20. Nick
Nick
Frankie and Fabio stay at my house half the week now, and I have started to resent the nights they don’t.
That’s where the season finds me in March: first in the division, neck holding, hip only complaining a little, and a three-legged animal asleep on my father’s bench most afternoons, because Frankie decided the shrine room gets afternoon sun and Fabio decided the bench was ergonomic.
I stood in the doorway the first time I found him there, braced to mind, and discovered the room liked having something alive in it.
There’s a new green pen hidden in my kitchen drawer that I bought three weeks ago and haven’t figured out how to give her.
There’s oat milk in my refrigerator with a permanence that scares me.
Happiness, it turns out, arrives like an opposing forecheck: you hear it coming the whole time and it still knocks you off the puck.
I let myself have it. A man in recovery audits his own highs on reflex, checks every good feeling for the trapdoor, and I ran the checks, and this one holds weight.
This is the real thing. I checked. I’m forty-one years old and first in the division.
I’m in love. And for the first time since the desert, the future looks like a life instead of a blank page.
The future has a date on it now, too. My agent found me a window: the second week of June, after the season ends, however it ends, before the option meeting, a room booked under a charity pretext that converts to a press availability with one phone call.
I kept my promise to Micah, and I kept the terms I set for myself.
Every night I lie awake drafting what I’ll say at that podium: twenty years ago I started managing pain, and the managing became its own injury. It needs work. I have until June.
And I’m telling Frankie this weekend. That’s decided too.
It was Micah’s other condition, and the one he was most right about.
I’ve been carrying the plan like a second ring box, waiting for the right moment, and Saturday, after Vegas, I get it: the bye week scatters the team, families flying in, guys peeling off to beaches, and the charter has to deadhead home to Denver, regardless.
Empty plane. A flight coordinator who owes me nothing and did it anyway.
Two boarding passes printed on real card stock, because Shelly in team travel is a romantic: LACHANCE, N — 3B. And one more.
I watch her find her seat.
She comes down the aisle of the empty charter reading the card, and stops at the row, and looks at the seat number, and looks at me, already installed by the window with a cap on for historical accuracy.
Her face goes from surprise to understanding to something that shines; she stands there in the aisle of a seventy-million-dollar aircraft holding a piece of card stock like it’s a relic.
“3C,” she says.
“They gave away the compact,” I say. “Had to upgrade you.”
“That’s June’s joke. That’s a chapter nine joke.”
“It’s yours. She stole it from you, remember? Everything in that book started out as ours.” I nod at the seat. “Sit down, Just Frankie. Wheels up in ten.”
The crew gives us the cabin. Two pilots, one attendant named Jonathan who dims the lights to red-eye levels on request, delivers two plastic cups and a bottle of sparkling cider with a completely straight face, God bless him, pulls the galley curtain, and makes himself invisible.
Thirty-nine thousand feet over the Rockies at nine p.m., an empty plane, a woman in 3C with her shoes off and her feet tucked under her, and no cameras, no teammates, no staging, nothing but eighteen rows of dark and the two of us doing the whole first flight again with the dread swapped out for joy.
She tells me about the convention this time, the real version, lanyard and all.
I tell her about the flight before that one, the grave, the offer on my phone, eleven days of my agent’s patience.
We fill in the missing pieces from both sides, trading the whole story, and somewhere over the Divide she goes quiet and looks at me sideways with an expression I’ve been getting all season and have finally learned to read, and puts her cup down, and says:
“You know what you said, that night. That it doesn’t get finished in a seat.”
“I recall the ruling.”
“Appeal,” she says, prim as a schoolteacher, already unbuckling, eyes not prim at all.
“New evidence. The seat has no cameras, the flight has no manifest, and the man has no excuse, and June and Beau never got this scene, because I couldn’t write what I’d never had.
” She swings a knee over and settles into my lap facing me, backlit by the little red aisle lights, hair coming loose, and grins the grin that started an entire franchise of trouble.
“The author is here to correct the record.”
“Jonathan—”
“Jonathan pulled the curtain and put on headphones, I watched him do it. Jonathan is a gentleman and the only professional on this aircraft.” Her mouth is at my jaw, my ear, the words going warm and unserious and then just warm.
“Technicality, Lachance. We never actually finished what we started on that plane. I’ve been waiting eighteen months to fix that. ”
What happens next starts with her kissing me mid-laugh, her mouth on mine with the smile still in it, her hands already at my collar, both of us listening for the galley with the guilty ears of teenagers.
I get her sweater over her head in the red-lit dark.
She gets my shirt half unbuttoned, gives up, and just puts her hands inside it, flat against my chest, and hums, satisfied.
“Quiet,” I remind her, against her throat.
“You’re the one who booked a —” My mouth closes over her nipple, and her sentence dies with a sharp little inhale, her fingers digging into my shoulders. “Unfair,” she breathes. “Wildly unfair.”
We manage the rest of our clothes in stages, between kisses, ridiculous with armrests and seatbelt buckles, her jeans landing somewhere in row four, the blanket dragged over us both.
Her skin is warm everywhere. She settles her thighs on either side of mine, takes me in her hand, and strokes me slowly under the blanket until I drop my head back against the seat and stop pretending I have any authority on this aircraft.
“Look at me,” she whispers. I do. Flushed, messy-haired, delighted, backlit by the little red aisle lights. Mine.
Two can play the slow game. My hand slides between her thighs under the blanket, and she is soft and wet and trying so hard to be quiet that her breath whistles, and I work her with two patient fingers until the trying starts to fail.
“You first,” I whisper. “House rules.”
