Chapter 8: Taking Off
The hum of the jet engines was a low, constant thrum in Aurora’s bones. She stared out the window at the tapestry of clouds, phone still warm in her hand. Her father’s voice, cheerful and static-riddled, seemed to echo in the quiet cabin. You sound different, Rory. Better. You eating?
“Yeah, Dad. Eating just fine.”
You’d tell me if you were in trouble?
“I’m not in trouble.” The lie was automatic, smooth. She was thirty-eight thousand feet in the air, headed to another continent with a man whose face was on billboards, wearing a cashmere sweater that cost more than her monthly rent. Trouble didn’t begin to cover it.
The leather seat shifted beside her as Callum slid in. His body heat reached her before his touch did. Then his thigh was pressing against hers, solid and warm through the thin wool of her trousers. He plucked the phone from her lax fingers and set it on the table before them.
“Everything okay, sweetheart?”
His voice was low, meant only for her. His fingers brushed a loose, frizzing curl behind her ear, his touch lingering on the nape of her neck. It was a simple gesture, but in the suspended reality of the cabin, it felt like a claim. It contradicted every frantic, internal warning she’d recited since she’d packed her bag. Too fast.Too public. A terrible, beautiful mistake.
“My dad,” she said, still watching the clouds. “He knows I’m traveling. Not the details. Just… traveling.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“He thinks I’m in a cabin in the woods, finally finishing my book. Not in a private jet.” She finally looked at him. He was studying her, his green eyes softer than she’d seen them on the training ground that morning. He’d been all sharp angles and shouted commands there, a different person from the one who’d made her coffee. Here, in a simple black tee and sweatpants, he looked like a version of himself she suspected few people ever saw. Tired.Quiet. Real.
“You are finishing your book,” he said, nodding toward her open laptop on the table, its cursor blinking accusingly on a blank document. “The location’s just been upgraded.”
“To a five-star hotel in Madrid where I’ll be locked in a room like a mistress in a bad novel.”
He flinched, just barely. His hand dropped from her neck. “Is that what you think this is?”
“I don’t know what this is.” The words came out too loud in the hushed cabin. A uniformed attendant glanced over from the galley before discreetly looking away. Aurora lowered her voice, her chest tight. “I watched you train today. I sat in that silent glass box while a dozen people took photos of me from the car park. Your publicist looked at me like I was a stain on your brand.”
Callum leaned back, running a hand through his hair. The messy look was perfected now, stress-induced. “Elsa is paid to be paranoid. The photos were handled. Non-issue.”
“Non-issue for you. For me, it’s my quiet life, exploded. I had to call my editor and tell her I was ‘researching in Europe.’ She thinks I’ve lost my mind.”
“Maybe you have,” he said, a faint smile touching his lips. “A little. So have I.”
He reached for a glass of whiskey on the rocks he’d left on the table earlier and took a slow sip. The ice clinked. The sound was impossibly loud.
“You asked me on this trip,” she said, forcing her voice level. “So talk to me. Don’t just… touch me and assume that’s enough. Who are you up here?” She gestured around the cabin. “Because down there, you’re Callum Nordskov, superstar. In my kitchen, you were just a guy burning eggs. Who’s in this seat?”
He swirled the whiskey, watching the liquid slide up the sides of the glass. For a long moment, he said nothing. The jet pushed through a patch of turbulence, a brief, rattling shudder.
“Up here,” he said finally, “I’m tired.My knee hurts. It always hurts after a double session. I’m thinking about their midfield. Their left-back is fast, but he’s reckless. He can be drawn out.” He took another sip. “I’m also thinking the way the light from this window hits your hair makes it look like silver. And I’m wondering if you’re going to freak out and ask the pilot to turn the plane around.”
The raw honesty of it stole the air from her lungs. He wasn’t giving her a line. He was giving her a list.Pain.Strategy. Her.
“I’m not going to ask to turn around,” she whispered.
