Page 28 of Comfort Read

“Am I supposed to be the flesh-eating bacteria in this situation?” Kit crosses his arms over his chest as they enter the airport itself. “Because I’d like to go on the record as objecting to that.”

“Of course not,” Sage says, ducking his head down. “The paparazzi is the bacteria, and this whole stupid city is a petri dish. Look—try not to draw any attention to us in here, okay?”

A little annoyed, Kit mutters, “Wow, damn, good thing you said that. Here I was planning to walk through the concourse backwards, pointing at you and screaming your name at the top of my lungs, so that no one could miss you.”

“In my defense,” Sage says, low, “you have gone out of your way to show me your talent for walking backwards.”

Kit, with no way to deal with the odd rush of pleasure he felt on hearing that, has no choice but to make a face at Sage and shut up. Sage looks smirky and pleased with himself under his sunglasses, which shouldn’t be so attractive. His whole thing, the tortured mercurial whatever-it-is, shouldn’t be hot. It should be annoying. It should set Kit’s teeth on edge. It should make Kit want to scream that Sage is rich and famous and can’t have that much to mope about, instead of making him want to forget the fake relationship and make a real but very enjoyable mistake. “The whole city is a petri dish,” honestly—maybe years in Hollywood makes people more dramatic. Kit’s sure it can’t be as bad as Sage always makes it sound.

He feels a bit guilty for that thought a few minutes later, when they step out of the airport and into an onslaught of noise and light. People are surrounding them on all sides, slipping around to occupy even the space between them and the door, and they’re all screaming so loudly Kit can only pick up sections of every sentence:

“Sage! We heard⁠—”

“—bad week on set, is there any truth to⁠—”

“—here! Sage! Sage, buddy, look right here, for the⁠—”

“—and the blinds said you were planning a soft-launch⁠—”

“—is this him, Sage? The new boyfriend? Give us a kiss⁠—”

“—said new guy! Hey, new guy! Look this way⁠—”

“—editor told me a photo leaked, just a heads-up, if you care to⁠—”

“—would love a quote, Sage⁠—”

Kit’s head is spinning, all the voices seeming to blur together to chant, “Sage! Sage! Sage!” The man himself is deathly pale, almost trembling with an emotion that might be fear or might be anger; Kit doesn’t know him well enough to tell, and either would make sense. He hadn’t realized until this moment how genuinely scary it would be, to be surrounded like this by people who all seem to want something from Sage, and from him, in a lesser and more ancillary way. Eleanor and Frankie are cut off from them by the wall of photographers—Kit spots Eleanor trying to push her way through without knocking anyone over, her face grim and resigned—and while he can see, parked on the curb just ahead of them, a black town car of the same make and model as the one Sage used in Ithaca, there seems to be a whole ocean of paparazzi between them and the safety of its doors.

Sage’s eyes are starting to take on a decidedly panicky look; when Kit glances down, he sees that one of Sage’s hands has balled into a fist. He doesn’t think, just reaches deep into the part of himself that was trained to work with children, who are wonderful, life-affirming delights on their best days and absolute demons from the pits of hell on their worst ones. His thread of unshakable internal calm, so at odds with the neuroticism of his daily life, weaves through him easily and without fuss now, as it always seems to in a moment of genuine crisis.

“I have something to say!” Kit bellows this from deep in his gut, imagining the roof of his mouth as the sky he just traversed. To his pleasure and mild amazement, they all fall silent, turning not only to stare at him but to lean in towards him slightly, like hungry hyenas. Sage gives him a wide-eyed look of warning, clearly wanting to shout, “NO!” and only resisting because he doesn’t want to be observed doing so. Kit ignores this. His plan is already working; with everyone standing still to focus on him instead of stamping and clamoring around, Eleanor is making faster progress towards them.

Kit takes a deep breath, smiles out at the assembled group, and says, “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.”

Everyone stares at him. After a moment, someone from amongst the rabble says, “What?”

As Eleanor reaches them and starts clearing a path through to the car, Kit says, “The cell, you see, is the building block of all organic matter. Everything that lives is full of cells. You, me, that, uh…” He shades his eyes and glances around him for another example as Sage, silently, takes hold of his sweatshirt and starts tugging him backwards.

Doubtfully, feeling both shocked to see one exist so causally in real life and stupid for being shocked, Kit says, “Uh, that palm tree, also, is made of cells! Millions and millions of cells. They’re too small to see with the naked eye, and nevertheless, inside are even smaller little… like… organic machines? Tubes and engines and data storage that helps everything work as it should. And the mitochondria—oof!”

This last is because Eleanor, without warning or ceremony, shoves him into the back of the waiting town car. Kit blinks in the abrupt darkness as she shuts the door behind him and walks around to climb into the passenger seat; when she opens the door, he can hear the clamor of the paparazzi shouting, having gotten over their confusion enough to be angry about having experienced it. But the minute she shuts it behind her, they’re enveloped in thick, sweet silence again, even the sound of tire on road inaudible as they pull away and into the flow of traffic. Sage is on the seat beside him, staring at Kit as though Kit is a total stranger who has audaciously clambered into his car.

“Shit, wait—where’s Frankie?” Kit twists around in his seat, slightly panicked to realize she’s gone, but Eleanor laughs from the front.

She explains that Frankie left to find a cab to her office, and that it’s protocol in these situations for her to do that. “Easier to extract one person from a bad situation than two, two than three, etcetera. And her face has never been on the cover of People, so. She can always peel off without much trouble.”

Kit’s barely there as she introduces him to Jason, their driver, and explains that she’s going to close the partition so that they can talk shop. He’s thinking about what it means that this happens to Sage, getting mobbed like that, so often that they have a set of practiced protocols in place.

For the first time since Sage walked into Sawyer’s and placed a piece of his life in Kit’s hands, Kit can feel the weight of it. Dizzily, he wonders how Sage has been carrying it alone all these years. He wonders how anyone could.

“What was that?” Sage asks after a moment.

Kit jerks and turns to look at him. For a horrible second he’s terrified that Sage has somehow heard his thoughts. Then he recognizes the look on Sage’s face, having seen it so many times on other people’s. That’s the “Kit, Your Behavior Has Baffled Me Utterly” look. Sage is, of course, asking about what Kit said to those reporters.

Wincing slightly, Kit admits, “A brief excerpt from the Corner of Knowledge lesson the kids were going to get tomorrow? I bet they’re all going to be glad it’s Miss Allison yelling about swords and flails instead, now that I think about it.”

When Sage’s baffled look only deepens, Kit quickly explains about the Corner of Knowledge, concluding, “Anyway—it was fresh in my mind, and it seemed like we could use a distraction, and… I don’t know.” He shrugs, offering Sage a sheepish smile. “I figured they might as well learn something.”