“Is she going home or straight to the hospital?” I ignored her question, focused on getting to my girl.
“The hospital. But I don’t understand why you—”
“I’ll explain later, Mims,” I said, cutting her off. “I have to go. Love you.” I hung up just as my elevator opened into the garage.
Normally, I would have taken a cab rather than driving so I wouldn’t have to deal with parking, but I wasn’t willing to wait for the front desk to call one. And there was no guarantee that I’d be able to flag a vacant one down right away.
Once I arrived at the airport, I ran to the desk and booked the first available flight to Ember.
7
Ember
Naomi worked her magic and got me on a flight that had me back in our hometown only a few hours later. When the plane touched down at the airport, I was anxious for news about my mom. After switching off airplane mode on my phone, it dinged with a bunch of notifications. I scrolled through them to find the text thread with my dad and heaved a sigh of relief when I saw his message letting me know the orthopedic surgeon said that he wouldn’t need to operate on my mom’s leg. “Oh, thank goodness.”
I smiled at the flight attendant as she unbuckled from the jump seat and started getting the cabin ready for the passengers to deplane. My best friend had taken my dad at his word about not worrying about how much the ticket had cost and had found me a seat in first class because it was the only one available unless I waited a couple more hours to leave. After the smoked salmon plate for breakfast, the copious amounts of Coke Zero I’d been served, the comfy seat, and free movie I’d streamed in flight, flying in the main cabin would never be the same again.
Since I was in the second row, I only had time to fire off a quick reply to my dad before I needed to gather my things in preparation for getting off the plane. I figured I’d scroll through them as I was walking through the airport, but just when I pulled my phone back out of my backpack, it rang.
Seeing my best friend’s name on the screen, I grinned as I answered, “Hey, Naomi. Have you been stalking my flight status to see when my plane landed? If not, your timing couldn’t have been more perfect. I literally just walked off the jetway into the gate area.”
“Ah, no. Just lucky, I guess.”
Her voice sounded odd. “Everything okay?”
“I’m not sure,” she drawled.
My brows drew together. “You’re being very weird right now. What’s going on?”
“Um…I guess I was just wondering how your date with Jordan went. There wasn’t time for me to grill you about it before you got on the plane, and I’m dying to know how last night went.”
I grimaced as I strode through the airport, headed toward the door where I could grab a rideshare to the hospital. “Ah, yeah. About that. It didn’t go as expected since I didn’t actually make it to the restaurant to meet Jordan. I’m sorry for letting you down. I know you meant well fixing me up with him, but I don’t think blind dates are for me.”
“Are you sure that’s all that it was? Because Nixon called me this morning.”
Holy crap. She’d already talked to Nixon? No wonder she sounded so weird. She was probably in total shock over the idea of her brother and me together…or whatever it was that we were. But I really wished she’d started with that so I hadn’t stumbled through an awkward explanation over why I’d canceled on Jordan.
“I get that I shouldn’t have kept this from you since he’s your brother. But you shouldn’t play with me like that. Not when I’m already frazzled from a middle-of-the-night call from my dad, my mom being in the hospital, and hopping on a plane at the last minute,” I complained. “If you’d just told me that you and Nixon already talked about what went down last night, I wouldn’t have been freaking out over what to say.”
Naomi didn’t respond right away. I was starting to get worried that she was furious with me when she finally said, “But you can understand why I wasn’t sure what to say to you either, right?”
That was a fair question. “Crap. Yeah, I guess I can. I’m still having a hard time believing that he was so bothered by me being fixed up with one of his teammates that he showed up to intercept me and stop me from going on my date.”
“Uh-huh.”
I barely heard her murmur of agreement as I babbled, “I never expected him to kiss me the way he did. Or to insist on sending the text to Jordan to cancel for me, like a caveman. And definitely not everything else that happened when he took me home with him.”