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The morning they were all due to leave London — Callum for the first leg of his press tour and Jamie and Nerea to Spain — everyone was quiet. For Nerea, this was nothing new. From the beginning of their relationship she had gotten used to being apart from Callum, but the knowledge she would be fine as soon as she was back in their house did not make her feel any better about leaving now. She knew Callum dreaded the separation just as much. He went about throwing last-minute items in his suitcase without saying anything and with a distinct air of glumness.
Jamie was similarly quiet as he sat in a corner of the sofa, his bag, packed back at his own flat, tucked neatly as his feet. Nerea wasn’t sure of the details behind his silence. Perhaps he was merely affected by her and Callum’s moods. But if she knew Jamie at all — and she thought she’d gotten to know him quite well in the last few months — he wasn’t thrilled at the idea of being apart from Callum. Besides, the prospect of a month in a new country, where he knew no one but Nerea and didn’t even speak the language, would have made anyone uneasy.
No one said much from the time they met the cab to the moment they walked through the automatic doors into the bright, busy, and overwhelmingly efficient interior of Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 1. Nerea frowned as a flight attendant rolling a suitcase behind them did a double take at Callum and then tripped over his own feet.
“Let’s get checked in and get through security. Then maybe we can find a quiet corner,” Nerea said. People were strange about fame, mobile phone cameras were ubiquitous, and people in airports were always keen for any sort of distraction. Nerea accepted that the three of them would eventually wind up documented against their wishes, but she wanted to put off that moment for as long as possible.
But when they joined the check-in queue, someone muttered to their companion, “Hey, is that what’s-his-face? I didn’t know he had a son!”
Nerea tried not to sigh audibly. The moment was perhaps closer at hand than any of them found desirable. Callum, with his head down and checking something on his mobile, chuckled. Jamie made a sound of utter dismay. Behind them, someone was making frantic shushing noises at the speaker. Good. Nerea pressed her lips together tightly to make sure she didn’t react to the particularly erroneous assumption at hand.
At the counter, there was a brief delay when the luggage tag on Nerea’s suitcase didn’t scan properly and another when Jamie’s bag was almost over the weight limit.
“What did you have in there?” Callum asked when Jamie, adjusting his backpack on his shoulders, finally joined them
“Uh. Books?”
“How many?” Callum looked amused.
“I’m going to be there for a while. I wanted to be prepared.”
“You know we have books at the house,” Nerea pointed out. “English ones even.”
“And haven’t you ever heard of an e-reader?” Callum put in.
Jamie flushed at the gentle teasing, but he didn’t look displeased to be the center of their attention. “I have one of those too. But there’s something about books. And I brought other stuff too. Like clothes.”
“I guarantee you that was unnecessary,” Callum said. “I doubt Nerea is going to let you out of bed.”
“Callum!” Nerea scolded. Yes, that was true, but Callum didn’t need to say it in public.
Callum shrugged one shoulder and held his hands out, palms up.
“I’m counting on that,” Jamie’s tone was cautious as he entered the banter. “But I didn’t want to assume.”
“You’re both awful.” Nerea was glad that Jamie was rallying a bit.
Callum pulled Nerea’s carry-on suitcase behind him as he always did when they traveled together. Meanwhile, Jamie hung a few paces behind them as they navigated the crowds on the way to the security line. Nerea wanted to turn around and tell him that neither distance from them nor deference was necessary; she wanted to grab his hand and draw him forward into her and Callum’s conversation. But if the three of them needed to discuss how they were going to handle their relationship in public, this wasn’t the time.
“How do you normally do this?” Jamie asked, when they had finally cleared security.
Nerea shook her head and led the way to a bank of chairs tucked out of sight of the main thoroughfare behind a pillar and a rubbish bin.
Jamie slouched into an uncomfortable seat across from Callum and Nerea, “The goodbyes in public thing.”
Callum glanced sideways at Nerea. “Normally, we don’t.”
“What do you mean?” Jamie asked.
“We’ve never both been involved with someone like this,” Nerea said. “Certainly not someone we’ve taken to the airport. People hardly pay attention to me or my relationships, and most of Callum’s relationships” — she made air quotes to highlight exactly how long most of those had lasted — “have been not worth the media hassle and/or involved people in sex clubs.”
Jamie’s eyes flicked toward Callum.
Callum gave a disinterested shrug in acknowledgment of the truth.
“So I’m a step up for you.” Jamie teased.
“It’s not a hierarchy,” Callum said. “A different set of feelings and desires. But yes, you’ve lasted longer.” How Callum looked so at ease as he lounged lazily in the uncomfortable metal chairs, Nerea didn’t know. She was only grateful he hadn’t launched into his spiel in defense of sex clubs in public.
“How do you do goodbyes when it’s just you two, then?” Jamie pressed.
“Discretely,” Callum said. “Especially since the time — oh, it must have been seven or eight years ago now — someone got a photo of us kissing at a gate and it made its way all over the internet before we even got off our planes again. Not world-ending, but annoying. It’s no secret that we’re married, obviously, but everything we do in public is not for the public.”
Nerea watched as Jamie pondered that. Which was good; he’d need that advice soon enough himself. No one should be forced to work for the public’s pleasure every time they stepped out their front door. It was, Nerea knew, a brutally hard thing to learn. She’d been by Callum’s side as his career had forced them both to struggle with it from the moment they’d met.
When boarding for Jamie and Nerea’s flight finally started, Callum pulled Jamie into a one-armed hug appropriate to men who couldn’t possibly be sleeping together. Then he kissed Nerea good-bye.
“Travel safe,” he told her, ducking his head close to hers.
Nerea replied, as she always did. “You too.”
“Call me when you get in?”
“You’ll be in the air.”
Callum smiled, sad and just for her. “I’ll still be here at the airport. In any case, I don’t care. I want to hear your voice again as soon as possible.”
Nerea took a deep breath against the surge of longing she felt at not being able to stay with him. As they went to the gate, Nerea turned to see Callum wave at them one last time.
As she and Jamie scanned their boarding passes and shuffled along the gangway, Nerea snapped out of her sorrow enough to notice that Jamie’s cheeks were red. “What is it?” she asked. She was still learning to classify all the variations of Jamie’s often intense, but not always transparent, emotions.
“He gave me a note.” Jamie held up a tightly folded piece of paper.
“What’s it say?”
“It’s not like I can read it out here.” Jamie twisted around to see who might be watching them, like a schoolboy caught with a note from his crush. He really was too adorable. “People could see.”
Nerea smiled. She thought it extraordinarily unlikely that someone would be able to decipher Callum’s scrawl over Jamie’s shoulder. Honestly, she wasn’t sure Jamie would be able to decipher Callum’s scrawl at all.
“He used to do things like that for me when we were first dating and being his girlfriend was making my life difficult,” she told him.
“Oh.” Jamie’s cheeks went, if possible, even redder. His fingers fumbled, displaying an urgency to open it and get to the message it contained. But then he shoved it hard into his pocket and instead helped her with her bags.
Only once they were settled, and the plane had taxied away from the gate, did Jamie return to it. Nerea watched as he opened it with blunt fingers and his eyes scanned across it, once and then twice. When he tucked it away in the inner pocket of his jacket, his eyes were — there was no other word for it — starry.