Afraid to Fly

by L. A. Witt

  “Sure. That’s fine. Just let me know.”

  “I will.”

  “And, um . . . one more thing.”

  Her eyebrow arched, but she didn’t speak.

  I struggled not to visibly fidget, since it always made her nervous to see me agitated. Wringing my hands to work off some nervous energy, I said, “I know this hasn’t been good for the kids. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have them . . . talk to someone.”

  “Talk to someone? Like who?”

  “Like a therapist. Someone who can help them sort things out.”

  She smiled subtly. “I didn’t want to tell you because I wasn’t sure how you’d react, but they’ve been going to a counselor for almost two years.”

  It was probably just as well she hadn’t told me before. Back then, I’d still been seriously unstable. Finding out she’d sent the kids to a therapist behind my back would have set me off in ways I wouldn’t have been proud to admit.

  But now I was relieved. Anything to minimize the stress and trauma I had already caused them. “How is that going?”

  “It’s going good. Danny wasn’t too sure about it in the beginning, but he’s opening up. And Crystal and Allen have gotten better. They don’t have so many nightmares anymore.”

  My stomach lurched. What did I do to you, kids? “Glad to hear it.”

  She shifted in her seat. “Maybe next time you come visit, you can go in with them. Talk to their counselor.”

  Nodding, I released a breath. “Okay. Sure. That doesn’t sound like a bad idea.”

  Her smile seemed more relaxed and genuine than before. “We’ll work it out. Anyway, I . . .” She glanced off-camera. “I should go. We’re heading to Phoenix today.”

  “All right. Drive safe. Say hi to my folks for me.”

  “I will. Take care, Clint.”

  “You too.”

  After we’d hung up, I closed my laptop and sat back against the couch. What a bizarre mix of emotions. The kids were in counseling because of me. It was helping, but the fact that I’d caused them to need it . . . ouch. But they had what I’d needed all this time—an outlet for their feelings. A place to vent. Hopefully that was enough.

  And now Travis and I were out to Mandy. We’d see how things went when it came time to tell the kids, but it was a start. A step in the right direction.

  I smiled. There’d been a lot of steps in the right direction lately. My life finally felt like it was moving forward instead of circling the drain.

  I just hoped it continued this way.

  Travis arrived a few hours after I’d talked to Mandy. He was bleary-eyed, with heavy shadows under his eyes, and his limp was slightly more obvious than usual. I shuddered at the thought of what state he’d be in if he hadn’t taken that Percocet last night.

  He was in good spirits, though. His smile was sleepy but heartfelt, and his kiss promised a very, very good night for both of us. Hell, maybe a careful afternoon quickie if he felt up for it, but if not, that was fine too.

  “Coffee?” I asked as we headed into the kitchen.

  “Coffee sounds great.” He leaned against the counter. “I’m wiped.”

  I could see that as soon as you came through the door.

  I poured us both some coffee, and we drank in silence until we were halfway through our cups. I set mine aside and rested my hands on the counter’s edge. “So I talked to my ex-wife earlier.”

  “Yeah, you mentioned you were going to.” He put his own coffee down. “How’d it go?”

  “It was all right. Better than the last few times. I, um . . . came out to her.”

  “Did you?”

  I nodded. “She was upset at first, but I think once it sank in, she was okay.”

  Travis exhaled. “That’s good. That’s great! Does she know you’re seeing someone, or just that you’re, well, not straight?”

  “She knows about you.”

  He gulped. “Oh.”

  “I called her specifically to tell her about you. And I think she’s curious about you now.” I laughed quietly. Man, I was tired—I hadn’t realized how draining that conversation had been until now. “I guess I’ll have to put you two on Skype one of these days.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” He shifted his weight, wincing subtly.

  “She’s not ready for us to tell the kids yet, but she said we will.”

  Travis stiffened abruptly, almost like I’d smacked him. Eyes locked on me, he swallowed again. “She . . . really?”

  I nodded.

