Disclaimer: I own a nice gravy boat. Actually, it is a pretty mediocre gravy boat. Okay, I don't own a gravy boat. I don't own New Girl either.
"Cheese puff?"
Nick looked over at his seatmate, and the crunchy orange treat she offered. "You still have these? Didn't they get confiscated in security?"
"I have skills, Nick Miller."
She did. He couldn't deny that. He took a puff.
Air travel always wigged him out. People should not be able to fly. Through the air. Like a bird. There was just something weird about that. And there were all sorts of rules, procedures that people seemed to know, but he didn't. So he just faked it, because that's what you did. His Dad taught him that.
Dad.
It kept coming back to him. He knew he was supposed to be feeling something more about his death than he did, but he just felt confused, and he had no idea what to do to fake it this time around.
"You need to rest," Jess said beside him.
He didn't think he could rest. He hadn't really slept in ... weeks, it seemed like. And the plane was loud and smelled weird and your stomach is always doing that flippy floppy thing and his Dad was dead and Jess was next to him and smelling good and...
Jess stopped the running thoughts by pulling his head down onto her shoulder. All of a sudden, everything receded and there was just the small scar on his knuckle, a bit of unhealed fallout from the exploding aquarium that he hadn't even noticed when it happened. He rubbed it with the unhurt hand.
It was only after the fact that he realized he'd been asleep and dreamt of his Dad. The images are jumbled - some con - a Susan B. Anthony, maybe? Dreams never made much sense to Nick, and this one wasn't clear except that, in the end, his Dad was gone. But his Dad was always gone, except for the times he'd come back.
His Dad isn't dead. He's just gone until the next time he came back.
Nick wiped his face, which felt raw and disconnected from his head. His hands came back wet. Nick can't remember the last time he's cried, though if this isn't the first time he's cried in his sleep, well, he'd never know. Not a lot of companions over the years to tell him, if he did.
"Where are we?" he asked. He turned to Jess, amazed by what it feels like to see her face right after waking. Her eyes seemed to be the size of dinner plates. No, something sexier than that. Were beachballs sexy? He really wasn't good at this, but he needed to cut himself some slack, since...
"My Dad died."
"Over Denver," she said at the same time. A beat. "I know, Nick."
"He wasn't a good man."
"No."
"But I kinda liked him, some of the time."
"I liked him too."
They stared at each other for longer than Nick would normally find comfortable. But, despite his nap, he was tired. Tired of everything. Tired of trying to be one guy for his family, and one guy for his boss, and one guy for Schmidt, and one guy for himself. He wanted to not have to try. He wanted to not have to try to try. He could think of only one moment in the last several weeks where he just was, absent any thinking or trying or anything.
So he did it again. He leaned forward and kissed her.
She kissed him back, quietly, unurgently, and he knew then that he'd never be a writer, because he was never going to be able to capture a moment like then worth a damn. But he didn't really care. He just knew that he wasn't kissing her because he was lonely, or in pain, or wanting sex or anything else. He was kissing her because when he did he became the Nick Miller he wanted to be, because she was Jessica Day, and a world that had a Jessica Day in it demanded a better Nick Miller than all the Nick Millers it had ever seen, before now.
She broke off the kiss, but didn't pull away, instead giving him that smile she had, the one that showed up when all the flibberty-gibbets self-defense things went away and the strong, smart Jessica Day was all that was left.
"My Mom likes you."
"Your Mom was angry the entire time I was there."
"That's just Mom. She gets angry so that she doesn't have to be scared."
Jess made a thoughtful, non-committal noise, low in her throat. Instead of answering, she reached into her comically large bag and pulled out sunglasses. Giant gold Elvis sunglasses. She put them on.
"I forgot to give them back. Maybe they should be returned to sender."
"They're better on you, you old hounddog."
The game fizzled out almost immediately, because Elvis was his Dad's thing, not theirs, but she left the glasses on, and he kept thinking they were adorable. He didn't think about his Dad, and he didn't think about Winston and Schmidt, stuck back at O'Hare on the 11:30pm flight, and he didn't think about how he and Jess still had a lot of awkward to wrestle through before they got to the part that would be good.
Because it would be good, he could see that, for once. Because she lightened him, and he ... heavied ... her and sure, his Dad just died, and he was a bartender in his thirties, and he was in a metal tube in the sky that really shouldn't be allowed to be in the sky at all, but that didn't mean tomorrow had to be the same thing.
Tomorrow he could be better. Tomorrow he could be Nick Miller. He could kind of see how that would go, now.