“I just want him to hug me again. I want to hear his voice again. When Ron and I broke up, I didn’t miss him. Because I never wanted to hug him. His voice wasn’t special. I didn’t want to have his babies. But Lance—I would’ve had Lance’s babies, Tara. I don’t even know if I want kids, and I would’ve had his babies.”
Tara squeezed her in a hug. “You’re going to be okay, Kaci. You have bigger things to do.”
“I just miss him.”
“His roommate came into Jimmy Beans last night.”
Kaci’s nose wrinkled.
Tara plopped down on the bed. “Sounds like it’s been an easy deployment so far for the guys over there. Devon said you can stop by anytime. His girlfriend slugged him. Nikki’s a grad student in the English department, and she kinda offered to help me with my redneck fairy tales. She’s doing research into the ways storytelling is shifting because of the digital marketplace, so I’m sorta going to be the subject of her master’s thesis. But I’ll meet with her at her place. Or alone here. I told Devon he’s not allowed to know where we live.”
Kaci rubbed the sore spot to the left of her breastbone. “Do what you need to do, sugar. Life goes on.”
So long as her plane was airworthy tomorrow. And the other one, too, that would bring her back from Germany.
Where she’d actually be closer to Lance than she was today.
“I can still drop everything and go with you tomorrow,” Tara said. She’d never once come out and said she knew Kaci was terrified to fly, but Kaci knew she knew.
She’d probably known since the night Kaci came home complaining that some hot guy in a bar had kissed her and run away. Because that was the kind of friend Tara was.
“I got this,” Kaci said.
Her fingers were numb, but she’d be fine. She’d get on that plane. She’d have the time of her professional life in Germany. She’d come home.
And life would go on.
Really, it was good that she and Lance had called it quits. If they were still dating, she’d be doing that helpless female thing, begging him to save her, and she’d be making excuses not to get on the plane.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
If she’d never met Lance, she wouldn’t be getting on that plane tomorrow.
She was going because he’d believed in her.
She was going because he called her strong.
She was going because he’d gone out of his way to show her planes were safe and then delivered her safely to the ground even with engine problems.
She owed it to him to do this. To not toss her cookies. To not cry. To not cause a scene.
And to enjoy it.
“And did I tell you we have a new club member?” Tara added with a sly grin.
“No!”
“Mrs. Sheridan.”
“The base commander’s wife?”
“Yep. Turns out, the commander’s her second husband. She was married to another military guy before that, and she thinks the ex-wives club is awesome. She’s offered to be either a full member or an advisor, whatever we want or need. She’s not planning on divorcing General Sheridan, but she does believe in supporting both current and former military spouses.”
“Shut the front door.”
“So, anyway, you have to go kick ass in Germany. Because we need you to get back home and put more flyers all over campus and town. Okay?”
Kaci nodded. “I’ll do my best.”
* * *
Deployments didn’t leave much downtime, but Lance found a few hours a week to catch up on email. He could also call Cheri toll-free through the base phone system, so he’d been bothering his twin as often as humanly possible.
It helped center him.
Unlike his previous deployments, his head still wasn’t all here. He gritted his way through it, digging deep for his focus, especially when he was flying, but he kept forgetting little things. Getting agitated by a boot string breaking or for leaving his sunglasses in the wrong place or forgetting his password.
He’d thought Kaci was the chaos in his life.
But he was beginning to suspect she’d been his balance.
After all the time he’d put into anticipating getting the hell out of Georgia, Georgia was exactly where he wanted to be.
Just before Christmas, he did something he knew he’d regret. He Googled Kaci’s name.
Because he had to know.
The top story was written in English, but it might as well have been gibberish. Lance was hardly an imbecile, but all the physics lingo being tossed around made his head hurt. The point, though, was that she’d done it.
She’d made it to Germany.
And from the nontechnical bits he could pick out of the articles he found in his three hours before he was due on the flight line, he learned that she’d aced her presentation.
Groundbreaking.
Game-changing.
Brilliant.
He found an article from back home, written two days after she’d gotten back, summing everything up in layman’s terms. Biofuels are only half the battle, local physicist says. Kaci’s research was paving the way toward improving engine efficiency, with an eye toward zero net energy loss. She’d been asked to go to Sweden in May and to an energy conference in California in the fall.
Before he could think better of it, he copied the link to the news story and switched to his mail program.
* * *
Kaci’s first Christmas without Miss Higgs was weird. Momma hovered more than she usually did, as though the loss of the cat had thrown her off too. Kaci wasn’t sleeping well in her old bedroom, and those things she’d always taken for granted—Momma’s rigid posture, the desperate need to get back to her own life, cat hair on the Jell-O mold—were all missing.
She slipped into her old bedroom—still decorated in the muted yellows and blues that Momma insisted were good for her constitution—under the guise of needing a post-Christmas-dinner nap, and pulled out her laptop.
The mashed potatoes had inspired an idea about a key point she was missing with her new hypothesis, and she wanted to write it down before she forgot it. While she was on her computer, she switched over to check email.
