“Wait… So you were supposed to take the plane tonight?”
“I was.” He cocks a brow at me with a mischievous smile.
“And you intentionally missed it?”
“Best decision I made in a while.” I giggle as he nuzzles his face in my neck. “Do you have another question?” He asks softly.
I sigh. “What’s the signet ring? You keep looking at it like you don’t expect it to be here, like it’s foreign to you.”
“Wow… You’ve got a knack for difficult questions, don’t you?”
“I’m sorry, if you…”
“Nah, it’s alright,” he says, but I can feel it’s a difficult topic for him. “It was my brother’s. It’s a family heirloom, given from first-born to first-born. I’m the second child and since he didn’t have any kids of his own, I got the ring.”
“Hm. Makes sense.” I pause to see if he wants to add anything, but when he doesn’t, I continue. “What is the scar on your cheekbone from?”
“A fight with my brother when I was in High School,” he answers sadly but with a faint smile. “Over a girl. He won. They got married two years ago.”
“Wow… They were together for a long time.”
“Seventeen years.”
“And they didn’t have children? Didn’t they want any?”
“They did. They just wanted to wait a little. They figured they had all the time they needed.”
I guess they didn’t. We can never know what will happen.
That makes me sad for my brother. He knows his years, or even months are numbered. He always told me he would never want children, not wanting to risk passing his rare disease along. But for the last couple of years, he begged me to settle down. Build roots. Find love, and get my own family so he could have nieces and nephews to spoil. Our other siblings being as close to us as strangers, we never really got to know any of their kids.
Plus, how can I settle when he won’t stop moving from state to state? I can’t leave him on his own. We’re a pair. We belong with each other.
“The scar on your jaw?” I ask, touching it with the tip of my finger, making him chuckle through his nose.
“My grandmother.”
“What? How?”
“We were making cookies. I was about eight. She opened the oven door and I was in the way, she didn’t see me, and the corner of it hit me on the jaw, right over the bone. I remember that it hurt like hell,” he says, muffling a laugh.
And here I was, thinking first that he was some kind of bad boy getting into fights when he seems like he’s more of a Teddy Bear. Fighting with his brother over a girl, baking cookies with his grandmother…
“That’s kind of cute. I guess it’s better getting a scar from baking than from a fist fight with your brother…”
“And yet, to this day, my jaw hurts every time I see a fucking cookie.”
A laugh escapes my throat and he smiles. From the beginning of our conversation, I wouldn’t have thought we’d be laughing now.
“Were you planning on missing your plane? Or did you just want her to wait a little?”
His smile falters imperceptibly before he flashes me his teeth again.
“I did not plan to miss it. I wanted to spend more time with you. And there was a feeling in my chest… Like if I left, you wouldn’t be here the next time I would find the courage to show back up. Or I’d miss something. I don’t really know, I just felt that I had to take a shot.”
He’s right. I know that our departure is a matter of weeks if not days. Jack is probably waiting to move after his monthly health check up in Seattle to ask them for a file transfer to a new city. The appointment is in two days, on Friday.
“And so you found a house last minute because you knew you were going to woo me?”
