Adam sat behind the wheel of the rental car, driving aimlessly down a country road with Jane beside him in the passenger seat. It was Sunday now, his last day in New York before he had to catch a plane back to the West coast. He flicked his eyes down for a moment to look at the car’s dashboard clock and then began fiddling with the radio dial, scanning for a pop station. At last, he hit upon the local affiliate broadcasting Ryan Seacrest’s top 40 countdown. Perfect timing, Adam thought, as he caught the tail end of Ryan’s sentence.

“…just out last week, this is Maroon 5’s new single, Payphone!”

“No,” Jane said, reaching for the dial. “I refuse to listen to that song.”

“Wait, wait!” Adam swatted her hand away from the controls. “I want to hear what number we’re at in the countdown.”

Jane groaned.

“Just humor me. I haven’t checked in all weekend.”

She shot him a glare.

“Come on,” he coaxed. “Have you even heard the radio version?”

He sang along with his voice on the radio as the song reached the lines that had been edited:

All these fairy tales are full of it.

One more stupid love song, I’ll be sick.

“So lame,” she said, rolling her eyes but unable to suppress a smile.

“So fucking lame,” he agreed, laughing. “Goddamn fucking piece of shit radio!”

She shook her head at him, but she was laughing along with him.

The song ended, and Ryan Seacrest announced it was at number three.

“Satisfied?” she asked him.

“Never,” he shot back with a grin.

It had started to rain. “Ah hell,” Adam said. “There goes our picnic.”

“Sunday morning, rain is falling?”

He glanced at her for a moment, smiling, before returning his eyes to the road. “Do you remember that little road trip?”

“Of course.”

“When was that?” he asked, thinking back.

“My 21st birthday,” she laughed, joining him on his trip down memory lane.

***

June 2000

“So, little girl, how’s it feel to be 21?”

Today was Jane’s birthday, and Adam had borrowed a friend’s car and whisked her off for a weekend getaway to celebrate. She’d been anxiously bracing herself for the prospect of a birthday party – his own 21st birthday a few months ago had been marked by an all-night jam session in a club packed with legions of friends – but he’d known she wouldn’t want that for herself. She could think of no way she’d rather celebrate than a weekend away, basking in Adam’s undivided attention.

Yesterday had been a beautiful warm sunny Saturday, and they’d spent it driving up the Connecticut coastline, stopping here and there along the way to take in a view or play in the surf. They’d stayed the night in a cheap motel and awoke Sunday morning with plans to picnic on the beach, but the dark storm clouds and pelting rain outside their window didn’t bode well. They’d lingered instead, spooning lazily in the motel bed. Jane twisted around now and snuggled herself against him beneath the scratchy covers.

“I’m so old,” she moaned. “Can you still call me ‘little girl’ now?”

“Oh, please!” he laughed. “You’ll see. We’ll both be 80, and I’ll still be calling you that.”

Jane smiled back at him, but her mood had shifted, the drowsy happiness replaced by a wave of anxiety. She’d been enjoying the freedom of the first few weeks of summer without all the responsibilities of school. There would be less time to spend with him once her senior year started up in September. And then there was the real question she’d been avoiding, the great gaping black hole that lay before her: graduation. She had succeeded so far in avoiding thinking about it.

 “What’s going to happen?” she whispered, feeling the doubts wash over her again.

“Right now? I’m going to kiss you.”

“No,” she put up her hand to stop him. “I meant a little longer term than that.”

He smiled at her, but she didn’t return it, so he tightened his arms around her and looked at her with an exaggerated imitation of her own frown.

Jane refused to let him jolly her out of her thoughts. “It’s not going to be like this forever,” she sighed into his chest.

“Sure it is,” he whispered. “Look at me, Janie.” He waited until she met his gaze, his face serious now.  “You have somewhere else to be?” he asked. “ ‘Cause me? I’m not going anywhere.”

She let him kiss her then, pressing her full length against him, taking comfort in the warmth of his body and the certainty in his voice. He broke away after a long moment and squinted his eyes as he looked down at her again.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m just trying to memorize this moment. Maybe this will be one of those moments we tell our kids about when we’ve been married 50 years.”

