AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I just turned so I was heading down the stairs, toward him.
And then I ran.
CHAPTER 24 Monday
10:40 P.M.
Russell!” I yelled as I ran through the airport.
And I didn’t even mind that it was a trope from my favorite movies. They weren’t a good blueprint for basing your life off of—I knew that now. But it was clear to me that they’d gotten one thing right: when someone’s about to slip away, possibly forever, you do what you can to get them back.
Even if it’s running through the airport.
Especially if it’s running through the airport.
I saw Russell just outside the sliding glass doors, walking away, and I picked up my pace, stepping back out into the cool California night. “Russell!”
“Darcy?” He turned, his brow furrowed, and walked toward me. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes. And also no. I just…” I closed the space between us and looked at him, seeing all the variations at once.
All the Russells I’d known over the last day. Russell sharing my pillow, reaching over to stroke my cheek. Lifting my suitcase out of the car, refusing to let me help. Reading to me as we drove across the Nevada desert. Helping me change a tire, patient and joking the whole time. Walking in the moonlight, holding a small, tired dog. Fighting with me outside his dad’s offices, both of us yelling, neither one of us backing down. Crossing the football field in step with me, a bag of tacos under his arm. And finally, the stranger in the bus station, the cute boy who heard I’d been looking for him. I took a deep breath and reached up to touch his face, my hands on either side of it. “I don’t want this to be goodbye.”
A smile flashed across Russell’s face like lightning—just as bright, gone just as quickly. “Me either,” he said. “But you actually did make some good points—”
“Why did you say actually?” I asked in a tone of faux outrage, and he laughed.
“—about what this year is going to look like for us.”
“I know,” I said. I dropped my hands and twisted them together and got my courage up. All I could do was ask. If he said no, he said no, but at least I would have tried. “But what if we didn’t have to decide right now what it’s going to be?” Russell looked at me, his eyebrows raised. I took a breath and went on.
“How about this? We’re not in touch for the next few months. We live our own lives, we do our own thing, we’re not tied to anything. But if we’re still feeling this way, we’ll meet back at the bus station in Jesse in December, over Christmas break. And if we both show up there, we’ll know we should give it a try. But we won’t be holding ourselves back or trying to stretch something out. And if only one of us—or neither of us—shows up, we’ll know it wasn’t meant to be, and no hard feelings.”
Russell had started to smile. He tilted his head to the side. “Isn’t this from a movie?”
“Um,” I said, looking down and tucking my hair behind my ear. “Possibly.”
“Isn’t it Before Sunrise?”
“Maybe,” I said, wanting to move past this. “But it’s An Affair to Remember and Sleepless in Seattle, too. There’s a long tradition.”
“But didn’t all of those take place before people could, you know—text each other?”
“I kind of like the idea,” I pointed out as I searched Russell’s face, trying to discern what he was feeling.
“No communication,” he said slowly—thinking it over. “Jesse bus station in December.”
“The twenty-first?” I asked, just picking a date at random. “Six o’clock?”
Russell shook his head. “I have something at six. Can we shift it?”
I started to reply, then realized a second later he was kidding. “What do you think?”
He took a step closer to me, cupping my chin in his hand. “I’m in if you are.”
I stretched up to kiss him just as he bent down to kiss me, and I didn’t care that we were in public or possibly blocking the doors to the airport. I needed this kiss to be the bridge between now and three months from now, giving me something to hold on to.
We broke apart after a while—I’d truly lost all sense of time—and I pulled my phone out of my pocket and groaned. “I really have to go.”
