Celeste sat down in her seat, strapping the belt over her lap. She dreaded seeing who would sit next to her. It was a short flight, but rolling the dice with a stranger seemed to not work in her favor.
Several attractive men came down the aisle, one-after-one, but none of them took a seat next to her. She frowned and waited. When it seemed like everyone had boarded, she sighed with relief.
She had the row to herself.
But then another group boarded, and she held her breath. Certainly she was going to get a very chatty old lady or a smelly person. She wasn’t about to get someone who wanted to mind their own business.
When it seemed like everyone would pass her, a man stopped and looked up at the seat numbers. He shoved his bag into the overhead bin and smiled at her before sitting down.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi.” She gave him a friendly smile.
He scrolled through his phone while they waited for the cabin doors to close and the announcement to come through that everything needed to go into airplane mode. In the meantime, she pulled out a romance novel she was reading.