Chapter 26 - Jamie
Jamie
"Uncle Sam!"
Rosie broke free of my hand before I could catch her. She ran across the baggage claim at a dead sprint, her backpack bouncing against her shoulders. Sam dropped into a crouch just in time to catch her. He scooped her up and stood with her against his chest and closed his eyes.
He looked at me over Rosie's shoulder with that smile.
Two weeks had put an edge on me I hadn't known I was carrying until right now, watching it leave.
"Hey."
He pulled me in with his free arm and I let myself land. The three of us in the middle of the airport, strangers moving around us, and for a second I couldn't tell whose heart I was feeling against my chest. I pressed my face into his shoulder.
I'd spent two weeks trying not to miss this.
"I missed you," he said.
"I missed you too."
Rosie talked the whole way back to the apartment. The airplane. The tall buildings. The taxi driver with a mustache like a caterpillar.
I half-listened and mostly watched Sam.
The way he glanced at her in the rearview mirror when she got to the good parts, laughed at the caterpillar story. The way his hand found my knee at a red light and stayed there until the light turned green, steady, his thumb moving once against the denim like he was checking I was really there.
This is what it's supposed to feel like.
The thought came and I didn't push it away.
After we'd tucked Rosie in and closed her door, Sam reached for my hand in the hallway and didn't let go.
He had a small smile that made me feel like a giddy teenager.
I'd thought about this on the plane. On the jet bridge. In the car on the way home. The specific way he kissed my shoulder. The weight of his arm across me afterward. The thousand small things I hadn't known I'd catalogued until I was two weeks without them.
None of it had prepared me for having it back.
He pulled me closer. His hand came up to my jaw, his thumb against my cheek. He looked at me for a long moment before he kissed me.
He walked me backward toward the bedroom and clicked the door shut behind us.
His hands found me the way they always did. Two weeks hadn't taken any of it.
Two weeks of missing him was in every kiss and every touch. We came together the way people do when they've been holding something they didn't want to put down.
I cried a little at some point. I didn't know why. He kissed the tears away without asking, and that only made more of them come.
After, we lay in the dark. My head was on his chest. His heart was slowing under my ear. His hand moved in slow circles on my back, the way it always did when we were coming back down.
I pressed my face into the warm place between his shoulder and his throat, breathing him in.
"I missed you," I said into his neck.
His arm tightened. "I missed you, too."
I lay there for a moment, listening to his breathing. The apartment was quiet around us. Rosie was asleep down the hall. Somewhere in the building someone was running a faucet, and somewhere outside a car passed on the street. In here it was only the two of us and the dark.
"I kept wishing you were there."
"In New York?"
"Rosie loved every minute. But she kept asking when we were going home to see you." I traced a small circle on his chest. "She missed you."
"I missed her too."
"I kept thinking how much she'd have liked showing you the carousel. The pizza was bigger than her head. She would have dragged you through every block of that city."
He laughed softly. His hand moved in slow circles on my back.
"My apartment didn't feel like mine anymore," he said after a moment.
I lifted my head.
"What do you mean?"
He was quiet for a beat. "I went back to it after you left. Slept there that first night because I thought that was where I lived. I lay there in the dark and realized I didn't know when that had stopped being true."
My throat did the thing it had been doing all night.
"Sam."
"I picked up every buddy shift I could after that. Couldn't stand the quiet."
I reached up and pulled his face down to mine and kissed him. It wasn't a kiss that would go anywhere. It was the kind of kiss you give someone when you're trying to put a thing into their mouth that you don't have words for.
When I pulled back, he kept his forehead against mine.
"I'm glad you're home," he said.
"Me too."
He kissed me once more, slow. Then he pulled me back down against his chest and tucked me under his chin, and his hand found its place on my back again, and after a while I felt him slip under.
I followed him a few minutes later.