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Collateral Flirtation Thread Tracker
Farnborough, UK, around noon local time
He hasn't slept much. The call ran until the sky went pale over London. Adrian grabbed a few winks while Danny stayed on the line with him, then showered, packed, told Danny he'd see him soon, and beat his own crew to the airfield, eager for once to get home. The FBO has a fireplace, a coffee service, and one other passenger waiting on a different tail number. Adrian takes the coffee and stands at the window while the crew finishes the walkaround, phone open to a new note titled DANNY WEEK, then DANNY WEEK (PERFECT EDITION), then nothing, because naming it feels like jinxing it and also like admitting how long the list is about to get.
Groceries. Clemencia's recipe, which means writing to Clemencia. He starts the email right there on the apron, types "Dear Mrs. Hernández," deletes it, types "Dear Clemencia," stares at that too long, and lands on "Querida Clemencia" with a request for the recipe and a promise not to shame her kitchen too badly. He reads it four times before sending. He's charmed foundation boards with less effort.
Towels, the good ones, wherever they ended up after March. Ice. Ice packs, plural, because Danny will ration a single one like it's wartime.
The list is at nineteen items when the captain comes to collect him.
Somewhere over the Atlantic
Seven hours and change with the cabin to himself, and the flight has never once felt like this. He's crossed this ocean on this aircraft enough times to know its rhythms, and today every one of them has slowed to spite him. The bed's made up in the back. He doesn't use the bed. He sits sideways in a seat built for lying down, knee bouncing, trying to do arrival math with one known number. Two days. Two days from when, though. Danny didn't say, and Danny never says. At some point a text will come from a concourse somewhere, sent under a name that isn't his, and that'll be the first anyone hears of it.
ren r u awake
stupid q. u don't sleep
list incoming, brace urself
The reply comes before the list goes out.
Bracing
He sends all nineteen items, then three more.
Her answers come back numbered and dry:
- Groceries scheduled for tomorrow afternoon so you can sleep in. I took the liberty of adding snacks since you forgot those. I'll check the bar too
- The towels are where they have always been. You reorganized them in March and blamed the photographer
- Your freezer now contains four gel packs. If he requires a fifth, propose
- I have also now read an entire month of security correspondence that did not exist on Tuesday. Riveting. The invoices match. Tell him I'm impressed and a little alarmed
The driver. He sits up straight because he almost forgot the driver, and this one has moving parts. He doesn't have a flight number or an airport or an hour, only the promise of a text, and when he pictures the other version, some chauffeur planted at arrivals holding a tablet that reads DANIEL HERNANDEZ in seventy-point font, the font alone nearly ends him. Seventy-point. For a man who introduces himself with an alias. He types fast.
ok CRITICAL one. car for pickup but here's the thing, I don't know when. or where. he'll text me when he's in. so I need someone on standby who can roll the second I say go. and LOW key. no livery, no suit, NO SIGN. not his name, not any name, no sign at all. sending u a pic, driver memorizes the face. he walks out, car's there, done
He scrolls to a photo from Texas, Danny leaned against Bertha's fender with his arms crossed and the sun behind him, and hovers over it. Too warm. Too his. He picks a different one, plainer, Danny scowling intently at a video game with his face clear, and sends that instead.
Understood. Yusuf is on retainer for the window, any airport, any hour. He once collected a sitting head of state in a Honda. Your boyfriend will experience the full witness protection package
Keeping the photo on file. He photographs well. Don't tell him I said that
Adrian laughs loud enough that the flight attendant leans out from the galley to check on him. He waves her off, types:
marry HIM?? ur the one solving my whole life rn
and waits through a full minute of nothing.
I'm aware. My rate reflects it. I'll probably have to plan your wedding too
There's a bed 10ft behind you, Adrian. Use it
He doesn't because he's too busy texting Ren with more things he keeps thinking of to get ready.
New York City, mid-afternoon
He walks in with his bag and what are technically yesterday's clothes and stops in his own hallway, because today he's not coming home, he's scouting a location. The hall runs long and white toward the windows. The art hangs large and quiet and cost more than it'll ever admit out loud. The kitchen gleams like a showroom because it gets used like one. The couch sits deep and low, good for a propped ankle, and he checks that the way he'd check sightlines. Forty floors down the city's already loud, and he tries to put Bertha somewhere in that picture, parked at some meter below with her rust and her bench seat, and he can't.
