Chapter 44

A/N: This chapter is short, but more will follow soon.

Chapter 44

I tapped my foot impatiently.  “Jesus Christ, Rob, let’s go already.  We’re gonna be late.  Are you stalling or are you actually not ready yet?” I yelled down the hallway.

He poked his head out of the bedroom door.  “Are you serious?  We don’t have to be to the airport for like another hour.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose with two fingers, willing the forming headache to go away.  There would be no way I could do this with a headache.  I sighed, and tried to be patient and calm. “Rob, we have to get to the airport early because of security.  I realize we haven’t been on a plane in a while, but that whole ‘get to the airport two hours prior to flight’ shit hasn’t abated in that time.”

There was silence and then, “Oh.  Right.” 

Something fell in the bedroom.  I shook my head. “Are you alive?”

“Yes.”

“Do you need help?”

“I don’t think so.”

I snorted.  “That’s encouraging.”  I walked in there anyway.  “What the hell?”

He jumped. 

He was completely dressed.  The suitcase was packed and closed.  It was even zipped and locked—what the fuck was he diddling around in here for? 

He tried for a sheepish smile. 

My eyebrow rose, but I wasn’t really angry.  I smiled softly. “Are you… are you scared?”

He shook his head, looking down. “No.”

I moved over to him, putting my arms around his waist. “Baby, it’s ok to be scared.  I’m scared too, but the chances of this plane going down are so low.”

He nodded, pulling me closer.  “It’s not that really.  I mean… I don’t think this plane will go down.”

I tapped his chest.  “Then what’s the hold up?”

He smiled.  “Nothing.  I’m good, let’s go.”  He started walking us backwards and I pulled away to let him grab his suitcase. 

The cab was waiting for us outside and we loaded everything up and then got in.  I snuggled close to him in the cab, and he had his arm around me, smiling as we pulled out into traffic, but his focus was out the window.  He seemed lost in thought, distant.  I chalked it up to the flight jitters or to seeing London after such a long duration.  He didn’t seem unhappy necessarily, just… sort of detached—like he got when there were too many things on his mind that he couldn’t put in the right order or figure out.  I let him be, knowing it would pointless to try and ask right now.  If it was a problem he wanted to discuss, he was forward about it usually and the moment I could see the trouble clouding his eyes, he’d be asking me about it. 

We arrived at the airport in record time.  The traffic had been blessedly light, which was odd for this time of day, but I was hoping that was the start of good omens for the day.  We went through the normal routine, the insane amount of security and taking off everything that wasn’t physically attached.  I’m not saying that we as stars should had received special treatment, but really, what were the odds of Rob and I concealing a bomb on our person or in our luggage—the likes of which to blow up his homeland.  I mean… seriously?  Anyway, the headache was starting to become full-blown and not just in the periphery which meant my tolerance level was going to drop accordingly.  After security, we reached the sanctity of the waiting area, which we found, pleasantly, to be largely empty.  We’d managed to avoid most of the paparazzi—how they found out where and when stars were going was a mystery to me—maybe there was a hotline.  1-800-find-a-star or 1-800-be-a-prick.  Rob and I had been so sheltered from that aspect for the last few months that it was startling and jarring all over again.  It was never fun, but if it happened every freaking day, you kind of, sadly, got used to it.  But as we’d been largely recluses for the past several months, and we only ventured out of the house for appointments and necessities that no one else could obtain our whereabouts, it was awkward; like starting all over again with the beginning of Twilight fame.  Plus, there was the added attention and focus on us… us as Rob and Kristen.  Not Rob and Kristen really, but RobAndKristen.  Together.  The article had been a blessing in reality; we received far less publicity than we could have but it was still unwelcome and awkward.

