by KB Winters
Rachel handed me a stack of white napkins that had come with the takeout. “Do you think it’s fixable?”
“I don’t know. It’s been like an endless merry-go-round for a few months now. Things are tense or we’ll have an argument and never quite resolve it. Then we’ll finally have a good night together and…in some cases, really incredible sex—”
Rachel’s eyebrow hiked up her brow. “Really, now?”
I laughed into my wine. “That’s the one area where we aren’t falling apart it seems.”
Rachel gave me a knowing smile. “Well, that’s something.”
I nodded and finished off the contents of my glass. Rachel hurried to pour me a second. “I don’t think he’s happy. So he’s looking at everything else because that’s easier than trying to figure out what’s wrong on the inside. If that makes sense at all.”
“Well, he’s a dude.”
She said this as though it explained everything.
At my silence, she giggled. “I just mean that he’s naturally inclined to be a fixer. Sadly, that instinct doesn’t usually work on themselves. They either don’t see any problem or if they do, they don’t have the first clue how to go about making it right. Jack’s a pretty analytical guy, but I doubt he regularly sits down with himself and figures out what’s up his ass.”
I laughed. “No. He’s not exactly the journaling or meditation type.”
“Exactly. It’s easier for him to go on as though nothing is wrong and he probably figures that eventually, nothing will be.”
“Men.”
Rachel raised her glass to mine. “Amen, sista.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Just wait out his little third-life crisis?”
Rachel swirled the contents of her glass as she considered my question. “I suppose that depends.”
“On?”
“On what you want. Jack is going to take care of himself. What’s more important is what you want. Do you want to make it work?”
It was a simple question with a very complicated answer. “I do…”
“But?”
Damn it. Knew that was coming. “But, I can’t keep going on this way. I don’t want to be his roommate or occasional friends with benefits. Regardless of how nice those benefits might be…” I blushed, remembering a few nights before. “I want to be his partner. His wife. I want to raise a family and have this great big adventure with him. Back when we met—hell, even a few months ago—I thought that’s where we were headed. I thought we were on the same page and wanted all the same things. Now I don’t know what he wants and he either can’t—or won’t—tell me. Then there’s this whole jealous, macho bullshit routine over who I work for.”
“PS,” Rachel interjected, her chopsticks raised. “I Googled your new boss and holy shit. He is hot.”
I frowned at her. “Not helping, Rach.”
She stuffed a sushi roll into her mouth and shrugged.
I sighed and leaned back against the couch. “Noah Scoville is everything I thought I once wanted. Wealthy, self-sufficient, confident, and yes, gorgeous to boot. He is a part of this almost secret world where price tags don’t matter and the options are endless.”
“Sign me up!”
“But I don’t know…I see now that I need so much more than that. I need someone who can make me laugh. Someone who makes me feel safe. Someone like—”
“Jack?”
I nodded, feeling sick all over again. Memories flooded over me in rapid succession: Jack and me in our apartment in Germany on our last night. All the furniture was gone so it was just us and the dogs, lying on the floor eating really terrible pizza out of a cardboard box, the night he punched some loud-mouthed guy out at a bar when he wouldn’t take no for an answer after asking me to dance with him, driving up the California coast in his vintage Camaro our first weekend back home from overseas.
Millions of moments were forever cemented in my mind and they all starred Jack.
The problem was that recently, there were more dark memories than the golden, glittering ones that played out like scenes on a reality show highlights reel.
Chapter Eleven
Jack
Sell out. No wonder Holly doesn’t want you. You’re lost, Boomer.
The echoes of my argument with Aaron woke me on Saturday. As my eyes adjusted to the bright light streaming in the windows, I realized I was in the living room, lying on the floor beside the couch. From the throbbing at the back of my head, I couldn’t be sure if I’d fallen off the couch in the middle of the night, or if I’d been so drunk I had my first hangover since high school. Judging by the amount of beer bottles on the coffee table, it was the latter.
“Fuck,” I groaned, sitting upright. The pounding in my head intensified and sent me crashing back down again. I grabbed the throw pillow from the couch and wedged it under my neck. “You’re an idiot,” I mumbled to myself.
A wet nose touched the bare skin on my back where my t-shirt had ridden up and I jumped out of my skin—which made my head feel like it had been assaulted by a jackhammer.
“Princess!”
She whined and then cast a desperate look at the back door.
Great, now I can’t even be a responsible pet owner. I hauled myself up gingerly from the floor and hobbled to let Princess outside. She bolted down the back steps and headed for the patch of grass at the bottom. I stumbled into the kitchen and dug through the cabinets for a bottle of pain killers. I swallowed three down with a cup of lukewarm coffee. The pot was set to automatically switch on at seven and it was creeping up on noon. I didn’t care. I chugged the coffee anyway. I needed the caffeine jolt to kick my headache.
My stomach was unsettled, reminding me of time spent living on a ship. Not nauseated—but not normal either. Princess appeared at the back door and I went to bring her inside after popping a piece of wheat bread into the toaster. Dry toast should help get me back on the right track. It’d been years since the last time I was drunk but I remembered the aftercare steps.
