No Kissing Allowed

Chapter 5: The Butterfly Effect

"Can't you get a new agency?"

He pulled in a shuddering breath. Get ahold of yourself, man. This was pathetic. He dropped his hand and forced himself to meet her eyes. A change of subject was in order. "Who are you going with?" he asked. "To Bora Bora. Girl's trip or something?"

Her eyes flicked down for a split second before she looked at him again. She smiled, but she was clearly a rank amateur when it came to faking her emotions.  "No. Just me. My honeymoon for one."

He blinked at her.

"You've never heard of a woman traveling alone before?"

"Let me guess. Did you recently finish reading Eat Pray Love?"

The tiniest trace of a smile quirked her lips. "No, but I saw the movie."

"Right." He arched his neck back, attempting to crack the vertebrae between his shoulder blades. "The book was better."

"You read it?"

"I read things from time to time."

She looked skeptical.

"I am semi-literate, despite appearances."

"You're not exactly the target audience. That's all."

He shrugged. "Know thy enemy..."

She smiled outright then. She pulled out her phone and directed her attention at the screen so as not to give him the satisfaction. "Oh shit."

"Problem?"

"Delayed two hours."

He adjusted his features into a suitably doleful expression. "Bad luck. They don't usually delay the early morning flights."

She sighed, still looking at her phone. And then she said with far more force. "Oh shit."

"What now? Cancelled?"

But no. Something else. She looked genuinely shaken. He leaned toward her. For once the look on his face was not a mask. "What happened?"

Her index finger floated upward, requesting silence as she read. A furrow formed between her eyes. Jamie scooted across the aisle into the empty seat beside her. She held the phone out for him to read over her shoulder, scrolling with her thumb back up to the top of the page.

CNN International
Dozens missing in French Polynesia after mudslides near popular resort

"That's where I was supposed to be," she whispered. Not to him. To the universe at large, perhaps. She didn't seem entirely aware of Jamie's presence.

Her hand was shaking. He touched her wrist to steady it. She looked at him with rounded eyes. "Literally. The resort where I'm supposed to be. There are tourists missing."

Jamie sensed her gaze pass through him as if he were a ghost. The tremor in her hand had spread. He could feel the faint vibration from her whole frame trembling. He fought the urge to put his arm around her.

Maybe he should have. Jamie wasn't sure. He did his best to comfort her with words. "You're fine. You're not there. You're half a world away."

"I was supposed to fly last night. I got bumped." She squeezed her eyes shut. "They asked, and I said— I said—"

He did slip his arm around her shoulders then. She didn't seem to mind. She leaned against him. "So that's what brought you to my cocktail table last night."

"I said yes. Pure random chance."

"No such thing." He squeezed her shoulders and fluttered the fingers of his other hand in the air. "A butterfly flapped its wings somewhere..."

She looked up at him. At him, not through him. He had the strangest feeling she was seeing him for the first time since they met. He dropped his arm.

"A butterfly flapped its wings," she repeated slowly, finishing the ending that he'd allowed to trail off. "And changed the weather half a world away?"

He hadn't expected her to recognize his reference. The Butterfly Effect. Tiny changes and their consequences, compounding infinitely through time and space, could explain the most random-seeming of events. An air current from the beat of a butterfly's wing could set off a chain of events that led to a hurricane on the other side of the planet. "Everyone believes in either random chance or fate," he explained, "but the truth is more complicated than either one."

She nodded. "I wrote a term paper once about Chaos Theory."

"Did you really?" Good God, he thought, when was the last time he met someone who understood his ramblings? But she didn't look at him blankly. On the contrary, she looked vaguely incredulous that the likes of him might be familiar with such a concept.

"I haven't thought about that in years," she said. "Did you study it in college?"

"Saw the movie." He released his hold on her shoulders. "You have it wrong though. Close but not quite."

Her eyebrows went up.

He grinned and bumped her shoulder with his own. "A butterfly flapped its wings in Bora Bora and changed your airline ticket half a world away..." He pulled out his phone and refreshed the screen to show her.

Cozumel - AM2834 - 7:34am / Gate 34E

"I can't," she whispered.

"You can't go to Bora Bora. Come with me instead."

"A whole month?"

"A nice break from reality. We'll lie side by side on a beach and forget the world exists."

She searched his eyes, and Jamie knew in that moment he needed to drop the mask. Let her see the truth, the mess of a man he really was. He drew her an outline of the facts in rapid fire. "Listen, I'm backed into a corner. My agency is going to drop me, and already I'm damaged goods. I'm too old to start fresh somewhere else. D'you understand? I need this or I'm dead."

He held his breath and prayed to whatever higher power might preside over butterflies and beautiful optometrists.

"I suppose..." she said at last. "As long as it's strictly a career thing."

"As opposed to what?"

"I have less than zero interest in a romance."

Not with somebody like him, Jamie silently amended. Oof.  He couldn't help but laugh at her directness.

"Right, of course," he chuckled. "All purely for show."

She bit her lip, and Jamie sensed her making mental calculations. "OK, but I have one condition. Non-negotiable."

"Anything," he said.

Her eyes flitted briefly to his mouth before meeting his open gaze again. "No kissing allowed. For show or otherwise. Is that going to be a problem?"

Jamie straightened his face and put his hand across his heart. "Of course not. You have my word."

She held his gaze for a long moment. Finally, she nodded and repeated his vow back to him. "Fine. You have my word as well."

Jamie tilted back his head, and the knot in his neck released its tension all at once. "Thank you, thank you, thank you." He breathed the words three times, a chant to the ceiling of the bus, before turning to Cora again. "You're saving my life," he said to his salvation. "I swear I will make it up to you somehow."

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