  “Oh.” He shifted, and he was tense now. Really tense. “So your kids . . . When, uh . . . when do you think that’ll be? That you’ll tell them?”

  “Don’t know. She’s going to talk to her brother and get his opinion.” I smiled. “She said she hopes it works out with us, though.”

  He smiled too, but he seemed guarded. Not distant, necessarily, but something was off.

  I pushed myself off the counter and crossed the kitchen. “Hey. You okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I . . .” He shook his head. “Just tired from last night.”

  “Oh.” I touched his face. “You seem kind of . . .” Distracted? A million miles away?

  “I’m good.” His smile warmed up a bit, and he kissed me lightly. “And I spent most of the day thinking. About, um, us.”

  My heart fluttered. “Yeah?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I . . .”

  Our eyes locked.

  He held my gaze for a long moment.

  And then his whole body tensed. Little by little, his expression changed. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly how, but his warm, nervous smile was gone, and in its place . . .

  I could’ve been imagining it, but I thought some color slipped out of his face. He was still looking right at me, and yet he had a thousand-yard stare too. Like he was looking at me and through me and somewhere else entirely, all at the same time.

  “Travis.” I squeezed his shoulder. “You okay?”

  Abruptly, something shifted in him. He released a breath as he broke eye contact, and his shoulders sagged. Then he turned away and, hand trembling violently, ran his fingers through his hair. “Fuck.”

  “What’s wrong?” My heart was in my throat. What the hell?

  His back was to me. For what seemed like years, he didn’t make a sound.

  Cautiously, I took a step closer. “Travis?”

  “I’m sorry.” He turned back around, and when our eyes met, he whispered the four words I was dreading the most: “I can’t do this.”

  Panic surged through me. “What? Why not? What’s . . .” I blinked a few times. “What’s going on?”

  He wiped a hand over his face. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, you said that. But what—”

  “This has nothing to do with you. I promise.” He swallowed hard, almost like he was trying to keep from getting sick. “But I . . . Look at me, Clint. I’m barely keeping myself together. I . . . I don’t have it in me to be in a relationship. Not now.”

  “But, all along, we’ve been—”

  “I know. But I—”

  “You’re dumping me out of the blue? For nothing?”

  “Not for nothing,” he snapped. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re . . .” He tightened his jaw, and his voice wavered. “You’ve been great. You’re . . . God, you’re perfect.”

  Oh, not even close. “Then what the hell—”

  “I just can’t.” He put up a hand and shook his head. “This is too much, too fast, and I—”

  “Then we can slow down. Just tell me what to do.”

  “No. There’s no slowing it down. We’re already too—” He snapped his teeth together, and his eyes widened like he’d almost said more than he should’ve. Breaking eye contact, he said, “I need to go.”

  “But—”

  “Please.” He met my eyes again, and he suddenly looked exhausted. As if we’d been standing here pounding our heads on this subject for hours and hours instead of barely a minute. “I need to go.”r />
  Before I could respond, he turned and headed for the door, walking fast enough to almost hide his limp as he left me staring slack-jawed at his back and wondering what the hell was going on. What did I do? What did—

  The other night’s conversation flashed through my mind.

  He knew what had ended my career as an RAP. He knew what I had done to all those people.

  Was that why he couldn’t look at me?

  And . . .

  Oh shit. He knows!

  I hurried after him. “Travis, wait.”

  Hand on the front door, he turned around.

  I tried and failed to ignore the queasiness in my gut. “What I told you . . . about what happened to—what I did.”

  His eyebrows rose, an unspoken Yeah?

  “That stays between us, right?”

  Travis’s lips parted. He stared at me like I’d just insulted his mother. “Of course it does. Why wouldn’t it?”

  “I . . .” My shoulders fell. “I don’t know. I . . .” Trusted you differently that night than I do now. “I don’t know.”

  He watched me for a moment. Then, without another word, he left.

  I leaned against the wall, heart thumping and head spinning. All the air in my lungs was gone. Hell, all the air in the room seemed to be gone. Fuck—another minute in here and I was going to suffocate.

