The Cupid Touch

The Cupid Touch Chapter 27 - The Hardest Thing is Saying Go

I changed my flights that night. It meant calling Fernando up and lying to him about having finished my coding project and being lonely, so he could pay for them. There was no way I had enough in my account to cover a twelve-hundred-dollar last-minute trip in the holiday season.

"Are you sure you don't mind?" I said to him, for about the tenth time, as he told me the money had been transferred.

"Of course I don't," he said, with all the warmth that I'd always liked in him so much. "You have no idea how upset your mother's been about you not being home earlier. Even if I didn't miss you, I'd want to get a little peace and quiet."

I laughed, almost disappointed that this was really happening. I'd even been granted an extension on my coding project, so there was no excuse any more.

"You want me to pick you up from the airport?" Fernando asked, before ringing off.

"Actually - that'd be great."

The idea of arriving alone and taking the train out to Marlbro town was miserable. It was going to take Fernando an hour to drive each way, but the idea of being cushioned in his gorgeous Lamborghini gave the trip a little something to look forward to.

"What's the flight number?"

Heavy-hearted, I opened my laptop and checked the page I already had up.

"It's AA268."

"I'll be there. Can't wait."

There were two muffled clicks and then he was gone. Joe was already sliding his arms around me and although I can remember the sound now, right then it was unimportant. I was looking at that bright, unforgiving screen, and there was nothing for it but to click the "Purchase" button and accept that I was going.

"You want to catch a movie or something while we get everything packed up?" he murmured, once I'd paid the breath-takingly large amount of money for the flights and gone through the online check-in.

"No," I said, leaning back into him. "Can we just talk? About your brother? And about, I don't know... all the stupid things you used to do when you were young?"

"Umm, we only have until the morning..."

Somehow I managed to laugh at it, and to keep laughing while I packed away my worldly belongings.

I don't want to go. I don't want to go.

It was a little mantra in my head, and it only got drowned out by a stream of inane, cheerful chatter that I somehow kept up the whole way to the airport.

Looking back on it, I feel like I might have known something. I was never one for premonitions, but most of my certainties about the world had been overturned by the crazy stuff I could do, and then by the craziness Joe did. Maybe I did know. Or maybe I was just too used to losing people.

Whatever the reason, I was trying so hard to hold in a wave of sadness and fear that I didn't have room for silence. If I'd stopped with my monologue about Christmas and my Mom and Fernando and the flight, I'd have started choking on tears. I'd have begged Joe-Moe not to make me leave him. And I might have let him thaw me out a little, but I wasn't going to come across as needy. No I was not.

He parked up high up in the multi-storey lot and walked with me all the way to the terminal. He was quiet, watching my face and smiling slightly, but his arm never left its place around me, and when we finally arrived in the bright, busy airport, he turned towards me and gave me a kiss so fierce it was hard to breathe.

I still sort-of hated him for the way he made me want to melt into him; for the way I would forget everything; for the sigh of desire that escaped me pretty much every time. I let go of my bags and wrapped myself around him, letting him muss up my hair with one hand and push my sweater up with the other, and not caring.

I don't know who went back for more kisses, him or me, but it seemed like it couldn't stop. They punctuated our few words.

"Message me when you land."

"OK. Will you - let me know what happens? Everything?"

"I promise. Everything I eat, and every piece of crap I watch on TV."

"Good. And, you know... any drug dealers who may or may not come after you."

He smiled at me, close-up, his green eyes on me. Then he leaned his forehead against mine and for a few moments he rocked us both to a music I couldn't hear.

"I'm going to miss you, Ms. Morgan."

"I guess I might miss you too."

I thought about saying more, but that awful lump in my throat was growing, and I knew I had to go if I was going to hold it in.

I let go of him, and it made me feel somehow better and sadder that he tried to hold on for a moment before he stepped back.

I made it to the security line without quite breaking down, but I was losing the room a little as my eyes filled up.

"Hey, Helena!" he called out, and I turned, seeing a fragmented version of him.

"What?"

"Do I get a Christmas present?"

"Only if you don't get dead, ok?"

He laughed, still not leaving, and looking so hot and so vulnerable just then in the middle of all that light and hard, reflective floor that I couldn't stand it.

"Don't you have someplace to be?" I called, with a smile.

He sighed. "I guess."

And then he ran over, ducked under the tape into the queue and straightened in front of me. I was already crying by the time he kissed me, but when he drew away from me his eyes were as wet as mine.

"Pussy," I muttered, and he gave a one-shouldered shrug and a half-smile and then, finally, left. It took all my self-control and steady breathing not to lose the fragile control I had on my feelings towards him.

"He'll be ok," I said, out loud, and found myself not caring at all that I was crying and talking to myself in front of a line of strangers.

Maybe if I hadn't been crying so hard, I would have seen them coming. Maybe I could have ducked aside, or pushed towards the security guys on the desk. But as it was, there was no warning until someone jostled into me, and I felt something uncomfortable dig into my side.

"Step out of the queue."

It was a quiet voice, but the kind-of voice that knew it was going to be obeyed. I was almost moving before I'd had a chance to think, and then when I paused to think, I realised that what was digging into me was a knife. I only hesitated long enough to see that it was the smaller guy who'd followed me into the Math department. The bright light was shining off his slightly-balding head, and meeting his eyes was like the opposite of looking at Joe. Where those green eyes had been full of communication and emotion and feeling, this guy was absolutely calm, and flat, and unconcerned. It scared the hell out of me.

I ducked under the tape while he held it up for me. I almost walked off without my suitcase, but he gave a flicker of a smile.

"Don't forget your case, darling."

I think that was worse than the order and the knife together. That calm pretence for everyone else in the queue, and the word "darling" used by a man who I was willing to bet had not a shred of empathy.

By the time I'd straightened up from dragging my case out from the line after me, he had managed to manoeuvre himself so that the knife was back against my ribs. I couldn't even see it myself, so there was no way anyone else was going to see and help me.

"Walk," he said, quietly, and I did it, the tears in my eyes beginning to clear. There were people waiting: two of them, one small and one large.

It was like an out-of-body-experience as I walked over to them. Fear is a strange thing when it's that intense. Nothing is real, and you think you might just stop breathing or functioning. Like it can't go on. But each second is followed by another, and you're still there, and still afraid.

"Hello, dearest," Lucas said to me as I grew close enough to make him out. He smiled that blank, lizard-smile of his, but there was a flicker to it, and I realised that he was scared, too. "Let's go and see a friend of mine."