Chapter 14
The van came at ten.
We rode to the airport, the three of us, in the parrot-seat van with the top cut off.
Finn spent the entire drive failing to look like a man who hadn’t orchestrated the whole thing from a bar stool, which is to say he beamed at the back of my head the way he had on our first afternoon, the meddling, self-satisfied, magnificent bastard.
Wes sat beside me with his knee against mine and his camera in his lap.
Somewhere around the halfway point, Wes lifted his camera and took a picture of the two of us without even a hint of warning, Finn, of course, was mid-sentence. I, of course, was mid-eye-roll. Wes looked at the little screen on the back and, for once, didn’t frown.
“That one’s good,” he said. “Light’s finally cooperating.”
At the airport, we split. Wes’s gate was a Lisbon connection two terminals over.
He kissed me at the security line, in front of Finn, a TSA agent who pretended not to watch, and the handful of people in line behind us who gaped like fish pulled from a lake.
“Three weeks,” he whispered into my mouth. “Maybe four. I’ll text you the dates once Lisbon’s locked.” He kissed me one last time and stepped back, shouldering his camera bag. “Don’t measure the days. You’ll drive yourself mad.”
“I’m going to measure the days.”
He chuckled. “I know you are. Try to enjoy it anyway.”
And then he was gone, vanishing into the river of people, a lean, clothed man with everything he owned on his back, walking toward a plane that would carry him far, far away.
I stood there and watched him go the same way I’d watched him walk up the cove path that first afternoon, except this time there was a man who’d be coming back instead of just a foot and a half of warm water I’d been too careful to cross.
Finn stepped up beside me and bumped his shoulder into my arm, as high as the poor little hobbit could comfortably reach.
“Well,” he said. “You got in the pool.”
“I got in the pool.”
“And now you’ve gone and told a man he can come back to it.” He grinned up at me. “Look at you, a whole personality and shit, sprouting up in five days. I’m taking full credit. I’m putting it on a plaque.”
“You bought a raffle ticket, Finn.”
“I bought us raffle tickets,” he corrected, “and you won. That’s not a plan; that’s grace, remember?”
Finn steered me toward our gate, talking the whole way, already planning his next bit of meddling, already three drinks ahead in his mind. I let him, because he was usually right, and that was his worst quality.
I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
I texted Wes before we boarded.
Only four words.
Me: Already measuring the days.
He texted back from his gate two terminals over, and it was the only answer I needed, the only number that had ever mattered, the one I’d been too scared to run until a freckled Irishman handed me a bottle of water and made me do it.
Wes: We’re worth the wait. See you in Tampa, Mark Apparently.