I heard Easy calling my name, felt the blonde tugging on my arm, watched as Bandit slipped his arm around Becca as though he could somehow claim the girl I’d fallen in love with when I was seventeen fucking years old.
I wanted to reach out and hold on to her, wanted to keep her in front of me even as I felt her getting ready to pull away, wanted to fall to my knees and fix the mistake I’d made a decade ago.
I swallowed again, trying to steady my voice, wondering if I sounded as desperate as I felt.
“Do you want to get out of here—”
“I’m going to go.” Becca lurched off of her chair, her gaze darting around the group, looking everywhere but at me.
Look at me. Please. Give me a chance.
“Becca—”
She didn’t look at me, didn’t react. It was as though I hadn’t even spoken, and after a hasty good-bye—swallowed up by the white noise rushing through my ears—she was gone as quickly as she’d crashed back into my life, her brown hair gleaming, bobbing through the crowd until even that disappeared and I was left standing by the bar, feeling like I’d just been hit by a Mack truck, surrounded by six pairs of curious eyes and one pissed-off blonde.
TWO
THOR
I ordered another tequila from the bartender at Tin Roof, bracing my elbows against the bar, regretting my decision to stay with the group rather than just going back to my hotel room. I’d lost the blonde approximately ten seconds after I’d lost Becca.
“What was that back there?”
I turned as Easy settled into the space next to me, signaling to the bartender for another beer. I downed the shot of tequila in front of me, needing the liquid courage before I answered him, setting the glass down on the bar top.
“How did you know the girl? Becca, right?” he asked.
God, her name sliced through me.
“Yeah.” I stared down at my hands, laced together over the scarred wood. “We were engaged.”
I didn’t have to look at Easy to know I’d shocked him. Some guys knew I’d been engaged, but it wasn’t something I’d advertised, either. Easy and I hung out together, had probably become closer in the last few months considering what we’d been through—the night we’d both been flying and lost our friend and squadron commander, Joker—but we didn’t talk about our feelings and shit.
“Fuck, man.”
That about summed it up.
“How long ago?”
“Ten years.”
We’d been in our early twenties. Kids. Kids who’d been together through high school and college. We’d been everything to each other. Family, best friends, a fire that had burned hot and bright until it flamed out.
“What happened?”
Me. I happened.
“I wanted to be a fighter pilot. She wanted to go to law school. We started fighting about our future, wanted different things. In the end, I left.”
“Shit.” He took a pull of his beer. “You looked like someone hit you in the balls.”
“Pretty much.”
“I asked the girls. Apparently, she’s a lawyer in a town near here. Bradbury.”
I’d heard through the grapevine that she’d stayed; I wasn’t sure if that was why I’d made it a point never to return, but considering my family ties were tenuous, excluding my grandmother, it hadn’t exactly been a hardship.
“It’s where we grew up.”
“And you haven’t seen her in ten years?”
I nodded.
“You thinking about changing that?”
I shrugged, unable to talk past the lump in my throat.
“You’re an idiot. Bandit was all over that. She’s fine. Seriously, fine. Got that sexy librarian thing going on. If I’d seen her first . . .”
I glared, all too familiar with Easy’s warped sense of humor and uncanny ability to get under everyone’s skin. “Fuck off.”
He flashed me a cocky grin. “I’m just saying, if you don’t get in there, someone else will.”
The idea had occurred to me approximately one million times in the last decade. It wasn’t like I didn’t want her to be happy, but at the same time, the idea of Becca with someone else, hearing about it . . . yeah, I wasn’t sure I was ready for that one. Another reason why I hadn’t exactly been eager to go back to the place where I’d grown up. I figured one day I would return and I’d see her walking down the street, or going into the grocery store, a baby on her hip and a ring on her finger, and I’d know unequivocally that I’d lost the best thing that had ever happened to me. But she’d been out tonight and I hadn’t seen a ring . . .
“You saw how she acted. She hates me.”
“Come on. You said it yourself—it’s been a decade. She doesn’t know you. Are you the same guy you were ten years ago?”
If I’d been any drunker, I’d have fallen off my bar stool. Apparently, Easy was doing deep.
“No.”
Ten years ago I’d been struggling to scrape together a future for myself, trying to become the kind of man who deserved someone like Becca, only to fuck everything up spectacularly beyond repair. Now I didn’t know what I was.
“I chose F-16s over her. Ended our engagement. Decade or not, I don’t think she’s going to forgive or forget that easily.”
“If you had the choice to make all over again, would you still choose flying?”
Had it all been worth it? I’d wanted to serve my country, wanted to do something with my life, to make a difference, and I’d thought I’d find all of that behind the stick of a jet. And now that I looked at the scales of what I’d given up and lost, and what I’d achieved, I didn’t know which one won out.
I’d gone to combat; I’d done my part, had supported the guys on the ground, but I couldn’t ignore the doubt inside me that recognized that we left one place just to return years later under a different operation name, a different spin, even when the mission sure felt like the fucking same. It was a rinse cycle—go to the desert, come back from the desert, go to the desert again. It was losing good guys, guys like Joker, and for what? We were called to fight, to risk our lives to defend our country, to fight for those who couldn’t fight for themselves. And we did it. But it never felt like we got anywhere, like we actually made things better. And in exchange . . .
