Fly With Me | ✓

42

"If Kingston Maverick is late to my wedding, I may suffocate him with all this tulle."

October turned to November and their promised talk about Vegas had never happened. Everleigh didn't want to bring it up, Maverick seemed disinclined to do so, too. They existed on parallel planes that refused to cross streams for fear of becoming nuclear.

When they woke up the morning of Roman and Florence's wedding—November 16, the day Roman pretended to be confused about an assignment and made Florence tutor him. A full dumbass, but Everleigh supposed it worked out—Everleigh and Maverick went separate ways. Everleigh had to be there early, some stupid shite about hair and makeup and how she was the maid of honour, so she had to be there. She'd done a thousand and one rehearsal dinners at that point so it was simply decorating the venue and hoping her outfit actually fit.

"I don't know when he's showing up."

Maverick had to record; he had emergency time booked that he'd only found out a couple days before. He always found out days before, sometimes hours. Sometimes he left in the middle of the night and Everleigh woke up in bed with Dewey in his place and a note that had been scribbled in the dark with practically illegible handwriting. That's what happened when files corrupted on his previous Superhero recordings and put him a month behind his self-imposed deadline. He sang like he was running out of time; re-recorded as many songs as he could with any time he could get.

(The day he found that out had been hard.) (Everleigh and Maverick might've been at a stalemate in terms of communication but not one ounce of lingering awkwardness had stopped him from crying in her arms.) (He broke the left lens of his glasses with how hard he'd dropped them on the floor while on the phone with one of his producers.) (He called Stevie a lot during the re-recordings for someone who refused to tell her his files had been fucked up—said he didn't want to bring her down with him but needed to hear from her.) (Everleigh wasn't sure he'd ever look so broken in all the time she'd known him.)

"Better be before I walk down the aisle."

Everleigh shrugged. "He needs to do what he needs to do."

"Is something wrong between the two of you?"

"What do you mean? No."

"I know you think I don't know you," Florence said, wiggling into her dress, "but I know that look. Do you want to talk about it?"

Everleigh started doing buttons up at the back. "Nothing's wrong between Kingston and me."

"No fights? Or I dunno—"

"Flo, it's your wedding day—" Everleigh was struggling with the buttons. Not because there was anything wrong with the dress, because her hands shook so fucking much talking about Maverick that it was practically impossible to function physically.

"Roman said you two had to buy emerg—"

"Oh my God, he's got a big mouth."

"Does Mav want kids? Is that what this is about?"

"We've never talked about that," Everleigh said. "That's not where we're at right now."

"Maybe you should."

"We're not fighting over fucking kids, we're arguing about him leaving for Vegas for potentially a long time." Well. There it was. Big old pile of dirty laundry. Dusty bones toppling from the closet.

"You're arguing about long distance when you did long distance for a while?"

"We're not arguing."