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She laughs softly and rolls out of bed, padding to the bathroom. When she emerges, she walks straight to her luggage and starts to paw around. “Damn, are all my sweatshirts in my other bag?” She rubs her hands up and down her arms.
“I have a spare in my suitcase. Help yourself.”
She flashes me a smile and flips open the top of my bag, shifting through my neatly packed clothes. I clearly didn’t think this through because she has to shift aside a pair of my boxer briefs before she finds my old Cubs sweatshirt. She pulls it over her head, and I definitely catch her holding the collar to her nose to give it a quick sniff before tugging the hem down. It hits below her shorts, but that still leaves plenty of leg. When she goes to flip the lip of my suitcase closed again, she tilts her head.
“Um. What’s this?”
I don’t know if she thinks I should be embarrassed to see her holding up the green bow headband she was wearing at the bar, but I’m not, not really.
“You left it behind.” I stretch and swing to sit on the edge of the bed as she looks incredulously at the object in her hand.
“No, the point is, you kept it?”
I shrug. “It was proof that I didn’t make you up.”
She bites her lip, spinning the headband between two fingertips.
“Yeah, I really was there and gone, wasn’t I?”
“It was more of a come-and-go situation,” I say with a smirk. This gets a groan and a laugh out of her, as I was hoping.
“Take it back,” I say. “I know you want to. We turned you into a full-blown Christmas girl yesterday, me and Sandy Claus.”
Her laugh is light and happy, and it chases away the last of the awkwardness that came from waking up in each other’s arms.
“I don’t know, it matches your new hat.” But she tucks it away in her suitcase, and I’m glad. I held on to that little scrap of green to prove that I hadn’t made up that beautiful, charismatic girl who let loose in bed and then ran without a backward glance, but I’m delighted that she wants to keep it. Maybe it’ll remind her of me someday when she looks at it in her Christmas tree-less apartment.
The reminder that this is our last day together is a sobering one, and it gets me up and out of bed. I should be annoyed by yet another delay, but all I really want to do is find a diner that serves a really good breakfast so we can linger over coffee and I can pull more confessions from Birdy’s pretty pink lips. I want to see her nose crinkle when she laughs. Get her to tease me some more about my soft-boy Christmas tendencies.
So that’s what we do. We spend the hours until our repair appointment at the little restaurant down the block, talking and laughing and arguing about movies and politics and dream vacation spots. We go through the camera rolls on each other’s phones, describing the highlights of our lives to the other person. We’re both full of pancakes and slightly burned coffee by the time the mobile repair van pulls into the hotel parking lot, and then we set off on the final leg of our trip.
The tension starts to creep back in the closer we get to Chicago.
The final leg of our journey has been uneventful, especially compared to the past two days, and it passes quickly despite my efforts to hold on to the last of the time I have with her.
I drive the speed limit. I make sure we stop for bathroom breaks. I regularly resupply our snacks. But the sun sets, the sky turns black, and my stomach gets more and more leaden as the traffic on I-90 starts to pick up as we near Chicago.
“Seriously, you don’t need to go,” I say. “You’re welcome at my parents’ house for Christmas.”
I’ve extended this invitation three times now. I’m probably starting to sound a little desperate, but it’s intolerable, the idea of Birdy getting on the train at Union Station that’ll take her to Milwaukee, where she’ll spend Christmas alone. She just confessed how isolated she feels, but she’s refusing to even consider a holiday surrounded by conversation and music and lights and food and laughter and love. Everybody deserves that, but especially her. I saw the way she lit up as we walked along the streets of Bermuda. I heard the longing in her voice when she was finally honest with me in the hotel room. She craves that joy; she just doesn’t know how to reach for it.
Like now. She lifts her stubborn little chin and says, “I told you, I’m not going to intrude on your family’s Christmas.”
“It’s not intruding.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the stranger in this scenario.”
I bite back a growl. It’s the same response she’s given me twice before. “You’re not a stranger to me.”
She rolls her eyes. “How old am I? Where did I go to undergrad? What am I allergic to?” When I don’t answer, she says, “We’re basically strangers.”
Every part of me wants to tell her that she’s wrong. If you count up the hours, I’ve spent more time with her than the last half dozen women I’ve dated. I told her serious things and silly things, and I’ve seen her laugh and cry and yes, I’ve seen her body shake as she comes. She’s not a stranger. She didn’t even feel like a stranger the first time we spoke.
I thought she felt that way too, but here she is, intent on getting away from me yet again. It’s that first day on the road all over again. I hate it, but after this time with her, I understand it. She lost the only person she loved, and she’s putting up boundaries to avoid future pain.
Once again, I have to adjust my idea of her. She’s the girl from the bar and the airport and the hotel that first night. She’s the girl putting on a brave face for Sandy Claus, the girl with no family, the girl who whispers her secrets in the dark. She’s all of those things, and underneath it all, she’s scared.
I want to tell her it’s okay, that I can handle her fear. I can be brave for both of us. But she’s made it clear that all she wants is for me to drop her at the train station and drive away.
