My hopes were sinking, but I refused to give up on her. She traveled light. No luggage didn’t mean no Charlie. But from my bench, I had a perfect view of all of the arriving travelers, and she hadn’t been among them. The gate agent had been able to confirm that the flight out of New York had been delayed, but the passengers aboard probably had enough time to make the New Orleans connection. Even at my most charming, the woman had refused to tell me one way or another whether Charlie had boarded either flight. Her murmured apologies about policies and data privacy didn’t calm the knots in my stomach. My call to Ivers didn’t give me anything either. He had no idea what Charlie had done after he’d left her at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. When I’d booked the flight, I’d once again debated whether to include a message for Ivers to pass along. But something had held me back. The conversation Charlie and I needed to have couldn’t take place through an intermediary. I was banking on the fact that the plane ticket would speak for itself.
How much clearer could I make it that I wanted her to come home? That I didn’t care who she was?
But I did care that she hadn’t trusted me. I hated knowing that she’d made a conscious decision to withhold the truth, even though I’d made it pretty damn clear that it didn’t matter what she was hiding. Well, as long as it wasn’t three husbands and a string of serial murders. I tried to put myself in her position, but even then, it sucked to know she hadn’t felt like she could trust me.
So I sat on my bench and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
When I finally rose, feeling like the metal slats had imprinted themselves on my ass, I had to face facts: I’d been waiting for a lot longer than four hours. I’d been waiting for months—even before she’d run. All I’d wanted from her was a sign that she was in this with me. A sign that we had a chance at something real together. And I’d gotten nothing.
I’d waited for nothing.
I left the airport wondering how much longer I could wait for this woman.
Derek met me at the bar.
“I take it she wasn’t on the plane.”
“No.” My tone was clipped. I really didn’t want to talk about it. About her. I wanted to get drunk. “Maker’s. Neat,” I told the bartender.
“Yes, sir.”
“So what are you going to do? You going up there?”
I turned to Derek. “Can we just drink?”
“Come on, man. You gotta have a plan. I know you. You always have a plan.”
He was right. Except, for the first time in my life, I didn’t. “Charlie has a habit of blowing all of my fucking plans to pieces.” The bartender set the bourbon in front of me, and I picked it up and took a healthy swig. “You want to know what my plan was for today? I was going to pick her up at the airport, and it was going to be romantic as hell. Instead, I watched luggage go round and round the baggage claim for four fucking hours, and she never came. Killed my sense of romance.” I tipped back the rest of my drink and smacked the glass down on the bar. “So now, I just want to get drunk enough so I can stop thinking about everything for a few hours. How’s that sound?”
Derek studied me with all too knowing eyes. “How long are you going to chase this girl before you finally give up on her?”
The thing that sucked about having a best friend who’d known you since childhood was that he wasn’t afraid to ask a question you weren’t ready to answer. I wasn’t ready to give up on Charlie yet, but I was nearing the edge of my fortitude.
I gestured to the bartender to pour me another. Derek stayed silent, clearly waiting for a response. Refilled drink in hand, I turned back to him. “What? How the fuck do you expect me to answer that?”
He shrugged and sipped his drink. “With the truth, I guess.”
“The truth is, I don’t know. If you were in my shoes, would you have stopped chasing Mandy?”
He swirled the liquor in his glass. “No. But still, there comes a point when she’s gotta push all her chips into the middle too. You’ve both gotta be all in.”
“You think I don’t know that?” My frustration ratcheted up a few more notches.
“I don’t know what to say, man. I guess, if I were you, I’d give it a few more days, and then I’d start asking myself some tough questions. Because with her history of running, you might have to face the possibility that she might never be coming back.”
I downed the rest of my bourbon. I waved the bartender over. “Can you just leave us the bottle?”
Derek looked sideways at me. “Getting hammered ain’t exactly gonna help.”
I sloshed liquor into my glass. “Sure ain’t gonna hurt.”
After one delayed flight due to mechanical problems, one missed connection because I’d misread my boarding pass, and one uncomfortable night of no sleep on a bench in the Atlanta airport, the plane touched down in New Orleans at eleven AM. I waited impatiently for the passengers ahead of me to grab their luggage and disembark. The saying, ‘a day late and a dollar short’ kept running through my head.
As the cab approached the familiar iron gates, topped with intricate fleur de lis, I struggled to piece together what the hell I was going to say.
I’m sorry seemed so … inadequate.
I paid the driver and climbed out. I faced the fence that separated me from Simon. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Just like before, there was more than metal between us. There were the lies, the truth, and everything else. I wondered if we could really overcome it. I reached for the button on the intercom, but paused when I spotted Simon through the vine-covered bars.