  On shaking knees, I stepped outside into my tiny backyard. There, I dropped onto the concrete step and stared out at the postage stamp of lawn.

  So that was it. Zero to sixty in under three months, and bam! Brick wall. I’d fallen hard for someone. Finally had some hope that I really was worthy of being loved, that I was no longer the asshole who’d nuked my marriage, and . . . this.

  I wasn’t even angry. I was probably hurt, but I didn’t feel it yet. I was just in shock. After the way things had been going, this was the last thing I’d anticipated, and I didn’t know how to process it yet, never mind how to feel about it. All I could do was sit here and stare blankly into space and wonder why Travis wasn’t here anymore.

  I needed to get out of here and go think about something else. Maybe I needed to find someone else to get my mind off Travis. I could always go down to that other town. What was the name? Flatstick? Whatever it was called, there were apparently a lot of gay bars. Or I could reactivate my accounts on the latest find-me-some-dick app.

  But even thinking about all that exhausted me. It didn’t matter that usually the first thing I wanted after a breakup was to get between the sheets with someone else. Hell, less than twelve hours had elapsed between my ex-wife kicking me out for good and a Vegas streetwalker getting into my car. It wasn’t my proudest moment, but it had happened.

  Today, I didn’t want to go anywhere with anyone. I didn’t even think I had the energy to pursue—let alone engage in—sex.

  The difference was obvious. When my ex-wife had dropped the divorce hammer, it was like yelling that we’d hit an iceberg after the ship was already ass-up and going down.

  This breakup, though, had come out of nowhere. One minute, smooth sailing. The next . . .

  The next . . .

  This was the next minute.

  And I still had no idea what had happened or where to go from here.

  Did I do the right thing?

  Of course I did.

  What else could I do?

  On the way home from Clint’s, I wondered more than once if I should pull over and get my shit together. I couldn’t concentrate. Not while I was still reeling from how things had gone. One moment, I’d been standing there ready to pour my heart out and tell him I loved him, and the next, he’d mentioned coming out to his kids, and suddenly my head had been full of Dion’s long silent voice.

  “If I could, I would. God, I would. But I can’t lose my kids over this. They’ve—”

  “I know.” I could still feel myself choking back tears as I’d spoken. “We can’t. I know. I wish we could, but we can’t.”

  Then he’d kissed me. Then he’d left. Then he’d been gone for good, lowered in a box into a six-foot pit while the kids he’d sworn not to lose had bawled their eyes out—

  And face-to-face with Clint, after psyching myself up to tell him that yes, we could . . . I couldn’t. It had suddenly come down to either diving headlong into something that would end in painful disaster, or walking out and wondering if I’d fucked up.

  So did I fuck up?

  A truck roared past me, startling me, and I realized I’d dropped below forty in a fifty-five-mile-an-hour zone. Yeah. Time to pull over.

  I slowed down a bit more, nosed off the highway, and came to a stop. With my hazards on and my engine idling, I scrubbed a hand over my face. I’d saved myself from going through the kind of heartbreak I’d had in the past. I had to do this if I didn’t want to hurt like that again.

  So why did it hurt so bad? Why was I shaking? Shit, did I make a mistake?

  Fuck. Apparently I was too screwed up in the head to figure this out on my own.

  Hands unsteady, I texted Paul. You busy? Really need to talk again.

  Paul met me at my place half an hour later.

  “Hey,” he said as he came inside. “What’s up?”

  “Thanks for coming over. You don’t mind me picking your brain twice?”

  He shrugged off his jacket. “Sean and his mother are still arguing about wedding shit, so I’m happy to vacate for a while. So what’s going on?”

  “Let’s go sit. You want any coffee or anything?” I didn’t know why I bothered stalling. He was here now, and he was going to drag the truth out of me whether I liked it or not.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  We walked into the living room.

  “You’re really wound up,” Paul said. “Talk to me, Travis.”

  That was what I’d brought him here for, wasn’t it? “I . . .” I rubbed both hands over my face, then turned and faced him. “I called things off with Clint.”

