Page 38 of Julian

It’s nothing. A passing irritation. A misplaced reaction.

It will fade. Has to.

But as we step fully into the terminal and the doors slide shut behind us, sealing out the cold, I find that it doesn’t fade.

It lingers, low and persistent, threading through my thoughts entirely out of proportion—and entirely out of my control.

By the time I step onto the plane, I’ve had enough of my own mind.

It’s too loud and crowded, every thought circling back on itself, tugging at a thread I don’t intend to free. Not here, not now. The next forty-eight hours are already spoken for, structured down to the minute, and I don’t have the patience for whatever this… change is, this unwelcome unraveling.

I take my window seat at the front of the plane and buckle in. I wave off the flight attendant and lay my head back. I close my eyes, an indicator to anyone who wants to take the seat next to me that I’m not in a conversing mood.

At first, nothing changes. The world holds its shape.

Then, slowly, as if someone is lowering the lights on everything sharp and defined, blurring the lines between what is real and what is remembered, the noise stretches and thins, dissolving into a distant and indistinct blur, and the tension I’ve been carrying loosens its grip, unwinding.

Before I realize it, I’m drifting away, transported somewhere else completely.

Central Park in April, the trees were fully green, and the typical smell of the city gave way to warm grass and the faint sweetness of the cherry blossoms. Kylie walked a few steps ahead of me on the path, her dark curls loose and catching the breeze off the water. The sun found the auburn buried in all that brown, mesmerizing me.

She glanced back over her shoulder, brown eyes bright with mischief. “That sound you just made is really cute,” she said.

“I did not make a sound,” I say drolly, although I’m pretty sure I’d hummed low in my chest when she beamed at a baby in a passing stroller.

“You absolutely did make a sound.” She slowed until I fell into step beside her and grinned in that confident way that said she was going to win this argument. “It was a very small, very cute sound of delight, but it was a sound nonetheless.”

“I don’t make cute sounds,” I grumbled. “I’m a man. I make beastly sounds.”

She laughed, oh so knowingly. “You make cute sounds when there’s good pie involved. You have absolutely no grace around pie, Julian. It’s honestly your most attractive imperfection.”

I put on my best aristocratic and egotistical voice. “I have very few flaws, I’ll have you know.”

She laughed again, looping her arm through mine and pressed into me. “The absolute confidence of that sentence is also adorable.”

“Now you’re just inventing things.”

Kylie stopped walking and turned to face me fully, reaching up to straighten the collar of my jacket. “You’re blushing now.”

“I don’t—”

She touched two fingers lightly to my cheek. “Pink… just on the edge of your beard. You think that thing can hide your emotions, but it can’t.”

And God help me, I felt the heat rise in my face. She giggled with delight, so purely Kylie, that I reached for her without thinking and pulled her into me.

“Don’t you dare ever repeat that,” I warned into her hair, my lips curling into a smile.

“Too late,” she said, still laughing, her arms coming around my waist. “I’m telling everyone.”

The memory fades, ending with the way it always starts… her laugh.

My Kylie.

She was just thirty when we met all those years ago, already so confident in a way I never was. There was nothing tentative about her, nothing cautious. She moved through the world as if it belonged to her, as if she had every right to shape it to her will.

It burned hot between us. Love should unfold gradually, but it took hold all at once. A conversation that turned electric, a challenge that turned into fascination, fascination into infatuation.

But beyond that, she met me head-on. And I loved her for it almost immediately.