4. Asher
ASHER
Iknew what Maddox was doing the second I saw the crew manifest.
Vivian is good company. She’s attractive and easy to talk to and she has the good sense not to make anything more complicated than it needs to be, which is a quality I’ve come to appreciate more than I probably should have to at forty-six.
Maddox has been watching me exist in what he’s started calling my mid-life drought.
Basically, I’ve been celibate for far longer than he thinks is healthy.
The fact that one of my oldest friends is paying this much attention to my sex life should annoy me, but it doesn’t.
It’s normal when it comes to Maddox. Killian and I tried the traditional route and though Killian got married and had a kid, I didn’t.
I’d tried and shit blew up in my face. And though it’s been years since that clusterfuck happened, sex hasn’t been what it used to be for me because once you have that trust, that love, a one night stand doesn’t slap as hard as it used to.
I appreciate the gesture. I do. It comes from the right place.
It’s just not going to work, and it’s not Vivian’s fault.
The problem with Maddox’s solution is that it assumes what I’m missing is company.
What I’m actually missing is the thing that happens before company means anything at all.
The moment before everything else. When you’re talking to someone and the conversation shifts and you suddenly understand that this particular person is going to matter, that something in your chest has just made a decision your brain hasn’t caught up to yet.
I’ve felt it exactly twice in my life. Once when I was twenty-eight and thought I’d found something permanent.
Once about two hours ago in a private aviation lounge in Tampa, which is terrible timing by any reasonable measure.
I’ve spent the last two years telling myself I don’t need the spark.
That what I had with Monica before everything went wrong was real enough, substantial enough, and that whatever I felt in those early years was worth rebuilding toward even after the engagement fell apart.
I told myself that spark was a young man’s idea of love.
That what matters at forty-six is something quieter and more reliable.
I believed it, mostly. Right up until a woman with dark hair and a warm laugh walked through a lounge door arm in arm with Sophia and I felt something I hadn’t felt in long enough that I’d half convinced myself it didn’t exist anymore.
So no. Vivian is lovely and I haven’t thought about her once since the first drink check.
Three hours into the flight, the plane has gone quiet.
Sophia and Lorenzo disappeared into the rear bedroom before we’d finished climbing to altitude. Raphael lasted another hour watching something on his phone before his head dropped back and the snoring started, low and steady from the cabin row behind us.
I’m in one of the wide leather seats near the front of the main cabin with a book I’ve read the same paragraph of four times. Maddox is across the aisle, laptop open, not really working.
Harper is two rows up, turned slightly toward the window, tablet propped on the pull-out table in front of her. She’s been staring at it for the better part of an hour and the screen hasn’t moved.
Maddox catches my eye and tilts his head in her direction.
I close my book.
We move up together. Maddox takes the seat across the aisle from her and I settle into the one beside him. Harper looks up when she registers movement and there’s a brief flicker across her face before she settles into a smile.
“Sorry,” she says, reaching to close whatever she had open. “Am I in someone’s seat?”
“No assigned seating on a private jet,” Maddox says. “We noticed you were up here alone and thought we’d check in.”
“How are you settling in?” I ask. “First time on a private jet?”
She laughs. “Is it that obvious?”
“A little. You checked the seatbelt twice before we took off.”
She turns to me, half embarrassed and trying not to smile. “I was being thorough.”
“Nothing wrong with thorough.”
The conversation opens up from there. She’s funny in a quiet, precise way, the kind of humor that doesn’t announce itself, and she listens when someone else is talking instead of just waiting for her turn.
I contribute less than I probably should.
I’m watching her more than I’m talking and I know it.
Then she tips her head to the side and looks between the two of us.
“So should I just call you both uncle? Uncle Asher and Uncle Maddox?”
I catch Maddox’s expression shift in my peripheral. He leans forward.
“Oh, I know what you can call me,” he says. “And uncle isn’t on the list.”
Harper chokes on air. Actually chokes. She presses the back of her hand to her mouth and her eyes go wide and she makes a sound that is somewhere between a laugh and genuine respiratory distress.
I look at Maddox.
He looks back at me completely unbothered.
“Sorry,” Harper manages, still recovering. “I wasn’t— okay. Noted.”
“So,” Maddox says, like he didn’t just say what he said, “is there someone back home who’s going to be upset you’re spending the summer in France?”
She shakes her head. “No. Not seeing anyone.”
Something in the plane feels different when she says it. Quieter. I keep my face where it is.
“What about Raphael?” I ask.
Her brow lifts slightly. “Has Sophia gotten to you already?”
“Sophia hasn’t gotten to anyone. Just observing.”
She shrugs, pulling one knee up onto the seat.