  “You did what?” Paul stared at me. “But I thought . . . Didn’t you . . .” He shook himself. “What?”

  I sank onto the sofa. “I had to. I—”

  “Had to?” He sat beside me. “Travis, we just talked about this. How could . . . How did you get from being crazy in love with him to this?”

  “I can’t do it.” I hated the pitiful sound of my own voice. “I went to see him, and I was going to tell him everything we talked about, and then I . . . I looked him in the eye, and I choked.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  I swept my tongue across my lips. “I freaked out. One second we were talking. And the next, all I could think about was what happened with Dion.”

  “With—” Paul blinked. “But they’re completely different people. And completely different situations.”

  “And feelings that are way, way too similar.”

  “Yeah, because you’re in love with Clint.” Paul shook his head. “But things are not even close to the same with Clint as they were with Dion. You two are out. You don’t have the regs and custody battles to deal with.”

  “Except Clint does have a custody battle going. Well. Sort of. He wants joint custody at some point and . . . anyway.” Nausea burned in my throat at the memory of that brief flashback while we’d talked. I could still hear Dion’s voice sadly telling me he couldn’t risk being with me, and my damn brain kept putting those words into Clint’s mouth. I’d never ask anyone to choose me over their family—God knew I’d never have chosen anyone over my daughter—but that didn’t mean someone would never be asked to choose their family over me. I didn’t want anyone in that position again. Especially not Clint. No matter how much times had changed, or how many other factors had driven Dion to take his own life, that fear had drilled itself into my mind and refused to leave.

  “Travis.” He squeezed my arm. “Don’t you think you deserve to be happy? And wasn’t that exactly what you were with him? I mean, you were practically swooning over him this morning.”

  “I know. I . .
.” I didn’t know how to put it into words. All day long, I’d been equal parts excited and terrified to finally open up to Clint and tell him I loved him, but then . . . then he’d been there. In front of me. Looking in my eyes.

  He’d mentioned coming out to his kids, meeting them—all steps toward making this real and making us something like a family, and panic had taken over. In an instant, everything Paul and I had talked about was gone, because losing two people I loved—one to a bitter divorce, one to suicide—had become too recent, too real, and I’d been overcome with the fear of a third. Excruciating memories had flooded my mind, but with Clint’s name and Clint’s face instead of Dion’s. I’d remembered, more vividly than I had in years, the crushing pain of watching that casket sink into that deep hole. In the same instant, I’d remembered how all the pain of a crash and an ejection had instantly become nothing compared to the news that my RIO might not make it through the night.

  I kneaded the back of my neck, wondering when I’d started sweating. “Look, I can’t control what happens to people in my life. The only thing I can control is who I let in.”

  “So, that’s it?” Paul blinked. “You’re not going to let him in because you might have to let him go?”

  I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. “I know it’s not rational. I sound insane even to myself. But I’m fucking scared.”

  “I know you are.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t you think everyone is?”

  I dropped my hand and looked at him. “I don’t think everyone has had to live with the kind of guilt I have.” I shrugged out from under his grasp, got up, and raked my fingers through my hair as I paced across the floor. “The last time I fell this hard for someone, I had to watch them put him in the goddamned ground.”

  “Yes, exactly!”

  I stared at him. “What?”

  “Travis.” Paul pushed out a breath and shook his head as he rose. “When you lost Dion, you almost went out of your mind, and the thing you kept saying was ‘I shouldn’t have let him go, I shouldn’t have let him go.’ Is that the kind of regret you want to have this time?”

  “I—”

  “No, listen to me.” His captain voice shut me up. “You’ve also been beating yourself up over Charlie’s injuries all this time, but have you ever stopped to think that if there’d been another pilot in that cockpit, Charlie might not have made it out at all? You both came out fucked up, but you came out alive. Maybe you didn’t correct enough when the flight deck moved, but you had a fraction of a second to react without any way of knowing how much space you needed. Yet you still corrected enough to keep from slamming into the stern and killing you both.”