DELILAH
Levi told me he’d send a car.
I said that was ridiculous. I have a car. I can drive myself to say goodbye to my…whatever he is. Boyfriend feels too small. Soulmate feels too dramatic. Person I’m terrified of losing feels too accurate.
So I’m driving myself to the airstrip.
Because apparently Levi doesn’t fly commercial like regular humans. He flies private. Because of course he does.
I knew he was successful. I’ve heard his songs on the radio and seen the awards mentioned in articles. But somehow, in my head, he was still just Levi, the boy who used to steal friesoff my plate at the diner and wore the same flannel so often in high school that I started calling it his “uniform.”
The GPS tells me to turn left onto a road I didn’t even know existed.
I turn.
The road is paved. Smoothly. Like, suspiciously smoothly. And lined with actual landscaping. There’s a gate with a security booth and a guard who checks my ID and waves me through like this is normal.
This is not normal.
I pull into a parking area and that’s when I see it.
The jet.
It’s just sitting there on the tarmac, gleaming white with some kind of subtle logo on the tail. It’s not huge, not like the commercial planes I’ve flown on exactly twice in my life, but it’s sleek and expensive-looking and very much a private jet that belongs to someone with more money than I will ever comprehend.
“Oh my,” I say out loud, to no one.
I sit in my car for a full minute, just staring.
This is Levi’s life, what he’s going back to. Private jets and fancy hotels and people who probably don’t think twice about things like grocery budgets or whether the electric bill is due.
And I sell flowers.
I arrange flowers in a shop I inherited from my mother, in a small town where the biggest news is usually whose dog got loose at the farmer’s market.
What am I doing?
My phone vibrates.
Levi:You coming? I can see your car.
I look up. Levi is standing near the jet, hand shielding his eyes from the sun, watching me have an existential crisis in the parking lot.
Great. Very dignified.
I get out of the car.
“You okay?” Levi asks as I walk toward him. “You were sitting there for a while.”
“I was just...taking it all in.”
“The tarmac?”
“It’s a very impressive tarmac.”
He grins, and for a second he’s just Levi again, not private-jet Levi or country-music-star Levi. Just the guy who made me laugh yesterday while a fish slapped him in the face.
“You’re freaking out about the plane,” he says.
