Twenty-One Night Stand ✓

31 / epilogue

For just a second, all Maddie could hear was water, the gentle trickle of a tap left on as she stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Yet another unfamiliar bathroom, but she hoped this would be one of the last for the year. Standing in the middle of Toronto Pearson International Airport, she was counting down the minutes until her final flight home. There were approximately thirty-seven to go before she and Posy would board, and she was overflowing with a million emotions.

A strange kind of sadness seemed to beat the others, a melancholy at the realisation that this was the end. After ten months of travelling, and seven months away from home, she was going back, and she wasn't quite ready. Canada had been their last stop, where they had been for almost a month now, and every country she had stopped in had ended up feeling like a second home. Whether she and Posy were meeting new friends while working in a hostel or splashing out on adventures around the globe, they had made the most of every minute of their trip.

Posy, on the other hand, did want go back. Maddie rolled her eyes to herself at the thought, knowing that when she returned to the gate, she would find her friend with her head bent over her phone, fingers furiously tapping away. A little over two months ago, they had come across a fellow group of Brits in California, right at the start of the American leg of their journey, and Posy had been messaging one of them ever since. Despite having had a few flings over the past few months, this one seemed a little more permanent.

Washing her hands and checking her hair, which didn't matter when she was about to embark on a seven hour flight, Maddie headed back towards the right gate and smiled when she saw that her prediction was right. She could see the blonde top of Posy's head, the flash of her blue nails racing over the screen. His name was Harry, which would be impossible to forget when he popped up in the conversation so often, and he was back in England now. Posy was smitten. She had messaged him more in the past nine weeks than Maddie had texted Nick in nine months.

"Hey," she said, dropping down next to Posy and startling her. "How's Harry?"

Posy's cheeks coloured and she smiled, a surefire sign that she was besotted. "He's good," she said. "He was just asking when we get back."

Maddie stretched out her arms. They had been in the airport for a while now, after a minor storm had delayed their flight by a few hours, and she knew her body wouldn't thank her when it had to be cooped up for a lot longer. What was supposed to have been a perfectly reasonable nine o'clock arrival back in the UK was now looking more like one in the morning, and Maddie was vaguely stressed about what would happen when they got back. The trains stopped running at half past ten and she didn't want to hang out in an airport any longer than she absolutely had to.

It also meant that she would be in the air as her birthday began. Tomorrow marked the seventeenth of July, twenty seventeen, and she had planned her return flight to give her a decent night's sleep before she turned twenty-two, but the weather had other plans. With a sigh, she slumped in her seat and Posy rested her head on her shoulder.

"Eight hours," she said, and Maddie looked down at her. "Weird, huh?"

"Mmhmm. Crazy."

Posy tucked her phone into her pocket and they sighed in synchronisation, counting down the seconds until their flight was ready to board. It was only just past midday but the sky outside was still grey, the clouds signalling to Maddie that she would have to brace herself for turbulence. The first time she had experienced it, somewhere in the sky between Warsaw and Moscow, her face had blanched and her life had flashed before her eyes. It had taken a lot of reassurance from Posy before she had been able to relax.

Now she expected it, but that didn't make it any more bearable. If her calculations were correct, this would be her seventeenth flight since the beginning of the year alone, and she was still getting used to soaring above the earth.