Page 26 of Comfort Read

She glances up and rolls her eyes. “Finally, there you are.” Frankie says this as though Kit was in any way responsible for his time of arrival. As though he was not driven here at the time she specified, and in a car she sent to pick him up. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

Kit stalks forward, stopping in the middle of the aisle without taking a seat. Adopting a sweetly dangerous tone he knows he stole from Maggie, he says, “Frankie. Hello. I wonder if you might do me the favor of thinking over the last week. Is there, perhaps, something you might have forgotten about? Some task that slipped your mind?” When she stares at him, brow furrowing, he sighs. “Maybe the words ‘email with deets to follow’ might jog your memory?”

Frankie stares at him for another beat, and then her eyes widen and her hand flies to her mouth. Groaning, she says, “Oh my God, I never emailed you, did I?”

“You didn’t!” Kit’s voice glitters with manic brightness. “So I have some questions. Like: Where am I going? When will I be back? Are we leaving the country? Because I sure don’t have my passport. Or, like, anything else!”

Frankie opens her mouth to reply, but before she can, a deeper and more irritated voice to Kit’s left snaps, “Frankie, Jesus Christ, are you kidding me? What is going on with you this week?”

Frankie pales, two bright spots of color appearing on her cheeks. It couldn’t be more obvious that she isn’t used to being spoken to like that, and doesn’t like it. For his own part, Kit closes both eyes briefly and then cracks one of them open to do what he should have done before he started talking: check for occupants in the seats he couldn’t see from the door.

One of the rear-facing chairs is empty, but Sage glowers back at him from the other.

They stare at one another as Frankie stumbles over an involved and hard-to-follow apology, clearly fighting not to snap at Sage. Kit tries to school his expression into one that reads, “I’m sorry you saw me get pissy just now, except not that sorry, because I have every right to be pissed, but now you seem like you’re pissed?”

Sage doesn’t seem to pick this up, which is fair. He just continues to glower and then, when Frankie stops talking, huffs out a hard sigh. “Well, since that didn’t answer any of your questions: We’re going to Los Angeles. We have a photo op set up for tonight and an awards show tomorrow. You’ll be back Sunday morning, early, probably around eight or nine. You won’t need your passport.” He gestures at the chair across from him and says, “Sit, if you’re staying. I don’t blame you if you want to bail, but this is your moment.”

After a beat of hesitation, Kit sits. Wincing, he asks, “Does Los Angeles maybe have a store called Everything You Would Have Brought In Your Luggage, But Inexplicably Much Cheaper? Because I don’t have any⁠—”

“For Christ’s sake, I said you could bail!” Sage says this too loudly, at exactly the same moment Eleanor swings the exterior door shut. She looks back at them with raised eyebrows, and then walks over to sit in the last vacant chair.

Although she says nothing, her presence seems to have a calming effect on Sage; he pinches the bridge of his nose, lowers his voice, and tries again. “Sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s ridiculous to ask you to fly across the country with nothing, on no notice. You could have plans, or need someone to feed your cat, or—it’s insane. I’m sorry. You should bail.”

“I mean,” Kit says, with a shrug. “I’m already here. The door’s closed. I’m definitely not against going to LA—I’ve never really been anywhere, except up to New Hampshire to visit my grandparents. More notice would have been cool, and probably I can’t wear this to an awards show, but…” He shrugs. “I’m fine to go, assuming someone can find me a spare outfit and a toothbrush.” And assuming Allison doesn’t murder me for asking her to feed Throg and do tomorrow’s Corner of Knowledge, he adds, but only to himself.

“Already working on it,” Frankie says, her voice tight. Her eyes are locked on her laptop screen, and she’s typing so rapidly that the clicking sounds have blurred together into one long staccato noise. “We’ll have replacement luggage ready and waiting in your room this evening.”

“So we’re going, then?” Eleanor’s looking at Sage, clearly only asking Sage; Sage is looking at Kit. After a second, he raises his eyebrows impatiently.

A little late, Kit realizes the look is a question, and not just an opportunity to attempt the impossible task of assigning a Crayola color to Sage’s absurdly blue eyes. “Oh! Uh. Yes?”

“Yes,” Sage repeats, to Eleanor.

“Great. I’ll let Beth know.” Eleanor stands, clapping Sage on the shoulder as she passes him. He winces, which she doesn’t see as she heads towards the front of her plane, calling, “We’re a go, let’s get her up!” before opening the cockpit door and stepping inside, shutting it firmly behind her.

There is a gentle lurch as the plane begins taxiing, and Kit finds himself helplessly drawn to the window, in this every bit as he was the last time he rode in a plane, at age eleven. That trip hadn’t exactly been a blast—he and his siblings had been sent as unaccompanied minors to visit his grandparents for the summer in New Hampshire. At the time they’d all believed they were being punished for something, as their grandparents’ house was among Earth’s most boring locations for anyone under the age of seventy-five. Kit had spent the whole summer certain his parents were furious with him, and wondered for years afterwards what he could have done to upset them so badly. It was nearly a decade before, pityingly, Maggie said, “Kit, for God’s sake, are you still holding onto that? They were working through a rough patch in their marriage, you moron. It had nothing to do with any of us.”

This time, without the imminent threat of his grandmother’s sharp tongue, or the dread of being forced by his grandfather to get up before dawn and murder innocent fish, Kit is able to fully enjoy the takeoff.

He forgets about Sage and Frankie, which is easy enough, as both remain sullenly silent; he forgets about where they’re going. The plane taxis slowly down the runway at first, then faster and faster, until it’s whipping across the asphalt. There’s a bump as the wheels make one last attempt to hold onto the earth and then they’re flying, climbing higher with every breath. As they ascend, the brilliance of the autumn leaves falls away, the trees blending together into an indistinct brown as they get smaller and smaller. The towns Kit’s tooled around in all his life, places that have served as his entire world, shrink to the size of postage stamps.

“Wow,” he breathes, dazzled.

There’s a soft sound. It pulls him back to reality, and when he turns his head, Sage is looking at him, an uncertain smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

Kit grins back at him, too excited to wrestle any of it out of his expression. But Sage doesn’t meet his enthusiasm; his tenuous smile slips into a much firmer frown as he looks away, visibly swallowing.

A small twinge of anguish twists up from somewhere deep within Kit, a raw scrape of feeling he can’t place or explain. It has a familiar quality to it, like waking to an ache from the strange position in which you only half-remember falling asleep. The leather squeaks under him as he shifts and resumes looking out the window, trying to shake off the abrupt turn of mood.

It’s difficult. The tense energy in the cabin is just this side of oppressive, which doesn’t exactly help. Frankie and Sage seem to have decided not to speak to one another, and Eleanor does not return from the cockpit, so they fly a while in chilly silence as Kit tries to gear himself up to break the ice.

“Why didn’t you say something?” It takes Kit a second to realize that Sage is speaking to him.

“Uh.” Kit blinks at him in confusion. “Sorry? I’ve just been trying to roll with the sullen-silence vibe.”

There is a soft snort to his right that sounds like Frankie containing a laugh. Sage cuts a sharp look at her, obviously annoyed, but Kit’s glad at least someone finds him amusing.

“I don’t mean right now.” Sage’s hands are flexing in his lap, his left thumb digging hard against his right palm. “I mean before. Why didn’t you say something when Frankie didn’t send the details? You could have texted her, or me, or both of us, instead of just jumping in blind.”