Answering Machine

There was something practically magical about an airport at Christmastime. Wreaths hung neatly at the front of every check-in desk, strands of garland and white lights were strung across the ceilings, and people were coming home. People were still rushed and rude, but at least one could account their actions to the prospect of being home with their friends and families.

I was no different as I all but sprinted from my gate, a smile plastered across my face, and my messenger bag bumping awkwardly against my hip as I darted in between and around people. I occasionally glanced up, checking the directional signs to ensure that I was, in fact, headed for the baggage claim. I slowed down as I began to round a corner, becoming trapped behind the hoards of people making their way out to their loved ones who had come to greet them. I smiled as I watched a father swoop his giggling, excited daughter into his arms, and I felt my heart swell as I watched an elderly couple embrace.

“Lindsay!” My head snapped away from the smiling couple, turning in the direction of John’s voice. My eyes darted from face to face until landing happily on his. The grin on my own face only grew, if that was at all possible, and I let out a quick, “’Scuse me!” as I pushed through the jammed crowd, bobbing in and out of clusters of families, until I reached him, jumping into his arms.

He staggered slightly under the sudden weight of not only me, but my bag, as well, but held me steadily as, somehow, my legs wrapped around his waist and I buried my face in his neck.

“Well, hello to you, too,” he laughed somewhere near my ear, the sound of his voice so close, and so real, that it made me shiver.

“Hi,” I replied with a giggle, smiling against his skin. I gently slid from his grasp, letting my feet return to the ground. I looked up at him, biting my lip, and barely a second passed before he pressed his lips to mine. I leaned into him, wrapping my arms around his neck to pull him even closer. Kissing John always felt new, especially after being apart for so long. Butterflies still rose to the pit of my stomach, and he still drove me crazy.

“I missed you,” he murmured against my lips, pressing his forehead to mine.

“Missed you more,” I told him with a smile. He smiled back and wrapped his arms tightly around my waist, pulling me into a close embrace. I latched my arms around his back and rested my head on his shoulder, closing my eyes and breathing in his familiar scent.

We stood like that, wrapped around each other in silence, for a few long moments, immune to the bustle of the overflowing airport around us. I didn’t care that people were eyeing us suspiciously or skirting narrowly around us and out of the way. Nothing mattered but the fact that I was in Arizona, in John’s arms, and in love.

“We should go get your bags,” he suggested, though neither of us made any effort to move from where we stood.

“I guess so,” I said with a slight shrug, still unwilling to pull myself even an inch away from him.

“Come on,” he finally said with a laugh, removing his arms from around my waist and hoisting my messenger back off of my shoulder.

“John, I got it,” I protested, reaching to grab the bag back from him.

“It’s fine, Linds,” he insisted with a smile, throwing it over his own shoulder and winding his fingers with my own before tugging me off towards the baggage claim. I sighed and gripped his hand tightly, leaning closer to him as we began to walk.

The baggage from my flight from New York had only just begun to be dumped onto the conveyer belt, but I eventually spotted my bag and leaned over, lifting it up and back onto the floor.

“Okay, are we good to go?” John asked, without bothering to wait for a response before he began to walk towards the exit.

“John, wait,” I laughed, reaching out to grab his arm and direct him back. “There’s still another one.”

“Another one?” he asked, looking at me incredulously.

“Well, yeah,” I said, a small smile working its way to my lips. “I couldn’t fit all of my stuff in just one suitcase.”

At first, John rolled his eyes and huffed, standing next to me with his hands stuffed in his pockets. Then, after a moment, I watched as his brow furrowed, then as his eyes widened slightly, before he turned to face me.

“Wait, what did you mean by, ‘all of your stuff?’” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “Do you mean all of the stuff you needed for two weeks in Arizona? Because I don’t think anyone needs that much – “

“No,” I cut him off, chewing my bottom lip nervously as I peered up at him, “I mean all of my stuff, all of my belongings. At least, aside from the things I decided to ship back rather then take with me on the plane, which is still a lot more – “

This time it was John’s turn to interrupt, as he gripped my shoulders with his hands and looked at me with a very, very serious look in his eyes.

“What are you getting at, Lindsay?” he asked slowly, licking his bottom lip that I assumed had been made very dry by the weather.

“I thought it was pretty obvious,” I responded, trying to smile at him. He couldn’t really be that dense, could he? When he didn’t respond, I furrowed my brow in frustration.

“I’m moving back here, back to Arizona, John,” I told him, searching his face desperately for the first sign of emotion that would strike his blank face. Nothing changed. His expression didn’t change from blank and confused to joyous and exuberant, as I had so hoped it would. Instead, I found myself muttering that my second suitcase was passing by, and he turned around and lugged it off of the conveyor belt.

Silently, he pulled at the handle and began walking towards the exit with my suitcase in tow. I practically jumped, realizing he was leaving, before hurrying after him with my other suitcase rolling behind me.

“John!” I called out as he strode briskly through the sliding glass doors and into the mild evening air. I shook my head and continued to rush after him, the sound of my luggage’s wheels against the pavement echoing once we had reached the parking garage.

“John!” I yelled again, making sure no one was close enough to notice my raised voice. He still refused to turn around, but slowed to a stop as he approached his truck – and God, I couldn’t believe he still had that damn thing – and lifted my suitcase into the back.

He took the second one from me, sliding it next to its counterpart, as soon as I caught up to him, before finally deciding to look at me.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked, practically huffing and almost out of breath. I might have been taller than your average twenty-two-year old woman, but my legs still were nowhere near as long as John’s, and I’d practically had to run to keep up with his long strides.