“Sophia has been trying to engineer something between us since she and Lorenzo got serious. I think she decided coupled-up was a good look and wanted to share it around.” She says it without any edge, just fact.
“Raphael’s great. He’s not playing into it, which I actually respect.
But there’s no spark. There’s either a spark or there isn’t and no amount of Sophia’s enthusiasm changes that. ”
I ask the next question before I’ve decided to. “So you haven’t encouraged it at all.”
“Why would I?” She looks at me like it’s obvious. “The man is going to be great friend material for a very long time. No need for anyone to LARP a scene from Game of Thrones over a situationship that was never going to happen.”
Maddox makes a sound that might be a laugh he decided not to finish.
I look back at my hands. There’s something sitting in my chest that I don’t examine too carefully. The information that Sophia’s been pushing Raphael toward her and Harper hasn’t moved an inch in that direction shouldn’t land differently than any other piece of information. But it does.
I notice her table is still empty. No wrapper, no cup, nothing since we boarded.
“Have you eaten?” I ask.
She blinks. Looks at the table like she’s only just registering it herself. “I… no. I forget when I’m stressed.”
“You forget to eat.”
“When I’m stressed. Yeah.” She says it like it’s just a quirk. Something she’s said enough times she’s stopped hearing it.
“What’s stressing you out?” Maddox asks.
She picks at the edge of her sleeve. “I got laid off before this trip. It’s a whole thing. The point is I tried to tell Sophia I needed to stay in Tampa and focus on finding something new and she—”
“She wouldn’t take no for an answer,” I say.
Harper points at me. “Exactly.”
“Sophia has never taken no for an answer in her life,” Maddox says. “Killian taught her to argue her position at age seven and she has never once stopped.”
Harper laughs. “That explains so much.”
I reach up and press the intercom.
Vivian answers. “Yes, Mr. Beckett?”
“Can you get the kitchenette open for me? I’m going to use it.”
A beat. “Of course.”
I stand. Maddox looks up. I give him a look that means keep her talking and head toward the back.
The kitchenette is stocked the way Maddox stocks everything, thoroughly and without being asked, because he grew up without enough and never forgot it even after the money stopped being a question.
There’s real food back here. Ground beef, brioche buns, a block of sharp cheddar that’s been kept properly. I find a pan and get the burner going.
Vivian appears in the narrow doorway while I’m shaping the first patty. She leans against the frame, arms crossed, and watches me for a moment.
“You cook even on vacation,” she says.
“I cook everywhere. It’s not a vacation thing.”
Pause. “Asher.”
I look up. She’s not unkind about it. Her expression is clear and direct, a woman who knows when something isn’t going to happen and has made her peace with it faster than most people would.
“She’s very pretty,” Vivian says simply.
I don’t confirm or deny it. The pan sizzles. I focus on the patty.
Vivian pushes off the doorframe. “I’ll check on the cabin.” She’s gone before I have to figure out what to say, which is its own kind of kindness.
I finish three burgers quietly. Sharp cheddar, the right condiments, brioche toasted just enough. Simple. A burger on a plane at thirty-five thousand feet should taste like something worth eating, not like an afterthought.
I carry the plates back through the cabin.
Harper and Maddox are still talking. She’s leaning forward now with her elbow on the table, genuinely engaged, and she hasn’t noticed yet that Maddox is being more careful with her than he usually bothers to be. She will eventually.
I set a plate on the table in front of her. She looks down at it. Then up at me.
“Eat,” I say, and sit back down.
She stares at the burger for a moment like it’s said something unexpected. Then she looks at Maddox, who’s already picked his up, and back at me.
“You just… made burgers.”
“You forgot to eat.”
Something moves across her face. Quick, there and gone, the flicker of someone who isn’t used to being looked after and doesn’t entirely know what to do when it happens. She covers it by reaching for the burger.
She takes a bite.
I watch her try to be casual about how good it is and fail.
“Okay,” she says, with the gravity of a formal announcement. “This is the best burger I’ve ever had. Like I base restaurants on their burgers and fries, and this…” she hums a sound that makes me smile, “is the best burger of my life.”
“High bar,” Maddox says.
“He clears it every time,” I tell her. “It’s annoying.”
She laughs, the full version of the smile I saw in the lounge, and something in my chest settles in a way I don’t entirely have language for. Quiet and certain. Not loud. Not urgent.
Just there.
I pick up my own burger and eat and let Maddox carry the conversation and decide this is a problem I’ll deal with later. When I’m not thirty-five thousand feet in the air with a whole summer ahead of me and nowhere reasonable to go.
For now, she’s eating.
That’s enough.