there and explain the situation.”

It’s not true. There’s absolutely no way that the Foundation is going to approve fifteen thousand dollars for a private flight and I know it.

But Wilder doesn’t. For all his pompous mockery, for all his flirting with flight attendants twice as pretty and half as smart as me, for all his making fun of my parents and acting like God’s gift to earth, I’m betting he hasn’t got a clue how the scientific granting process works or where the money comes from.

“Why do you need to be there so bad?” he asks, leaning his elbows on the table.

“Because the arctic research season is short, and I don’t want to miss my plane.”

“You can’t charter a flight the last leg?”

“It wouldn’t be cheaper.”

Also, I don’t actually have fifteen thousand dollars.

“You sure?”

I swallow hard, my spine ramrod-straight. My heart is beating so hard I’m probably developing a medical condition, I’m sweating, and I know my face is bright red.

But this is my chance to kill two birds with one stone: get to where I need to be on time and screw Wilder Flint out of fifteen thousand dollars.

It’s the least he deserves.

Wilder just looks at me, his blue eyes hard and indecipherable as they’ve ever been. The flight attendant behind the counter, the one he practically started humping in front of me, is still smiling emptily at the two of us, like she’s done a grand job of solving some problem.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I say quietly. “How about it?”

I can practically see the gears in his head working, trying to think through the reasons that I, of all the people on this entire planet, might want to be in a small plane with him for hours on end.

“Help her out!” the flight attendant bubbles, but neither of us pays her any attention at all. “Come on Wilder, you’re such a good pilot, it’s your chance to do something nice for someone in need!”

She rubs his shoulder, looking up at him, and finally he glances back at her, both his hands staying in his bomber jacket pockets.

“All right,” he finally says. “Hope you like small planes, because that’s what fifteen grand gets you. Private hangar, thirty minutes. Have all your shit with you already.”

He turns on his heels and walks back through the door he came through in the first place, flinging it open and striding through, a couple of heads turning, and my stomach plummets instantly.

What on earth am I doing?

I can’t do this. I can’t, this is stupid and dumb.

He’s probably going to piss me off until I grab the rudder or whatever and plow the plane into a mountain, just to make it stop.

“Great!” the flight attendant says, clapping her hands together.

Really. She really does that, claps with happiness, because I guess not everyone knows that Wilder Flint is actually a misspelling of Satan Himself.

My fingers curl against the desk top and I have to fight the angry urge to ask her if she’s fucking him, if she thinks he cares about her at all, if he’s shown his true colors and humiliated her just yet.

It’s coming, I want to tell her. Just run, you poor sweet dumb thing.

But I don’t. It would be an act of mercy, really, but instead I leave her to her own devices with Wilder.

“I guess I’ve got a flight,” I say, trying to smile at her. “So… where’s the private hangar, and how do I get my stuff?”

Thirty-one minutes later I’m on one of those mini-trucks that are always scooting across the airport tarmac, loads of gear in the back, next to a very gruff guy who doesn’t seem to know more than two words.

I don’t mind. It’s not like I can handle small talk either, particularly when I’ve spent the day tying myself into anxious knots at the airport, which culminated with getting a plane ride from the one person I really and truly hate.

It’s not dislike. It’s not distaste, it’s not mild annoyance. Believe me, I feel those ways about other people regularly, and this isn’t this.

I really, truly, deeply think that Wilder’s a bad person. He’s the kid of the richest guy in Solaris — and while Solaris may be small, it’s the wintertime skiing playground of billionaires, so that’s saying something — and he’s the kind of snotty rich kid who punches down.

Punches hard. Punches fast, leaves you reeling.

The tiny little strange truck pulls up to a giant hangar, and the guy driving looks over at me expectantly. I clear my throat, my face flushing slightly because I’m about to talk to a stranger and when you’ve already got social anxiety problems like I do and then have the day I’ve had, you blush at every single provocation.

“This is it?” I ask, since for all I know he could be taking a snack break.

“Right,” he says, his eyebrows going up.

I remember to smile as I dismount the strange, tiny truck.

“Thanks!” I say. “Let me just get my stuff, it might take a minute, there’s a whole bunch of it because I’m going away for a while and so—”

He doesn’t care, stop explaining yourself.

I shut up. I don’t think he was listening to begin with.

Someone else brings a cart for my stuff over, another gruff guy with stubble and an age of forty-to-sixty, and we load it up. Gruffster Number One drives away, and I push my cart into the hangar, feeling like a bug in a terrarium.

A little bug, not something cool like a hissing cockroach or a unicorn beetle or a tarantula. Not that tarantulas are bugs, they’re arachnids, obviously, which every six-year-old knows—

“You the girl going to Yellowknife?” a woman in a bright yellow vest asks, jolting me yet again out of my own thoughts.

“I think so?” I respond.

She gives me a look, glancing up from her clipboard.

