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Ezra didn’t have the best history of good plane rides. When he’d moved to New York after college, his plane had an electronics malfunction and had to divert to a cornfield for an emergency landing. His parents had been so terrified when he’d told them about it two days later that they’d offered to pay for a train ticket so he could move home immediately. Another time, he’d been on a red-eye flight to New Orleans for Miles’s bachelor party. He’d barely slept in the three days before — working night and day on the prototype of his efficient engine — so he’d been ecstatic to just sleep from gate to gate. But as soon as he’d collapsed into his seat, he’d been waylaid by an old man who spent the entire flight telling him — a complete stranger — his entire life story. But as far as he was concerned, nothing would ever be worse than ten hours on a plane with the woman he loved who refused to even look in his direction.
He slept in short intervals. His ears were so attuned to the sound of footsteps in the aisle that he woke up every time someone passed him, hoping it was Candace. It never was. She didn’t come back to First Class until after the breakfast service, to collect refuse. When she made it to his seat, she angled the bag in his direction and averted her eyes. He didn’t get another glimpse of her for another three hours as she’d rushed to the front galley and then back again.
He desperately wanted this flight to be over, but also, he didn’t. For whatever reason, he was reminded of college graduation. He’d been standing on the Oval with Miles and Mei and their parents. Everyone was taking pictures before the ceremony started. He was smiling, but his focus was everywhere else but at the camera lens. He was looking for Candace. He hoped she was just late, unwilling to accept the possibility that she really hadn’t come back. He didn’t want this plane to land for the same reason he’d been dreading the sound of the chapel bells to start the ceremony. If Candace hadn’t shown up by those bells — and if the plane landed and she still wouldn’t look at him — then there was a very real chance they would never see each other again. That fear was even stronger now that Miles and Mei were divorced and the connective tissue of their best friends couldn’t hold them together. And even though he’d convinced himself that he was heading to Quito to get over her, sitting on this plane desperate for her eyes to swivel in his direction forced him to finally accept that there was no getting over Candace Garret.
He unbuckled his seatbelt and stood.
“What’s going on?” Marty mumbled, his eyes fluttering open, still half-asleep.
“Nothing,” his wife Alejandra said, patting his hand and smiling up at Ezra.
Ezra smiled back and then pushed the curtain aside to head into the main cabin.
He sped through Business Class and spotted Candace easily in the main cabin. She was holding a small baby on her hip and rocking side-to-side as she talked to a toddler standing up in her seat. The sight of her was like a violent punch to Ezra’s gut.
When they were in college, Miles and Mei had always talked about kids with the kind of easy assurance of a couple on firm ground. “When we have kids...” was a common refrain when the four of them talked about the future. But he and Candace were much more circumspect. They weren’t sure if they wanted kids, so they pledged to be the best aunt and uncle for any kids their best friends brought into the world. And every time his parents carefully mentioned the possibility of grandchildren, Ezra shook his head and shrugged noncommittally. But seeing Candace holding a baby clarified all of his indecision. He didn’t have to have children, but if he were to have them, it would be with Candace. Like everything else in his life, it was Candace or bust. This moment was Candace or bust.
“Candace,” he whispered softly when he was within earshot.
Her back stiffened, but she kept bouncing the baby in her arms as she turned slowly toward him. As she moved, Ezra saw a woman in the aisle seat next to the standing toddler, with an in-flight meal in front of her. It didn’t take a genius to realize that Candace was holding the baby to give the mother a long enough break to eat.
“Is there something you need, sir?” she asked in the friendly voice she’d used for all the other passengers; polite, not warm, vaguely distant. Not the way she would ever have spoken to Mei or Miles.
His eyes darted to the mother and toddler and then the baby in Candace’s arms. He swallowed and leaned slightly toward her. “I need to talk to you,” he whispered.
“I’m busy,” she said in a tight voice.
“I know,” he said. “I just...”
“All done,” the little girl announced.
Ezra and Candace turned to see the mother smiling indulgently at her daughter. She turned to them and reached for the baby in Candace’s arms.
“Thank you,” she said to Candace. “It was nice to eat with two hands.” She pressed her son’s nose as if it was a button and both of her children dissolved into peals of laughter. It was an adorable family scene and Ezra couldn’t help but turn to look at Candace’s profile. She turned to him with wide eyes and sucked in a breath before turning quickly away. She grabbed the woman’s tray, waved at the toddler, and then turned on her heel toward the back of the plane. Ezra followed her.
In the back galley, she refused to look at him as she threw away the refuse and bussed the tray. He wanted to grab her shoulder and turn her to him, but touching Candace had always been a reverent act for Ezra. He lived for those invitations, when she opened herself up to him and welcomed his tentative touch. He didn’t want to ruin all those beautiful memories between them in a moment of frustration, so he shoved his hands into his pockets as he spoke to her back.
