Page 110 of Guilty as Sin
The control tower was visible now. In another two minutes, they’d be at the airport. “So what do you think I should do?” Paige asked. “And anyway—whose side are you on?” Lily had always stuck up for her, had always told her she was the best.Always.If she didn’t have Lily’s love, Lily’s approval, she trulywasalone.
“I’m on your side, sweetie.” Lily followed the signs to Departures and eased to the curb. “Always. I want you to be happy. But you know… sometimes happiness takes risk. Like moving to Montana all alone, when you’ve never been alone, and opening a store with the last credit you have. Or like being a cop.”
“I do take risks. You just said it.”
“You take them for me. You took them for your partner. You take them for strangers. You’ll put your life on the line. How about your heart?”
Paige was trying not to choke up. It wasn’t working. “I don’t… I can’t…”
Lily said, “Oh, sweetie,” reached across the seat, and gave her a hug. “I love you so much. You’re so special. You deserve everything. I wish you could believe it. I wish you could reach out and take it.”
“OK.” It made no sense to say, but it was what Paige had. She got out of the car and pulled her suitcase out of the back. Black. Small. Holding about ten garments and a pair of running shoes. A Paige suitcase, not a Lily one. All she could be was who she was.
Lily came around the car and hugged her again. “I love you. You know that. You want me to park and come in?”
“No.” She needed to be alone. She needed to shut down for a while. She’d process when she could, but not now. Now, all she was feeling was panic. “Love you.”
“Call me when you get there,” Lily said.
“Yeah.” Paige was already moving. “I will.”
Thirty minutes in the terminal. A cup of coffee, thinking about a muffin, and not buying it. Taking an apple out of her purse instead and eating that. Fitness. Discipline.
She waited at the gate, standing because she was too impatient to sit, and scrolled through the messages and notifications on her phone. She and Lily had finally switched phones again this morning, but there was nothing on her phone that Paige cared about enough to captivate her. After that, she stood and stared into the distance, waiting for it to be time.
Everything ended eventually, and this wait did, too. She was in a long, slow boarding line, and then she was shoving her suitcase into the overhead bin and taking her aisle seat. No eager businessman this time. A young kid, maybe seventeen, with curly hair, a prominent Adam’s apple, and a ball cap, who looked at her, swallowed nervously, and stared down at his phone again.
Time to dye her hair back to brown, she guessed, now that her face wasn’t bruised and swollen. She’d kind of liked being blonde again, but it didn’t fit her life. Her real life. She didn’t want to look at her phone, but she did anyway, because there was nothing else to do.
The voice came from above her. “I’ll give you… seventy-three dollars to switch seats with me.”
She looked up fast.Jace.Standing over her with no suitcase, no laptop bag. Nothing but his wallet and a fistful of bills.
The kid next to Paige said, “Really? Sure,” and tried to stand up.
What could Paige do? She stood up and let him out. The flight attendant came down the aisle and said, “Take your seats, please.” Paige moved over one, next to a grandmotherly lady in the window seat, and let Jace sit down. Her head was whirling. Her heart was trying to do a dance, then trying to stop itself. She was in no way cool.
Jace said, “Buckle your seatbelt,” and did it himself.
She said, “What are you… what…”
He said, “I had a thought.” The engines were revving, and the flight attendant’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Which will have to wait,” Jace said, “until we’re airborne.”
He was so calm, and she was nothing like it. The wait was endless. Talking, talking. Life jackets and oxygen masks, when Paige was flailing in the water without any kind of support, and she couldn’t get her breath.
Finally, the big engines were hurtling them forward, the ground dropped away, and the green and gray and white of the Rocky Mountains showed out the window. And Jace said, “Life’s too short not to have every minute count. Who said that? Oh, yeah. You.”
“I did.” Her heart was trying to run away with her.
“I abandoned two trolleys full of things I needed in a store back there,” Jace said. “I didn’t want to buy things to put into a house where I’d be alone. If I’m going to all that trouble, I want to put them into a house that might at least get a visit from the woman I love. Though I’d rather she lived there with me. If I’m putting it on the line here, and it seems I am.”
“But you… you didn’t like living in the city.”
“I didn’t like living in New York. I didn’t want to go to cocktail parties. Do you go to cocktail parties?”
“No. I might go to a barbecue sometimes with cops, though.”
“Research,” he said. “Works for me. And it could be I’ll like San Francisco better than New York. Or someplace around there. You never know until you try. There’s a place where people live on houseboats, hey.”
