Chapter Four #5
“Or a good television show,” he added, clearly remembering what she had told him the night they met about what had drawn her to a career in television.
“Yes. Exactly.”
A moment of understanding passed between them, the intensity of it surprising her. She studied him for a beat, as though she could figure out what quality he possessed that made her share so much, so quickly.
“I’m sorry.” Vivian flushed. “I shouldn’t have told you all that. You were probably just looking for a polite ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to your question, and instead you got my entire life story,” she joked, embarrassment settling inside her.
“Don’t apologize. I would very much like to hear the rest of your life story sometime.
To know you better. I don’t—” Now it was his turn to look frustrated, to break off and turn away from her.
“Like I said earlier. It’s easy to talk to you.
You don’t—I feel differently with you than I do with other people. It’s the strangest thing.”
Vivian nodded, because she felt the same inexplicable way, too, and then she realized he couldn’t see it because he was looking out at the city and not at her.
“Is your mother gone, too, now?” Joe asked her, his gaze off in the distance, trained on some point that she couldn’t see.
“No, she’s still alive. It just feels like that relationship, that part of my life belongs to someone else.
I started working as early as I possibly could, and I saved up enough money so that I could leave when I was eighteen to go to college.
We haven’t really kept in touch. Last I heard she was living in Atlantic City. ”
“You’re on your own.”
“Yes.”
Joe was silent for a moment, his back still to her. “My parents and my sister died when I was little. A car accident. I was in the car with them. It was a miracle that I survived—I was thrown from the car. A driver in a passing vehicle saw me on the roadside and got help.”
“I’m so sorry.” She reached out, unable to resist laying her hand on his arm to give comfort.
The muscles of his forearm tensed beneath her touch, and she pulled her hand back like she’d reached for a hot stove, curling her fingers into a little fist by her side.
Vivian swallowed. “How old were you?”
He turned to face her. “Six years old. My aunt and uncle—my mother’s brother—took me in and raised me.”
Ah.
Was that it? Did the sense of recognition she felt when she was around him come from the fact that they both lost so much at such a young age?
It made more sense than any other explanation she could come up with.
After all, growing up, she’d always struggled to see her experience reflected in that of her friends and their families.
When she’d gone off to college, it had been difficult to explain to her roommates that she was going to spend her school breaks working rather than traveling home to visit family.
That she would have a far happier holiday on her own than she ever would with her mother.
“Do you see, then? Why us having a drink together—or something more—would never work? Why I can’t?” Vivian asked him, hoping he understood why she had told him about her father and the rest of it, why there was no point in this going any further.
“Yes. I think I do.” Joe shook his head as though he had found himself the butt of a grand joke the universe had decided to play on him.
“In a way, I understand. I like my life the way it is. I love flying planes. I enjoy moving around the world. I love having the freedom to pick up and go where I need to go without worrying too much about anything other than how I’m going to get from point A to point B.
And when I’m up in the air, when I’m flying, what makes me such a good pilot, what makes me a great pilot—”
There was no arrogance in the way he delivered the line, a lofty achievement considering she doubted very few men could call themselves great and get away with it.
“—is that I’m not afraid of dying. There’s nothing on the ground keeping me tethered, no one waiting for me, no one for me to come back to. I’m not looking for anything else. I don’t want anything else.”
He delivered the words with a quiet ferocity that suggested he wasn’t just trying to convince her, but maybe himself as well.
Perhaps she should have taken offense at how definitively he said he wasn’t looking for someone in his life, since he’d just asked her on a date, but she understood completely.
Neither one of them was interested in romantic entanglements, was looking to find love or even a relationship.
And still—he’d asked her out on a date.
Vivian glanced up at the sky above them, the words she searched for floating up until they hovered just above her grasp.
“There’s no hope, then?” Joe asked after a silence that stretched on and on. “For us, I mean. No grand love affair around the corner,” he joked, even if the humor didn’t quite meet his eyes.
“I suppose not,” she replied, struggling to match his playful tone, because the way he said “grand love affair,” even though his tone was light, teasing, made her more than a little regretful that she was missing out on something grand indeed.