We sat down on one of those two-seater couches that were always one seat blue, one seat white—seriously—they needed different color schemes, all airports seemed very alike the more you were in.  I leaned over and put my head on Rob’s shoulder and he scooted me closer so it looked like a whole other person could sit next to us.  He was still quiet, but seemed jitterier now.  His left leg seemed to be physically incapable of stillness, it was bouncing like a basketball on speed and I was waiting for the hand-in-hair ruffling and fidgeting to begin any second now.  I finally reached over and put my hand on his knee, making him realize that he was bouncing it uncontrollably.  He smiled at me, and stopped the bouncing, but he said nothing. 

“Would talking help?” I asked.

He shook his head.  “Nope.”

“Is something else wrong?”

“No,” he assured me, “I’m fine, really, just…anxious.”

“To get on or to land?” I inquired.

He chuckled.  “Both I guess.”

I nodded.  “Yeah I guess me too.”  It wasn’t that I was scared or uneasy really.  I mean… in a way I was, I had lingering thoughts and flashbacks of our time in the small plane, but this was a commercial jet.  I realized the difference—the exponentially better safety this plane provided.  And I had a sneaking suspicion that when the studio found out we were taking this little trip that they had checked into the airplane and the airline and probably other shit I didn’t want to know to avoid another incident and pissed off actors.  I did not realize the full consequence of this until the plane was boarding… and we were the only ones sitting in the waiting area.  Rob shot me a look and I had to question this.  Because the odds of us being the only two passengers on an international flight to England in the middle of the day were slim.  And I hoped that the studio would not have been stupid enough to book us an entire commercial jet.  That would have made me even more nervous.  Like someone was trying to get us crashed again.  Together.  Alone.  Rob and I got up and I approached the airline employee, questioning, “Where are the other passengers?”

She smiled. “They’re already on board.”

“Huh?” was my brilliant response.

Her smile stayed firmly affixed. “We were given explicit instructions to minimize your exposure, so we’re boarding you last.  You’re in first class anyway, so your seats will be in the front of the plane and we thought this was less of a hassle than the entire plane filing past your seats.  We boarded the rest of the plane one gate over.”

“Oh,” was my next brilliant response.  Rob had said nothing.

“Can I ask you one favor?” She asked.

“Uhm… I guess?” brilliant response number three.

“Could you sign this for my daughter?”

“Sure,” I said, handing the small poster to Rob after I’d signed it.  He signed it wordlessly and handed it back to the woman with a small smile.  “Thank you,” he said as we began to move to board the plane.

She nodded.  “Thank you,” she said back to us, holding up the poster.  “Have a good flight.”

I nodded back and we walked the short distance where the plane was waiting.  I was in the lead and honestly, I was freaking out slightly walking down this stupid small hallway, knowing it was one of those air docks that had nothing under it really and was leading us to what could possibly be our deaths.  Again.  Some more.  It wasn’t rational, but fears weren’t meant to be and I was quite out of breath by the time we reached the door.  A stewardess was waiting for us and she must have registered my panicky look and smiled warmly as we got closer. 

“Your seats are ready and everything will go smoothly,” she said as I stopped in front of her.

That wasn’t exactly reassuring.  I’m sure the original pilots of our first doomed flight thought everything was just going to go swimmingly too.  No one planned a crash in ordinary circumstances.  Rob was a solid presence behind me, urging me forward a bit when I hesitated getting on the plane.  It was funny how things shifted between us, but understandable.  I followed the stewardess to our seats and she made a large production of telling us if there was anything we needed, not to hesitate in any way to ask.  I took the window seat, mostly because I just happened to be first and that was logical, but I sensed that Rob might not like the window seat and he might have some manly protective issue with sitting in the aisle seat. 

Once we were seated and buckled and all that shit, then the waiting began.  This might have been when we both started freaking out again because the anticipation was always worse than the actual act.  I started chewing on my nails about the same time his leg started its speed-bouncing again.  We hadn’t even taken off yet and I was already reaching for his hand.  He took it happily and we sat there waiting for what seemed like hours but was probably only minutes.  When the engines fired, his grip became quite a bit tighter and I started counting in my head and trying to match my breathing to the counting.  It wasn’t very successful because every few numbers some errant and stupidly ridiculous thought would run through my head. 

