Chapter Text
“You’re not stalking me, are you?” Percy jokes to the pretty brown-eyed girl in a yankees cap behind him. He’d noticed her in line again as they boarded the plane. She was the same girl that waited for the bus with him, and was at the security line together, and again was with him when he grabbed a bag of fries at McDonalds.
She realizes late that Percy has said something to her and pops out a headphone to hear him better, “What?” she asks him.
Percy’s ears grow hot as he shakes his head to say it was nothing, then tries his best to will himself invisible as he steps onto the plane and scans for his seat. Of course she hadn’t noticed him, why would she?
He finds his row, stows his bag, and plops into the aisle seat, only to get right back up as the same pretty brown-eyed girl taps him, points to the window, then back at herself.
Oh. She’s his seatmate. Great.
Percy helps her shove a rolling bag next to his duffle in the overhead when she’s just a bit too short to get it fully tucked in, and then re-takes his seat after her. He’s careful to look very cool and unbothered by their seating arrangement.
His phone pings with a message from his mom wishing him a safe flight. He snaps a thumbs up pic and updates her with an all good so far.
It’s a bit of a stretch, but his mom knows he’s dreading this trip and feeling guilty about it and refusing to talk about it. As always her strategy is to be so nice about the whole thing that he eventually caves, and as always he knows it’s eventually going to work. But he’d like to avoid talking about it for just a little longer while he can.
At least she, Paul and Estelle are flying in on Saturday, the night before the wedding. He just has to last two days without them. If he just keeps to himself for two days, he knows he can get through it.
Percy flips through his open applications and sees the unanswered text from Grover again -
Ok, so if Callie isn’t your plus one, who is?
*********
Annabeth hadn’t meant to follow him through the airport.
She liked walking fast which is hard in a busy airport at her height. But the tall blonde guy cut through the crowd at a good enough pace for her to tuck in after and follow.
His curly head bobbing leisurely, her frantic steps working to stay in his wake.
Then it turns out they are at the same security line. Then the same gate. Then the same row of the plane. What were the odds.
She hears the stalking joke. She’d almost made it herself.
But her brain was doing that thing where it’s so focused on something that everything else bounces off of it for a few seconds before she can actually comprehend anything extra.
For instance - It took her three tries to understand that the guy at McDonalds was asking her what size sprite she wanted and not just saying “more fries” over and over again.
All because she couldn’t stop thinking about that text from Luke.
Because if she responds to it, that opens up the conversation, right? And she’s dreading sending one text, she couldn’t do more. And if she ignores it, then that’s telling him to, what - try harder?
But if she responds nicely, is that telling him to pay attention to her? If she responds rudely then is that also asking for too much attention?
Feels like a no-win. Like everything with her and Luke.
She’s drafting possible responses and then ranking them by from biggest to lowest risk of completely ruining the weekend for her whole family, when her airport guardian does a double take at her behind him and smiles.
Annabeth’s first thought is not comprehension of what he’s saying - which would’ve been helpful.
Instead, it’s admiration.
Tall guy has nice smile, her tactical brain thinks, pushing all other thoughts aside.
“What?” she responds a full four seconds later.
Tall Guy, Nice Smile quickly bails on their meetcute and rushes to board, only to then sit directly in her row.
The last plane out of JFK to San Francisco is one of those with two seats on one side of the plane and three on the other, so it’s just her and Tall Guy, Nice Smile together for the next seven hours.
Great.
Annabeth mimes that she’s on his window, thinking that maybe if she just feigns hard of hearing he’ll give her a pass for being so weird.
Not only does she get another smile, but he also jumps up to help her with her bag, leaning in to give it a final shove in the overhead when she loses her grip on it.
His cologne is something woody, lightly floral, and sharp like sea salt. Hm. Tall guy has nice smile and also smells good.
Get it together, brain, she warns it.
Once in her seat, she pulls out her phone’s notes app and starts listing out the text responses she’s considering. She looks them over, sighs, and deletes the entire embarrassing list.
Then she switches apps and sends Piper an update. Best Friend en route - taking off soon.
Piper hearts the message almost the instant she’s sent it and that makes her feel a little better. There’s at least someone in San Francisco excited to see her.
Annabeth goes back to her inbox and stares at the unanswered text from Luke, like she can will it out of existence.
I hear you’re bringing someone? Can’t wait to meet him ;)
She huffs to herself, thinking - Yeah, me too.
*********
“If really you don’t want to do it, I can ask someone else to,” Grover had offered Percy. This was months ago when the wedding plans were still coming together.
“Are you kidding?”Percy had protested. “How could I call myself your best man and not plan your bachelor party?”
Later, he wishes he hadn’t protested so much. Grover and Juniper wanted to plan a joint bachelor/bachelorette day at a local sleep-away camp they both loved. They’d be getting married in the camp’s huge greenhouse so they had run of the entire place for the weekend - something Percy would normally be thrilled about. He had a million ideas for three dozen adults to have fun at a kids camp for a day.
But for this particular event, he’d have to share those ideas with Juniper’s maid-of-honor.
And he couldn’t comprehend how he could casually call up Rachel to have any kind of conversation. No less one about a wedding.
He’d been in his room practicing what to say out loud when she beat him to it and a text popped up in their conversation thread:
Hello best man! Can I give you a call later today?
The text just above that was sent from his side six months ago:
Please just pick up. I’m sorry.
It made his stomach turn.
