Chapter 23
It wasn’t fair, she thought. The weekend floated by like a dream: lazy mornings making love, late brunches, walking the waterside, cocktails, lazy afternoons napping, entangled with one another, late night dinners, lazy nights making love. Unmoored of any schedule—not that she held too much of a schedule normally—and not intruded on by the real world, they soon found themselves at the airport on Monday morning. This time, she was in no rush to leave. She fought to keep it breezy, desperate not to appear desperate.
“So, another airport,” he said, trying to smile.
“I’m not a mess this time,” she said.
“I really had a great time.”
“So when are you flying up?”
He brightened. “To Boston?”
“Duh.”
“I’d drive, but whenever you’re free.”
“I don’t care if FedEx yourself, Norfolk.”
“Norfolk?”
“Yeah, you’re my Norfolk.”
“A guy in every port, I totally get it.” He pursed his lips and nodded deeply. “You’re my Boston, by the way.”
“Oh really?” she said, her eyes narrowing.
“Boston and Lawrence, Kansas technically.”
“I better be your entire Eastern goddamn Seaboard. I better be your US of A.”
“But free and clear internationally, right?”
“Planet Earth, bitch.”
“So that’s how it is then?”
“That’s how it is.”
She hadn’t asked him to kneel before her, tapping his shoulders with a blade and proclaiming that henceforth he shall be her boyfriend, but in her own roundabout way, she had laid a claim. She hadn’t planned on it, but there it was, and she was surprised to find herself relieved. In those moments before boarding the plane and saying goodbye to this pocket dimension where money was an antiquated construct and boy bands never pranced the earth, she needed to extract something. A talisman to hold onto when she returned to her dreary Boston kingdom.
She wanted him to visit her, badly, but she held him out like a prize. Work needed to be done first. Dragons needed slaying. Once she got home, she called Lou.
“New York tomorrow,” her manager told her. “I’ll text your train tickets.”
“Great,” said Corey, with zero enthusiasm.
“Try to think of it this way: once upon a time, most women would have killed to be in the same room with these guys.”
Yeah, thought Corey, but I’m not most women.
Wasn’t that supposed to be the point?