Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Aspen had been standing outside of the international arrivals gate for forty minutes, holding a bouquet of pink lilies and staring at the customs doors with her leg bouncing in place.
The flight from Nadi had landed forty-five minutes ago. She knew this because a very helpful app had been tracking the plane’s little icon across the Pacific since the moment she woke up, and because she had checked the arrivals board four separate times in the last twenty minutes.
Aspen had watched roughly four hundred strangers come out those doors and not one of them be Maddy Sterling.
And then, finally, there she was.
Maddy’s carry-on dragged behind her as the automatic doors slid open for her. Her blonde hair was longer than it had been three months ago and she scanned the crowd with that adorable little crease between her brows that Aspen loved so much.
Aspen’s stomach swooped, her eyes went hot, and for a second she genuinely couldn’t breathe.
Maddy was the most beautiful, sexy, perfect woman that had ever lived and no one would ever be able to convince her otherwise. Eleven months together, and she still could not believe that that stunning creature was her girlfriend.
Then Maddy’s eyes found her, and the crease vanished, and the whole travel-worn look dropped clean off her face as she broke into a wide grin and started to run.
She weaved around a man and his roller bag and Aspen had about one second to realize oh shit, she’s not slowing down before Maddy hit her at full speed.
The flowers got crushed somewhere between them and Aspen took the impact with a startled laugh and stumbled back three full steps, almost going down with Maddy on top of her before she caught her balance.
She wrapped her arms around Maddy and lifted, swinging her off the floor, and buried her face in Maddy’s neck and breathed her in.
“God, I missed you,” she said into Maddy’s hair.
Maddy squeezed tighter. “I missed you too.”
She set Maddy back down on her own two feet and framed her face with both hands and Maddy was already surging forward.
They kissed deep and slow, three months of wanting poured into it.
Somebody nearby said aw and somebody else said excuse me, and Aspen kept kissing her girlfriend in the middle of the arrivals hall and did not care one bit who saw.
Aspen kissed her until they both had to come up for air, foreheads pressed together, Maddy’s hands fisted in the front of Aspen’s shirt.
Maddy peered down at the mangled flowers still trapped between their chests. Her eyes were wet. “These are…beautiful.”
“They were,” Aspen laughed. “Until my girlfriend went full wrecking ball.”
Maddy laughed, wiped under one eye with her fingertips, and pressed the wreckage of the bouquet to her nose anyway. “Thank you. They’re my favorite.”
“I know.” Aspen tucked a strand of hair behind Maddy’s ear, mostly so she’d have a reason to keep touching her face. “Ready to go home?”
“Absolutely.” Maddy kissed her once more, quick this time, and then threaded their fingers together. “Lead the way, baby.”
* * *
Aspen pushed the front door open and stepped aside so Maddy could go in first. “Welcome home, Maddy Sterling.”
The bungalow was completely empty—bare oak floors, white plaster walls, afternoon light pouring through the arched windows. No furniture. No boxes yet. Just a lot of square footage that, as of twenty-one days ago, belonged to them.
Maddy stopped just inside the doorway and put one hand over her mouth, and gripped Aspen’s arm with the other. “Oh my God, Aspen,” she said into her palm. “It’s even better in person.”
It was the first time she was seeing it that wasn’t through a six-inch screen with a spotty connection.
They’d been talking about getting a place together for months—ever since Maddy had told her that when she came back from Fiji, she was moving to Coronado.
She’d already talked to Margaret about attending more meetings virtually and less network events for season eighteen.
She had more leverage after the massive success of her Redemption season that drove audience engagement through the roof, saved the network hundreds of thousands of dollars, and was the most highly anticipated show airing in the fall.
Aspen had attended a Cast Lock party with Maddy, back in February, at the end of the audience voting campaign, when they announced the eighteen contestants for season seventeen.
The execs were raving about the success of the campaign and Margaret made sure Maddy got all of the credit, even when Doug-from-the-network joked about Maddy gunning for Margaret’s job.
Margaret had agreed that Maddy would make an exceptional showrunner, but much to Aspen’s surprise, Maddy had responded by telling them she wasn’t interested.
Apparently, that had been as much of a surprise to Doug and Margaret as it was to her.