“Talk to Grover, he’d understand,” his mom urges, a comforting hand squeezing his shoulder.
They’re making lunch together in the kitchen as they talk about it. His mom finishes cutting up fruit and puts it on the table while he spreads mayo on slices of bread for their sandwiches.
He has his phone open on the table, the text conversation just sitting there. It’d been a day already and Percy still couldn’t bring himself to type anything back.
Estelle is there too, helping with her favorite activity lately - setting the table - which includes covering every open space that isn’t the floor with paper plates. Percy smirks at her little head bobbing over the top of the table.
“I can’t do that to Grover,” he insists. “They’re friends. I promised him like a thousand times I was ok with it.”
“And Grover would still understand,” Sally reminds him. “He knows how you are.”
“An idiot?”
“Well meaning - to a fault.”
He sighs, pulling Estelle into his lap on her next turn around the table. She starts eating off his plate and he buries his face in her little toddler head.
“Give me strength, Stella,” he pleads.
In response, she turns her curly head around and shoves strawberries into his mouth and then pats it twice with her sticky hand.
“Thanks girl,” he mumbles, mouth full.
Percy rubs the sleeplessness out of his eyes and groans. This isn’t fair. He should be studying for his finals instead of agonizing over how he was going to talk to his ex with his mom. Or if he’s avoiding studying he could be out in the warm weather running with Estelle down to the park. Anything but this.
Before he can lose his nerve, he picks up the phone and dials Rachel.
He only stumbles a little bit when she first picks up, but powers through the awkwardness by making faces with Stella across the room. So long as he can stay distracted, he thinks maybe he can survive the conversation.
Twenty minutes later they have the semblance of a good plan for the bachelor/bachelorette day.
Percy is thankful they mainly talk logistics. It saves them from too much casual talk about what’s actually going on in their lives.
He knows she’s seeing someone. He’s desperate to ask her about it - and desperately hoping she doesn’t mention him.
It feels like a knife hovering just above his chest the whole time.
Towards the end of their conversation, he starts to think he can actually get through this thing without being too miserable the entire time. Maybe they can even be the kind of cool couple that does stay friends after a big break up.
“That’s too much, Percy, you know that,” she says softly into the receiver, shattering the illusion of cool that had been hovering over them. He can imagine her saying it, mouth sad, eyes sharp. A little too vividly.
It makes him take a step back and wonder what he’d said to upset her. They had been dividing up the responsibilities. He didn’t think he was asking her to do too much - they seemed evenly split. But then Percy had offered to call her the following week with an update from the camp on using the waterfront. Did she not want to do canoeing or swimming anymore?
“I think we can do the rest over email,” Rachel insists when he doesn’t respond. “This is a lot for me.”
There it is. The knife falls. His chest twists.
Percy doesn’t know what to say. He’s torn between being incredulous because he didn’t want this to be a phone conversation to begin with - it had been her idea - and being defensive because he’d thought he’d handled it pretty well, all things considered.
Plus she broke it off with him. Doesn’t that mean he’s the one who’s allowed to mope around while everyone walks on eggshells around his feelings?
The uncertainty of what he was even allowed to feel pushes him right back to where he’d been the last time they talked.
He isn’t fine and normal like he’s been pretending, but his entire core has been exposed this whole time without him realizing, and she’d only just barely turned her hand slightly out of bounds to hit the raw and live wire coursing through him.
Suddenly he agrees. This is a lot.
They aren’t going to be friends again one day.
And worse - this whole wedding could've been something fun maybe seven months ago. Something that the devoted, longterm boyfriend version of himself could’ve enjoyed with his devoted, longterm girlfriend.
Back when they were that. Back before he screwed it all up.
“You got it,” he says, suddenly cold. Needing to feel the cold around him like armor.
They hang up with a stiff goodbye.
They don’t talk again outside of email.
*********
Like every time she calls up her family, Annabeth spends most of the day avoiding it, twenty minutes psyching herself up, and now was trying her best to not let her annoyance seep into her voice.
“It’s the second weekend in October,” Thalia repeats, louder the second time so she could be heard over the party happening in the background.
“Ok but what day is the actual wedding?” Annabeth asks again. For the fourth time. “I want to get my tickets before the price jumps up.”
Thalia starts to answer again but then starts having a conversation with someone in the background. Something about napkins or maybe the hose.
Annabeth sighs. She hates planning things with her family. They expect her to have everything together at all times, but it feels like pulling teeth to get them to nail down a single detail on their end. This is a wedding for godssake - and it's in a month no less. You’d think they’d know something by now.
Suddenly the speaker on the other end shifts and says “Hello? Beth, honey can you hear me?”
Annabeth prickles under the nickname. Her stepmom cycles between Annie, Anna, Anne, Beth, Bethie - any number of names besides her own. And she knows she hates it, she’s told her a million times before. It’s Annabeth.
But she’s not fighting today. She’s playing the good daughter.
“Helen,” She says a little too enthusiastically. “How’s the party?”
“Oh you know how these things get,” Helen tuts. “Your father invited the whole hockey team over.”
“Hmm,” she says in exaggerated sympathy, not really knowing at all how those things get. They always seem to happen without her around.
“Thals says you had some questions about the wedding?” Helen asks.
“Yes!” Annabeth says, hoping to get a straight answer. If anyone should know the dates, the bride should. “I'm buying tickets now so I’m just wondering -” but she’s cut off again. Helen is having another conversation with someone in the room and she can tell her phone has been covered by a hand or put on her shoulder.