She raised one hand and traced a finger along his jawline. “I love you,” she whispered.

“I lov—“

He stopped mid-sentence, freezing suddenly. She couldn’t help but laugh at the startled look on his face. “Now what?”

Adam didn’t answer. He slid out of bed and started rummaging through her purse on the bedside table.

“What are you looking for?” she asked, but he waved for her to be quiet. He came up eventually with a pen and a crumpled piece of paper. Satisfied, he sat back down on the edge of the bed. Jane scooted behind him and slipped her arms around his waist, molding herself against his back and resting her chin on top of one of his shoulders. She struggled for a moment to decipher the messy handwriting as he wrote:

Sunday morning, rain is falling.

Steal some covers, share some skin.

Clouds are shrouding us in moments unforgettable.

You twist to fit the mold that I am in.

***

“You wrote Sunday Morning that weekend,” Jane said, remembering.

“Just the first verse.”

They were both silent for a moment as they thought of the lyrics that came next:

But things just get so crazy, living life gets hard to do,

And I would gladly hit the road, get up and go if I knew

That someday it would lead me back to you,

That someday it would lead me back to you.

“When did you write the rest?” Jane asked him quietly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Must have been when we were getting ready to head out on that first tour.” He paused for a moment, lost in thought. “It took me a lot longer to write a whole song back then."

Jane sighed, thinking back to that conversation in the motel room. Adam took his eyes off the road to look at her for a moment and saw the wistful expression on her face. He reached over and took her hand, squeezing it gently.

“Sorry.” She shook her head, blinking back the tears that had started to form in her eyes. “I just wish you didn’t have to leave tomorrow.”

“I’ll be back,” he told her firmly. “You’ll come out and stay with me in LA. We’ll figure it out.”

“There’s a lot we still need to figure out.”

“So we’ll work it out. Life is messy, Jane. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

She looked at him doubtfully.

“You have somewhere else to be?” he asked, cocking his head at her and giving her hand another squeeze. “ ‘Cause me? I’m not going anywhere.”

She smiled, recognizing the words. Was it really possible, after all this time, that they might wind up driving down this road together after all? Adam lifted her hand and brought it to his mouth to kiss it. With his other hand he turned the steering wheel and pulled the car over into a passing gas station.

Jane looked quizzically at the gas meter. They still had close to a full tank. “You need to go to the bathroom again?”

“No.” He shook his head, pointing out the window. “Look. A payphone!” He turned and grinned at her. 

“That’s why you pulled over?”

“Stay here,” he said. “I need to make a call.”

“You said no phones this weekend!”

“I said no cell phones. Here,” he said, turning up the volume on the radio for her as he popped open the car door. Seacrest was up to number two on the countdown now. “Sit tight. This will only take a sec.”

She watched him over her shoulder as he jogged through the rain to the phone booth and fished some change out of his pocket. He waved at her for a second, and then turned his back, picking up the receiver and leaning against the side of the booth.

Jane couldn’t help but smile to herself. He was so impulsive, but maybe that was exactly what she needed in her life. Someone to reach down and pull her out of the mile-deep rut she’d carved out for herself. He seemed so sure of everything, and it was tempting to trust in his confidence. But it had only been a week, she reminded herself – too soon to start getting carried away.

And when it came right down to it, the reason she had broken up with him in the first place was still there, staring her right back in the face. She didn’t want fame and fortune. She didn’t want to be with a star. She couldn’t even deal with the attention of a 21st birthday party, let alone the spotlight that came from walking down the street next to Adam Levine. They had talked it over the other night, after the run in with the paps, and he had tried to reassure her. “I’ll do all the talking,” he had told her. “You just smile and let me answer the questions.”  That would be fine, Jane thought to herself now, but what about the questions neither one of them knew how to answer? “Adam, is Jane the one?”

Jane hadn’t been listening to the radio, but she was shaken out of her thoughts by Ryan Seacrest’s voice as he started up his patter once again. He had a caller on the line. A surprise caller. Adam Levine.

“You’ll never guess where I’m calling from,” Jane heard Adam’s voice say over the radio. “I’m at a payphone!”