But Maddy simply wrapped an arm around Aspen’s waist and told them she would be moving to Coronado to be with her girlfriend when the current season wrapped, and would be working more remotely for future seasons.
It had been the first Aspen had heard about it and it had taken every ounce of strength not to grab Maddy’s face and kiss her in front of all of her bosses and her boss’s bosses.
When she’d asked later that night if Maddy really meant what she’d said about moving to Coronado, Maddy had kissed her and told her she’d meant it and was hoping that once she got back from Fiji, they could start looking for a bigger place together.
And then this one had come on the market in April—three-bed, two-bath, a den, two blocks from the water with a lemon tree in the back and a kitchen that got the morning sun—and Aspen had walked through it once and known it was theirs.
The problem was that a place like this would not wait around two more months for the love of her life to get back from filming on a remote island in the South Pacific.
It would be gone within a week. Which was how she’d ended up giving Maddy a frantic virtual tour during their one thirty-minute FaceTime window of the week, phone held out, talking too fast, narrating every room while jogging through it before her time ran out—kitchen, light’s incredible, here’s the weird little nook, ignore my thumb, backyard, lemon tree, Maddy are you seeing this—and Maddy, sunburned and exhausted in a production tent at the end of the earth, had taken one look and said put an offer in. Today. I mean it.
They’d closed on it weeks ago and Aspen had had the keys in her pocket and hadn’t moved a single thing in, because she’d wanted to wait for Maddy.
Their footsteps echoed as Maddy walked into the middle of the empty living room and turned a slow circle, head tipped back, taking in the high ceilings with exposed beams.
In three days, they would drive up to LA and meet the movers to pack up Maddy’s belongings. Half of her stuff would be coming here to their new home, and the other half to the condo she’d bought near Abbott Kinney for the times she absolutely had to be in LA for work.
Maddy had put her Venice house on the market the same week they’d closed on this one, with the open house starting next week.
It had been a lot of logistical juggling while Maddy was six thousand miles away and difficult to reach.
But Aspen didn’t care about the logistics.
Aspen cared that home for Maddy was finally the place with Aspen in it.
Maddy crossed to the open kitchen and ran a hand along the island. She opened a cabinet, closed it, then opened the one next to it.
Aspen leaned against the doorframe and smiled as she watched Maddy already deciding where the coffee was going to live.
When Maddy first went back to LA after they’d made things official, Aspen had been ecstatic but still a bit wary.
She wasn’t sure how much they would be able to see each other, or what a relationship with Maddy would even look like.
And she was still a bit concerned that Maddy would pull away again. But she never did.
Maddy had told her she wanted everything that came with being in a relationship with Aspen, and she’d shown up day-after-day to prove she meant it.
Maddy had done a lot of her pre-production work remotely during those first few months, which meant she came back to Coronado much more often than Aspen had been expecting.
And one or two weekends a month, when Maddy couldn’t get away from LA and the Wave were at an away game, Aspen made the drive up.
She sat in Maddy’s kitchen in Venice cooking her dinner while Maddy ran her meetings, and got to fall asleep next to her.
It was never enough. But it was so much more than the nothing she’d braced herself for.
In September, season sixteen of Marooned & Merciless finally aired, and the two of them had a standing date to watch it together no matter how long they had to wait to be in the same place at the same time.
Maddy, of course, already knew how the entire thing ended and refused to give up a single spoiler.
She just sat there with her little smirk and let Aspen narrate her own theories, week after week, and Maddy would sip her wine and say interesting and give away absolutely nothing, which Aspen found infuriating, and also kind of hot.
Aspen had picked Ainsley as her favorite contestant to win it in the first episode, and when she watched Ainsley destroy Brad in the finale, Aspen had thrown both fists in the air and cheered loud enough to cause the neighbor’s dog to start barking.
Maddy had laughed, and watched her gloat, and looked unbearably smug about how happy it made her.
Then the holidays came, and Aspen got greedy.
The Wave’s season was over, the network went dark for its mandatory breaks, and suddenly they had time.
Whole uninterrupted stretches of time, together.
A week over Thanksgiving and two and a half weeks over Christmas, which included a trip to Paris to ring in their first new year together.