Annabeth sighs and lays back on her bed. She’d opened the windows this morning to enjoy the breeze since it had started off as such a mild day out. But she’d left them open too long and now the sun feels like it's filling up her whole apartment with its warmth. Her shirt is sticking to her a bit.
After another few minutes of being ignored, she shouts into her phone, “Hello? Is anyone still there? Can you hear me?”
The other line fumbles around like she’d startled them and then Helen comes back.
“What’s that honey?” she says. “No need to shout, sorry that was the reverend’s wife, you know how she can be.”
Annabeth did not know the reverend, his wife, or how any of them could be. She opens her mouth to ask her question for the upteenth time when Helen interrupts again.
“Oh here, Bobby wants to say hi - Bobby say hi to your sister.”
Annabeth resists the urge to throw her phone.
“What's up, loser,” her preteen stepbrother murmurs. Well if she has to talk to her family at least she can talk to someone who likes her. “Why aren’t you here?”
“I’ll be there next month for the wedding,” she says sharply. “Or at least I’m trying to.”
“Too busy partying in the big apple, eh gov’nuh?” he asks, his voice lilting into an accent with the question. For some reason the boys use a British accent to make fun of her living in New York. It’d been going on so long she forgot why they did it but they think it’s hilarious.
She looks around her hot, small, empty studio apartment. “Oh yeah,” she says. “Big party over here.”
“Lame. You better bring me something good this time. Quit bringing me books.”
“It was a SINGLE book and about five pounds of taffy to go with it,” she says defensively. “Do you know what days this wedding is?” she asks, really desperate if she’s trying to get details out of Bobby.
“Ew why would I know that.”
“Good point. Try to give me back to Thalia.”
There’s loud footsteps and muffled talk on the line and then suddenly her dad’s cough into the receiver.
“Oh um, Annabeth? Is that you?”
“Hi dad,” she says and tries again not to sound annoyed. He’s the last person who’s going to know anything. “Did you smoke those brats you were talking about?”
“Oh no, no smoking. We did the beer boil this time and finished on the grill with the onions. You’d love them. Wish you could be here.”
Her stomach rumbled a bit. That did sound good. “I’ll be there next month,” she reminded him. “Maybe we can make them again.”
“That’d be nice. Bobby says you’re looking for Thalia? Oh here -” He hands the phone off again.
Annabeth hopes it’s finally back to Thalia.
But she’s wrong.
“Annabeth,” Luke breathes into the receiver. “We’re all missing you here.”
Her blood runs cold at the sound of his voice. She can tell he’s leaning close. She can tell he’s smiling when he says her name.
It feels like her breath has been sucked out of her lungs.
“What’s the matter kid, cat got your tongue?” he jokes with one of his fake laughs.
Just like that, she’s fourteen again and he’s asking the same question in the glow of the tv in their basement, a bottle of something sweet and pungent lowering from his lips. He smiles at her in the dark and offers it to her but she can’t look away from his mouth.
Annabeth can’t bring herself to say a single word.
There’s more noise in the background and then the spell is broken with Thalia back on the line.
“Hey, you there? It’s Friday. The wedding is Friday - hello? You still there, kid?”
Annabeth takes a deep breath before answering. “Yeah, I’m here - you uh, cut out for a minute.”
The other line gets quieter as Thalia finally steps away from the party to talk to her.
“The wedding is that Friday,” she says. “But we’re having a family thing on Sunday so you should really plan to stay ‘til Monday or Tuesday. So maybe fly Thursday to Tuesday if you can? Or you could come for the full week. I could use the help.”
She probably could. They hadn’t really talked about how Thalia is the unofficial official maid-of-honor for Helen for this whole event. Annabeth isn’t sure how to process what that means but recently it had started to feel like for every year they got older, Thalia became less and less hers and more and more theirs.
Annabeth knows the offer to help is an olive branch. A chance to prove herself as a good daughter. For once.
Over the years she’d been careful to only stay a max of three days when she visits. It seemed to be the safest amount of time. They have fun but they aren’t around each other long enough to start talking about anything real and start fighting. Plus can figure out how to avoid Luke enough to feel safe.
Thalia had noticed the short timeline and been complaining about it to her lately. Annabeth always claims she can’t get off of work and school enough to come longer, but this is a one-time occasion that she should be able to take off for.
A whole week though…
She smiles a tired smile Thalia can’t see. “I’ll do my best,” she says.
That night she books a red eye that will bring her in Friday morning and another that leaves Sunday night. Three days.
Later, Clarisse and Silena are over. Annabeth has cooked them a very modest spaghetti dinner and they’ve brought over a bottle of red wine Silena’s stolen from her mom’s house. They’re all eating around her coffee table since her studio is too small for a real table.
Annabeth sits on the floor, having let her guests take the loveseat, and has the wedding website open to the RSVP tab on her phone.
“Just do it,” Silena insists between sips of wine. “RSVP with a plus one.”
“And bring who?” Annabeth says in protest. They’ve been debating which is worse: showing up alone to this wedding, or showing up with a plus one buffer she’d have to explain to her family.
Clarisse rolls her eyes, already tired of the debate. Of course she is - she thinks that if the solution isn’t obvious it isn’t worth thinking about. Silena is at least being sympathetic. Annabeth has never under-thought a thing in her life.
“You know Connor would jump out of his pants if you asked him,” Clarisse says, shoving spaghetti into her mouth.
