Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [119]
He moved toward her on the creaky daybed. He put his arms around her waist and pulled her onto his lap. He pressed her hard against his chest. He put his face in her neck.
“This is something I want,” he said, and she could hear the emotion in his voice. “This is something I’ve always wanted.”
When Lena stepped off the plane from London in JFK airport in New York City, the first face she saw was his. He’d somehow managed to talk, bribe, or wrestle his way all the way up to the gate to wait for her.
She saw Kostos walking toward her in long slow-motion strides, his gray tweed coat flapping open. His eyes were steady on her face. He wasn’t smiling, but he didn’t look sorry. He looked serious, like a serious man would look doing a serious thing.
Here we go. She walked toward him and he toward her, as far as he could come, into the throng of the departing passengers and past the gate attendant, who seemed to be annoyed with him and calling out to him. But he didn’t say anything back or even turn his head. He kept his eyes on her and she didn’t look away. She didn’t feel self-conscious or nervous. She didn’t need to smile or ask silently for reassurance. She was sure.
She didn’t see any of the people around her as she went. She saw the determination in his face and she felt it too. She found herself thinking, Well, this is it, and knew she was walking into the rest of her life without another pause or question or even a glance to either side. I choose you, she thought. Come what may, you are what I choose.
She didn’t stop until he was right in front of her. They just stood there staring at each other for a moment. She wasn’t sure what happened after that. He put his arms around her, she put hers around him, she was up off her feet and he was squeezing her against him as hard as he could have without knocking the wind out of her.
People streamed around them and the gate attendant continued carping at them and he put her back on her feet and they kissed like they had been waiting to do that and only that for a dozen years.
At some time after the people were gone and the gate attendant had given up and moved to straightening the desk, they broke apart and looked at each other again.
He took her hand and they started walking toward the baggage claim. They didn’t say anything to each other. They swung their held hands like little kids, like they believed anything could happen, like they might take off soaring into the air. All the things you wanted to happen could happen. Why not?
She looked over at him and he was smiling. How she loved the British Airways terminal.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s someday.” He said the last word in Greek.
Country roads,
take me home.
—John Denver
Carmen crept along the bewildering roads in a rented Ford Focus certain she was lost. She’d flown from New Orleans to New York the night before last and stayed long enough to meet Jones at their loft and tell him she didn’t want to get married. “Not now, or not ever?” he’d asked.
“Not ever,” she’d said as gently as she could manage. She wasn’t sure if he was more disappointed by that or by the earlier revelation that she’d come home from New Orleans four days prematurely and without a contract.
He wasn’t so bitter, really, except when he told her he was keeping the loft. He seemed to think she was going to fight him over it, but she said fine. She hadn’t wanted to stay in it anyway. She had never loved it the way he had, and even the third of the rent she paid was honestly more than she could afford.
He sat on the bed for the first hour and watched her pack. He told her she was making a big mistake, and she nodded even though she knew she wasn’t. He told her single girls over thirty in New York City never found husbands, even if they were beautiful, and she nodded, though she found it frankly insulting. He told her magnanimously that