Fly With Me

by Chanel Cleeton

  I threw it out there, not sure I wanted to know the answer.

  His jaw clenched. “You know I don’t have an option.”

  I knew. And I knew it was unfair of me to care, to weigh our love as though it could be measured by a set of scales. But I did. Because I didn’t want to be second in his life when he was always first in mine.

  * * *

  As far as good-byes went, ours pretty much sucked. We stood outside the squadron, the same awkward tension that had descended since Noah’s faux proposal lingering like a bad smell.

  We were both clearly pissed, and now was definitely not the time to discuss it, so we just stood there, trying to hold back the floodgates that nearly burst at the seams with the desire to air our personal laundry in the squadron parking lot.

  “Look, maybe we shouldn’t talk for a while,” Noah suggested, his gaze trained on a point over my shoulder.

  “Are you serious?”

  I knew he was upset, but not talking seemed like the worst thing we could do.

  “Maybe we need some time apart to figure out what we want.”

  “Are you breaking up with me? Minutes after you proposed to me?”

  “No. God, no. I just think we might need some time to think about things.”

  “About what? Whether we should be together? Because that kind of sounds like a breakup.”

  “It’s not a breakup. It’s me trying to give us some space to figure out what we want.”

  “Still sounds like a breakup.”

  “It’s not,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “You aren’t the only one who’s confused here, Jordan.”

  I looked up at his face, his eyes shielded by aviators, a knot tightening around my heart.

  “I don’t want to leave things like this.”

  “I think we need time to figure out if this is what we really want,” Noah replied. “I love you. But I think we need to decide if love is enough for us to make this work. And I think space will help us get there.”

  I didn’t agree with him, but I also didn’t know what to do anymore.

  He moved, opening the trunk, pulling his bags out.

  A lump formed in my throat.

  His head jerked toward the building. “I gotta go.”

  I couldn’t believe this was how we were leaving things, but I didn’t want him distracted and upset before he had to fly. And the problems between us seemed bigger than the five minutes we had left. I swallowed the hurt and fear pummeling me.

  I stood on my tiptoes, pressing my lips to his, trying to keep my emotions together when they threatened to spill over and rip me to shreds.

  “I love you,” I whispered. “Be safe.”

  “I love you, too.”

  I stood in the parking lot, watching him walk away, wondering where we could go from here, and how I was going to get through the next month and a half without him, leaving our relationship hanging by a thread.

  TWENTY-ONE

  JORDAN

  It was the longest six weeks of my life. We spoke every few days, our conversations short and stilted. He didn’t bring up Korea or marriage again, and neither did I. For the most part, I threw myself into work, spending time at the store and with Sophia, hanging out with Lulu. I tried to picture giving it all up, living a different life, wondering if I should have said “yes” to his proposal or whatever it was in the car. Wondering if he regretted asking me.

  I flew to Oklahoma a few days before Noah was scheduled to come back from Alaska, no closer to knowing what I wanted to do. It felt weird going to his house when he was still away on his TDY and things were tense between us, but I’d had the flight booked for a few weeks now and his return date had changed so many times, I’d given up trying to predict when he’d arrive. I used the key he’d given me and tried to make myself comfortable. And I called Dani.

  She came over to have a glass of wine and to give me some much needed military life advice.

  We sat on Noah’s couch, his place the cleanest I’d ever seen it. I hadn’t been able to resist the urge to straighten up, rationalizing it by telling myself that no one wanted to come home to a messy house after a few weeks away. Also, cleaning kind of calmed me and right now my life felt like such a chaotic disaster that I craved the normalcy of a routine.

  I missed him so much.

  “How are you doing?” Dani asked, a knowing look in her eyes.

  I figured it was pretty obvious that I was kind of a mess.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Noah’s assignment had to have been a blow.”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “Have you guys talked about what you’ll do when he goes to Korea?”

  I took a sip of my wine, gathering the courage to talk about it. I hadn’t told anyone about Noah’s proposal, had been a little too freaked about what my friends and family would think if I confessed that I was considering marrying a guy I’d only known a few months. And the scariest thing was that I was considering it. A lot. Even as it utterly terrified me.

  “He asked me to marry him.”

  I figured her lack of a response was a testament to Dani’s familiarity with military relationships. Maybe this was normal when your life was unstructured. It just didn’t feel normal to me.

  “What did you say?”

  I winced.

  “I kind of freaked out. It wasn’t exactly my finest moment.”

  “Understandable.”

  “I don’t think he understood. We’re sort of taking a break right now to figure out what we want.”

  “He’s a guy and a fighter pilot. Sometimes it’s hard for them to see beyond the target,” Dani answered, her tone sympathetic.

  “So you don’t think I’m crazy?”