“Yeah,” Annabeth grumbles. “That’s kind of the problem.” She really doesn’t want to solve one problem by causing three more. Connor Stoll joined their study circle this year and hasn’t exactly been subtle about his interest. She hasn’t found a way to let him down gently, and asking him to her father’s wedding really doesn’t seem like the right signal to give him.
“Give it here, I’ll do it for you if you’re too chicken,” Clarisse says and lunges for the phone.
Annabeth successfully swipes it off the table before Clarisse can get to it and feels proud of herself until she looks down at the screen.
Oh no.
In the scuffle, she submitted her RSVP. With a plus one. Apparently the plus one name was not a required field.
“Clarisse,” she hisses when she sees it.
In response, Clarisse downs the rest of her glass of wine with a bit of a smile.
“Well who knows,” Silena offers in sympathy. “You could still meet someone.”
*********
Percy’s proud of himself. He holds out at least five minutes after they’re in the air before he caves and buys the wifi package. Once he sorts it, he opens up Instagram. Again. Scrolls through posts at too fast a pace to pretend like he’s not searching for someone in particular.
His stomach lurches when he sees it.
The first post he finds is a selfie of two people on a beach in Mexico enjoying the sunset and cuddling in the sand. The caption says Bon Voyage New York, see you when I see you.
Well that confirms why Callie has been ghosting him for the past few weeks. She got back with her ex again. Bon voyage, Callie, he thinks miserably to himself.
The very next post is a redhead walking through the redwoods, her hand outstretched toward the camera like the viewer is walking through the forest with her. It also makes the new, huge solitaire stone on her finger the focus.
Unlike his situationship with Callie, he feels this one in his gut.
Percy clicks to her profile. He’s muted her updates since their disastrous phone conversation, not really wanting to learn anything new about her life and really not wanting her seeing him look at her stories. Now he wonders when the engagement happened - Grover had warned him but hadn’t said exactly when, and there doesn’t seem to be an announcement or anything like that on her page.
His finger hovers over her profile pic. Impulsively he clicks it.
Her story is a picture of her with Juniper, Grover, and a handsome guy in a suit whose name Percy refuses to learn. There’s a sticker around the four of them that is ribbons and flowers that spell out “Wedding Weekend!”
The nameless guy has a long face and short cropped blonde hair. Percy frowns. Of course he would look like the successful, put-together version of Percy. In the picture, Rachel leans into him, her face tucked under his, which means he’s taller than Percy too. Why wouldn't he be.
Percy closes the app and shoves his phone back into his pocket. He leans back in his seat and looks out the window, trying not to imagine how hilarious it’ll look when the two of them have to stand next to each other. How obvious it will be that Rachel really traded up. He watches the sky turn pink and thinks about how pathetic he is.
It would’ve been great to be coming to this wedding with Callie instead of alone, but even when he’d asked her he knew it’d be a stretch. She was always so non-committal and he always made them out to be more serious than they actually were, just because he didn’t really see himself as someone who casually hooked up.
No, there was never anything casual about how Percy got attached to people.
He’s replaying the top hits of berating himself, when the plane hits a bit of turbulence and it jostles the entire cabin. Instinctively, Percy grabs at the open water bottle on his seatmate’s tray table to stop it from spilling on her open laptop.
“Wow,” she says with a relieved glance his way. “Fast reflexes. Thank you,” and then takes the water bottle back, securing the cap back on.
Her smile disarms him and can’t think of something quippy to say back, so just nods and says, “Nmyep.”
Smooth.
They both settle back into their seats. She returns to typing. He returns to looking out the window. After a moment his eyes flit over to her to look her over.
She really is pretty. She’d stowed her yankees cap away and pulled her braids back from her face with a blue satin scrunchie. The setting sunlight through the window is catching her brown eyes and making them glow. She frowns at her laptop like something on it has offended her.
He wonders if it’d be weird to ask her what she’s frowning at. That sounds like more fun than thinking about all the ways Rachel’s new guy is probably superior to him or doing the reading he has to finish before Monday’s class that’s waiting for him in his backpack.
Then that angry gaze is leveled at him.
“You good?” she asks.
Percy pulls out his headphones, like he didn’t hear her. “What’s that?” he asks.
“You a nervous flyer?” she asks, a little less aggressive this time.
“No,” he insists with a frown, then follows her gaze to his bouncing leg. Oh. His knee is jostling her tray table. That’s what’s bugging her. He puts a finger on his thigh and pushes it down until it stills. “Sorry.”
“It’s ok. Didn’t mean to be rude.”
“You’re good,” he reassures her. He’s definitely the one being weird.
She turns that intense gaze back to her laptop. Percy goes back to brooding out the window. He picks a playlist on his phone and tries to reroute his nervous energy to pushing down the skin around his thumb’s fingernails so his legs won’t bounce and bug her again.
Out of the corner of his eye, he can see her chewing on her lip, staring at the screen, fingers hovered over the keyboard but not actually typing anything. Then typing. Then deleting. Typing. Deleting. Then sighing.
She turns back to Percy.
“Is it ok if I…?” she asks, hovering her laptop over his own tray table.
He nods, taking her laptop from her so she can close her tray and reach into her backpack for a sweatshirt, then does a double take when she pulls it on, pointing to the Columbia logo on her shirt and then a thumb to his own CUNY hoodie.
“We’re neighbors,” he says with a smile.
“Small world,” she says, taking her laptop back and eyeing his shirt.
