“Hello?”
“Good afternoon. This is—” There was a sharp gasp of air. The woman on the other end of the line made a soft moaning noise. “Oh, no. You’re in California, aren’t you? I’m terribly sorry. It’s afternoon here in Sydney. I can’t believe I woke you up.”
“It’s all right.” Sydney? As in Sydney, Australia? “Can I help you with something?”
“What? Oh, of course. The reason for my call. I’m Jan. I’m with the travel agency Mr. Smith uses for his South Pacific travel. He’d called us a while back to have us put him on a waiting list for an earlier flight. I wanted to let him know a first-class seat just became available. He’ll be leaving tomorrow.” She giggled nervously. “Technically, that’s later today, isn’t it?”
Chloe sat up in bed. Arizona was still snoring. A couple of seconds ago she’d had trouble focusing her eyes in the dark room, but now her head was spinning. He wasn’t leaving in a couple of days. He was leaving in a few hours. He’d arranged for an earlier flight. All this time she’d been thinking about how much she was going to miss him while he couldn’t wait to get away.
“Give me a minute,” she said. “I’ll have to write the information down.”
She supposed she could have tried to wake up Arizona, but the truth was, she didn’t want to face him. Not now, not like this. He would be able to read everything on her face. He would know how much his leaving was going to hurt her. He would pity her. Lord help her, he might ask her to go with him again and she didn’t think she could refuse him a second time.
She squinted at the two-line phone and realized there was a hold button. After pushing it, she set the receiver back in place, then made her way into the living room. Once the bedroom door was closed, she turned on a light, found paper and a pen, then released the call.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“Great. He’s on Singapore Airlines.”
The travel agent gave her the flight information. Chloe wrote it down, then read it back to confirm that she had it right. Then she hung up and slumped back onto the sofa.
Now what? She stared at the paper in her hands and wished it could be different, but it wasn’t. He was leaving and she couldn’t go with him. Even if she hadn’t already figured out her life was here, she could not follow a man around the world, simply to be with him. She needed more for herself.
None of which answered the question of what she should do now. The obvious answer was to get back in bed and try to sleep. In the morning, she and Arizona could talk.
“About what?” she asked in a whisper. “Gee, maybe I could ask if the service on Singapore Airlines is as fabulous as everyone claims. Or discuss ways of handling the jet lag when one crosses the international date line.”
The note began to blur. Chloe brushed impatiently at the tears. “What am I crying about? I knew he was leaving. I’ve expected this from the beginning. Nothing has changed except for his departure date.”
But that was part of it. That he was leaving early. How could he do that to her? To them? He was supposed to care, at least a little. But to be leaving early.
She sat there for a long time trying to make sense of it all. In the end, she knew she couldn’t. She wrote a quick note explaining that the travel agent had called, then gave him the new flight information. Then she turned off the light in the living room and let her eyes adjust to the dark.
When she could see well enough to find her way back to the bedroom, she did so. Her clothes were on a chair by the dresser. She collected them, put the note on her pillow, then left the room.
Dressing took all of two minutes. Chloe stood there, purse in hand, but she wasn’t ready to leave. There was still something left to be done. She crossed to his computer and turned it on. After searching for a couple of minutes, she found the program to access the Internet and went on under her own account number. After getting into the newspaper’s system, she accessed her computer there at the office and downloaded her article. She’d finished it yesterday. In a few hours she would be putting it on her editor’s desk. She also wanted Arizona to have a copy.
She flipped on his printer and waited while the article came out, a page at a time. When that was finished, she logged off the computer, wrote a note on the last page of the article and returned to the bedroom.
It was after three and from Arizona’s body position and loud snoring, he’d barely stirred in the past hour. She put the loose pages under the information from the travel agent, then walked around to his side of the bed.
In the darkness she couldn’t make out individual features, but she knew every inch of him. She could predict his moods, recognized his voice and his laughter. He touched her as no one had before. Not just physically, but also in her heart and her soul.