Page 5 of 50 Ways to Win Back Your Lover

Shrinking into the confines of my seat, I attempt to hold my breath for the duration of takeoff. The experiment ends with me closed-mouth coughing while trying to avoid alerting Delilah to my presence. By the time we’re cruising at thirty-five thousand feet, my stomach hovers somewhere at one thousand.

The flight attendant, with a seriously thick set of eyebrows, is pushing the drink cart toward our row. When he asks Delilah—who’s one seat in front of me, in case you forgot that nut shot—what she’d like to drink, I immediately think: Sprite without ice.

“Sprite without ice,” Delilah says.

My stomach lowers to eight hundred feet.

Delilah never liked ice in her drinks. She hated how it felt bumping against her teeth, claimed it got in the way of drinking. Apparently, some of her preferences haven’t changed, and I hate that I know this about her. She probably still cracks her knuckles when she’s stressed and loves the smell of a new book and looks at her boogers after she blows her nose. Her fiancé probably knows these details about her and more. New habits I never got to learn.

“Would you like pretzels or cookies?” the flight attendant asks Delilah.

I think: Cookies.

Delilah says, “Cookies.”

Make that six hundred feet.

Unable to handle food or drink or anything sloshing around in my stomach, I wave off the flight attendant and his huge eyebrows. Orange Jeans Guy beside me has usurped our shared armrest. Lennon is silently fuming over our fate. Delilah’s wind chime voice assaults me from up ahead as she talks about the book her seatmate’s reading.

Elbows held tight to my body, I debate pulling out my sketchbook, distracting myself with drawing wild creatures or working on my graphic novel, but I’ll probably just draw Delilah.

Lennon shoves a magazine in my face and points to the Wi-Fi option while holding up his phone. He stares at me until I comply and receive his message on my phone.

Him: I hate you.

Me: Again, not my fault. I didn’t plan this.

Him: We should’ve switched flights.

Me: YOU CAN’T MISS WORK.

Him: I still hate you.

Me: No you don’t. You hate our life.

Him: I really fucking do. And I do hate you when you drink my beer, Brian.

I hate when he purposely uses my WITSEC alias, knowing it irritates me. Our US Marshal handler pushed us to choose our new names, each one starting with the same letter as our birth names for easier recall. Lennon is Logan. Callahan is Connor. Desmond is Daniel, and the oldest, Jake, is John. Since everyone called me E instead of Edgar, I was told not to use that letter. I grudgingly opted for Brian after one of my favorite illustrators, Brian Bolland.

While I’ve used our aliases aloud the past ten years, in my head I’ve refused. Thinking of my brothers as anyone other than who they were was a line I couldn’t cross.

Thinking about the woman in front of me is pure torture.

Despising life, I resume texting Lennon.

Me: If you hit me really hard, I might pass out for the whole flight. Forget it ever happened.

Him: I hate this for you more than I hate you for drinking my beer.

Me: I hate our father more than any of that.

The money-laundering bastard who pulled the rug out from under us.

Frustrated with everything, I cross my legs, then realize I’m jostling Delilah’s seat. I freeze. At least, my limbs freeze. My pulse thinks it’s running the hundred-yard dash. When Delilah moves her seat back, leaning into my space, I grab the puke bag from the seat pocket and tuck it by my side. The last thing I need is to projectile vomit onto my lost love’s head.

This is how I spend the next half hour: my body atrophied, each bone fused into immobility, worried one small breath will alert Engaged Delilah Moon Who Loves Someone Else that the guy who broke her heart is behind her. I also have to pee, but I’m terrified she’ll see me, so I’ve crossed my legs so tightly my calves cramp.

Lennon is staring morosely out his window. Orange Jeans Guy spreads his legs, his knee hitting mine as he sprawls. I shrink smaller, too freaked out to speak and ask him to keep to his space. My voice is deeper than when I was seventeen. Still, Delilah might recognize it. Her voice has more husk than I remember, but her bright wind chime tone is unforgettable.