*********
“What about Charles’?” Annabeth asks, wracking her brain for any half-way decent food she’s been able to afford by school. “The chicken place.”
Her seatmate waves that answer away. “Everyone likes Charles’,” he insists dismissively.
Her laptop screen had gone dark a while ago, taking her unfinished speech along with it. For now, she’s grateful for the distraction from Tall Guy, Nice Smile beside her. She’s been avoiding that speech all week - telling herself she can always work on it on the plane - and she’s glad to keep it off a little longer.
And she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t a little flattered by the attention. Tall guys with nice smiles don’t usually start chatting her up. Then again, they’re usually trying to flirt with Clarisse and Silena before they realize they’re a couple. Also Annabeth has a bad habit of shutting them down pretty quick. Not on purpose, mind you. But just right now she’d talk to anyone to stay distracted.
So she enjoys the small talk and tries not to overthink her answers.
Yes she does go to Columbia and yes he does go to CUNY, so yes they spend most of their lives right now a fifteen minute bus ride apart (on a good day).
They’ve found out they both barely survived their junior years, though he thinks he might need an extra year to graduate and she’s hoping to finish her five year degree a semester early. Architecture (hers). Social work (his).
He works at the YMCA on 135th - right next to that hole in the wall coffee shop she likes. The one with the good cinnamon scones. He’s going to try them the next time he’s up there.
And yes they both smelled that weird smell when it got warm on Tuesday and assumed it was the Hudson. It’d been a cool September but everyone’s saying summer’s lingering with the heatwave they had this week.
Now Annabeth chews her lip, trying to think. What was the name of the place their study group went out to last week? She can’t remember. She was busy dodging Connor Stoll and Clarisse’s attempts to get them alone somehow. “What about that new Ramen place on 133rd?” she asks.
He makes a face. “There are too many ramen shops.”
Annabeth can’t help but roll her eyes at him. “There absolutely can’t be too many ramen shops,” she argues.
“A new one opens each week, who can keep up with it.”
Ah. Clarisse kept complaining about the same thing. She points at him. “You’re a local.”
“Queens,” he says, his accent getting a bit stronger as he adds, “born and raised. You?”
It makes her smile, but she knows what’s coming when she admits: “Transplant. From San Fran. I’m flying home for the weekend.”
He winces. “Transplant and a yankees fan, whew. I dunno if we can be seen together.”
Annabeth purses her lips, amused at his presumptuousness. Then she snaps her fingers, finally remembering. “What about Hamilton Deli? On Amsterdam? The best Italian subs.” They really were. She had to put a limit on how often she was going there when she walked home from work. It had been eating up her entire grocery budget.
He looks at her impressed and she feels like she’s scored some kind of point with that one. “HamDel is good,” he concedes. “I’ll give you that. Best breakfast. I’ll have to try their Italian next time.”
She rolls her eyes again but smiles at his concession.
“Ok Queens, what should be on my list then?” she asks.
He counts them off on his fingers as he lists them: “Mama'sToo on 106 for pizza, Souvlakis when their truck is on Broadway for Greek, and The Vale if you want a good burger, but you’ll have to come up by me to get it. Literally any Mexican place above 110. And Jin Ramen is the best one.”
Annabeth shakes her head and says, “I’m not going to remember any of that.”
She’s trying to think of some kind of line about maybe he can show her (ugh, but something much better phrased than that) when he points at her laptop and asks, “Can I?”
She nods and turns the laptop to face him.
He opens up a new doc and starts typing up everything he’s listed for her. After he’s done, he goes through and corrects all the red squiggling lines that have shown up under his misspellings. “Sorry,” he says sheepishly. “Dyslexic.”
“Hey,” she says, her heart warming a bit with understanding. She reaches over him to do a few commands on the keyboard. It changes the screen to a blue filter overlay. “Same. This helps me.”
“Ok, Ivy League,” he says, that nice smile coming back to his face. “HamDel and dyslexia putting you back into the game.”
“Oh gee, thanks,” she says, pursing her lips again and wondering exactly what kind of game he might be thinking.
He switches windows back to her first document - the speech - and turns the laptop back to her.
“So what’s stressing you out?” he asks. “A paper on big-ass buildings or something?”
“I wish,” she grumbles.
“Small-ass buildings then?”
“What? No,” she says, laughing a bit when she realizes he’s teasing her. “It’s ah… a speech. For a wedding. That’s what my weekend back home is for.”
His eyebrows shoot up when she says it. “No kidding?” He asks. “Same here.”
She cocks her head at him, “You’re not going to Frederick Chase and Helen Martin’s wedding this weekend are you?”
He smiles. “How crazy would that be if I said yes?”
She barks a laugh. “That’s my dad.”
“I’m just there, best man, already know your life story” he says, his mischievous grin growing on his face. “Big gossip with your most dramatic cousin. Everyone acts like you’re the weird one for not remembering me. One big gaslighting wedding.”
Her eyebrows quirk at that last part. She can’t quite bring herself to laugh at the joke. Maybe he does know her family.
“Sounds fun but no,” he says. “Mine is for my best friend’s wedding. I also had to write a speech for his - took me like a month before I was happy with it.”
She groans. “That would’ve been the smart thing to do.”
“And Grover is like so forgiving. He would weep like a baby if I just told everyone I like being friends and then sat right back down.”