It was dangerous to let the losses consume me, but when the stakes were as high as they were with our job, the ramifications of fucking up were catastrophic.
I’d been on his wing.
That night in Alaska, the night we’d lost Joker, I’d been number two in the formation—Easy and our buddy Burn, who’d since moved on to Korea with his new wife, Jordan, rounding out the four-ship. I’d been Joker’s wingman when the spatial D hit, when he became disoriented and crashed his plane into the cold ground. I’d heard the radio call, that last sound of his voice that I’d never forget, and then nothing. He’d just fallen from the sky.
I’d hugged his widow, Dani, when we all returned from the TDY to Alaska, minus the most important member, had sat through his memorial service, had presided over the piano burn where we marked his sacrifice, and still, through all of it, I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that he was gone, couldn’t quiet the questions and doubts that kept me up at night, wondering if I’d fucked up somehow, if I’d failed him—I was on his wing—if I should have noticed his spatial D, if I could have saved him. The accident investigation board had cleared all of us, but I couldn’t quite manage to clear myself.
I wished I had an answer to Easy’s question, but right now it sure as fuck felt like our losses outweighed our successes, and despite the heroic spin of my job, I wasn’t sure I could point to one instance where I’d actually made a fucking difference, especially in the face of the glaring loss of my friend.
I turned and held Easy’s gaze, flinching a bit as the bleakness in his eyes hit uncomfortab
ly close to home. I definitely wasn’t the only one trying to outrun my troubles tonight at the bottom of a glass. We’d never spoken of it, but I’d seen the despair in his eyes enough times to realize that losing Joker hit close to home for Easy—after all, he had the added guilt of being in love with Joker’s wife.
“Do you ever regret being a pilot?” I asked him.
“Not for a fucking second.”
There were guys who flew F-16s and guys who were fighter pilots. Easy was a fighter pilot through and through. He lived and breathed the lifestyle, pissed jet fuel, and got off on the high of pulling G’s. He bedded women, partied hard, and sucked every inch of life. He was a throwback to what it had meant to be a fighter pilot in the olden days, a dying breed of men who looked up to Robin Olds as their own personal hero and were happiest on the edge. And he was a fucking killer with the stick. One of the best pilots I’d ever known.
I was good, damned good, but I still didn’t know which I was. If flying the 16 was what I did or who I was.
I was just drunk enough to ask—
“If you had to choose between flying or a woman . . .” My voice trailed off.
Easy looked away, staring off into the distance. “Hell if I know.” His jaw clenched. “Let’s just say, I didn’t exactly have a choice. But if it came down to a choice between the Viper and . . .” He took another swig of his beer. “Yeah, no contest.”
There was no need to fill in the blanks; his feelings for Dani were quickly and dangerously becoming an open secret in the squadron. I imagined most men would agree with him. There weren’t many women like Dani. Or Becca.
Easy got a lot of shit in the squadron for being a bit of a whore. The stereotype of the love ’em and leave ’em fighter pilot was slowly becoming eclipsed by the carpool brigade, guys who were more about family than pussy. Easy saw more action than any guy I knew, and he never made a secret of it, so it wasn’t like his reputation was undeserved. But at the same time, as someone who’d had the girl, the one you’d turn yourself inside out for and work yourself to the bone to please, and been so fucking stupid as to blow it, I knew that sometimes it wasn’t about not caring who you were with as much as it was not caring who you were with because for some guys, once they’d met the one, there wouldn’t be anyone else who mattered.
I pushed back from the bar. “I’m going to go.”
Easy’s brow rose. “You sure? You fucked it away with the blonde back at Liberty, but this place is full of hot undergrads.”
“You don’t think a ten-year age difference is too much? Even for you?”
“What the fuck else am I going to do?”
I opened my mouth to speak and then closed it again, figuring I was the last person who should give anyone romantic advice. It’d be overstating the obvious to admit that we’d been living on the edge before, neither one of us the poster child for healthy decision making, but at the same time, it was also impossible to ignore the feeling that Joker’s death had killed a part of us that night and we were both hurtling through life, trying to hold on to anything that would make it bearable, anything that would make us okay—
If we ever found it at all.
BECCA
The cursor hovered over the “Add Friend” button. I swallowed. I moved the cursor away like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
Fuck me.
I took a sip of merlot, questioning my sanity for the four hundred and fifty thousandth time since I’d fled Liberty.
I hadn’t been prepared to see him. Understatement of the year, and yet, the brutal truth. I’d had a decade free from Eric Jansen, and in one evening the Band-Aid had been ripped off and all of my feelings—pain, and anger, and confusion—had slapped me in the fucking face.
And even though I knew I should just be glad that the whole thing was over, there was another teeny-tiny undeniable part of me that wanted to redeem the fact that I’d come off looking horrendously awkward at best, and totally crazy at worst.
