5. Chapter 5
Christina
My suitcase has been packed three times and it's not even six thirty.
The first version was sensible. The second version had the green swimsuit in it. The third version has the green swimsuit under the jeans, which is different from on top and means nothing. I have Kate on speakerphone from her kitchen, where I can hear her spoon going around a cereal bowl.
"Walk me through the math one more time," she says. "Because a week ago you were showing me your banking app at the coffee machine with the face of a woman at a funeral."
"It's done. The money's gone. It went to babies with heart conditions and I refuse to be sad about it."
"And the part where you spend three days alone with him at a lake."
"That's the prize. I won the prize. People win cruises all the time, Kate. Nobody interrogates them."
"People who win cruises don't repack four times."
"Three times," I say.
"You're going to open that bag and move something before you zip it.
I know your hands." The spoon stops. Her voice changes.
"Hey. Real question. Are you okay? You haven't said his name once this week.
You talked about the linen credit. You told the valet story to every single person who stood still long enough. But you skipped right over the man."
I sit on the edge of the bed next to the suitcase. Through the window the street is still quiet, one guy walking a dog in a sweatshirt, the coffee shop at the corner just turning its lights on.
"He brought me a sandwich," I say. "He came to the office with lunch. You were there."
"I was extremely there. Rachel had the photo printed and on Vivian's desk within the hour, which, honestly, you have to respect the turnaround." The spoon starts again. "You still didn't answer."
"I'm fine."
"Christina."
"I'm going to have a nice weekend at a free lake house, and when I get back everything goes exactly back to where it was. I made that clear. He knows the arrangement."
Kate is quiet for a second too long. "Send me pictures of the house," she says finally. "Not of him. I want countertops."
"Okay. Talk to you later."
"Have fun," she says before hanging up.
The buzzer goes at five to seven. I look at the suitcase, open it, move the green swimsuit from under the jeans to the side pocket, zip it, and take the stairs down because the building elevator breaks every other week and today is not the day to test it.
He's standing at the curb in front of an old Land Cruiser and that stops me on the bottom step.
He's in a navy pullover with the sleeves pushed up, sunglasses hooked in the collar, leaning against the door with his arms loose at his sides, and I had a whole composed face prepared and it was built for a man with a different car entirely.
"Something wrong?" he says.
"I expected something German."
"Everyone does." He takes my suitcase before I can argue and swings it into the back. "My mom picked this one. She drove it twice, got the price down four grand, and made the salesman visibly nervous. Every mechanic I've met since has told me to sell it."
He opens my door.
I get in. The seat leather is worn soft and pale at the edges, and there's a faded parking sticker in the corner of the windshield from a hospital lot. The car smells faintly of coffee and of him, and I put on my seatbelt and look straight ahead.
"You're not going to sell it," I say.
"No." He shuts my door, comes around, and gets in. "I'm not."
The drive takes forty minutes and we don't fill the silence.
He drives with one hand low on the wheel and lets the quiet sit, and somewhere around the halfway point I realize I'm not performing anything.
I'm just in a warm car with my feet pulled up on the edge of the seat, watching the city thin out, and my shoulders are somewhere other than my ears for the first time in weeks.
The executive terminal is its own small building at the far edge of the airfield.
A man in a polo meets us at the desk, checks one ID, and walks us straight through a glass door onto the tarmac.
No line. No bins. No taking my shoes off next to a stranger.
The plane is thirty feet away, small and white with the stairs already down, and a pilot shakes Julian's hand at the bottom.
"Doctor Cross. Mr. Brennan says to tell you the bar's stocked and to stay out of his scotch."
"Tell him no promises."
I climb the stairs ahead of him and stop one step inside.
Eight seats. Cream leather, walnut trim, a low couch along one side, and a basket on the credenza with fruit and pastries and two coffees in real cups, still steaming, because someone timed it. My whole apartment could fit in here twice and still have room for the landing strip.
"You're staring," Julian says behind me.
"My mom couldn't afford to get us plane tickets growing up. Let me have this."
We take the two seats facing each other by the window.
