He groans. “That sounds like heaven. I didn’t sleep at all on the last flight. The guy next to me was snoring loud enough to shake the entire row of seats.”
“You can sleep in my lap if you want.” I hand our tickets to the agent at the gate, a sour-faced woman who looks out of place in the cheery Hawaiian Airlines uniform. “I’m too wired to sleep.”
“I don’t want to sleep yet,” Danny says. “We should talk first.”
“All the overhead bins are full,” the agent says, casting a pointed look at Danny’s giant weathered backpack, distracting from the anxious look I’m sure just flickered across my face. “You’re going to have to check that at the end of the Jetway.”
While Danny fills out the bright orange luggage tag and gets it strapped to his pack, I give myself a mental pep talk worthy of my toughest volleyball coach back in high school. It’s time to leave all the shit in the locker room and get out onto the court.
If I carry my misery and pain onto the plane, I’m going to ruin my new life before it gets started. There’s no room for that junk in my head anymore. I’m going to leave it right here, at the door to the Jetway, a pile of psychic waste I’m better off without. Regret isn’t going to change the past, and I can’t survive for much longer carrying the weight of two ruined lives on my shoulders.
It may make me a bad person or a sociopath or something worse, but I’m officially erasing the past five months—and anyone or anything that reminds me of them—from my timeline. From here on out, it’s Danny and me against the world and I will do whatever I have to do to protect our second chance.
Our last chance, because if this fails, I know there won’t be enough of me left to try again.
“Ready?” Danny shoulders his pack and turns to me with a smile.
“Ready.” I take his hand and follow him down the Jetway without a single look back over my shoulder.
I’m leaving the past behind and I swear on everything good in the world that I will never, ever look back.
Chapter Two
Danny
“You gave me the key to your heart, my love,
then why did you make me knock?”
-Lord Byron
* * *
I’m determined to stay awake and keep talking to Sam until I can get to the bottom of whatever’s been going on, but by the time the plane reaches cruising altitude, my eyelids feel like they’re made of granite slabs. The week before I left Croatia, I led three mountain bike tours and four overnight rock-climbing expeditions, wedging in as much work as I could before I headed to Maui to take a month off before opening another branch of Extreme Adventures on the island.
Now, I’m feeling every adrenaline-packed hour.
I can barely stay awake long enough to wolf down the teriyaki chicken and Hawaiian shortbread cookies on my dinner tray and then I’m out, sucked into my first deep, peaceful sleep since Sam stopped returning my calls six days ago.
No matter how long we’ve been together, or how much we’ve been through, a part of me had been certain she was about to end it. End our seven-year relationship and take a sledgehammer to my life in the process because I can’t imagine who I would be without her.
I’m the owner of a thriving adventure-tourism business, but only because it’s a career I knew would blend well with our dream to travel the world before we settle down. I’m a brother, an uncle, and soon-to-be an uncle again when my sister Caitlin’s first baby is born, but no matter how much I love my family, they could never fill the place Sam holds in my heart.
Sam and I have grown up together, and all I want is to grow old with her. We’re like trees planted too close, our roots tangled and our trunks fused together. If I lost her, I would lose my foundation, a part of my heart, and everything that makes me happy. Without her, I can’t imagine what there would be to look forward to. There would be no reason left to dream, and without a dream there’s no fucking point in being alive.
Watching my father piss his life away taught me that lesson early.
The world would have been better off without Chuck Cooney in it, and I never want to be anything like him. That’s why I’ve been sober for two years and fight through temptation every time someone, who doesn’t know I’m an alcoholic, offers me a drink. But if I’d lost Sam, I might have started shuffling through life in my father’s footsteps, drinking too much, caring too little, choosing selfish oblivion over facing the world.
To say I’m relieved that Sam and I are still together is an understatement.