I could friend him. No big deal. Maybe send him a message that said something like:
Nice to see you. So sorry I had to run. I had an appointment I couldn’t miss.
No, a date. A date sounded better. Yes. Let him think that I’d moved on, that I had a fabulous new boyfriend who was a doctor . . . no, wait, an accountant. That sounded stable and not thrill seeking. Like the kind of guy who would be happy to come home for dinner at a reasonable hour, who wouldn’t get tired of living in the same place, who didn’t flinch or flee at the idea of putting down roots. I could totally see myself with an accountant. Except, I had dated an accountant, and he’d had the unfortunate habit of jabbing at my clit like it was a key on a calculator until I’d finally had to break up with him before he broke my vagina.
Whatever.
I took another sip of wine. Okay, a gulp. A big fucking gulp of get-your-head-on-straight-and-forget-you-ever-saw-Eric-Jansen liquid courage.
I clicked on “Message” instead.
A message was safer. No need to actually friend each other and make that commitment into each other’s lives. I mean, yes, I was friends with my old hairdresser, but surely ex-boyfriends, hell, ex-fiancés, were held to a more tenuous standard.
My fingers shook as they hovered over the keyboard, pressing down on each letter like it was a wire connected to a bomb . . .
Eric,
It was nice to see you tonight. I’m so sorry I had to run, but I had a date. I hope you’re well. Take care.
Becca
That was nice, right? Maybe a little crazy, but at this point I figured I had nowhere to go but up. And it was probably an improvement over what I wanted to type, which was basically a variation of, Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you for breaking my heart. It got the point across, but probably wouldn’t do a lot to help me in the sanity department.
I stared at his profile picture. He looked good in his green flight suit. He wore a blue cap on his head that I figured was part of his uniform and covered up his thick Prince Harry hair. He stood in front of an F-16, looking like every girl’s fantasy. And even though I didn’t have a pilot fantasy, I had a whole lot of Eric fantasies, and more than that, I couldn’t ignore the twinge of pride for the man he’d become.
He might have broken my heart in the process, but it was impossible to deny that Eric’s transformation from the boy who’d been in and out of juvie before we got together to a captain in the Air Force—one of the elite few who flew fighter jets—was impressive to say the least.
Once upon a time I’d been his biggest fan, had believed he could do anything. We’d had dreams—I’d wanted to go to law school at the University of South Carolina and he’d still been figuring out what he wanted. I’d been surprised when he told me he wanted to join the military, but so proud of him. I hadn’t thought about what it would mean for us then, just felt excitement that he’d found something he was passionate about, something that could give us the future together that we’d envisioned.
And then, little by little, the fights had started.
The military meant that he couldn’t control where he was sent; it meant overseas assignments, and as he slowly explained to me, it meant moving every couple of years, sometimes as frequently as every year. It meant that being an attorney—a difficult enough goal to accomplish—would be that much harder, that I would struggle to find a job that would be willing to take a chance on someone as transient as me, that if I passed the bar in one state and then we were moved to a state that didn’t offer reciprocity, I’d be forced to take the test all over again, studying for months and months only to repeat it again the next time the Air Force moved us, that all of a sudden my future started to look like it would always come second to his.
We’d tried long distance when he went off to basic training, but even then the cracks had begun to show. We’d both been under so much pressure—me in my first year of law schoo
l, working my ass off just to keep up with the nightly reading, forget doing what I needed to in order to excel—him going through the process to become an officer and then getting ready to leave for pilot training in Texas. In the end, it had been too much and he’d given up and left. Or maybe I’d pushed him away. I didn’t even know anymore.
I clicked “Send” before I could chicken out, figuring I owed us this at least. And then I was alone again in my apartment, the connection to Eric somewhere out there.
I’d gone out tonight hoping to have fun, to get my mind off of work and my overwhelming caseload, thinking that maybe if I was really lucky, I might meet a guy and maybe get laid. Instead, the past had caught me in its talons and I couldn’t shake loose no matter how badly I wanted to or how hard I tried.
THREE
THOR
I read over Becca’s message three fucking times Monday morning before my flight, not to mention all of the times I read it between getting the message and landing back in Oklahoma on Sunday afternoon, trying to decode it and coming up short every single time. She hadn’t reached out to me in ten years, and now this . . . Did she want me to respond? But if she did, why hadn’t she sent me a friend request? My finger hovered over the “Add Friend” option, and then I pulled back.
Shit.
I seriously contemplated messaging Burn and his wife, Jordan, to get a female opinion on this, needing someone to sanity check my next move, but I did a quick mental calculation and realized that with the time difference it was the middle of the night in Korea, and I figured there’d be no end to the shit I’d get from the guys if it got around that I was this pathetic.
Flirting with women had never been this difficult. It was Becca who always made me feel like I came up short.
I could respond, but with what? It wasn’t like she’d left me much—any—room to maneuver. And I didn’t want to get into some awkward pen-pal relationship with her—talk about rubbing salt into the wound. But that was the problem. I didn’t know what I fucking wanted from her.
Into the Blue (A Wild Aces Romance) Page 2