Chapter Six
Elijah
I had to get the fuck home. Something was seriously wrong, and I was stuck there, half a country away from the only thing I gave a damn about.
My phone kept pinging with notifications, and every single time, I jumped with hope, my heart thudding in anticipation, praying it was Bonnie.
But it never was. She had her own special ring—jingle bells—and when it was just the generic ping, I didn’t even bother checking it.
I just kept racking my brain on the fastest way to get home.
Dread started to seep in when I realized that my only real option was to wait for the next nine hours and thirty-eight minutes until I could board the plane I was flying and make my way back to Bonnie, back to my home.
Which would almost take another eleven hours—ten, if I broke some laws getting home.
I looked at the palm trees and the view of the pool outside my window, feeling nothing but hatred for all things tropical building just as quickly as my panic. Fuck the trees, sun, and sand. I wanted snow, Christmas cookies, and my girl.
A knock on my door had me growling in frustration, and I decided to completely ignore it and continue my pacing. But the knocking only grew louder, and my simmering rage was about to blow with each continued knock that echoed through the otherwise silent room.
“E? I know you’re in there. Are you okay?”
Satan herself was the one knocking, and she absolutely didn’t know that I was in there.
How does she even know my room number? I knew for a fact that I didn’t give it to her.
Normally, I just avoided Tiff like the plague, and it was the same with the guys.
We had become close in flight school. It had been easy to unwind with the people who understood what I was going through…
The stress, the insecurities, the thrill of flying.
The need to be in the sky. Not having to explain, not having to find friends who scoffed at my crazy schedule, was easy.
Being able to sit in the companies of others who had my life was a blessing, at first.
It wasn’t until I met Bonnie that I realized how truly awful they were. So, I distanced myself, stopped accepting invites, stopped responding, and eventually just stopped paying them any mind outside of work at all.
In fact, 99 percent of the time that I found myself in their presence because of work, all I heard was waaa, waaa, waaa. I just didn’t care, so I ignored them.
They used to give me so much shit about Bonnie.
About how I had started to change when I met her.
That I walked around with stars in my eyes.
But I much preferred to think of it as snowflakes in my eyes.
Christmas used to just be another holiday before I met her.
Now, I thought of my life as split into two: Before Bonnie and After Bonnie.
Before, it was like an old movie in black and white, with no sound.
Fumbling around, trying to find happiness.
After, it was like living in a snow globe.
Light, bright, and glitter everywhere. So much joy that if someone broke out in song wherever I went, I’d have joined in. Pure joy, just like Christmas morning.
The knocking still continued. Clearly, she wasn’t going away. Huffing in annoyance that my focus was being deterred from my life with Bonnie, I flew over to the door and all but ripped it off its hinges as I opened it.
“What?” Icicles had nothing on the frosty tone I gave her.
“I see you’re still in a bad mood,” she chirped, and somehow pushed her way into my room. I couldn’t help the nausea that overtook me with her and I being in a space, so close and alone. So I found myself stepping outside my own room to keep that distance.
The only reason I always partook in the after-flight drink ritual with everyone was so they would leave me alone, and it was always in someone else’s room because the second my drink was empty, I was saying my goodbyes and making my way to call my girl.
It also helped with some of the heckling they gave me, since I had become such a bore—their words, not mine. I’d just stopped building a life with them in it. All I wanted was my life with Bonnie, and they were downgraded to background noise, coworkers, no longer even friends.
They didn’t understand, and that was okay.
I didn’t need them to. I found that I didn’t care about how they felt and how they lived their lives, as long as they kept me out of it.
I let them be assholes, let them ruin their own lives.
I only had to see them and put up with them at work, and even then, I’d cut down our interactions so much that I really had no idea what was going on with any of them. I found I much preferred it that way.
“E?” She-satan all but stomped her foot to get my attention, and I realized I’d forgotten she was still in my room.
“What are you doing here, Tiffany?” I barely managed to get out.
“You didn’t answer us or come to my room for drinks. I was worried about you.” She giggled and waved a bottle of champagne she must have brought in my face. I hadn’t even noticed she had it with her, like that was an acceptable reason for her to be in my room. It wasn’t.
“I didn’t go because I didn’t want to,” I told her. She looked shocked by my words, but tried to play it off as she closed the distance I had created between us with her free hand. She squeezed my forearm before I could stop her, and I had to swallow the bile in my throat.
“Don’t touch me. You need to go,” I told her, and I did the last thing I wanted to do—touch her.
I couldn’t see any way around it. She had to go, and go now.
I put my hands around her arms, lifted up as gently as I could, and deposited her on the other side of the door.
“Go away now, Tiff,” I said quite plainly, and shut the door in her face.
Good riddance.