Smothering at 20,000 Feet
How to Flirt with A Naked Werewolf“Smothering at 20,000 Feet” is the title of Chapter 23, framing the arrival of Mo’s parents by plane as a moment shadowed by the language of airborne danger. Yet the opening scene begins not with a crisis in flight but with the plane landing at Dearly Airport, where Mo and Cooper wait at the single gate. The title’s alternate identification as a parody of an airplane-terror story reinforces that contrast between suspenseful framing and a grounded family reunion.
Chapter Title and Opening Scene
The chapter heading appears after the author credit and chapter number, before the scene of Mo’s parents’ arrival. Cooper tells Mo to take it easy as the plane taxis down the tarmac. She is eager to see the people who drove her to Alaska and, ultimately, to Cooper. The anticipated danger suggested by the title gives way, in the opening, to the emotional importance of their arrival.
Pregnancy and Protective Attention
The title’s language of smothering sits beside a scene of care rather than an actual threat: Cooper buttons Mo’s light jacket and skims his fingers over her growing belly. At four months pregnant, she looks far further along than a human pregnancy would suggest. Her pregnancy otherwise seems normal, though Dr. Moder has assured her that the baby will not have a tail and warned that it may have a full set of teeth—enough to make Mo reconsider breastfeeding. The chapter’s opening thus balances Cooper’s protectiveness and Mo’s dry humor against the title’s more alarming register.
Threat, Memory, and Contrast
Elsewhere in the novel, bodily danger returns through both violence and its aftermath. John Teague twists Mo’s arm behind her back, presses her against brick, and grips the back of her neck; later, she struggles with images of the attack and imagines his death in the truck that went into a ravine. Returning to the alley where the assault occurred brings back the scrape of pavement, the sour Dumpster smell, and the memory of his blood on her shoulder. These episodes give the title’s language of constriction a broader resonance, although the available chapter opening does not establish a literal airborne emergency.
The novel also links danger to uncertainty about what a person may have done while transformed. Cooper recounts how his father was shot while trying to free his trapped brother, and later fears that he might have attacked Abner during a night he cannot remember. Against those scenes, the Chapter 23 heading carries a pressure of anticipated threat into an opening that instead centers on reunion, pregnancy, and Cooper’s gentle attentiveness.
