Layover

An extended Beach Read epilogue

“I told you that you’d regret packing all this for a three-day trip,” Gus says as I’m dragging my broken-wheeled suitcase onto the escalator. He gently bumps me aside to hoist it up ahead of himself.

“Well, I wouldn’t have regretted it if you’d let me stuff my shoes in with your two identical T-shirts and wad of loose socks. Of course, that would only work if my husband, an adult man of six and thirty years, were bringing an actual suitcase to the professional publishing conference, instead of a JanSport backpack.”

“January,” he says, voice low as he buries his mouth against the side of my head. “You know I like to keep my hands free.” He snakes one hand around my low back, easing my weight in against him until it feels like we’re melting together.

I wrap my arms tight around his waist and tilt my face up to his. “Okay, you have a point,” I say, his fingers brushing up and down my spine. “I guess this is worth only having one suitcase.”

He smiles at me, says nothing. Sometimes he does this still, even now, years into our relationship, where his eyes get so focused and dark it feels like he’s looking straight into my veins, and whatever else is happening outside my body has dissolved, inconsequential as mist.

Like I am the only solid thing in the world. And it feels like such an honor, to be solid for him, to exist with him in moments when nothing else does. I reach for his free hand and his rough, dry fingers slide into mine like it’s a choreographed dance we’ve practiced for hours, for weeks on end, like we couldn’t mess it up if we tried.

“I can’t wait to be home,” he says quietly, and despite all the echoing noise of the airport—holiday music piped through the speakers, people talking too loudly on their phones, muffled announcements of yet more flight delays due to the snow—I hear him like he’s in my head.

Maybe he is. Maybe I’m just reading his mind, the same way he seems to read mine.

“Me too,” I say. I’m excited to get back to our patch of frozen lake, to bundle up in sleeping-bag-style down coats and duck boots and tuck our chins as we walk against the icy wind, our hands locked together, the two of us alone in the strange alien landscape of Lake Michigan in winter.

We reach the top of the escalator, and Gus wrestles my mangled bag onto the rubber-streaked tile floor so we can join the mass of people moving through the airport. “I thought you replaced this thing,” he says.

“I did,” I said. “That’s the new one.”

His brow furrows, his eyes darkening. “The same wheel on it’s broken as the last one.”

“Damn,” I say. “Really makes you think.”

“Come on,” he says.

“What, you want to go make out in the bathroom?”

“Obviously,” he says, “but first, there’s a luggage store over there. Let’s just buy a new bag.”

We pause and wait for a gap in the foot traffic, then Frogger our way over to a store called Suits & Cases, which sells—you guessed it—hazmat suits and cold-case files. Just kidding, it’s all blazers and suitcases, for the businessperson on the go whose in-flight Jameson didn’t agree with them. A harried-looking teenage shopkeeper in a pale blue polo helps us choose from a row of—frankly, identical—roller bags, and then we leave and keep trekking toward our gate.

Another announcement overhead. We pause and listen. Our flight’s been pushed back yet another hour.

Gus looks at me, brow pinching and lifting in that thoughtful way of his. “Chain restaurant cocktails?” he says.

“Oh, fuck yes,” I say.

We check the next faintly glowing, lightly vandalized (only three dicks, but one of them has eyeballs on its testicles and a mustache on top of it, so it looks like an upside-down face) terminal map. There is something called a “Chili’s Too,” which we are fascinated with.

“I just want to know what this Chili’s is in addition to,” Gus says with an air of genuine frustration, like this is a puzzle he simply must solve.

We turn back the way we came and pass Suits & Cases. Bryan-the-shopkeeper is selling someone the exact suitcase he sold us.

Gus notices too. Of course he does. “You think he works on commission?” he asks. “And that’s the most expensive thing they have in the shop?”

