And it furthermore was not her fault that the entire city had been hit by such severe thunderstorms that all flights had been grounded until this morning, creating a clusterfuck of backups that pushed my ten-o’clock flight’s takeoff to six.
And I suppose I also couldn’t blame her for the cell network outage in the vicinity of the airport, which had made communication spotty and unreliable.
In fact, the only person I could blame for any of it wasme.
So much for not letting anyone down.
I stopped by the window halfway down the terminal and typed out a quick text to my dad. Approximately my twentieth message of the day.
Me:What the heck is going on? Did Chet arrive? Is the concert okay? Call me!!!!
I waited an entire minute for the three bouncing dots to appear, but they didn’t.
Damn it.
I’d started calling people the minute cell coverage had been restored this morning, but no one had answered. Not my dad. Not my brothers, or Mason, or any of their boyfriends. Not even sweet Gloria, my dad’s girlfriend. Not the Extravaganza Committee group chat. Not Chet Hatcher. And notJay.
At this point, I was starting to take it personally.
I might have worried that the rapture had come, except my cousin Fenn wasn’t replying either, and there was no way that fucker wouldn’t be left behind just like me.
And if this was a preview of what life might be like if I had to stay home while Jay toured… well, I was gonna have to learn to start loving airplanes, even if that meant finding another therapist and getting some better coping strategies or good drugs or something, because I missed Jay like a severed limb.
It was crazy talk. Objectively, I knew that. I mean, we’d been apart foryearswhen we weren’t speaking, and even before that, we were best friends who only spent summers together. Of the six days we’d spent together this week, at least two of them we’d spent hating each other.
None of those numbers mattered, though. I’d had the tiniest taste of what being with Jay would be like—his long, lean body curled up next to me in the night, his honey scent teasing me all day, his rough voice crashing over me when he said things that made me feel important and seen and cared for…
Yeah, there was nothing I wouldn’t do to have that in my life forever.
My phone finally dinged with a text from Jay after I started walking again, but it was only a picture from earlier that had finally come through.
It was Jay and Ari Friedrich, sitting side by side at an outdoor picnic table, sort of like the one where Jay and I had sat at Mitchell’s the other day—Jesus, had it really only been a little over a week ago?—grinning for the camera.
Jay had captioned it, “Your boyfriend and your favorite singer having lunch. WHICH IS WHICH?”
I grinned.
Me:My favorite singer IS my boyfriend. Who’s the dude on the left? I just landed in FL and I’m rushing back to the Key. Call me tonight?
But I also paused for a second to enlarge the picture so I could sigh over Jay’s face for a minute.
He looked so damn good.Happy. He’d gotten a haircut, but it wasn’t that. He just seemed settled in a way he hadn’t been a couple of days ago when we’d said goodbye.
Which was good.
Obviously.
Seeing him happy always made me happy.
And I was also not at all worried that he looked happier without me than he had when I left.
I rolled my eyes. I sounded like Jay when he got all dramatic. The truth was, I knew Jay cared about me alot. I knew he wanted us to be together. But I could admit there was, as Jay would say,maybe possiblya tiny, uncertain corner of my heart that remembered how I’d had to strong-arm him into agreeing that we’d work things out, and worried that once Jay had gotten back to his regular life on the road, he’d realize having me as a boyfriend was a complication he didn’t need.
So I’d just have to show him different, right?
I didn’t need the world to know I was his boyfriend. I didn’t care if we called me his tour manager, or his guitar handler, or his honey drop supplier, as long as I got to be with him.
The phone rang while I was holding it, and when I saw it was Jay, I answered immediately.