The door closes with a sound that settles in my ears, and within ten minutes we're moving, then up, the lake tilting into the window beside me, the city dropping away under the wing.
I keep my face calm. My hands on the armrests are not calm at all.
Julian watches me over his coffee. One ankle crossed over his knee.
"What," I say.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine."
He sets the coffee down and leans forward, elbows on his knees, and the space between our seats gets noticeably smaller.
"Just say it once," he says. "No ballroom, no spotlight, no audience. Say it wasn't about the kids and I'll never bring it up again."
"It was a tax-deductible donation to a pediatric cardiac unit."
"Nine thousand dollars."
"They're very sick children, Julian."
"You did math between every single bid. I watched you do it."
"I'm an event planner. I'm always doing math. Yesterday I did math about napkins."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he laughs, low, dropping his head, rubbing the back of his neck, and something about pulling that laugh out of him feels like turning over a good card.
The plane shivers. One flat bump of air, nothing, but my hand jumps off the armrest and his comes off his knee at the same second, and mine lands in his.
Neither of us moves.
His hand is warm and dry, twice the size of mine. His thumb settles across my knuckles slowly, deliberately, giving me the whole length of a breath to pull back.
I don't pull back.
"Christina."
"Don't say anything smart."
"I wasn't going to."
"Sure."
He reaches over with his free hand, takes hold of my armrest, and pulls the whole seat toward him across the aisle track, slow and deliberate, until our knees are almost touching and there's nowhere left to look but at him.
"Come here," he says.
I don't know which of us moves first. That's the honest answer, the one I'd give under oath. There's a seatbelt clip and a small hard armrest and then there isn't, there's his mouth, and six years collapse so fast my ears ring.
He kisses me with one hand sliding along my jaw into my hair, careful for exactly three seconds, and then not careful.
I come out of my seat into his and his arms take all my weight without any negotiation, one hand spread flat between my shoulder blades, the other finding where my knee settles over his hip.
He tastes of coffee. He makes a sound against my mouth that is quiet and wrecked and mine, and I pull back two inches just to look at what I did to him.
His eyes are dark. His lips are parted. There's color along his cheekbones and his hand on my thigh has a real grip in it now, and he's looking up at me from the seat with an expression no magazine photographer has ever gotten out of him.
"Six years," he says, rough. "You want to know what I thought about for six years?"
"No," I say.
"Liar."
"I'm here for the lake house." I say it against his mouth, already kissing him again, my fingers in the short hair at the back of his neck, and his hand slides up under the hem of my shirt to the skin at my waist, just resting there, five warm points of pressure, and I press down into his lap and feel exactly what this is doing to him, and the sound he makes this time isn't quiet at all.
The cabin speaker clicks.
"Folks, we're beginning our descent into Harbor Springs. Should have you on the ground in about fifteen minutes. Beautiful morning up here."
I climb back into my own seat with exactly as much dignity as the situation allows, which is none. I buckle in and smooth my hair down with both hands. He watches me do every bit of it, sprawled in his seat, making absolutely zero effort to fix himself or his expression.
"Stop looking at me," I say.
"I genuinely don't know how."
The airfield is one strip and a windsock with trees on three sides.
A black SUV sits next to the little terminal building with the key under the visor, exactly where the house manager's note said it would be.
Julian loads the bags while I read the welcome folder, and we drive into Harbor Springs with the windows down.
It's all white clapboard and flower boxes, a main street four blocks long, sailboats standing quiet in the harbor.
We stop at the market because the chef doesn't come until tomorrow and I refuse to eat out of a fruit basket for dinner.
He pushes the cart. I didn't give him the cart, he just took it, and he leans on the handle while I read labels, and he keeps dropping things in when I'm not looking. I catch a jar of cherry preserves. A bag of pistachios. Two different candy bars.
"Put one back."
"They're different flavors."
"That's not a rule I recognize."
He puts one back with enormous suffering. Then he sets a bag of pappardelle in the cart along with butter, parmesan, a lemon, cracked pepper, cream.
I look at the pile. I know exactly what that pile means.
"Julian—"
"I'm making it. You can stand there and argue, or you can have a glass of wine while I cook. Both are available to you."