I need an actual weekend, not a phone call. Something released in her chest. When? Whenever you can get here. A pause.
Maya's been asking about you every other day for 2 weeks. What's she asking? When you're coming home. He let that sit. She doesn't say it like a question.
She says it like a plan she's already made and is waiting for you to confirm. Clare closed her eyes again. I'll look at flights tonight. Okay. And Andre, she held the phone a little tighter.
Thank you for not making me defend the extension. I told you. He said I'm not building a counterargument. That's not what I am. She knew that.
She had known that since a Friday night 9 months ago when he'd stood in his doorway and set one rule. She had known it and she had kept testing it anyway because 38 years of needing to defend herself before being challenged takes more than 9 months to undo. She was working on it. She flew home the following Friday. Andre picked her up the airport at 7:14 in the evening.
She came through the arrival's door with her carryon and she saw him before he saw her. He was standing back from the waiting crowd with his hands in his jacket pockets scanning. And when he found her, his whole face did something that he didn't try to manage, which was the thing about him. She had missed most specifically. The way he never managed his face when he saw her, the way the real thing arrived first and the composed version came second.
She walked straight to him and he put both arms around her and she let herself be held, really held completely, without calculating how long was appropriate or what it communicated. And she pressed her face against his shoulder and stayed there for a moment that had nothing performative in it at all. "Hi," she said into his shoulder. "Hi," he said into her hair. They stood like that for a few seconds in the middle of the arrivals hall while people moved around them.
And Andre's hand moved up her back once, just once. Just that specific gesture of someone confirming that you're actually here, actually real. Not a phone voice or a text or a morning call, but a person in their arms. And Clare felt something unlock in her body that she hadn't known was locked. "Maya wants tacos," he said without moving.
"Of course she does. " She made a list of questions she wants to ask you about New York. "It's written in a notebook. There are 14 questions. " She numbered them. Clare pulled back enough to look at his face. He was smiling in the way he smiled when Maya did something that delighted him.