He stops trying and unpacks instead. That helps less than he expected. He'd texted Danny when he landed but hasn't heard back yet and that just feels like pins and needles in his brain because he doesn't know how to translate it. Was Danny already on his way? Was he still finishing things up?
Adrian gives up and heads to the gym, despite being exhausted.
The next day, early afternoon
Ren arrives behind a tablet and a pharmacy bag. The tablet he expected.
Compression sleeve. Ibuprofen. Two more gel packs, the flexible kind. A wedge cushion, ugly, beige, medical, exactly the height of a propped ankle, and she's already moved the ottoman to the end of the couch before he can say a word.
"You went to a drugstore," he says, and the last word comes out higher than he meant it to.
"It's a CVS bag, Adrian, well done." She sets it on the counter and swipes the tablet awake. "Grocery delivery came at noon. Clemencia's email is printed and on the island, and I want you to know the scanned recipe cards have annotations in two languages and I have chosen not to translate the margins for you. Some things a man should discover in his own kitchen."
They work through the list. He asks whether the hallway is too much and she looks down the hallway and says "The hallway is a hallway," which isn't an answer and is also the answer. He walks her through the no-sign rule a third time as if Yusuf hasn't already been briefed, then asks whether Yusuf understands the call could come at any hour, and she lets him finish before confirming that Yusuf keeps his phone on a charger next to his bed like everyone else in the twenty-first century. He tells her to cancel the spa day, Danny doesn't want a spa day, Danny said, and she cuts in without lifting her eyes from the screen.
"Cancelled it yesterday. You read me the text at one in the morning. With commentary."
"I don't remember that."
"I wouldn't expect so since you've been in a manic frenzy since London." Ren's tone is utterly unconcerned. "Did you find the towels?"
Adrian scoffs, but she's not wrong. "Yeah, I found them, thanks. And thanks for the throw pillows and blankets and stuff. Looks nice. Cozy. Better."
Ren just nods. By six the freezer and the bar are stocked, the recipe's on the island, Danny has a nice box of contraband cigars to enjoy, his own bathroom stocked up with handpicked toiletries, and the flowers Adrian swore he wasn't going to buy are on the table because he bought them anyway. There's nothing left to do, which turns out to be a problem. Ren shoulders her jacket at the door and he stops her with her name.
"Honestly. Is it all too much?"
She considers him the way she considers a venue, top to bottom, no hurry.
"He drives a truck named Bertha and puts up with your bullshit already. He'll survive a nice sofa." The door's open under her hand. "It's the right amount of you. Good luck and try having fun maybe? He's coming to see you, not the amenities."
The lock clicks. The apartment goes quiet around all its correctness, and he stands there in it, because that's the part she didn't solve. Whether the right amount of him is the reassuring part or the terrifying part.
That night
He calls knowing it'll go to voicemail. It goes to voicemail.
"Hey, it's me. You're asleep or on a plane or in a hangar, I never know, and I respect it. I didn't do anything weird today." He pinches the bridge of his nose. "That's a lie. I bought groceries. Personally. It's the weirdest thing I've done here in years and I refuse to elaborate. Car's on standby whenever you text me, day or night, and before you ask, no sign. I promised no dumb sign and I keep my promises. Get here safe, okay? Love you."
He hangs up before he can add anything else, because the additions are all inventory. The freezer. The wedge cushion. The recipe cards waiting on the island like a run-of-show he keeps rehearsing. @Danny asked for none of it. Danny asked for the opposite, said it plainly from a couch in the middle of nowhere with ice melting on his ankle. I'm not coming there to make you change your whole life around me.
The whole life in question is currently arranged, dusted, stocked, and glowing above the street.
At 2 a.m. he's up again, barefoot on cold floors, moving through rooms that need nothing from him. He carries the flowers from the table to the kitchen, then back to the table. He opens the freezer and counts the gel packs like they might have gone somewhere. Six. An absurd number. A confession in cold plastic.
His phone stays face up on the counter the whole time, volume all the way on, because the text could come tomorrow or the day after or at four in the morning, and whenever it comes, he's not going to miss it.
He ends up at the window, where he started the day an ocean ago, glass again, except this glass is his, and the city on the other side is still running its lights for nobody. Somewhere out there Danny's moving toward him under a name that isn't his.
Please let this feel like a place, he thinks, forehead almost touching, and not just an empty statement.
He leaves the flowers on the table. Final answer.