Annabeth pinches the bridge of her nose and closes her eyes for a long moment. She knew she shouldn’t have procrastinated on this. And she wouldn’t call her family the forgiving type. Why’d she let the conversation steer into her family? She was having fun not thinking about it for a bit.
“Oh but hey, hey - that’s just me,” he says quickly when he sees her face. “I over think everything and you’re obviously like, really smart. I bet it’s not that bad at all. Plus you still have time. When’s the wedding?”
“Tomorrow night,” she says through her fingers.
“Yeech. Okay, give it here Ivy League.”
She hesitates, suddenly remembering that despite how they’ve been chatting for the past hour, this guy is a stranger. Her brain kicks into overdrive and she looks him over again. She doesn’t get a bad vibe from him, but it wouldn’t be the first time she was tricked by an earnest smile.
He notices her hesitation and adds, “Only if uh, you want to I mean.”
And he flashes that smile at her again. Despite her worries, it works its magic on her.
She takes a deep breath and passes the laptop over to him, adding, “Ok but fair warning, Queens. It’s garbage.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” he says, scrolling to the top of the document to start reading. “And it’s Percy by the way,” he adds.
“Annabeth,” she offers.
“Annabeth,” he repeats her name and she likes the way it sounds when he says it, like he’s settling into all the syllables. It gives her another shot of unexpected warmth. “Let’s see what you got here.”
*********
“It’s a perfectly fine speech,” Percy reassures her.
Annabeth has been watching him intently as he reads it, like she’s trying to decipher his facial expressions before he gives his opinion. It’s distracting being the focused target of those brown eyes, and makes his reading slow, even with the help of the blue light filter. Plus he actually wants to be helpful and that means his brain has to stop thinking about how pretty she is and start thinking about what he’s reading. Which is harder than he expected.
“But…” Annabeth prompts him.
He hesitates before admitting, “it’s a little stiff. If you hadn’t told me I wouldn’t have thought this was for your dad.”
She sighs. “I’m deleting it. Give me back my laptop.”
“No, no!” Percy insists, lifting the laptop out of her grasp as she lunges for it. “It’s good, it just needs like one or two fixes, I promise.”
Annabeth presses her lips in a thin line and then finally settles back into her seat. “Fine,” she says, “Only because yours was so goddamn good. I can’t believe you made me read that.”
He laughs at that. “It was your idea to trade speeches,” he argues. He lowers the laptop and starts highlighting sections in the document.
“Yeah well I didn’t know I was sitting next to a professional writer,” she says, rolling her eyes. “It almost made me cry. I don’t even know any of these people.”
He waves his hand dismissively, but warms at the compliment. “Well my mom actually is a professional writer and she gave it her approval,” he says. “So that helped. Plus, I’ve been friends with Grover since like grade school. I’ve had time.”
“Oh yes, that must be it - compared to my dad, who’s only been around since my birth.”
“That’s different,” he says, wondering if she’s always so hard on herself. “We’re in our twenties, we just barely started thinking of our parents as just like, people a few years ago.”
She sighs but doesn’t argue this time. Instead she leans closer to him so she can look at the screen.
He can smell her shampoo. Something flower-y. And bright, like lemons. It’s nice.
Percy points to the screen as he explains, “Here, here and here - just needs a personal touch. Something only you can talk about. Replace these parts and I really think you have a solid wedding speech here.”
Annabeth frowns at the parts he’s highlighted, but nods, “Got it.”
“Something besides a performance review about how great he is as a professor,” he adds.
“Right.”
He looks at her from the corner of his eye, wondering how much he can tease her. He hopes she doesn’t mind because he kind of likes getting her riled up.
“He’s not marrying a university, you really don’t need that in here.”
This time she is faster than him and snatches the laptop back before he can react. She settles back into her seat and starts typing. Her angry stare softens as she thinks.
He realizes he’s staring at her again and looks away before she notices. Instead, he scrolls through songs on his spotify like he’s looking for something to listen to.
When the flight attendant comes by offering drinks, Annabeth orders a ginger ale then changes her mind and orders a jack and coke.
Percy impulsively orders the same and she insists on paying for it (as a thank you, for helping).
He protests at first, but gives in after a little back and forth and an annoyed look from the flight attendant. Plus he’s grateful not to have to do the math to figure out if his current bank account balance can handle a surprise expensive airline drink.
And when was the last time a pretty girl bought him a drink?
Percy sips on it and pulls up google on his phone, double checking she’s not paying attention to him before typing in Annabeth Chase to the search.
He scrolls past results that don’t look very promising. First it tries to auto-correct her name to Annabelle. Then there’s superfastbackgroundcheck.com offering to pull up her criminal record for him for $4.99, 40+ Chase LinkedIn profiles, and an Annabeth Chase who’s a Drag Queen in New Mexico (he does check that out, but she’s a lot older and white). He finds a facebook profile that might be her but there’s no photos, and also who uses facebook.
Then he finds a tiktok account which turns out to actually be Annabeth. It has a few posted videos of her doing different dances with friends and one of her walking through the Columbia campus, proudly pointing to her sweatshirt. He turns his phone away from her eyeline so she can’t see him watch them.
Ok so she is a real person who does go to Columbia, that’s reassuring.
And she’s a pretty good dancer. Great. Yeah. Good. Good for her.
He settles back into his seat and realizes it has been at least an hour since he’s been tempted to open up instagram again. He opens it on instinct, but switches apps before it can load, instead selecting a song to listen to while he watches Annabeth’s slender fingers glide across her keyboard and feeling a little less anxious than he’d been only an hour ago.