“Candace, I don’t know what I said — what you think I said — but I have never been ashamed of being with you. I can’t even remember a time before wanting to be with you.”
She slammed the tray into one of the carts and turned to him, her arms crossed over her chest and a scowl on her face. He met her eyes. He felt his heart — and hope — shrivel at her glare.
“I’m not calling you a liar,” he said, just in case that wasn’t clear. “I’m just saying that I know how I feel about you, how I’ve always felt about you. And no part of me has ever been ashamed to be seen with you. If I’d thought that you wanted more, there was nothing anyone could have done to keep me from you.”
“If I’d wanted more?” she asked, her eyebrows furrowing.
He felt the plane dip down ever so slightly toward the ground, which underscored the urgency of this moment. He couldn’t imagine what he’d said in some half-asleep post-orgasmic admission to make her think he wouldn’t have reveled in finally being hers. But if she was right, if there was some hidden part of his consciousness that had given her this impression, he knew where it would have blossomed; the first crack in their bond.
“You didn’t come back,” he whispered.
The wrinkles between her eyebrows deepened and her scowl turned into a frown. “What?”
“Graduation. You said you’d come back,” he smiled weakly. “I spent that entire spring semester psyching myself up to ask you out. I had it all planned out. I’d bought you flowers.” He shrugged. “I borrowed money from my dad to buy you flowers. I gave them to Dr. Freedman instead. And I had a copy of my Gilder Prize speech to give you. I laminated it.”
“Why?” she asked.
He was blinking faster than normal, the pressure of possible tears in his eyes. “I thanked you in it. Two paragraphs about how none of it would have happened without you. How lucky I was to have you as my best friend.” Ezra smiled a bit wider this time as a few tears fell from his eyes. “Miles was pissed about that, actually. But the version of the speech I was going to give you ended with me asking you out on a date. A real date.” He swiped at his face and took a few breaths, trying to get himself together. “But you never came to graduation. You didn’t come home for three years.”
Candace’s mouth had fallen open in shock. Ezra’s cheeks and neck were hot with embarrassment. He’d decided long ago to never tell her this. It made him sound pathetic. But maybe he’d been wrong to say that he’d never lie to her, because hadn’t he been lying about the intensity of his feelings for years? Hadn’t he been pretending he wasn’t head over heels for her? That he was perfectly fine just being her friend? That he didn’t need more than one night a year?
He’d never thought of it this way and just next to the airplane toilets was an inconvenient place to have such earth-shaking self-realizations, but better late than never, he guessed.
The captain’s voice over the intercom system cut into the tense, quiet moment between them. They stared at one another with wet eyes and mouths open, as the captain announced that they’d started their descent into the Quito International Airport. The sound of the seatbelt sign illuminating felt like a bomb in Ezra’s ears and he jumped.
“I know you have to get back to work but I... I couldn’t get off this plane without clearing that up. Even if I never see you again, I don’t want you to go another day thinking I haven’t been completely in awe of you for the past eighteen years. Every day. I’m sorry I didn’t make that clear before now.”
Candace hissed a breath and opened her mouth to speak. Just then, Jorge burst into the back galley.
“Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got motion sickness.”
“Oh God,” Candace groaned.
“Yep. Just barely got him to the toilet. I’ll clean it up, but you and Mark are going to have to handle the landing procedures until I’m done.”
She nodded and then her eyes shifted to Ezra.
He smiled sadly at her. “I’ll get out of your way.” He hesitated, clenching his fists in his pants pockets. “If I don’t see you, Happy New Year, Candace. I hope next year is good to you. You deserve the best.”
And then he turned away. If he’d thought moving on would make him feel lighter, he was wrong. Every step back to his seat and away from Candace felt heavier than the last; like he was leaving his heart and entire soul at the other end of the plane.
***
Candace felt shell-shocked. Somehow, what should have been a routine trip from San Francisco to Quito had turned into the worst of her career. It seemed impossible that a flight with no technical malfunctions or service issues or even many children had wiped her out, but it had. She found it hard to follow what Jorge and Mark were saying as they wheeled their bags to baggage claim.
At the carousel, Mark waved goodbye to them and ran to catch a cab to his hotel. He only had less than a day in Ecuador before working a short flight to Panama and then on to Chile, so he needed to get to sleep asap. She and Jorge were staying in Quito for a while and weren’t in the same rush. Jorge hadn’t checked a bag, but he waited around for Candace to collect hers, so they could travel to the hotel together.
But she was distracted. Her head swiveled around, her neck straining as she looked at the passengers from the flight; searching for Ezra.
