Becca smiled at the flight attendant who’d handed her a mini-bottle of Grey Goose, can of tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon and lime wedges.  As she told Jo a story about her Gran in Hong Kong, she fixed herself a classic Bloody Mary, eschewing the Bloody Mary pre-mix that the flight attendant had offered her.  Jo silently handed Becca the tiny salt and pepper shakers she’d asked the flight attendant for, smiling as she shook her head politely at Becca’s offer to fix one for her, too.

“But enough about me and my Gran,” Becca sighed contentedly after taking a healthy slurp of her drink, and leaned back on her seat.  “So you’re a power engineer?  Wow, how’d that happen?  After starting at MIT as a math major?”

They swapped stories of early misadventures at their first jobs, with Becca complaining about unwanted attention from male managers and their persistent invites for after-hours drinks, and Jo moaning about being ignored during meetings by project managers whenever she pitched a radical idea.

They tried to talk at a lower register, given the relative silence of others in the plane’s front cabin that was curtained off from the rest of the passengers seated in the main cabin.  From time to time, they looked around their cabin and saw that one or two of the others were glancing their way, leaving them unsure about whether or not people were eavesdropping.

Nevertheless, Jo was excited about the easy rapport they’d established and sorely wanted to get into more personal topics with Becca, since she could see that she would meet with very little resistance if she steered things in that direction.  But she wondered about how they could do this in the midst of a hushed cabin.

Jo decided to test the waters after Becca laughed at her story about flubbing a question she’ tried to ask one of the first people who’d interviewed her from the HR department of the new company that she was now moving to London for.  “Yeah, I messed that one up.  Didn’t script things, like I should have.  So what about you?  Do you like to rehearse what you’re going to say before making a phone call?”

Becca was still wiping her tears after laughing at Jo’s story about having a clumsy FaceTime conversation with the HR guy who’d interviewed her.  “Well, if I was about to talk to HR, I think I would.”