Take Me Home | ✔

BONUS CHAPTER

[a/n] in celebration of getting 300,000 votes (thank you so so much lovelies!!) here's a bonus chapter into the lives of  twenty-seven year old elliot and and twenty-six year old vienna...after the road trip and before the stuff in the epilogue happens x

VIENNA'S POV

AFTER TAKING ALMOST A HUNDRED AIRPLANE RIDES in my entire life, I still couldn't get used to that floating feeling of wanting to puke on the person next to me as soon as I landed. My ears still wouldn't pop, and the plane was already having a delay even though we were already landed. I don't think I'd ever get used to flying. Honestly, I'd much rather be on the ground — train, car, tour bus, motorbike gang — anything but being in the air.

We'd been in the cabin for almost thirty minutes now. I glanced at my phone and saw Elliot staring back at me in the lockscreen. It was a picture of the time he was studying in Greece, and he was standing shirtless on a dock, and in one hand, he held a bouquet but not of roses or any other flowers. Instead, it was a bouquet of corn for our one-year anniversary of dating. I didn't know whether to want to kill him or fly to Greece instantly. The lock screen was my favorite picture of him, but all I could focus on was the time. It was already late into the night, well past midnight, and my body just wanted to break down.

After leaving the Philippines for my fifth humanitarian aid trip in three years, I should've been used to this dragging feeling on my body and the lingering feeling of the sun's kiss on my shoulders once I started breathing the San Francisco air. Nope, I thought. Still not used to it.

After about thirty more agonizingly slow minutes, the flight attendants finally opened the door. "Excuse me," I mumbled politely at the elderly woman sitting next to me, who I practically hopped over just to get to my bags.

"Sorry!" I cried, when I whacked some man in the forehead with the wheels of my carry-on luggage whilst lifting it out of the overhead containers. "So sorry!"

I was the first one out, and I felt like collapsing right onto the soft, plush carpets of the airport. My stomach started clenching, like it always did just when I was about to see him. This time, though, it felt slightly different and more on the nauseous side. My hand instantly went to my wedding ring, anxiously spinning it round and round my ring finger. I scanned the airport furiously for the same tuft of brown hair followed by three identically small ones.

"Mommy!"

I spun around to the source of the voice, knowing that high-pitched tone anywhere.

"Luca!"

My bags dropped to the floor with a loud thud, and I fell to my knees as my son ran to me, his stubby little three-year-old feet moving so fast, it created a blur under his waist. Luca was chubbier than his brothers so when he collapsed into my arms, it was the equivalent as hugging the world's fluffiest marshmallow to my chest.

"Oh, I missed you," I said to his hair, breathing in the familiar scent of his cotton-candy shampoo. "Mommy missed you for a week, but it was such a long week."

Behind him, I could see the wheels of one year old Sebastian's stroller come pulling up and inside, the world's happiest little baby was cooing and drooling all over his blue bibs. His arms reached out for me while he started laughing, something that made my heart soar straight to the moon and never come back. Just thinking that that noise was made by a little tiny person, and that little tiny person was given life by being inside of me — it still hasn't hit me.

"Mommy," another boy, the eldest of the three, knelt down and wrapped both short arms around me and Luca. His name was Gabriel, and he was serious and solemn, but when he smiled, it was like seeing Elliot for the first time too. He was only five, but he was already so responsible, it was insane. It was like having a little grown-up trapped inside a tiny, superhero-obsessed body.