Chapter 13 Adam
Currently playing: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John
***
Rachel’s knee was bouncing feverishly next to mine, shaking our seats as she looked out the window.
It was a four-hour flight, and if she kept wringing her hands and making the plane ricochet back and forth, I was going to go insane. She looked down at her phone, refreshing her text messages, and locked it—before repeating the process again.
She’d done the same thing the entire way here, anxiously waiting for something to pop up that she didn’t want to see.
I leaned toward her seat, spreading my legs enough so our knees touched. “You’re worried about Jack.”
Her pout deepened with her nod as she looked up at me. She didn’t bother asking me how I knew. At this point, I knew her well enough to read her like a book, and she knew that. It was part of my job. To pay incredible attention to my surroundings. She didn’t bother beating around the bush with me, because there was no point. It was like how she understood me, whether I felt like talking or not. Every furrowed brow, every rumble in my chest, she translated. Anything I didn’t say, she already knew.
Rachel sighed. “It’s just, if something happens or they have a question or anything at all, they can’t reach me for four hours. I can’t help but be a little nervous. Plus, he started taking that medicine for his acid reflux last week, and what if he all of a sudden gets an allergic reaction? It could be fatal. He could—”
I nodded along to her rambling, letting her fire off every potentially dangerous scenario that could happen in a span of four hours.
My eyes caught on her cheeks. They were void of any makeup. Fresh freckles danced across her nose, all the way to her ear. Usually, they were so covered up you’d never even know they were there. They were so light you’d have to pay close attention to even notice, but when you did, it was like you couldn’t look away.
She must’ve really been nervous, because I could count on one hand the number of times I had seen Rachel without makeup. She always said if she wasn’t 100 percent put together, then she was either deathly ill or taken over by aliens. She wore heels more than tennis shoes, and was rarely ever caught without her face perfectly done. I liked that she dropped her walls around me. It took at least a year, but when she did open the door to let me in with her hair in a loose braid and her face void of anything extra, my heart stuttered. Even in her ridiculous pajamas and the Snuggie draped over her, she still made my body react in ways no one else could. My cheeks lit in a flame at the sight of her, and I was not a blushing man. It felt like her way of saying here I am. I’ll allow you to see this part because I trust you.
Watching her ramble along about possible allergies he could develop over the course of a plane ride and flailing her arms around dramatically, I took a mental picture of her. The pale skin and pink cheeks. Full lips that were naturally rosy and eyelashes that curled upward. I wasn’t going to say she looked better or worse with or without makeup. I liked looking at her regardless. But there was something so appealing about having her guard down like this. With no flirty wit or winged eyeliner to block her true feelings. I liked her that way. It felt like there were fewer walls between us.
She continued her runaway list of potential mishaps, her voice raising louder. “And God knows that if they try to call my sister, she’ll have no clue what to do. She doesn’t even know which building he’s in. It would take her at least six hours to get there anyway. She may not even have the same number. I mean, what do they do if she doesn’t answer? They better not call my mother. I would light a flame up someone’s—”
I cleared my throat as an old lady diagonal from us gave us a death glare.
Rachel took in a deep breath and turned her head to the window with a sniffle. She hated crying, hated it more than anyone I had ever known. It made her feel angry and defeated.
Desperate to stop any tears from rolling down her cheek, I mumbled out, “So you wanna move in with me or what?”
She jerked her head back to me, the tiniest tear stuck in the corner of her eye, hanging on the edge. “What?” she whispered back.
“We’re married. You should probably move in,” I reaffirmed.
The switch from her disheartened state to the sputtering that came out of her mouth as her eyes grew wide was cute. “I—you. We. Move in—” she scoffed. “We don’t even really, well. I mean, we do. We did, anyway. I don’t think—”
“If we’re going to be married, it’s best if we live in the same house. It would be suspicious otherwise, right?”
Her head dipped back and forth, like her brain was doing a mental game of table tennis as she weighed the pros and cons. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“You’d save on bills there too—”
She shook her head and lifted a hand to my lips to shush me. “No, no, no. I might be desperate enough to take the government’s money, but I will not be taking yours. We are splitting everything right down the middle.”
We wouldn’t. I would make sure of that. The point of this deal was for her to save money for her dad’s care. The difference between her rent and my mortgage would eat all of that up.
“We will settle on something. You can…pay the water bill.”
She pointed a finger at me, her nail inches from my eyeball. “Stop that. I don’t want the tiny bills. You said yourself that you needed the money too. You have to have some kind of debt you’re struggling with too.”
I cracked my knuckles one by one.
The difference was my debt was unexplainable to her. She would find out soon. I was sure of it. I needed the right time. A four-hour plane ride where we were stuck together didn’t seem like the ideal setting.
“It’s not unmanageable. It would just be nice to tackle it head-on.” That was the best I could come up with for the time being.
During take-off, we argued back and forth, haggling over every small bill, until I finally got her to agree on a seventy-five/twenty-five split. She wasn’t happy about it, and neither was I, so it worked well enough.
As the plane steadied its course, Rachel pulled out her earbuds, and her shoulders relaxed. She leaned into the seat with a small grin on her lips. Like she’d been reunited with her best friend. Other than me. On the way here, one flight attendant had said she was going to have to confiscate her AirPods if she didn’t take them out for the safety presentation. I thought Rachel was going to come apart at the seams.
Connecting her AirPods to her phone, she handed me the left one, and I smirked. I was working slowly on music education. I still had a way to go, but I wanted to understand her in these songs. Understand a deeper meaning of who she was, how she felt.
As I placed the device in my ear, I leaned back in my chair, ignoring the kicking against it by some kid behind us. A slow thrumming played over us, and I looked down to see her phone lighting up in her lap, showing Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”
A few moments later, her head dropped to my shoulder and her breathing steadied into a slow rhythm that matched the music’s tempo. I planted a small kiss on the top of her head as I felt her drifting to sleep against me, her hand with my ring on it lying right next to mine.