John stuffed his hands into the front pockets of his jeans and stared at the ground, scuffing the tip of his left boot against the concrete below his foot. My stomach churned as I began to grow nervous with dozens of absurd ideas running through my mind.

He didn’t want me in Arizona. He was hiding something. Was there another woman? Was he cheating on me? He didn’t love me.

“You don’t want me here,” I found myself blurting, though I suddenly regretted not having more control over the words I had sputtered. His eyes flashed up, briefly, to meet mine, a glint of sorrow becoming more than evident. My stomach dropped and I felt as if I could vomit. My hands turned clammy and I clenched my fists at my sides, trying to remember how to breathe.

“No,” he spoke clearly, and I swear, it took everything I had not to cry. “No, that’s not it, Lindsay.”

I stared at the ground now, watching as his boots suddenly moved to stand directly in front of my much smaller, pointy-toed flats. He pushed a strand of my hair behind my ear, then let his finger drift slowly down the line of my jaw, before resting underneath my chin, tilting my face up to look at him. His stared at me intently, his eyes burning intensely like smoky emeralds.

“You’re all I want, and of course I want you here. You know that.” His voice was earnest and controlled, his words slow and deliberate. “But I don’t want you to ruin your life because of me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I don’t want you to give up your dreams just so you can stay in Arizona with me. It means I think you deserve more than to be stuck here, tied down in a sleepy Southwestern state when you want to be in the city. You want to be a journalist for the New York Times, and god dammit, you’re going to be one. You have dreams, Lindsay; you have all of these beautiful, impressive dreams that you have been working your entire life to make realities. It would kill me to look at you every day and know that you gave all of them up just to come back to Arizona to be with me. I get to live my dream, so why the hell shouldn’t you get to live yours?”

I listened to his entire tirade, keeping myself from interrupting. Just as it was with every impassioned speech he made, he closed his eyes once he was done, and took a few deep breaths, before opening his eyes once more and looking at me, pleading.

“John,” I started, slowly collecting words in my head before stringing them into phrases that I would speak, “listen to me. You never asked me to move back to Arizona, not once; this was entirely my decision."

He opened his mouth to protest, but I held up a silencing finger and continued.

“I’ve been thinking about this since my last year of school. I even, at one point, wanted to move back right after graduation, so don’t go thinking this was a last-minute decision that I made on a whim. I’ve thought about it, and I want to be here, John; I think that moving back to Arizona is what’s best for me.”

“What about the New York Times? You can’t just give up on that,” he interjected before I could stop him.

“Dreams change, John,” I said, this time quietly, and after a slight hesitation.

“You don’t want to write anymore?” he asked, shock written entirely over his face and dripping from his tone. “That’s insane, you’re the best writer I’ve ev – “

“I didn’t tell you this,” I began, interrupting him and, as I forever was, biting dwn on my bottom lip as I looked hopefully at him, “but at the end of my last year at school, I uhm – “

“You what?” he asked, trying to speed along my confession. I could see the anxiety in his eyes.

“Jesus, John, don’t have a heart attack,” I told him, rolling my eyes at his dramatic expression. “I'm sorry I didn't tell you about it; I mean, I really, really should have. But I wasn't sure of it at first, and I didn't want to tell you and then not go through with it, and then I thought I could surprise you, and - "

"Lindsay?" John interrupted, encouraging me to get to the point.

"I started going to classes to get my teaching certification.”

“Teaching?” he repeated, looking at me curiously, and thankfully much more calmly.

“Yeah!” I responded, becoming enthused. “I started volunteering at an elementary school in the city during my sophomore year, and I continued doing it until I graduated, because I loved it so much. I never thought about bein a teacher – I always thought I would hate it – but, I don’t know, there’s just something so… So… Defining and just absolutely wonderful about inspiring kids to learn.”

“So you want to be a teacher?” John asked, to which I smiled brightly before responding.

“I’m going to be a teacher,” I corrected him.

“A teacher,” he mused, staring into space pensively. I simply stood in front of him, bouncing on the tips of my toes. “So you’re just forgetting about being a journalist?”

“No,” I told him, “I’m not forgetting it. Maybe I’ll write for the Republic, or something. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing, and I loved going to school for journalism and everything about it was incredible. But, I don’t know, John, there’s just something about teaching, about helping kids like that, it just gets me. I don’t know how else to explain it. I love it. It’s what I want to do.”

John stayed silent for a moment, processing my words. I realized I had just bombarded him with an immense amount of shocking information that was so incredibly different from what I had always told him I wanted to do. Finally, a soft smile spread across his face and he leaned even closer to me.

“So you’re telling me,” he began, “that you’re moving back to Arizona because you want to be a teacher.”

“Correct,” I replied, my smile slowly growing.

“And this decision had nothing to do with the fact that when I do not live in a touring vehicle, I live in Arizona?”

I rolled my eyes and laughed, wrapping my arms over his shoulder to hug him closely.

“I can be a teacher anywhere, John,” I told him, a tone of finality in my voice, “and I chose Arizona.”

“Okay,” he responded simply, pulling his arms around me to hug me more tightly. I buried my face in his shoulder and grinned like crazy into the fabric of his shirt. “But if you ever change your mind and want to go back to New York, promise me you’ll go, because – “

“I promise,” I told him, partly just in an effort to shut him up, and partly because I meant it. But I knew I wouldn’t go back, because I was sick of missing him, even when he was home, and because being here with him felt right; it felt better than being without him in New York.