115. Night Flight

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Jim turned off his light and reclined his seat further, stretching his legs. The flight attendants had offered to make his bed, but he'd declined. He wasn't there for some funny pajamas and a good night sleep. His eyes darted out the window. A whole continent spread down there, thousands of feet below, and they had to go all the way to the other end of it.

He dozed for a while, a shallow sleep that brought him no rest, and woke up to find an attendant had covered him with a light blanket. Just like Silvia had done every time she'd found him asleep.

A sigh escaped his lips. What the frigging hell was he doing on that direct flight LA-Buenos Aires? He'd just let Sean drag him along, mostly because if he refused, their argument would've ended up in a fist fight.

But that didn't change that their trip was totally useless.

He knew Silvia too damn well to harbor any hope. He could spend the rest of his life sitting on her doorstep and she wouldn't even glance down at him. Because she'd already made up her mind.

He'd sort of sensed it on their first night in Chile, and pretended he was wrong. He had his confidence and his pride to hold up the lie, and he'd even believed it for a couple of days. Until Sean had opened his big damned mouth, and he hadn't gotten any kind of answer to the acoustic the night after that.

He'd grasped to a little hope when she'd showed up at the hospital. It hadn't lasted, though. And he'd wished so bad to be wrong over the following months. But he'd finally given up fooling himself about the meaning of her silence.

He'd kept the Hey, Jay! online because he didn't want her to have any doubts about his feelings, and to make her face what he'd already acknowledged: the bond between them was there to stay, whether they liked it or not.

Nobody around them would ever understand half the things he posted from his northern city by the sea, for her to see in her southern mountain town. They did. It was about points of view, a sense of humor, doubts, convictions, thoughts they didn't share with anybody else. What she'd tried to explain to him once, talking about why she liked his music.

Those little things that had brought them together right from the start, with the first sarcasm on that stormy night. Those things that still fed a dialog everybody would call a monologue, validated by her quiet visits to the blog.

It'd been hell to pay for him.

He'd fallen for the last woman on earth he would've ever thought he'd be interested in. The last woman everybody would've expected him to even sneer at. So he'd turned her into his deepest secret, to spare himself mocks and critics. A secret he'd managed to conceal even from himself for a while. Until one day he'd realized this woman had become so close to him, the one to share what he wouldn't even share with his brother. The one that needed him and loved him away from the limelight, when he became just a man.

And shoved face to the mud by his brother, he'd found himself forced to accept he didn't only care for her. He loved her. And he wanted to know her always there, it didn't matter if she was lying in his bed or at the other side of the world. He needed to know her heart was still his. He wanted to be the only one to move her, bring tears to her eyes and make her laugh her heart out.

Facing all that had brought him a weird kind of relief. He'd already shown her the best and the worst of him. There was no heroes left on any pedestal. So now they were free to be themselves together.

Only she'd chosen silence.

She'd told him she loved him; she'd kissed him with tears in her eyes and she'd left. To never speak to him again.

When no other woman was so funny, so smart, so sweet. When he needed to think of her to fuck the best pieces of Hollywood ass. When recalling their voices singing together triggered songs like Explain the Thoughts, that would be song of the year and one of the band's classics in a few years, no matter what Sean said.

He wasn't a fool that only valued what he'd had after he'd lost it. He was the fool perfectly aware of what he was losing as he lost it.

So he'd sent her the song and the poem. She had to have them. Because it was about time she admitted too there was no out for them apart.

Bad thing he'd underestimated her once more. He'd failed to keep in mind the depth of her emotions when it came to him. She'd needed a whole month to catch her breath. And then she'd broken her stonewall silence for the first time to tell him, pretty literally, "Off with your music."

She didn't want to be moved by his music anymore, that first bond between them, the one that came from years before they'd first met and the last one still standing.

Yet there he was, flying over the three Americas to humor his brother, who was taking his turn to display all the blind stubbornness of their shared gens.

They would look for her, they would find her. He would take insults or indifference. And Sean would have to accept he was right for one damned time and let him be, so he could find away to move on with that thorn in his side he'd never be able to left behind.

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