“Good.” He set the glass down. “Because the playboy thing?It was a shield. A shitty, transparent one. You get labeled early—good looks, a decent smile, a few tabloid pics at a club—and the machine feeds itself. After a while, it’s easier to let people believe the fiction than to constantly correct them. Safer.”
“Safer than what?”
“Than this.” He looked directly at her, his gaze unwavering. “Than wanting something real and having every vulture in the world pick it apart before it can even breathe. Than inviting someone into the chaos and having them decide it’s too much. Which it is. It’s too much. It’s fucking exhausting.”
The confession hung between them, a fragile, living thing. Aurora saw it then, the depth of his loneliness. It wasn’t the melodramatic solitude of a rock star. It was the quiet, grinding isolation of a man living in a gilded cage, surrounded by people yet utterly alone. He was offering her the key, knowing she might drop it.
She reached over and took his glass, bringing it to her lips. The whiskey was smoky and sharp, burning a warm path down her throat. She handed it back, her fingers brushing his.
“My dad,” she said, leaning her head back against the seat. “He’s the reason I know offside traps and tactical fouls. He’s the reason I love the game. My mom left when I was seven. It was just him and me in this little flat, and every Saturday was sacred.Match day. He’d make these terrible burgers, and we’d shout at the telly. It was our language. After he… after he got sick last year, watching the games alone felt like losing him twice. Then you moved in next door. And suddenly, the thing that felt like a ghost was alive again. I’d hear you kicking a ball against the garden wall, and it was just… a connection.To him. To the joy of it.”
She’d never said it out loud. The secret reason behind her expertise, her fandom. The profound, private link between the man in the seat beside her and the man she was slowly, heartbreakingly losing to early-onset Parkinson’s.
Callum was silent for a long time. He didn’t offer pity. He didn’t try to fix it. He just listened, his eyes on her profile.
“So when you kissed me,” she continued, the whiskey giving her courage, “it wasn’t just some fan fantasy. It was… complicated. And now I’m here, and it’s more complicated. And I’m terrified.”
He moved then. He unfastened his seatbelt with a sharp click, then hers. In one fluid motion, he pulled her across the space between them, settling her onto his lap, her legs curled to the side. He wrapped his arms around her, his face buried in the cashmere at her shoulder. He just held her. Not kissing, not demanding. Just anchoring.
“I’m terrified too,” he said, his voice muffled against her.“Every single day. Of injury.Of losing. Of this all disappearing and being left with nothing but the person I was before it, who I don’t remember anymore. You think my life is glamorous? It’s a schedule. It’s a product. You’re the first real thing that’s happened to me in years. And I have no idea what I’m doing with you, either.”
Aurora let her body melt into his, the tension of the day, the week, the years, beginning to seep away. Here, in this bubble of noise and sky, they were just two people, equally lost. She turned her head, her lips finding the shell of his ear.
“My dad’s favorite player was always the number ten,” she whispered.
She felt him go very still. Then, a slow, understanding laugh vibrated through his chest. He pulled back just enough to look at her, wonder and something like triumph in his eyes. “You never said.”
“I was busy being aloof and literary.”
He kissed her then. It was different from the hungry kisses in his kitchen, or the sweet one sticky with jam. This was deep, searching, a conversation of its own. It tasted of whiskey and shared secrets and a fragile, blooming hope. When they finally broke apart, both were breathless.
The pilot’s voice crackled over the speaker, announcing their initial descent into Madrid. The spell wasn’t broken, but it shifted, adapting to new pressure.
Callum didn’t let her go. He kept her in his lap, his arms locked around her waist, as the plane began its gentle tilt earthward. The world outside the window was no longer an endless blue but a approaching grid of city lights and dark countryside.
“So,” he said, his mouth against her temple. “No turning back.”
Aurora watched the ground rise to meet them, the chaotic, beautiful sprawl of a foreign city she was entering under a name that wasn’t her own, for a man who was both exactly and nothing like she’d imagined. The fear was still there, a cold knot in her stomach. But nestled against him, it was joined by something else—a fierce, reckless curiosity.
“No turning back,” she agreed, and laced her fingers through his.