  “I’d think you were crazy if you weren’t a little scared. Marriage is a big step. Military marriage is a leap without a net to catch you. It’s all or nothing, and that’s a lot to ask. Especially when you guys haven’t known each other that long. I don’t blame you for being scared. We all are.” She made a face. “I’m still scared.”

  It was strange to hear Dani confessing to being anything other than completely comfortable with this lifestyle. To the outside eye, she thrived here. I envied her ability to manage everything with the kind of aplomb I could never adopt. I needed some kind of military wives handbook, or at the very least, advice from a really good friend who’d run the gauntlet and come out the other end unscathed.

  “So how do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Any of it. All of it. How do you stay sane?”

  “The truth?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t know. I just do. I’m scared every second of every day. Always. That fear is a knot that lives inside me. It never goes away. It never shuts off. It just is. When he’s gone, when’s he up in the air, it’s like I’m underwater holding my breath. The world around me ceases to exist. Everything hinges on the moment when I know he’s safe. And when he’s back, I can breathe again.”

  “Do you ever . . .”

  “Wish I’d fallen in love with someone else? An accountant? Someone who doesn’t take his life into his hands every single time he goes to work?”

  I nodded, a lump settling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Yeah. I do. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a part of me that thinks this would be so much easier if I didn’t love him so much. If I loved him a little less, maybe the absences and the constant fear that I’m going to lose him wouldn’t hurt so much. But then again, if I loved him any less, I’m not sure I could do this. Not sure the life would be worth it. I love him just the right amount to make it hurt so much that I can’t walk away.”

  “I’m scared.” I whispered the words I hadn’t been able to tell Noah, the feeling inside me that I was afraid to give a voice to.

  Sh
e squeezed my hand. “I know. I wish I could tell you that it’s going to be easy, or that you have nothing to fear. Wish I could tell you that this life won’t take a chunk out of you; but as hard as it is to be in a relationship, it’ll be that much harder to be in a military relationship. I know it sounds tough to believe, and it isn’t easy to comprehend until you’re in it, but in a lot of ways this is the most difficult thing you’ll ever do. Still, there are two kinds of military wives. The ones who lean on their men, and the ones who are strong enough to give their men somewhere to lean when they come home after a six-month deployment that has beaten them down or a week of working twelve-hour days.

  “If you love him, really love him, and you can’t be the second kind of wife, then you really need to think about whether or not you guys can make this work. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, or that you won’t have days when you’ll just sit and cry for a few minutes, but you’ll have to be strong for him. Stronger than you think you can be. Because at the end of the day, his mind can’t be on a fight you had that morning or on whatever problems you might be dealing with at home. It has to be on the mission. On coming home safely. Because in their line of work, the smallest mistake can be the difference between life and death.”

  “I’ll always be second to the Air Force.”

  She nodded. “Some wives resent that. It’s a hard pill to swallow, and believe me, I’ve struggled with it. But if you find a good man, one who loves you—and Noah loves you—he’ll put you first every time he can. And the other times when he can’t, when he doesn’t have a choice, those moments when he does choose, when he chooses you, will have to be enough to get you through the times when you feel like your entire life revolves around something you didn’t sign up for, when you start to lose parts of yourself and the only thing you have to hold on to is him.

  “It’s corny, but true—military marriages make a good marriage stronger and a bad marriage worse.”

  “How do you know? How do you know if your marriage is going to be one of the ones that makes it?”

  I was so over my head. I’d always had a messy approach to dating. Romantic guru, I was not. I’d screwed up my fair share of relationships, but this one—the stakes were so much higher this time. I didn’t want to hurt him. And I really didn’t want to get hurt. And I had no clue what the fuck I was doing.

  “When I decided I wanted to marry Joker, I thought about the life we’d lead together. I tried to envision what military life would be like, but to be honest, I had no clue. No one does. Being a military wife is a lot like getting thrown into the deep end to learn how to swim. You just have to deal with things as they come and adapt. But I did make myself a promise.

  “I knew I couldn’t live my life the way I had when I was single. I knew there would be times—way more times than I’d like to count—when it wouldn’t be about me. When I would spend holidays by myself, when I’d have to give up my career because his job meant we moved so much that steady employment was pretty much impossible. I knew there would be times that I would want to give up. But I told myself that no matter what, every decision I would make after I married him would be the best decision for the family we built. For our marriage. Even if sometimes it meant sacrificing what I wanted.”

  “And that’s what you do?”

  She nodded.

  “And you don’t resent him for it?”

  “For moments? Sure. But that’s where the part of finding a good man comes in. He loves me. I am the love of his life. And he has given me an amazing life. So for every moment when I’m pissed off that I’m spending another Christmas by myself, for every time I’ve binge eaten chocolate on the couch on my birthday because I’m alone, there is always a moment, every single day, when I feel like I’m the luckiest girl in the entire world, because I am loved by a man who looks at me the way he does. Who fights for me every day of his life. He would die for me. Without question. So yeah. That’s enough for me.”

