Vivi Kouropoulos gripped the armrest of her airplane seat, on the aisle of row H, chosen expressly for its proximity to the emergency hatch. Her stomach was in knots, her abdominal muscles clenched even though the flight was smooth, no turbulence so far. A clear sky mocked her from every window. She clamped her eyelids shut to close out all that space in the air, a visual reminder of how far there was to fall if anything should go wrong. Vivi watched the pilot episode of "Lost." She knew it was fiction, but some things don't need to be enhanced for effect; physics held true even on television.

"Ma'am?" Vivi heard the flight attendant's voice above her shoulder. "Can I offer you a drink?" She forced her eyes back open and carefully avoided looking out of any windows, concentrating on the attendant's pretty, meticulously made-up face. It would take me an hour to get my make-up that perfect, she thought.

"Ginger ale, please?" Vivi replied, and the flight attendant set about pouring it from a can into a small plastic cup. Vivi watched the bubbles and thought about carbonation. Maybe the drink would help calm her nerves a bit. On the rare occasions she couldn't get by without flying it hadn't really helped, but at least it was a small routine thing she could do to reassure herself, not to mention keep herself busy for the next few minutes to keep her mind off the altitude and the inescapable physics. That was the danger of having a science degree, she supposed. She possessed just enough accurate information to realize the inherent dangers of a wide variety of everyday phenomena. Most of the time, she let her higher intellect rule her brain and day-to-day life wasn't scary, but flying was different. Her common sense stayed firmly on the ground and in the tiny, mercifully pressurized and oxygenated cabin she was anxious and quietly irrational.

Jolting herself back into activity, Vivi lowered the tray from the seat in front of her, and the attendant handed Vivi her ginger ale.

"Thank you," Vivi said softly, and the flight attendant consulted the passenger across the aisle. Vivi focused on her cup, wondering briefly if the atmospheric pressure in the cabin was different enough from the pressure on the ground to effect the rate at which the carbon dioxide bubbles left the fructose liquid mixture. That was at least chemistry more than physics, in her mind, anyway. Oh, she could recite the periodic table; that would keep her busy for a couple of minutes. Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium--

"Nervous flyer?" It took her a couple of seconds to come to the conclusion that the man across the aisle was asking her and not someone who could actually look him in the eye. Looking directly across the aisle meant a straight line of sight out of a window, and that was not going to happen. Okay, I'll try to be friendly, but if he needed her eye contact, I am going right back to being boron-- um, boring, she thought firmly.

"What gave it away?" she asked self-deprecatingly, even attempting a small laugh.

"Your death grip on the armrest, among other things. Should I make you a list so you can be more incognito next time?" It sounded like he was smiling.

"Oh, I'm painfully aware of how obvious it is, believe me, and as nice as that offer is, I don't think a list will help. If you know a good hypnotist, though..." He laughed at her attempt to power through her fear.

"At least your sense of humor still works at 35,000 feet," he offered good-naturedly.

"Could we not mention the altitude?" she requested softly and took a gulp of her ginger ale.

"Sorry. What should we talk about? How 'bout them Cubs?"

"That conversation would be over in the amount of time it would take me to tell you I have no clue about sports." Her father had watched college basketball since before she was born, but Vivi had never become interested like her brothers and sister.

"You knew I wasn't talking about baby bears, so that's something." Wow, this guy was a real optimist. She wondered why he was being so nice to her when she couldn't even look him in the face. "What do you like to talk about? Music? TV? Puppies?"

"Promise you won't out me as a dork?" she queried.

"If you would look over here, you would see me crossing my heart."

"Maybe in a minute." She took a breath. "I was reciting the periodic table. You know, like in chemsitry class."