*********
Annabeth stares at the blinking cursor on her screen and stretches her neck until she hears it crack.
Ok. Three memories that could only come from her about her father.
That aren’t weird or sad or connected to anything weird or sad.
She takes a sip of her drink.
C’mon brain. Moments with her dad. Why are you suddenly so quiet? You wouldn’t shut up while we were talking to Percy. But now that I actually need you?
She takes one more sip.
When she was little…
When she was little, she could fit into her dad’s big armchair beside him, where he liked to do all his reading. He’d have his book in one hand, a pen behind his ear, and with his other hand he would play with her hair, taking a section of it at a time and twisting it. He’d do it until half her head was covered in irregular knots.
She would cry when Thalia would comb the knots out, her scalp so tender she could barely stand it. Thalia would yell at her dad about it, but Annabeth would always go back to his chair and would never stop him, even as a joke.
She wouldn’t give up that attention from him. It was all she got from him back then.
Her heart hurt a little to think about that. It’d been a long time since that happened last. Still, she knew that today, even fully grown, if he wanted her to sit with him and play with her hair, she’d still do it again no matter how tangled it got.
No, that’s too sad to include. Maybe just that first part. She can make it sound cute and safe.
Then there was this one time, just after her mom died…
It was the night before their first day of school and her dad had panicked because they hadn’t gotten anything they’d needed yet. Back to school shopping had always been her mom’s job.
So they went out that evening to six different stores trying to find everything on their list, only to realize he’d printed two copies of the second grade list - when Annabeth was only in kindergarten and Thalia was already in 3rd.
Instead of yelling at each other like they usually did, Thalia and her dad started laughing deliriously and then he let them have cake for dinner way past their bed time.
She remembers it because it was the first time they’d laughed together since the funeral. And because she’d added an extra box of colored pencils at each store and it got missed in the chaos so she had stocked up a year's supply of sketching for herself.
Is she allowed to talk about her mom dying at her dad’s wedding?
She deletes that story.
Gods, is that really all she can pull? There’s gotta be something else in there, brain.
My dad is… she starts. My dad is. He just is.
That’s kind of how it’s always felt. He’s there, doing his own thing. He has his hobbies. He lets her have hers.
Yikes. She finesses that.
He is a steady, calming presence. That’s how chill dads are described, right?
He’s never raised his voice. He’s never lost his cool. She supposes he should get dad points for that. Especially with the whirlwind that Thalia was back in the day. She could rage-bait a paper bag. But she couldn’t ever get their dad to yell back.
It had always bewildered her when she was a kid and friends would complain about parents nagging them or pressuring them in some kind of way, or pushing them to succeed.
What would that be like - for her dad to remember when she had a test she should be studying for, or that she was worried about being cut from the fencing team this year and not sure if it’s worth keeping up with it?
She closes her eyes. No feeling sorry for herself, she reminds herself again. This is not a pity speech.
The first time she met Helen, Thalia had already known he’d been dating someone. Annabeth had been completely blindsided, but then again that was back when the whole thing with Luke was happening so she –
Annabeth deletes anything mentioning Luke.
Afterwards it was obvious - her dad had been different for months - more talkative, more present, more excited about life.
Plus Helen had two twin boys from her previous marriage. They were six at the time and Annabeth was obsessed with them and vice versa.
It felt like, for the first time in a long while, that they could be a whole family again.
And now…and now…
And now that’s exactly what they are.
She swallows. Even typing it feels disingenuous. Is that really something she can say out loud in front of all those people with a straight face? A family whole again?
It’s not not true. Thalia still lives nearby. They have dinner every week all together. The boys are in hockey now and her dad - yes her dad - helps co-coach the team.
And then their other daughter comes home to visit twice a year to remind them all why she lives on the other side of the country.
Delete, delete, delete, delete.
And now, that’s exactly what they are. A family whole.
She finishes her drink in a gulp that earns a side-eye from Percy beside her.
It's just this one time. And it’s her dad’s wedding day. She can stuff it down for just this weekend. She can say all the right things without thinking about how her family is new, happy, and whole without a place for her in the picture. And she can do it without making it into a thing.
She can. She will.
*********
“So,” Percy ventures. “Is it the wedding you’re dreading, the speech, or just having to be in San Francisco?” He’s stacking a cracker with alternating salami and cheddar and eyeing how high he thinks he can make it and still have it fit in his mouth.
He’s gathered from their back and forth about her speech that she’s not exactly thrilled about this weekend, but he’s not sure if he’s over stepping in asking why.
He is curious though. Funny that they’re both in the same boat.
Annabeth inspects the chicken in her wrap and lets out a puff of air. “Hard to pick just one of them,” she says.
Percy chews through his cracker tower and looks through what else came with his meat and cheese plate. There’s some disappointing grapes, some pistachios and a vacuum sealed container he thought was going to have oreos but instead is packed with olives. Gross. Annabeth perks up when she sees the olives and he offers them to her.
“Is it because it’s your dad?” he asks, moving the olives to her tray table. “My mom got remarried - I remember it being weird at first.”
Not for the first time, Percy feels thankful that Paul ended up being such a good stepdad. And he can’t imagine his life without Estelle now. But back in the day he would’ve rather died than think that his mom was having some late-in-life romance with his English teacher.
Annabeth pops one of the olives into her mouth. “No, not really,” she says. “They’ve been together for so long it won’t really change anything. We’re already a bit of a hobbled together family.”