After a long, lingering shower and the makeshift breakfast and a cup of fresh, hot coffee, I was feeling back to normal. At least physically. Mentally, I was still all kinds of fucked up, and pacing around the house wasn’t going to fix anything.
“Hey, girl,” I said, turning to Princess who was lying on the floor in front of the TV. “You wanna go for a drive?”
Her ears perked.
If there was anything that could get me back on track, it was a long drive in my Camaro. Sure, I didn’t have my favorite little blonde in the passenger seat, but I tried to ignore that fact as Princess and I cruised up the 101. The sunshine, cool ocean breeze, and palm trees was better than any kind of therapy I could think about. We stopped at Sunset Beach—another spot ripe with memories—and went to my favorite little taco shack for a late lunch. After a taco platter and an ice cold Corona, I nodded off in one of the lounge chairs while Princess chased the seagulls.
The sun was still high in the sky when we piled back into the car and headed back to Holiday Cove. The little break was nice but I knew there wasn’t a lasting solution in the bottom of a bottle. I headed up the hill when I cruised into town and parked the Camaro in front of the Rosen Air Museum. Aaron and Gemma lived in the bungalow-style house on the property and his truck was in its normal spot beside the house. Gemma’s sporty Audi was beside it.
“Good, at least there will be witnesses,” I muttered to Princess.
Gemma was the one to answer the door and by the look on her face, Aaron had told her about our argument. “Jack?” she said, eyebrows lifted.
“Is he here?”
She glanced behind her and then turned back to face me. Instead of inviting me inside, she took a step forward, getting into my personal space and dropped her voice low, “Make this right, Jack. You two have gone through way too damn much to throw it all away over some shitty fight.”
Gemma was a pint-sized woman but she had this lioness strength and fierceness that was impossible to ig
nore. Her voice wasn’t raised and her expression wasn’t even angry, but her words were in no way a suggestion.
Only once I’d nodded my agreement did she back up and pull open the front door. Princess barreled inside and Gemma smiled as the pooch made herself right at home. I gave her arm a light squeeze, a silent promise, and then crossed the threshold.
Aaron was in the kitchen, wearing sweats and a scowl. “What are you doing here?”
Gemma, who had silently stepped behind me, cleared her throat. “Baby…”
Aaron glanced at her and then sighed. Under any other circumstances, I would have smiled. It brought me unmatched joy to watch him act whipped. “You want a beer?”
Gemma brushed past me, grabbed her glass of iced tea from the kitchen table, and then walked out again. “Play nice, you two.”
Aaron got up from his place at the table, abandoning the tablet he’d been holding and went to the fridge. He pulled out a beer and set it in the place Gemma had just vacated. He jerked his chin at the chair and I sat down. I folded my hands and laid them on the table. “I should have told you about the interview. Actually, I should have told you the minute I started applying for other positions. It was never my intention to leave you in the lurch or make your life difficult. You know I’d never fuck you over like that.”
Aaron considered me as he took a long pull from the longneck bottle. When he set it down, the scowl faded. “Why do you want to leave? Is it really about the money?”
I heaved a sigh and dropped my hands to my lap as I leaned back against the wooden chair. “I miss flying. Like really flying. These little short, tourist trips are nice, and sure, it pays the bills, but it doesn’t make me happy. I like working with you and Nick and all the other people over there. But it’s not enough. I’m missing something and I thought that if I could get into a real career track, I’d snap out of it.”
Aaron nodded, his gaze lingering on the table for a moment. “You know what I think?”
“Hmm?”
He looked up. “I think you’re a lifer.”
It was an inconvenient truth. But I’d reached the same conclusion at some point along the way. “I know.”
“It’s okay, Boomer. Who says you can’t do both? Be the family man with the wife and kids and still be in the navy? Fuck, people do it all the time. Half our old unit was married or with someone and almost all of them our age had a pack of brats.”
I laughed softly. “I know.”
“So what’s the hold up? Instead of trying to fill the void with something else and make everyone miserable in the process, why don’t you just go back and re-up your contract? You know the Skipper would flip his shit if you walked back through the doors. You always were a teacher’s pet.”
We shared a wistful smile and I took a drink. “Holly doesn’t want to risk me getting deployed again once we have a family. I put her through a lot on that tour after we got together.”
Aaron nodded. He didn’t need to be reminded which tour. He’d been just as sick with worry as Holly had been at the time. My plane was shot down in some shithole mountain range in the Middle East, leaving me in hostile territory with no communication at all. I’d ended up hiding out in a cave and discovering a rebel base—which I then managed to blow up—but back home the news reported I’d been killed in action and even though I returned to Holly in one piece, the entire experience had gutted her. There were times I wondered if she’d agreed to go to Germany simply because she knew there was no chance of me being deployed back to the Middle East while I was stationed there.
“I can’t blame her,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to go through that. Hell, I’m worried about the nights Gemma pulls at the hospital. If we had a baby and she was gone the whole night…damn…that’s gonna be a rough road. I couldn’t imagine six months. Nine. A year.”
“I know. I can’t ask that of her.”