I shake my head. “No,” I say. “I think that’s just his favorite. It’s probably, like, the suitcase his dad bought him when he went to college or something. And now he’s saving up to go home for the holidays, and he’s working at this shop, and it’s long hours and the fluorescents give him a migraine, but whenever he looks at that bag, he just remembers what he’s going home to, and it helps him get to the end of the shift.”

Gus gives me a bemused look.

“What?” I say.

“Nothing,” he says, with a one-armed shrug. He draws the back of my hand to his mouth and presses his lips against it. “I just like you.”

Sometimes, maybe not every day, but sometimes, I still get that weightless flutter under my breastbone when he says things like this. No matter how many years we pass together, I don’t think I’ll ever forget how lucky I am to have found someone who not only loves me as much as I love him but likes me too. “I like you back,” I say.

“I had a feeling.”

We pass the gate for a plane that’s, in the most optimistic sense, bound for New York, though even once the snow-delayed connecting flights make it in, they’ll have to have the ice sloughed off of them before they can take off again. In the crowd at the gate, a fair amount of people from the publishing conference lounge around the waiting area, watching movies or reading on the floor with their luggage or wistfully gazing out the windows as snowflakes twirl past.

“Isn’t that your old editor?” Gus asks, nodding toward a man in all black sitting near the gate agents. He’s with a tall, sleek blond woman who’s speaking animatedly into her phone.

“Oh, you’re right,” I tell Gus. I start to wave, but Charlie doesn’t see it: he’s just pulled the blond woman into his lap, knotted a hand into her hair, and kissed her like there aren’t two separate elderly men eating tuna on either side of their seats. And like the phone isn’t still right next to her ear. Who knew the Ice King Charlie Lastra had it in him?

“Well,” Gus says, “I guess we don’t have to say hi to them now.”

I twist my face into his arm to smother my laughter, maybe a little bit to hide my face—I loved working with Charlie, but I suspect he hates small talk as much as Gus and I do—as we hurry past. Within a couple minutes, we finally make it to Chili’s as Well, We’re a Real Chili’s, We Definitely Count, Don’t Make Us Say it Twice. Across the aisle there’s one of those overpriced gadgety shops. You know, for in case you forget your drone or massaging foot bath at home. My dad never passed one of those shops without ducking in, and seeing one still always makes me feel a kind of complicated achy warmth in my chest. Like he’s just right there, on the other side of the flimsy layer of time and space.

As we’re sipping our Chili’s (Too) “Margaritas of the Month,” Gus notices me looking over at the techy shop and tips his chin in its direction.

“What about them?” he asks.

I follow his gaze to the only people in the store aside from the cashier: a short woman with absolutely chaotic blond hair and sparkly red cowgirl boots is holding the microphone attached to a karaoke machine and tapping it, saying, “Testing, testing, one, two, three,” loudly enough that she might as well be doing a stand-up set inside the restaurant.

She clears her throat as the first notes of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” begin to play, and shouts with aplomb, “This one’s for you, Alex!”

A few feet behind her, a tall sandy-haired man who looks like he just stepped out of a Dockers catalog is trying to melt into a shelf full of electronic fitness gear, or possibly hoping the whole shelf topples over and he meets a swift death.

She’s singing along into the microphone, at the top of her lungs, with what appears to be a somewhat rehearsed dance routine. Her companion has gone beet red, but he’s also fighting a smile.

“Siblings?” Gus asks me, starting up our game again.

As the blond woman shimmies closer to the man, his grin widens, but he’s also literally covering his face with his arms like he’s found himself in a sexier version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and he’s not sure what to do about it.

“Okay, not siblings,” Gus corrects himself as the woman turns and wraps her arm up around the man’s—Alex, she called him—neck. “Coworkers stranded by the blizzard? Mortal enemies.”

I snort.

Gus looks at me, his mouth hitching up on one side, a sexy evil smile if ever there was one. “What?”

“Those people,” I say, “are completely in love.”