Percy tries to remember exactly what she’d said. “It’s one adopted sister and two step brothers?” he asks. “So all the kids in your family have different parents.” He finds it fascinating to find a family as complicated as his own.
Annabeth cocks her head. Percy has the briefest thought of an owl when she does it. He looks away before he’s tempted to tease her about it.
“You know what’s weird,” she says. “I’d never thought about it like that. I guess because I’ve never met any of the other adults. It’s just always been my dad and Helen.”
“And your mom at some point?” he asks, curious. She hasn’t mentioned her yet.
“Yeah but she died when I was little. All the mom memories you’re supposed to have? I just have my sister there instead.”
“But she’s only like four years older than you,” he says. Percy has a hard time wrapping his mind around that. But then again, it’d always been just him and his mom most of his life. Some of it had been hard. He can’t imagine going through it with just another kid instead of an adult.
“Yeah,” Annabeth shrugs and takes a bite of her wrap. “But Helen wasn’t around until I was in high school - then I spent my junior and senior years at a college prep school in New York, so when they moved in together, I wasn’t around.”
Percy thought about what that might’ve been like at fifteen - if he had been on the other side of the country right when his mom met Paul, if he had missed Estelle being born and all of that. He feels a twinge of sympathy for how hard that must’ve been.
“So it’s like your family became a different family without you,” he says as he thinks about it.
She coughs a little on her food, and croaks a weak, “Y-yeah,” when she gets her breath back.
“That’s rough,” he says and tries to think of anything else he can add to make it clear that he does, in a weird way, really understand her.
Annabeth doesn’t respond. Instead she gives her chicken wrap a disappointing look, lifts one side of the tortilla and adds a bit of salt and pepper from the tiny paper packets that came with it before biting into it again.
“I’m not really dreading the wedding,’ she says after a bit.
“It’s ok if you are,” he says, shaking his head reassuringly. “I think I would be.”
“I’m not,” she insists. “My dad deserves it. And Helen is not so bad. She doesn’t actively try to make my life worse. People have worse stepmoms.”
“Low bar.”
“I’m happy for them,” she insists again.
“Sure,” he shrugs. “You just don’t want to stand around in San Fran giving a speech about it.”
“Exactly,” Annabeth says, pointing her chicken wrap at him like he gets it.
Percy smiles at her, feeling like maybe he’s not fumbling things with her after all.
Then he offers her the rest of the grapes he definitely won’t eat. She offers him the lemon cookie that came with her wrap. It’s terrible. He tries to give it back after he’s already bit into it and she laughs and pushes it away.
“So what about you?” Annabeth asks after a beat.
“What about me?” he replies, finishing off his pistachios by shoving the full handful into his mouth.
“Is it the wedding you’re dreading, the speech, or just having to be in San Francisco?” She says, asking his own question back at him.
He’s a little surprised by the question. He thought he’d been doing a pretty good job hiding his own dread for the weekend.
“None,” he insists automatically. “I love Grover, I love public speaking, and I love San Francisco.”
Annabeth looks at him skeptically. “I wish you could see your face when you say San Francisco.” She exaggerates a look of disgust when she says it.
Yeesh, okay. He should probably get better about that before he’s around a bunch of people who’ve known him for much longer.
Percy throws an olive at her for teasing him. She catches it in her sweatshirt and pops it into her mouth, unbothered, and he tries to hide his impressed smile.
Instead, he busies himself with sweeping all of his garbage into the wrapper his meal came in while he thinks about what he wants to say.
“I met Grover at this summer camp when I like, really needed a friend,” he explains. “He was my only friend for a long time. I don’t think I’d be me today without him.”
“You said as much in your speech,” she says, settling back in her seat and looking at him as he talks.
“He’s older so he graduated a few years ago and he got two job offers. One in New York and one in San Fran - and the San Fran one was his dream job, so…”
Annabeth hums a sympathetic sound.
“I knew when he moved out there he wasn’t coming back, even before he met Juniper - that’s his fiancé.”
“So it’s mostly San Francisco you’re dreading,” she guesses. “Because it took away your best friend?”
It was weird to hear it said like that out loud. Was that really all it boiled down to? Sounded silly to him without all the years of context and nuance attached to it. Sure he and his mom talk about it, but not so plainly and simply like this. He fiddles with the corner of plastic wrap in front of him, unsure if he’ll tell her more.
“And…” He adds.
“And?” She prompts.
He sits back in his seat and rests his head on the headrest so he can look at her. It makes him feel a little more calm to watch her listening. Those big brown eyes looking particularly doe-eyed in the low cabin lighting. He likes looking into them. He likes their attention on him. It makes it easier to keep talking.
“And on top of it… there was this girl I was seeing for a while. After we broke up she also moved out there. Met someone. Got engaged. And now they’re all friends. They all hang out all the time. Soon they’ll all be married friends.”
He searches his brain for a way to make a joke that doesn’t sound jealous and pathetic and fails. Instead he picks at a loose thread in the stitching of his seat. He resists the urge to pull at it.
He watches her face as Annabeth chews the last of her chicken wrap.
“But you’re super happy for them,” she says with an understanding look. “And not dreading the wedding at all.”
He gives her a self deprecating smile. “Couldn't be happier.”
She wraps up all their garbage together in a big pile and waves the flight attendant back over.
“Well aren't we both full of shit,” she muses.
They both get another drink.