Rob sounded like he was choking all of a sudden and I looked over to see what the hell was the matter, but he was already turning, pulling the armrest that was between us up so that there was no barrier.

“Ok,” he started, and I could tell he was trying to regulate his own breathing.  I was expecting some pep talk about how we were going to be fine but got exactly the opposite.

“I’m not going to lie.  I’m completely terrified that a wing will fall off, that an engine will ignite and fry us all, that the airlock will suddenly fail and we’ll all be left with no pressure or oxygen and like… whatever happens when that particular thing happens… will be extremely unpleasant, that the pilots will fall asleep and smash us into a mountain…”

This wasn’t helping.  I really wanted to tell him that this was not helping at all.

“…or that the flaps or whatever the fuck they’re called will break off and we’ll wind up in the Bermuda Triangle or something equally ridiculous.  What I mean is that if I don’t do this now and the damn plane winds up going down again and I die this time, I’ll never have done this and I would never forgive myself.  I mean, I don’t want to tempt fate and all that, but you never know, lightening isn’t supposed to strike the same place twice, but this is all very surreal and I keep having to try to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming and wondering why the hell we didn’t just like take a fucking boat across the ocean no matter that it would have taken like 18 times as long, and I really don’t want to tempt fate… I said that already, didn’t I?  It’s just that… I feel like I really can’t take the chance; that you never know—threat to life may be immediate and all that, right?”

And he paused.  And I was looking at him like he’d completely fallen off the loony cart and raised the crazy flag. 

But he didn’t seem to care, as he just kept rambling on.  “So what I’m saying is that I was going to wait until we were in England and do this all officially and romantically in the middle of somewhere like the London Bridge or one of the parks or hell, I dunno, my parents’ house or the gardens or the Tower of London, but that’d be kind of macabre, I really hadn’t planned it out completely, I was going to just be spontaneous and just go with the flow of things but I didn’t anticipate this being so completely terrifying that I feel I’d be safer jumping from the plane with a parachute.”

He paused again and my eyebrows must have been up to the plane ceiling by now.  He wasn’t talking loudly by any means, but the couple sitting across the aisle from us were looking over with an air of concern as Rob kept bringing up ways that planes crash and shit.  We’d be lucky if he made it to England without a straightjacket. 

He took a breath.  “What I really mean to say… I’m completely fucking this up…” he stopped to admonish himself here for a second or two, and then another deep breath.  “I just… oh, fuck it.”  He started riffling through the pocket of his jacket, the inside one and I couldn’t really see what he was getting out of it but it all became quite glaringly clear when the next second he had unbuckled his seatbelt and was on awkwardly on his knee in front of me and there was a ring there.  

Holy mother fucking shit.

“Will you marry me?”

Ugh.  Fucking Catherine Hardwicke. 

Chapter 1  Chapter 2  Chapter 3  Chapter 4  Chapter 5  Chapter 6  Chapter 7a  Chapter 7b  Chapter 8 Chapter 9a  Chapter 9b  Chapter 10  Chapter 11  Chapter 12  Chapter 13  Chapter 14  Chapter 15 Chapter 16  Chapter 17a  Chapter 17b  Chapter 18a  Chapter 18b  Chapter 19a  Chapter 19b  Chapter 19c  Chapter 20  Chapter 21  Chapter 22  Chapter 23  Chapter 24  Chapter 25  Chapter 26  Chapter 27  Chapter 28  Chapter 29  Chapter 30  Chapter 31  Chapter 32  Chapter 33  Chapter 34  Chapter 35  Chapter 36   Chapter 37  Chapter 38  Chapter 39  Chapter 40   Chapter 41  Chapter 42  Chapter 43 Chapter 44  Chapter 45