01.
The first time she meets him, Aether notices the weary look in his eyes and the way the first few buttons of his shirt remain undone.
She nearly brings herself to pointing it out, but she finds herself distracted by the unkempt stubble on his jaw and the way he smells lightly of a previous night’s liquor. It’s a little unnerving, but Aether decides to take it. All she can think of is how desperately she needs to talk to someone, provided that the ‘someone’ isn’t part of the airport staff. She can’t help it. Aether’s an introvert, and she knows that well. After suffering more than nine hours in the sky and one hour attempting to navigate through Seattle-Tacoma, she finds that a conversation about anything but her flight would do her some good.
Unfortunately, however, the first conversation concerns her flight. She forces a thin smile and responds with a tired voice. It was okay seemed to be the best answer for any query, from the in-flight entertainment to the food that had been served. Her companion—Tadashi, that’s what his name is—merely nods at her answers, and any hope that she would have literally any other conversation seems to extinguish itself from that point onwards.
She doesn’t like the feeling.
Aether attempts at starting conversation about anything else and tries to engage him about Seattle, about the airport, even about the car that they were riding on the way back to where she would be sleeping for the first couple of nights. She brings up certain details here and there, tries to compliment the interior of the car, attempts at asking about the picture of the pretty lady on the dashboard. Aether tries to talk to him about where she would be studying and does her best to ask him about the university she would attend for the time being, but Tadashi’s lips remain tightly shut. Her enthusiasm fizzles once more, and Aether finds herself mumbling a quiet “okay” as she resorts to glancing out the window.
(From the corner of her eye, she spots him glancing at her with an apologetic look. Aether almost wants to believe that he’s sorry for not engaging in conversation. But then again, nine hours of tossing and turning in her seat with little to no sleep tended to cause one to see and imagine things that might have not been.)