And lost her breath.
Wheeler, Lance (Capt, USAF) had sent her a message.
She hovered the mouse over the checkbox beside the message, debating if she should simply delete it.
They hadn’t parted on bad terms. They’d parted on we have different lives terms.
Mildly embarrassing different lives terms, what with her slipping out that she loved him, but still. Not bad terms.
She couldn’t be a military wife and still meet her professional goals, and when he was finally far enough from his breakup that he could see clearly, he’d realize he was just having fun, and they weren’t destined soul mates like Tara’s couples in her books.
But Kaci could read the email from Lance. Reading it didn’t mean she had to respond.
Or care.
Her heart swelled.
Too late. She already cared.
And she probably always would.
With a defeated sigh, she clicked on the message.
Proud of you, was all it said, with a link below to the article from the Gellings paper.
I’m freaking proud of me too, you dolt, she wanted to reply.
Or maybe Shove it, flyboy.
But she’d discovered her pride wasn’t the best at speaking for her.
She hesitated longer than she wanted to admit, looking for hidden messages between the three words. Ten letters. Ten letters could say so much. But these ten letters said so little.
True, they said he’d been thinking of her enough to read an article about her and forward it to her. Or that one of his squadron buddies had hacked his email and sent her a message to screw with them both. Or possibly she was asleep, and he hadn’t actually sent the email, but she wished he had.
She growled at herself.
She was thirty-freaking-four yea
rs old. If she couldn’t reply to a simple email from a friend, she had more issues than she thought.
Thank you, she typed. And then she hit Send before she could overthink it.
Thank you was appropriate. He’d gotten her there. He’d taken her up on her first airplane ride. He’d believed in her. He’d challenged her. He’d held her. He’d pushed her.
And he’d taken five minutes out of his deployment to let her know he was thinking about her.
She hadn’t seen the man in over a month, and he still tied her up in needy, emotional knots.
Of all the men she’d known in her life, none had treated her like Lance did. Some men wanted her for her body. Others for her brains. She’d known a few who had dug her potato gun.
But Lance had honestly seemed to like her. All of her. The redneck parts. The physicist parts. The female parts. The obnoxious parts.
Regardless of anything she’d said to him, what she’d done to him, he kept coming back.
He could’ve been perfect for her.
But she would never ask a man to sacrifice something she wasn’t willing to sacrifice herself to be with him. She wasn’t willing to give up her tenure-track position, which meant she wasn’t willing to move away from Gellings.
So how could she ask Lance to leave the military for her?
And why would he want to?
She found Momma working at her desk in the pristine den, vacuum marks still visible in the plush carpet. Momma’s reading glasses were perched on the end of her nose while she stared at the monitor.
“Enough beauty rest for one day?” Momma said.
Kaci curled up in the plush round chair beneath a hanging sweet potato plant. “If you’d known what was gonna happen to Daddy, would you have still married him?”
One of Momma’s perfectly plucked eyebrows went up. “Age is no excuse to lower your beauty standards,” she’d said on more occasions than Kaci cared to count. “Are you reconsidering your separation from Colonel Kelly?”
Kaci hugged a mauve throw pillow. “No.”
Momma pulled off her glasses and swiveled soundlessly to face Kaci in the corner. “Had we known what your father’s fate would be, it’s far more likely he would’ve left me to save me from the grief.”
“Would you have let him?”
“Of course not.”
Kaci found a smile.
“I take it you’ve been dating again.”
“If that’s what kids these days are calling it.”
Momma’s cheek twitched.
“We’re over,” Kaci added softly. “I was just wishing one of us could’ve been a little different.”
“You wouldn’t like him if he were different, and if the man has any sense at all, he wouldn’t like you if you were different either.”
Some days, every once in a while, Momma was Kaci’s favorite person.
But then there were moments like this when her brilliance was as irritating as a mosquito bite in a place she couldn’t reach.
Because she was right.
Lance probably wouldn’t like her if she were different. If she changed her mind about what she wanted out of her career, he wouldn’t respect her as much.
And then where would she be?
“I think I’m better off single,” Kaci said.
“All the best of us are.”
* * *
Lance was back in his bunk, staring at his two-word reply from Kaci, when Pony came in with a stack of boxes. “Mail call. We got presents.”
Mail. One of the highlights of deploying.
“Shit, Thumper. Ain’t that your ex-fiancée?”
He took the shoebox-size package Pony thrust at him and glanced at the return label. “Huh.”
He hadn’t heard from her since September. But that was her name and address in the return sender field.
And sending a deployment care package was exactly the sort of thing Allison would do. Because it was the patriotic thing to do.
Doing it for him was a little weird, but the weirder part was that he didn’t feel anything seeing her name on the box.
No anger. No regret. No excitement.
Now, if Kaci had sent a care package—
He tossed aside the box from Allison and examined the other three boxes Pony had piled at his feet. One from his parents, one from Cheri—the dork, she was deployed too—and one from Flincher and his family.