Ryan laughed. “So you just called to tell us that?”

“No, no,” said Adam. “I’ve got some unfinished business I’m hoping you can help me out with.”

“What can I do for you, Adam?”

“There’s someone I tried to call on a payphone once. A long time ago. Wayyy back before I even owned a cell, if you can believe it.”

“Wow, man. You shouldn’t admit that. People might realize how old you are.”

Adam laughed. “Yeah, well, so the girl I was trying to call never picked up, and I never got to tell her something. But it just so happens I know for a fact that she’s listening to your radio show right now.”

“Well, here you go!” Ryan chirped. “The airwaves are yours, my friend.”

Jane had turned in the car seat and was watching Adam, but he still had his back to her. He slowly spun around now to face her with the phone receiver pressed to his ear. He was close enough that she could read his lips as he spoke, and there was a fraction of a second delay as the words made their way over the phone wires to a broadcast booth on the other side of the country and then back across the radio waves to her ears.

“OK, so this is what I was going to say,” Adam began. “Hey Jane, I don’t know why you ran out before we finished our set, but you’re never gonna believe what happened!” He was doing an impression of himself as a 22 year old, and Jane’s lips curved in a smile of recognition as she listened – his voice high and excited, brimming with that youthful enthusiasm she remembered so well. The voice of a boy, she realized now, a boy who still had so much to learn before he became the man who stood before her today. “There were these guys from a record label backstage and they want to sign us! Like, to a record deal!” He even managed to make his voice crack on the final word.

Jane laughed and rolled down the car window to shout at him. “You’re a lunatic, you know that?” She could hear the laughter in his voice as he continued.

“Yeah, so anyway, it looks like I may be able to make a living at this music business after all—“

“—I think that’s pretty safe to say,” Ryan’s voice cut in, joining in the fun.

Adam’s face was turning solemn again, though. He had his hand pressed up against the side of the phone booth, and his eyes were locked with Jane’s as she watched him from the car.

“I’ll tell you a secret, though. Just between you and me, Jane – something you can’t read in the magazines.” The boyish voice was gone now as he spoke into the phone, and Jane felt her heart begin to thrum inside her chest as she watched the last traces of laughter leave his eyes. “If I could take this phone and call up that kid – that little boy I used to be – do you know what I would tell him?”

Ryan wasn’t laughing now, and neither was Jane. She had swung the car door open and was walking toward Adam. She came up and stood before him, aware of the strange dissonance as the words he was saying into the phone intermingled with the echo from the car radio behind her.

“I’d call him up before the show that night,” he continued, low and steady, “And I’d tell him to sing every note off-key. Every single note. I’d tell him to bomb horrifically.”

She shook her head. “You don’t mean that,” she whispered.

“Yeah, I do,” he said. “I do mean that.” A smile danced across his lips for just a moment as he reached out to take her hand. “But what’s done is done. And so now I finally got your new number, but we’ve got the whole world listening in on the line with us, whether we want them there or not.”

“Adam,” she said softly, fighting to speak against the tugging sensation in her chest, but he shook his head to silence her.

“They’re not hanging up, Jane. So we may as well let them in on the truth. Right? No more publicists. No more bullshit. Just the truth. Because the truth is—“ He paused to clear his throat. “The truth is, I have loved you for 15 years, and I will love you for the rest of my life.”

She opened her mouth to answer him, but the words died in her throat. Without moving his eyes away from hers, he had reached out and set the phone receiver back in its cradle, and she let out a startled gasp as he sank down to one knee.

Time slowed down for a moment. The rain had grown heavier, and Jane was aware of her soaked sleeve clinging to her outstretched arm as Adam held her hand in his. She heard Ryan Seacrest’s voice buzzing in the background. “Adam? Adam, are you still there?” She stood frozen in place, looking down at the man she’d loved for as long as she could remember, watching the droplets of water running down his face and dangling from the tip of his nose, and waiting for the words she once thought she’d never hear him say, the words she thought were lost to her forever.

“Janie, you’re the one,” he whispered. “I love you.Will you marry me?”

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