“Looks like we missed him,” Jorge said carefully.
Candace couldn’t look at him. She was too afraid she’d cry. Again. But she deflated at his words.
“Is that your suitcase?” Jorge asked, pointing at the carousel.
Candace nodded and wiped at her eyes, pressing the pads of her fingers against her closed eyelids as he darted off to grab her luggage.
“Thanks,” she whispered when he returned.
“Anytime. Now come on. First round at the hotel bar is on me.”
She laughed. It sounded weak and reedy. They walked out onto the curb and the air was wet with humidity. They both looked up at the sky.
“It’s gonna rain soon,” Candace said.
“Yep.”
She turned to look at the traffic around them and her entire body froze. “Watch my bags,” she said, already walking away.
“What? Candace, where are you—? Oh.”
She didn’t look back. She kept her eyes on Ezra’s profile. He was looking at his phone as a black town car pulled up in front of him. She sped up as he reached for the door handle.
“Ezra,” she called out to him.
He turned to her with red-rimmed eyes. His full beard needed a trim. He looked beautiful. He always did. But that wasn’t what this was about.
He turned to her as the driver stepped out of the car and walked to the opened trunk. He lifted Ezra’s bag and put it in the trunk just as Candace reached them. And then the driver looked between them in confusion.
“Necesitamos un momento, por favor,” Candace said in rusty Spanish.
The driver turned to Ezra who nodded, his eyes still focused on her.
“Así,” the driver said and walked back to the driver’s side.
Ezra’s entire question was in the furrowing of his brow.
Candace swallowed. She was uncomfortable. She wanted a shower, a long nap, a good cry and a shot of whiskey, and not necessarily in that order. But before all of that, she needed to say this to him.
“I was going to come back. My return flight would have landed at SFO three days before graduation. I spent the first few days here homesick, thinking about how happy I would be to get back to The Bay. To spend all my free time with Mei and Miles and...” she swallowed and rubbed her wet palms on her skirt, “you. I thought about you every day for the first few weeks and that New Year’s Eve together when we kinda defiled Teddy.”
His face and ears turned a soft red. “If you were going to come back, why didn’t you?” he asked carefully.
There was an old pit of sadness in Candace’s heart about that question. She’d harbored it deep inside herself for so long — too long — afraid to tell anyone of how deeply Ezra had once hurt her. How could he not know? Why did she have to tell him this? But she shook her head because none of those questions mattered now, she supposed, since this was the end anyway.
“You were supposed to email me. You ate me out on my childhood teddy bear and then nothing. You didn’t even try and contact me while I was gone. Not until the end of the semester when you told me you won the Gilder Prize.”
She could feel the sting of tears in her eyes, but she knew they wouldn’t fall. She’d cried so many tears about this subject, she had no more water left to give. “I waited days and weeks and months for you to contact me. I was always waiting for you to get it. I was always waiting for you to make a move and then taking it when you didn’t.
For once, I thought, you would act. That you’d finally take the first step to me because after that night, how could you not know how I felt about you? How could you not even email me to ask? And when you didn’t, I realized it was because you didn’t feel the same way about me as I felt about you.”
Ezra shook his head. “Mei said you were busy. That you barely emailed her.”
“I would have emailed you,” she yelled at Ezra. “You were the only person I asked to contact me.”
“I— What?”
She furrowed her brow.
“You didn’t? The last thing you said was that you’d be back for graduation. If I’d known—”
“What do you mean, if you’d known? I left you a message.”
“Where?” he yelled back.
“With Miles,” she exclaimed. “I told him to tell you to email me. And you never did.”
“Candace,” Jorge yelled behind her.
She turned quickly to see their shuttle at the curb in front of him. She nodded and turned back to Ezra. “Look, I have to go. I’m tired.”
“Where are you staying? I can drop you off,” Ezra said quickly. Desperately.
She shook her head. “That’s not what this was about. I just wanted you to know that I had planned to come back. Maybe I should have.” She reached out to cup his face, enjoying the soft, downy feel of his beard under her palm. “I wish we hadn’t waited this long or held all these things in. I wish we’d been more mature. Less afraid. But we can’t go back and fix this. Maybe this is exactly how this was all supposed to play out.”
“Candace—”
“Happy New Year, Ezra,” she whispered sadly.
She practically ran to the shuttle, which was a mistake in the heat. She was drenched as she climbed onto the bus. Ezra was still standing by his car. He turned to follow the bus as it passed, his mouth open, his brow furrowed in confusion. Candace had to look away.
And then Candace’s cell phone chirped with a new text message. She had to fish her purse from her bag. The message was from Mei.
What’s going on with you and Ezra?
Where are you?
When are you two going to finally get it together?
Don’t tell Miles I’m still single.