“This is an aircraft—”
“Aircraft rules.” My thumb settles on her clit, slow circles, and her argument ends there.
She comes on my hand with her face pressed into my neck and her whole body shaking with the effort of silence.
I hold her through it, absurdly pleased with myself, thirty-nine thousand feet above everything I used to think mattered.
There is nothing to retrieve and nothing between us anymore. She rises up on her knees, takes me in hand, and sinks down onto me bare in one slow, deliberate slide, and we both make a sound the engines barely cover.
“Shh,” she says.
“That was you.”
“It was both of us. Hold still.” She braces her hands on the seat back behind my head and starts to move, slow and deep because quiet demands slow, and I hold her hips and let her set everything, the pace, the angle, the rules, while thirty-nine thousand feet of night slides by underneath us.
“You feel — ” I start, low, against her ear.
“I know.” She grins in the dark, breathless, wicked. “Tell me anyway. Quietly.”
So I tell her, in a whisper, with the blanket around her shoulders and her hands braced behind my head, every filthy, honest thing I have, and she rewards each one with a slow roll of her hips that nearly puts me through the seat.
The cabin hums around us. The mountains slide past below, dark and endless, and the only warm thing in all that sky is her.
At some point the blanket slips and neither of us fixes it. At some point her carefulness burns off and mine goes with it, and we’re moving harder, her hand clamped over her own mouth, my grip tight on her hips, right at the edge of too loud and neither of us able to care.
“Close,” she warns, barely a sound, and I get a hand between us and press exactly where she taught me, and her rhythm goes ragged and urgent, her forehead hard against mine.
Somewhere in it the laughing stops. It just becomes us, her forehead dropping to mine, her breath going short, my hands sliding up her spine, the two of us moving together in the red dark with the engines holding their one long note.
I whisper what she does to me. She whispers back, filthier, because she’s the writer, and I feel her start to tighten around me.
“Nick — ”
“I’ve got you. Go.” She buries the sound in my neck when she comes, her whole body pulling at mine, and I follow her a few strokes later with my hand spread across her spine and my mouth pressed to her shoulder, holding her through it, holding both of us as still and silent as two people can be while coming apart.
For a while neither of us can do anything but breathe. Her hands stay in my hair. My heart pounds against hers. Somewhere up front, Jonathan turns a page of whatever he is heroically pretending to read.
We stay wrapped together while our breathing settles, her heartbeat knocking against mine through the blanket, and I press a kiss to her damp temple, and the mile-high club, it turns out, is wildly overrated as a stunt and completely underrated as a way to hold her.
After, she’s wrapped in the blanket sideways across my lap, drowsy, tracing Steve through my shirt like a reader running a finger under a favorite line.
“Best flight of my life,” she says. “And I once got upgraded next to a hockey legend.”
“I heard he’s difficult.”
“Terrible. Barely said ten words the entire flight.” She yawns into my collarbone, boneless, mine, and the cabin hums, and the moment arrives the way a lane opens, everything visible at once: now.
Tell her now. The podium, June, the plan, the last locked room, and then there’s nothing left between us but the future.
I take a breath I’ve been rehearsing for a week, and my chest so full it aches, and I say, “Frankie. I—”
The seatbelt sign chimes. The PA crackles, Jonathan apologetic: early descent, weather over the Front Range, crew seats, and simultaneously my phone, freed from airplane mode by proximity to home, buzzes against the armrest with the team group chat detonating: line juggling for Tuesday, Rory bumped to my wing, coach wants video at nine a.m., eleven messages, twelve, the sport reaching up thirty-nine thousand feet to collect me, the way it has reached into every room of my life since I was five years old.
“Hold that thought,” she says, sliding back into 3C, clicking the belt, smiling at me across the armrest with her hair wrecked and her eyes soft, no idea, no idea at all, that the thought was the whole speech. “Descent rules. You can tell me on the ground.”
I don’t tell her on the ground.
On the ground, on the tarmac, in the cold clean March night with the mountains black against the last light and my hand at the small of her back and my heart the fullest it has been since I was a boy at my father’s kitchen table, her phone comes off airplane mode too.
And rings. Becca, says the screen. Ten forty-one p.m., which even I know is not a business hour, and Frankie’s face does something I’ve never seen it do, a shutter coming down mid-shine, and she says “one second, it’s work,” and steps away from me on the tarmac.
Three steps. I stand next to a seventy-million-dollar aircraft and watch the woman I didn’t get to finish my sentence to hold a phone to her ear and go still.
I know stillness. I’m the local expert. Hers is all wrong.
Whatever the voice on that phone is saying takes ninety seconds, and I watch the joy leave her body degree by degree, but when she turns around, she’s smiling and it’s a beautiful smile, and she says, “Sorry. Publishing stuff. It never sleeps,” and the thumbnail rises, and she catches it, and puts her hand in her pocket.
One more for the list: when it’s truly bad, she doesn’t bite the nail. She hides the whole hand.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“Everything’s…moving,” she says. Later I will understand that was the only true sentence she could afford.
She loops her arm through mine and walks us toward the cars, chattering about Fabio and the bye week, funny and warm and half a beat too quick on every laugh.
I let her do it. It’s late, she’s tired, and tomorrow feels soon enough for the rest of the truth. Hers. Mine.
Tomorrow, I figure. A man who has spent his whole life arriving early.
The plane sits behind us on the tarmac with its doors open, cooling, and in my jacket pocket there’s a boarding pass printed on card stock that I am going to keep until I die, and it says 3B, and the last thing I think, before the rest of everything, is that I got the seat assignment wrong all those months ago. It was never the window or the aisle.
It was whoever is sitting next to you when the rough air comes.