  I batted at the tear that trickled down my face.

  “Noah loves you like that. He would be that for you if you let him. You just have to decide if you feel the same way.”

  “It’s fucking scary.”

  Dani grinned. “Yeah, it is. It’s all or nothing, which makes it a leap-before-you-look sort of situation. And no matter how much you plan or try to imagine what it’ll be like, there’s no way you can know until you’re in it. It’s jumping into the deep end and hoping you don’t sink to the bottom.”

  “And it’s a whole other country. I mean, it’s not just me becoming a military wife; it’s me becoming a military wife and moving to South Korea. I don’t speak the language. I’ve never even been outside of the U.S.”

  “For what it’s worth, our overseas assignments were some of my favorite times in the Air Force.”

  “Where have you guys been?”

  “Italy and Germany.”

  I’d never really been one of those people who craved adventure. My idea of a perfect night included curling up on the couch with take-out Chinese and a Friends marathon. I wasn’t Noah. I wasn’t looking to take on the world. But the problem was that now, when I looked at my idea of the perfect night, he was right there next to me.

  “You could try long distance,” Dani offered, the tone of her voice conveying her true feelings on the subject.

  “Noah hates the idea.”

  “When they make their mind up, they tend to stick with it.”

  I grimaced. “I’ve noticed. It’s super fucking annoying.”

  She grinned. “Trust me. Five years of marriage. I get it. And for what it’s worth, Joker’s even older and even more set in his ways. I’ve given up at this point.”

  “How do you handle it? The bossy factor?”

  “I let him run the things that are important to him, and sort of do what I want with the rest of it.”

  “And that works?”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes. It’s not easy. Sometimes it feels like there’s something about being a fighter pilot that takes normal annoying masculine traits and magnifies them by a thousand. But it also has its perks.”

  She had a point there.

  Dani reached out and squeezed my hand. “It’ll be okay. Promise. The answer will come to you.”

  My voice cracked. “He doesn’t understand. He’s pissed and he doesn’t understand, and I’m worried that if I don’t decide soon, he’s going to just get fed up and give up on me.”

  “He won’t. He’s scared. He doesn’t want to lose you and right now he’s worried that he’s asking too much of you. And I can promise you, he knows how much he’s asking you to give up.”

  I hoped she was right. I hoped I hadn’t fucked everything up.

  TWENTY-TWO

  JORDAN

  The sound of my cell going off jarred me awake.

  I reached for Noah and came up empty. Then it hit me—he was gone. Alaska. I was in his bed in Oklahoma by myself.

  I flicked on the light, rubbing my eyes as I answered the call. The clock on the nightstand said it was six in the morning. Was it Noah? What time was it in Alaska? I tried to do the calculation, but I was too tired. At least he was calling.

  “Noah?”

  “Are you okay?”

  Confusion filled me as Meg’s panicked voice came through the line.

  “Meg? Yeah. What’s going on?”

  She sucked in a deep breath. “Jord.”

  There was something in the way she said my name, something that combined with the early morning phone call, filled my stomach with dread.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I sat up in bed now, pulling the sheets up around my chest, heart pounding.

  “Are Mom and Dad okay?”

  “Yeah. Mom and Dad are okay.” Her voice shook and I could hear the effort it took for her to pull herself together. “You need to turn on the news. There’s been
a crash.”

  Four words. With four words, she brought my entire world crumbling down.

  I grabbed the TV remote off the nightstand, my cell phone sliding out of my other hand.

  Noah.

  His name thundered through my head like a prayer, terror flooding my body. I flicked through the channels, panic filling me until I hit the news station and the panic became something else entirely. Something I’d never felt before.

  F-16 Crashes in Alaska.

  Four words. Four words that before Noah wouldn’t have meant much to me, but were now everything.

  I turned the volume up, heart pounding, scanning the headline, waiting for them to say something about the pilot. I should know, shouldn’t I? If something happened to him, I would know. Someone would have called me. This couldn’t be Noah. This couldn’t be happening.

  F-16 Crashes in Alaska.

  I heard my sister’s voice yelling at me through the speaker and I picked up the phone.

  “Jord.”

  “I have to go.” I struggled to get the words out, fought to push them past the panic clawing at my throat. “I need to call Noah.”

  “Call me as soon as you hear anything. If you need anything, Jord—”

  “I have to go.”

  I hung up on my sister, my fingers shaking as I called Noah.

  “Please answer. Please.”

  I just needed to hear his voice, just needed to know he was okay. It couldn’t be Noah.

  His voice mail picked up immediately and the first tears began to fall.

  “Babe, if you get this, please call me.” Tears ran down my cheeks. “Please. I need to know you’re okay.” I choked on a sob. “I love you, Noah. Please call me.”

  My body curled into a ball, numbness spreading through my limbs. I pulled up the Internet on my phone searching for news, something, anything.