Aaron cocked his head. “You can’t throw away your whole life for her either, Boomer. I know you love her. I mean, you’re engaged for fuck’s sake—”
“I’m not sure about that…”
“Well, in either case, you have to be happy too. If being back in active duty is what will make you happy, then shouldn’t she at least consider it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to ask that of her. It’s not just me ya know.”
He flopped back against his own chair and fiddled with his beer bottle, rolling the bottom of it along the table. “Charters?”
I shrugged. “The money’s good. Benefits. Free access to some insane planes and the opportunity to travel anywhere in the world. Sounds pretty sweet to me.”
“What does Holly think? It might not be months away at a time and it probably won’t have you cruising into red zones on a regular basis, but you’ll still be gone a lot, I imagine.”
“We haven’t really talked about it. I mentioned looking for something else and she shot it down.”
Aaron gave a sage nod. “Where is she now?”
“At her friend, Rachel’s.” Aaron’s eyes registered the name and I remembered they’d met before. “She’s supposed to start her new job next week sometime. So, I’m not sure where she’s going to be staying.”
“If you want to go work somewhere else, I’m cool with it. I’ll miss having you around. It’s more fun to bust your balls than Nick’s, but I’ll make do.” He grinned. “But no more of this sneaking around, high school bullshit, all right? We don’t do that to each other. You got a problem, you come to me.”
I gave him a salute. “Yes, sir.”
He lifted from his seat just far enough that he could lean across the table and slap my shoulder. “Yeah, yeah.”
Gemma popped her head around the corner. “Bromance back on?”
We laughed and Aaron waved her in. “Come in here,” he said. “You can stop shamelessly eavesdropping now.”
Gemma laughed as she poured herself a refill and then settled onto Aaron’s lap. She eyed me over the rim of her glass as she sipped the amber liquid. “Why don’t you guys open a charter service? I mean, we already have an airstrip and a huge number of rich customers. Jack could be the owner and rent the space. That way you two each have your own thing but can keep working together.”
Aaron tore his eyes off his pretty fiancée and shot me a quizzical look. “It’s not a bad idea, Boomer. What do you think?”
I had to admit, the idea of owning and operating my own business was both daunting and exciting. It wasn’t something I’d really given much thought to, but had a lot of positives to consider. “I’d have to think about it, map it out. Something like that would cost a good chunk of change. I don’t exactly have the kind of capital needed to go out and purchase some million dollar plus luxury plane.”
Aaron nodded thoughtfully. I could almost hear the gears clicking into place.
“Besides that, right now, I’m not in the right head space to take on something like that. If Holly is really…gone…I need to consider renting out the house and finding an apartment or condo. I can’t afford that house by myself. Especially not if I open a business.”
Gemma shrugged and continued sipping her iced tea.
“What?” I asked, giving her a pointed look.
Her green eyes met mine. “Holly doesn’t want to go, Jack. She wants you to give her a reason to stay.”
“Wasn’t that the whole reason we got engaged?”
Gemma rolled her eyes to the ceiling, as though pleading with the gods to save her from my stupidity. She stopped just short of muttering men under her breath. “You have to see it from her point of view, dude.”
“That’s hard to do when it changes every other day…”
Gemma glared at me.
I straightened in my seat. “Sorry. Go on.”
“Holly’s been through this once before. She got engaged, married, and that didn’t exactly work out so well. She wound up divorced and heartbroken. She’s a strong, independent, and headstrong woman but that’s only because she had to be.
She had to learn to put on her game face and charge forward, no matter what was coming for her, because she was on her own. That’s not what she wants though. She wants someone to take care of her and be there for her at the end of the day. She wants someone who is looking forward to building the future she’s had in her heart all these years. The one that got stolen away.”
Gemma’s words sent my heart into a frantic pace. Emotions swept over me like a riptide and tugged me in all different directions. “I want to be that guy, Gemma. I’ve told her that over and over again but she doesn’t believe me.”
“Her ex-husband cheated on her, Jack. That’s not something she can just gloss over and forget. Sure, it was years ago, but that doesn’t mean those memories don’t come flying right back to the surface when she gets scared. And right now, with all the change and unrest you two have been through over the past few months, I’m sure there were plenty of times she’s been scared to death!”
It was hard for me to imagine Holly being afraid. Even when I was standing beside her. She hid it well. But Gemma was right. Things had been constantly changing since the time we got home from Germany. The house buying process had been intense and then all the work and energy she’d poured into rebuilding her accounting business.
“Fuck,” I whispered as I processed every memory in light of this new filter.
Even things that I’d complained about—finding the perfect coffee table or dishes—wasn’t really about what was happening. To Holly, those things weren’t just things. They were security. Stability. The future. And what had I done? Told her it didn’t matter what kind of coffee table we had and that she shouldn’t spend so much time pouring over Pottery Barn catalogs. That no matter how much time we spent shopping, short of a team of highly trained professionals, we were never going to have a magazine-worthy living room—the dog hair alone…
I winced. “I royally fucked this up.”
Gemma slid from Aaron’s lap and came around the table. She patted me on the shoulder. “Yep. You both fucked it up. But it’s not too late to fix it.”