“You going to Yellowknife?”

“Yes,” I say.

She snaps her gum.

“You a girl?”

“Um, yes,” I say.

“Over there,” she points. “Baby Flint is waiting for you. Best get out before the weather gets here.”

I look over at where she’s pointing to: a plane that seems way too small for the flight I’m about to take. I don’t even like flying in those little jets with two seats on one side of the aisle and one seat on the other, I don’t know if I can get into this thing and dear God especially not with Wilder and weather on the way—

“I thought the weather was over Vancouver?” I finally say.

“Technically, darlin’, we’re surrounded by weather day in and day out if you’d like to get philosophical about it,” she says. “But the bad weather is currently sidling over from Vancouver to here, so if you want to get out I’d suggest sooner rather than later.”

“Right,” I say, giving my head a quick shake. “Thanks.”

That’s another problem of mine: run-on sentences in my head turn into one-word answers, even when the conversation I’m part of isn’t a one-word-answer conversation. I get a lot of stares as people wait for me to finish what I’m saying, only to awkwardly realize that there isn’t more as I’m frantically trying to think of something else to say.

Like just then, for example.

I grab my cart. I throw my weight behind it, shoving toward the tiny plane I don’t want to get on with the pilot I can’t stand, who’s still the worst person I think I’ve ever met despite being considerably more world-weary now than I was in high school.

As I shove my way over, sweating again with nerves and exertion, I finally spot him. Doing something on the underside of the plane, messing with it, wearing overalls stripped to the waist and a black t-shirt underneath.

If it was anyone else I might stop and stare, because objectively speaking, Wilder Flint is a very attractive man. I don’t know what he’s doing but he’s reaching up, tightening something on the plane, but it’s making all the muscles in both his arms flex and release, over and over again, the coveralls just barely hanging from his hips.

I don’t think about what he looks like underneath them. I don’t think about the fact that, unlike plenty of our high school classmates, he clearly hasn’t let himself go.

I don’t think about the fact that once upon a time, I knew his body like a map.

Fall off, I think at the coveralls, despite myself.

If there’s someone who deserves a public pantsing, it’s him.

Except Wilder wouldn’t care. People like Wilder don’t get humiliated or embarrassed. When something happens, everyone laughs, he says some stupid, witty one-liner, and everyone forgets about it in thirty seconds.

They don’t cry about it for weeks. They don’t let it keep them from their few friends, or let it control their lives, or let it—

Shut up, brain.

“Wilder,” I say, just so I can’t stand there and think any more.

“Imogen,” he shouts, his voice echoing off the metal body of the plane. “Nice of you to come by.”

I know I shouldn’t take it literally. I know.

I do it anyway.

“You’re flying me to Yellowknife,” I say back, my voice nearly swallowed by the space inside the hangar.

He looks back at me, arms still raised over his head. There’s barely-hidden anger in his blue eyes, his entire body radiating dislike.

“Yeah, I remember the conversation we had fifteen minutes ago,” he says, not turning the rest of his body. “Contrary to popular belief, I do have the full working brain of an adult human.”

He turns back to the plane, my mouth going dry. What do I say to that? What would anyone say to that, is there even a response a person could make? It’s his fault to begin with, he was the one who acted like it was interesting that I was here and then I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

I clear my throat, trying to un-scratch it.

“I’ve got all my stuff with me,” I say. “Should I start loading it in? Some of it’s kind of fragile, camera equipment and stuff, so I should probably do it myself.”

Wilder jumps down from the step ladder he’s standing on, whips a rag off his shoulder, turns to face me. The lines of his face are tight, his jaw clenched as he uses it to wipe his hands off, though the rag is so dirty that it’s probably just getting him even greasier.

“Yeah, you wouldn’t want my dumb ass handling anything sensitive,” he says slowly, flicking his eyes at me. “God knows what I’d break. Just tell me if there’s something I can run at real fast.”

I meant if someone breaks my stuff it should be me, not I think you’re clumsy and going to break everything, but I don’t say that.

I just wonder what his problem is. He hurt me, not the other way around.

“I’ll load it. Just get me there, okay?” I say sharply and turn away from Wilder so I don’t have to look at him anymore.

I hate this. I hate this the most of anything I’ve hated all day, and today’s been a doozy in terms of hating things.

I hate the way he transports me back to Solaris High School, age seventeen. I hate that he makes me literal and awkward in exactly the same way, makes me feel like I’m puppeteering my body from somewhere outside it.

I hate the way he obviously still thinks that he’s the one who was wronged, that he’s the one who should have some kind of vendetta about our past, as fucked up as it is.

I hate that I watch his stupid hands and his stupid forearms and think about winter nights in his dad’s Mustang. I hate that I look at his stupid face and despite knowing better now, it still sets off a thrill in the pit of my stomach.

But more than anything?

I hate that I know I’d do it all again.