"I do know. I'm a hematologist." That got her attention. She let her eyes venture over to his feet, covered with comfortably worn cross-trainers, then up the medium blue jeans on his long looking legs, although it was hard to be sure when those legs were folded into an airplane seat. The plane was still in the sky on its planned trajectory, and her breathing was still at the same rate, no eminent hyperventilation, so she continued looking up. She got to his arms, resting in his lap, long-fingered hands folded in a blessedly relaxed pose, which he broke to cross his heart. He had on a rust-colored short sleeved T-shirt that fit just closely enough to outline a pair of shoulders that were somewhat wide and very probably strong. Those were not the shoulders of a doctor chained to a lab bench. Hematologist? Really? She looked up to his face, not really knowing what to expect a hunky hematologist to look like, and she was not disappointed. He gave her a big smile.

"See? Your eyes are open and the plane's still in the air." His shiny dark brown hair was clean-cut, but he had a bit of an edge about his features, slightly more angular than all-American, and the small crinkles around his kind, slightly sleepy-looking eyes from the warm, open smile were reward enough for daring to look up. Vivi felt like the inside of her chest was expanding slowly and briefly wondered if the cabin was depressurizing. Then she realized it was this man's face that was affecting this change. She took a deliberate breath and gathered her wits before she made more of a fool of herself than she already had by being a prisoner to her phobia.

"So far, so good, anyway. You're a hematologist? I'm a medical lab technologist. My name's Vivi," she offered. Maybe conversation was the way through the fear to the end of the flight. And what a handsome way through it could be.

"I'm Vaughn. Nice to meet you, Vivi. We could probably swap blood anecdotes for hours. The flight would be over before you know it."

"Oh, God, could we? I'm being serious, not sarcastic, I swear. Blood is the whole reason I went into the MLT program after undergrad. I was not up for med school for a variety of reasons, but blood, I could handle." Talking about school reminded Vivi of the reason behind this flight: her 10 year college reunion. She supressed thoughts of that whole other set of circumstances which would only serve to stress her out more. She could think about them after she landed safely. For now, she would concentrate on this man and the enticing field of hematology.

"I was genetically predisposed for it. My parents were both medical doctors who started their own research lab, and I work with my dad there now." She wondered why she didn't work with his mom, and he must have noticed some change in her expression. "My mom passed away several years ago."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that." It always seemed ineffectual to her to offer condolences like that even when she knew the person she was offering them to; this time it really sounded hollow to her own ears.

He shrugged. "Thanks, but it was a long time ago. I'm glad she got to see the lab open up before she died."

"Where is your lab? What kinds of research do you do?"

"Charlotte." The destination of their flight, her childhood home, where she'd attended college, and where the rest of her family still lived. She both loved the place and resented it.

"I grew up in Charlotte."

"Me too." They seemed to be finding more common ground by the second.

"Really? What year did you graduate high school?"

He surprised her by blushing slightly. He had been so composed in approaching her that it was completely unexpected.

"2000," he replied, seeming somewhat reluctant to divulge the information.

"Wow, you don't look that young. I gradutated in '94. We probably ran in totally different circles." His face definitely belied his age. She wasn't sure if it was those crinkles around his eyes that had fooled her at first, or the slight sense of emotional, or perhaps mental, weight present in his expressions. She did some quick calculations in her head. "You must have blasted through college and med school," she noted impressed. This man was cute and obviously intelligent. This flight was getting less atrocious by the minute.

"I did an M.D./Ph.D. program at Oregon Health & Science University, in Portland."

"Overachiever much?" she joked, thankful she felt comfortable enough to do something that normal in the middle of a flight.

"If you only knew," he responded, shaking his head in a gesture of what she interpreted as faux regret.

"Yeah, science is a real time-sucker sometimes. Especially in med school, I would imagine."

"Practical research is even worse than school. No classes to interrupt your testing. And it doesn't help when you're so interested in what you're doing that you forget about everything else. Between me and my dad, we have to get our administrative assistant to remind us to eat meals. Sometimes she sets an alarm clock when she leaves so we don't keep working right through the night."

"That sounds dreamy," she confessed. "Hospital labs are pretty routine. Almost everyone gets the same basic tests, with a few specifics thrown in for good measure, but there's never anything that keeps me glued to my seat when I'm done with my shift."

"You would probably fit right in at our lab," he noted with a half-smile.