Bride (Ali Hazelwood) by Ali Hazelwood

            “L for Liliana,” she whispers at me conspiratorially, because her faith in my alphabet skills is shaky at best. Then she skips away to subject Sparkles to unspeakable cuddly things that have him purring his heart out, but would earn me permanent disfigurement.

            “Let’s go,” Lowe tells me after bending down to kiss her forehead. I follow him up the steps, waving back at Ana before disappearing inside. It looks less like a one percenter’s luxury jet, and more like a cross between a nice living room and first class on an Amtrak train.

            “Is the pilot Were?” I ask, following Lowe to the front of the plane. It’s not a particularly cramped space, but we’re both tall, and it’s a tight fit.

            “Yup.” He opens the door to the cockpit.

            “Who—”

            I shut up when he lowers himself into the pilot seat. He presses buttons with quick, practiced movements, puts on a large pair of headphones, and talks to air traffic control in hushed tones.

            “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I roll my eyes. I’m tempted to ask when, between leading a pack and becoming an architect, he got a small aircraft license. But I suspect he wants me to, and I’m too petty to oblige. “Show-off,” I mutter, bumping my right hip into half a dozen protuberances on my way to the copilot chair.

            His smile is lopsided. “Strap in.”

            Like everything else, Lowe makes flying look effortless. Being in a giant metallic bird in the sky should be terrifying, but I press my nose against the cold window and gaze at the night sky, the sprawling lights interrupted by long stretches of desert. I only reemerge when we get permission to land.

            “Misery,” he says, softly.

            “Mmm?” From up high, the ocean is unmoving.

            “When we land,” he starts, then takes a long pause.

            So long, I pry myself from the cold glass. “Ouch.” I’m stiff from not moving for hours, so I stretch my neck in the narrow cabin, trying to avoid accidentally pressing an ejector seat button. “Everything hurts.” When I straighten after arching my spine, the way he’s staring at me is too intense to not be judgmental. “What?” I ask, defensive.

            “Nothing.” He turns back to the control board. Too fast.

            “You said, ‘when we land’?”

            “Yeah.”

            “You realize that’s not a sentence, right? Just a temporal subordinate clause.”

            His eyebrow lifts. “You’re a linguist now?”

            “Just a helpful critic. What happens when we land?”

            He roams the inside of his cheek with his tongue.

            “Are you going to tell me?”

            He nods. “I need to send Emery and her people the message that you’re part of my pack and no violence against you will be tolerated. Not just the verbal message.”

            “You said you’d do that by marking me, right?” Whatever that is. The blinking lights in the landing strip are approaching, and the turbulence is making me nauseous. I shift my focus to Lowe. “I don’t need to speed-read Architecture for Dummies and pretend I can tell Gothic and art deco apart?”

            He turns to me, stone-faced. “You’re joking.”

            “Please look ahead.”

            “You can, right? You are able to tell apart—”

            “Husband, darling, deep inside you know the answer to that, and please look at the road when you’re landing a plane.”

            He turns back. “It’s about scents,” he says, clearly forcing himself to change the topic.

            “Of course. What isn’t?” He’s been a champ. He doesn’t seem to react to my scent anymore. Maybe it’s all the baths. Maybe he’s getting used to me, like Serena when she lived by the fish market. By the time her lease was ending, she found the eggyness almost comforting.

            “If we smell the same, it’ll send that message.”