20 Hours in LA: the journey home

Out of the corner of her eye she watches him. Watches him doze. She knows he’s not sleeping; he breathes differently when he’s asleep. Not that she sees him asleep that often, not as often as she should, not as often as she –

Anyway.

She doesn’t know, now, if she did the right thing. She was sure at the time, but then it made no sense to her that anyone would ever say no to Josh, even with a million other options, even in a tricky situation. She’d never contemplated the possibility of Joey sending him back to her looking wounded and sad and rejected and defeated and so in need of a hug that she’d given in, against her better judgement, held him and not said any of the things that came to mind because none of them seemed like the appropriate thing to say to your boss in that kind of situation, even with the lingering tipsiness and sleep deprivation.

And now he is dozing, and reliving it, she knows, and there is nothing she can do to stop his mind whirring. She knows full well it never stops anyway, like the engine of this airplane that they don’t hear anymore, that they’ll only hear when it is switched off back in DC. Like, she supposes, the background hum of her deep, deep love for him that has been ever-present for so long that she only notices it on those rare occasions when she wakes up and her first thought isn’t of him. (Of course, if the first thing she heard in the morning wasn’t his voice on the telephone, there might be some chance of that happening more.)

“I’m sorry, Josh,” she whispers, squeezing his hand imperceptibly. Sorry for what, she couldn’t tell him, doesn’t know it herself. Sorry for encouraging him to be proactive in relationships? Not exactly. Sorry it didn’t work out with Joey? Not completely. She knows she should want him to be happy, and she does, she really does, but. You know.

That must be it, then: she’s sorry to see him so hurt.

Sorry, so sorry, that she can’t do more to take the pain away.

He squeezes her hand back, gently; doesn’t seem to want to let it go.

“Mmmm,” he says, and she knows he wants her to think he is asleep. She knows that when his head lulls forward and find itself on her shoulder, he wants her to think it just sort of happened all by itself – that he tumbled sideways into her.

She wants to whisper to him to go to sleep; she wants to put her arm around him; she wants to ruffle his beautiful hair. She wants to –

But anyway.

For now she goes on playing the game: the boss-and-assistant-game, the best-friends game. The game where he won’t admit his need for her, for her closeness, where she will send him into the arms of other women to protect her own heart and both of their jobs, all the time praying that he will not quite find happiness there, not the kind of happiness that she knows is in store for the two of them, just for the taking, if only.