None from Kaci.
Not that she had reason to send him anything.
He had a feeling he was lucky to get two words in an email from her.
“My wife left me after my first deployment,” Pony said.
Lance shot a look at his buddy. “You were married?”
“Not long. I reconnected with a high school girlfriend and eloped to Vegas. Knew it wouldn’t last when her care packages pissed me off. She sent crossword puzzle books and a photo album of her dog.”
Lance grunted. No wonder Pony didn’t talk about his ex-wife.
“Got one from a family friend once though.” Pony sliced open the first of his seven boxes. “Oreos, Lucky Charms, and a stack of Star Wars books. Looked her up when I got home. Was ready to propose, but she was dating someone, so I just said thanks. Funny thing. She wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, but when she smiled…” He shook his head. “Sometimes the chicks get us. And there’s a connection. But we’re too late.”
Lance glanced at his tablet again. “Or we picked the wrong career.”
“Fuck that excuse. I got thirteen years in. Seven more, I can retire. She loves me? We’ll make it work.”
“I’ve got six in, and I’m sticking around until they put stars on my shoulders.”
“You take a three-year tour in the training squadron and a four-year follow-on at Gellings, you’ll be in as long as I am now. Difference, though, is you got a girl you miss who’d be happy at Gellings for another seven years. All I have is a job.” Pony lifted a pair of socks decorated with mustaches and grimaced. “And a bunch of family with weird senses of humor.”
“You think this is just a job?”
“It’s more than a job. But it’s not enough to be my entire life.”
Lance picked up the box from Cheri and balanced it on his knee.
Did he want a job in the training squadron?
It would mean staying in Georgia. Teaching and training and mentoring more kids like Juice Box.
Whom Lance actually missed, in a little-brother kind of way.
But staying in Georgia, even for a job that sounded appealing, meant he’d be close to Kaci.
There were plenty of women in the world who made good wives to military members. Plenty of women who wouldn’t write him off because he deployed, because he moved every few years, because he might not come home one day.
But none of those women who would’ve loved him despite his job were Kaci Boudreaux.
And even here, halfway around the world, weeks after he’d last seen her, he couldn’t get her out of his mind.
Chapter 21
On a blustery Saturday afternoon in late March, Kaci took her Physics Club kids back out to the fairgrounds to test their improvements to Ichabod. After her last disaster with launching pumpkins, she’d called in advance to make sure the field was open and that they could use it for test-firing.
She’d also asked Tara to pass along to Lance’s roommate that she was firing pumpkins, just in case she aimed the wrong way and put their squadron bar in danger again.
Tara had found it hilarious. Apparently Nikki and Devon-slash-Juice Box had too. And so the message had been passed along, and Kaci had asked Zada to take the lead in making sure they were aiming away from the houses when they arrived at the field this morning.
A small cluster of Civil War reenactors were also set up on the firing line. And instead of a catapult, they had a cannon.
Her redneck heart gave an indignant squeak. She’d always wanted to fire a cannon.
“Aren’t they a little far south?” Zada whispered. “I didn�
��t think there were any Civil War battles in this part of the state.”
“Love of the Confederacy isn’t always tied to a battleground,” Kaci murmured back.
Her six students went to work setting up Ichabod.
Kaci willfully ignored the cannon dudes.
She’d had a lot of practice at willfully ignoring things in the past few months.
Willfully ignoring that she’d committed to getting on two more airplanes to speak at two more conferences. Willfully ignoring that she still had two more years of teaching before she could go before the tenure board, and that she still hadn’t made friends with the old cronies who would decide her fate. She kept half hoping at least one or two would retire before then.
Willfully ignoring that Lance’s squadron was supposed to be home sometime today since Devon-slash-Juice Box had left earlier this week.
Not straining for sounds of cargo planes or casting glances at the sky every few minutes.
She pinched her lips together and resisted stomping.
He’d kept emailing—short notes every few days to every few weeks, which she responded to in equally short terms—but that didn’t change anything.
He was still a military pilot first and foremost, and she was still a physics professor who needed job stability.
Zada jogged past. “I’ll grab the vegetables,” she called behind her.
Pumpkins were scarce, and the imported watermelons Kaci had found were expensive, so her students were using cloth bags stuffed with potatoes for a few test runs on Ichabod. She wrenched her eyes away from the sky and stepped over to watch the girls load the catapult.
“That potato’s face looks like Zada’s ex-boyfriend.”
“Let’s crush him.”
“Smashed potato face, coming up. Hey, anybody want to go to the movies tonight?”
“Excuse me. Is one of you Dr. Boudreaux?” A rotund gentleman whose Confederacy uniform was bursting at the buttons stopped at the edge of their group.
“That’s me, sugar. What can we do for you?”
“We got word you might could help us fire our cannon.”
She swiveled her attention between the man and his cannon, but her gaze snagged on something else at the edge of the cluster of Civil War reenactors.
Her Rebel Heart Page 23