Three Words.
You have to transfer stations from Coliseum to Oakland International Airport. It’s a secondary little tram that goes purely between those two stations for easy public commute. If there was one eccentric interest Mae and Johnny both shared, it was their enthusiasm for public transit. Beyond being an efficient and affordable means of going to the airport, it saved Johnny the extravagant rate of having to park his car to walk her to the gate. And it gave them a little more time for her to snuggle her head against his neck and loop her arm around his with their fingers interlaced.
Once BART had left the underground tunnels of Oakland, it was a semi-picturesque travel down the East Bay coastline. The only blemish on a beautiful Bay Area day was the sight thoroughly deserted Oakland Coliseum, still-standing between a last view of the Oakland Hills. It was a shame – Mae had wanted to wish them good-bye. The night before, they’d taken Johnny’s AMC AMX up Fish Ranch Rd to the top of Grizzly Peak to look down at the Town and the City from those hills, before they pulled off into a deserted lookout and climbed into the backseat. Replaying the night in her mind, she gave his hand a reflexive squeeze. It hardly bothered her how exhausted she was from the lack of sleep – there’d be more than enough time on the flight to New York.
“I could come too, ya know,” he mumbled softly into the side of her head.
“Yeah,” she said closed eyes, taking the brief trolley ride for a moment of rest, “but Lissie seems a little grumpy with me. And with her going out in Memphis that night, I just wanna have some time alone to bond again.”
“I know,” he relented, closing his own eyes for barely more than a few seconds before the trolley slowed down and came to a stop at the airport. After the doors slid open, the young couple rose and departed, Mae dragging a rolling suitcase behind her.
“It’s only a day. I’ll see you on Monday.”
“Yeah, but it’s May Day. That’s like the international commie holiday, and it’s even more appropriate this year. Now it’s Mae Day.”
She snorted. “You’re such a dork.”
“You like it.”
They came to entrance to security, and she stopped and turned to look him in the eye.
“I never said I didn’t,” she said as she reached into her purse, withdrawing an envelope, “And, in fact, I have this for you. But you’re not allowed to read it until you’re on BART from that last station. The one before the transfer.”
“Coliseum?”
“Yep.”
He took the letter from her hands, opening his jacket and clumsily placing it his pocket while fishing around. “That’s funny because…” he said with a tinged of task-directed frustration before tugging a thin plastic case containing a blank CD out of his pocket, “…I also have something for you.”
He offered it out to her. She smiled for a moment, an amused and almost coy grin, before she took it from his hands.
“This funny thing keeps happening where I keep turning on the radio and somebody else is singing a song about the two of us. So I took all those songs and burned them onto a CD for you.”
He looked down and reached for his pocket, pulling his phone out and flipping open an app.
“I’m also sure you don’t have a CD player because nobody does anymore, so I’ve also compiled it as a Spotify playlist and will text that to you in a moment.”
“Johnny.”
“But you should get a CD player because it’s a very fun experience to listen to a mix on your Walkman. I think that’s probably a technology just a little before your time, right? I don’t know how South Africa is.”
“Johnny.”
“Little out of my wheelhouse of interests. Though when I was nine or ten I became briefly but intensely interested in Botswana for a while. I still know the capitol is ‘Gaborone.’”
“Johnny. I need to get through security or I’ll miss my flight.”
He looked up from the phone and sighed as her own phone pinged with the playlist successful delivered.
“I know. This is called ‘distract you until you miss the flight so you don’t have to leave.’”
She tilted her head to the side, pouting out her lower lip and making pity eyes at him before getting up on her tip-toes to loop her arms around his neck and place her lips to his. They kissed long and hard, two too-old teenagers making a scene in the airport terminal, drunk on 80’s romcoms. As their lips parted, he looked her in the eyes, those three sacred words locked and loaded in his chest.
But his throat tightened up, and force once, the Pure Champion had nothing to say.
“I’ll see you on Monday. Not until you get to Coliseum.”
She released him and turned to her suitcase, dragging it behind through the security line. At the threshold, she stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “I would say ‘good luck’ against Bunga, but we know how that’s going to go,” she said with a smile, “So how about instead – looking forward to walking you down the ramp at Evolution.”
As she continued through the line, he stood there watching her leave. And right as she had taken her shoes to place on the conveyor belt, he yelled over the gap.
“Mae!”
She turned. They made eye contact across the room.
“I love you.”
But as they left his mouth, the loud screech of the metal detector went off, a tech dweeb now in full argument with a TSA flunky about taking his Google Glasses off as he went through Pre-Screen.
“What?”
And his throat seized back up. He grimaced a smile and waved. She rolled her eyes, grinned, and waved back. And then she was gone. Johnny Bacchus took the trolley from Oakland International Airport back to Coliseum and then waited patiently for the Bay Point/Antioch train. Once seated, he pulled out her letter and opened it up.The End. |