His lips part. His brow furrows. He glances back at the couple. She’s just knotted her hands behind his neck. He’s still red faced, but he also can’t take his eyes off her. She pulls away as the song ends. She gestures toward him, as if she has an audience. “Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, the hottest man in the world and the love of my life: Alex Nilsen.”

Gus applauds. I join in, and hoot like I’m at a baseball game. They look over. Alex Nilsen miraculously finds a way to deepen his blush and grimaces. “Any requests for the encore?” the woman asks us, letting out a little surprised whoop when her boyfriend picks her up around the waist and bodily carries her away from the karaoke set. “Thanks, folks, you’ve been a great pleasure! I’m here all week, or until my plane’s deiced, whichever comes fir—”

Gus meets my eyes over the table again, a faint grin lurking in the corner of his mouth. “Wow,” he says, “I can’t believe we saw The Hottest Man in the World at Chili’s Too in O’Hare Airport.”

I devolve into laughter, my head dropping to my forearms on the table as it shakes through me. Underneath the sticky laminate, his palm slides up over my knee, leaving a trail of tingles behind. I set my hand over his and lift my gaze to his. It holds for a beat, the air heating between us.

But suddenly, something changes in his face, the grooves of his brow deepening as his eyes drop. “Something wrong with your drink?”

He’s just noticed I haven’t touched it.

I’m trying not to smile too big, not to give anything away. I shake my head.

Our gazes lock again, and I can see it working out behind his eyes, the realization dawning. I’ve only known since yesterday.

He stands up from the table so suddenly, his chair knocks back and everyone in the place looks our way. “Holy shit,” he says, breathless.

I start to laugh. It’s half nerves, half disbelief.

His hands rake through his hair. “Oh my god,” he rasps. “Really?”

I nod.

Gus comes around the table. He wraps his arms around me hard, clutches me to him. He’s shaking, trembling against me. “Really?” he says again.

“Really,” I say.

He draws back, looks me in the eye, voice shaky, tears fully streaming down his face, out here in the open, quite possibly the last place I ever would have chosen to make this announcement to him.

“You’re going to be a mom?” he says.

“Gus,” I say, the nervous laughter bubbling up again. “You do realize it’s yours, right?”

“I mean, I assumed.”

“You’re,” I say, “going to be a dad.”

He pulls me in again, his arms tight around my back, his mouth roughly brushing my temple, my forehead, my lips, my lips, my lips once more.

“Are you okay?” I ask when he draws back, every inch of him still trembling. “I know we weren’t planning on doing this yet. I just found out yesterday.”

Gus had been doing an author panel at the conference when my phone chirped, reminding me my period should have arrived at some point during the day. Usually I wouldn’t have bothered with a test so soon.

Somehow I just knew. Or had a hunch, at least. We hadn’t been trying, but lately we weren’t the best about not trying either. I bought four different brands, just in case some gave me false negatives, or false positives, or were otherwise faulty. Then I took all four tests in a row in a Starbucks bathroom.

One after another: positive, positive, positive, positive.

“I’m okay,” Gus promises me, his hands wrapping themselves into my hair now like he’s trying to keep me—or himself—from floating away. “I mean, I don’t feel okay at all, I feel like my heart is going to break my ribs, but I’m happy. January, I’m so fucking happy.”

Finally, the tears hit me too, just as he lets out a disbelieving laugh. He wipes at his eyes. “God, right now I just want to be home.”

“I know,” I agree. “Me too.”

“I want to build a crib,” Gus says. “I want to paint a nursery.”

“Same!” I say tearily. “I can’t stop thinking about it. We’re going to be so annoying, Gus.”

Our eyes meet. Then his dart toward the window, gauging the slow trickle of snowflakes drifting past. His gaze snaps back to mine, and the question hangs in the air for a second before he says, “Rental car?” in the same instant I say, “I could drive.”

“Let’s go home,” he says, pulling me out of my seat.

No more beautiful words in the English language, I think to myself.

“Let’s.”