Chapter Nineteen
Josh
“Yeah, thirty days of leave,” I told Mom over the phone before dinner. I ran my fingers alongside the staples on my thigh. Just a few more days and this shit would be out of my body.
“I don’t mean to be all mama-bear, but I’d really like to see you,” she said, her voice heavy with emotion.
“Yeah, of course. I have some things to take care of here in the next couple of weeks. Do you want to come here? I’ll pay for a ticket if you want.” I looked up where Ember was chopping lettuce, and she gave me an approving nod before turning her eyes back to the greens.
It was the closest thing to communication I’d gotten since the doctor’s appointment hours ago.
“Oh, a plane? I don’t know.”
I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. “Planes are safer than cars, Mom. By about forty-three thousand to thirteen.”
“Says the man who just got himself into a helicopter crash,” she admonished.
All my speech stuttered on my tongue. “Ehhh, not the same.” No one is shooting at you here, trying to kill you, watching you crash so they can pull your body out and torture you a little more before killing you. I swallowed, trying to block out the thoughts. I looked up to Ember, her hair pulled into a messy topknot, strands of red framing her face as she rinsed tomatoes in the sink facing me. “Hold up a second,” I said to Mom and put her on mute.
“You want to go to Arizona?” I asked Ember. “Mom’s afraid to fly.”
“At least one of you is,” she said under her breath, drying the tomato.
“Ember.”
“Yes, I’d love to see your mother.” She didn’t look up, but I knew she was genuine. Ember and Mom were peas and carrots. I hit the unmute button just as Ember muttered something that sounded like, “You can stay here.”
I let out a deep breath. “Mom, how about we come there for a week or so? End of June? We can swing through Colorado after and see Ember’s mom at the same time.”
Mom burst into an exuberant planning machine, and I let her go with a laugh and a promise to call again soon. Then I turned to the extraordinary, gorgeous, brilliant, angry redhead in our kitchen. “Are you going to speak to me?” I asked as Ember chopped carrots.
She waved the butcher knife at me, her mouth opening and closing like she couldn’t decide whether to talk or not. She’d been silent since we left Dr. Ortiz’s office, which in Ember-ville meant I was fucked. Or not fucked, rather. She turned away from me and attacked the celery.
“It’s my job,” I told her as she carried a plate over to me. “I just want to do my job,” I repeated as she set the plate on my lap. She’d baked my favorite chicken, so she couldn’t have been that mad, right?
“Well, your job right now is to heal, so eat that.”
Wrong. She was definitely that mad.
She brought over her own plate and sat on the loveseat.
“I had to ask, more for a measure of my downtime than anything. Once I have an up-slip, I’m completely healed.”
“Uh-huh,” she said between bites.
What did she expect? For me to never set foot in a helo again? Wouldn’t you? What if it had been her? The fork clicked against the plate as I set it down. “Babe, do you want me to stop flying?”
Her gaze flew to mine. “What? No? I mean, maybe? I don’t know. It’s not fair to ask me that question right now.”
“Are you mad that I asked?”
“I’m not mad that you asked. I just don’t understand the timing. It’s been five days since the last helicopter almost killed you. I know it’s an inevitability, you getting back up there. I know how you feel about flying, the mission, all of it. I get it. But…five days.”
“And we probably have another twelve weeks,” I said softly, trying to make her see that I wasn’t trying to hop in an aircraft and take off right this second.
“Right, but that’s where your head is at, getting back in the sky.”
Instead of staying safe with me.
She didn’t have to say it. Her eyes did, the giant pools of blue wide and shimmering, begging me to see her side.
I set my plate on the coffee table and rose to my feet—or foot, rather.
“Josh, you need to sit.”
I hopped the distance to her, took the empty spot on the loveseat, and propped my leg on the coffee table. The pain awoke with a dull throbbing, but it was nothing I couldn’t manage.
“Hey,” I said, tilting her chin toward me.
She looked at me, and I was a goner, lost like always. Ember held nothing back in her eyes. She laid every piece of her pain bare—her fears, her insecurities. It was one reason I was madly in love with her. She was confident enough in us to let everything show.
I owed her the same respect, even if it gutted my pride.
“I have to know how long I have, because I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I can ever get behind the controls again and not hear Jagger’s mayday call, or see my death staring at me through the windshield as we went down, or feel the impact. I don’t know if I can do it, if I want to do it. What does that make me? Because the minute I admit that to anyone in MultiCam, you know my wings are gone. If I can’t get back up there, what was it all for? What was Will’s death for?”
She put her plate next to mine and turned, tucking her feet under her and taking my face between her soft hands. “I will support whatever you do. I made you that promise, and I’ll keep it. Yes, what you do terrifies me. I know that you love it, and it’s become just as much a part of you as hockey ever was. But you need to know two things, Joshua Walker. First, you are so much more than a pair of silver wings. I loved you before them, and I’ll love you long after you tuck them away, whether that’s in twenty years or twenty minutes. Second, your apprehension makes you human, and a better pilot when that time comes. I have no doubt that you will get past this. It’s not in your nature to fail, remember?”
I took her mouth, letting my kiss say everything I didn’t have words for. My need for her, my awe over her unwavering support, my gratitude for the simple fact that she existed—she was mine.
Then I handed over her dinner and picked up mine, and just hung out with my future wife, reveling in our normal, no matter how odd it was, because it was hard-fought and ours.
“Don’t do it! Don’t!” Will’s voice screamed through the coms, but I ignored him, racing through the rocky valley, the ground speeding by us.
“Walker, was his life worth both of ours?” Captain Trivette asked, just before blood began to drain from her helmet, covering her face in rivers of red.
My heart slammed against my chest as she hit the controls, putting us into the dive I knew I couldn’t recover from. We plummeted to the earth, and she reached up with her crushing embrace, welcoming us home as we made impact.
My body jerked, air rushing into my lungs, and my eyes opened to total darkness. My right arm reached for my weapon, only to find my arm trapped, immobile. Panic rose in my throat. We were sitting ducks out here. My left hand flew to my vest to find it missing, my skin bare. What the fuck?
There was a pillow behind my head. Wait. Bed. Right.
I turned onto my left side, a jarring pain screaming from my thigh, and swept my hand under my pillow. Gone. My weapon was missing. “Fuck!” I growled. “Where is it?”
“Josh?” Her voice broke through, and I paused.
December. Here? I blinked through the disorientation and saw her form rising next to me in bed.
Our bed.
“Baby?” she asked, slowly reaching across the small distance that separated us, as if I were a wounded animal—as if I would attack her. “You okay?”
Her hand made contact with my cheek, the touch soothing, bringing me into reality. A nightmare. It had been a nightmare. I was home, in our bed, not in Afghanistan. That’s why there was no weapon.
“Yeah,” I replied, leaning into her touch. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
“Another nightmare?” She moved forward, pressing her body against mine as if she’d instinctively known that was exactly what I needed. She was my anchor, holding me to reality, to our life.
I nodded, my chin rubbing against her hair. She smelled like the citrus shampoo she used, bright and alive, and I breathed her in, pushing the nightmare away. Will hadn’t blamed me. He’d whole-heartedly agreed to go after Jagger. So had Captain Trivette.
But when I closed my eyes, I still heard their blame, felt it reverberating in every cell of my body.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, her hand tracing a light pattern on the side of my rib cage, just under my sling.
I shook my head. She couldn’t get into my thoughts. Not yet. Not until I had my shit straight, or I’d lose her. There was no way a woman like Ember, with her father’s morals, would stay with someone who had traded one life for another, not when it cost her a friend. Not until I’d figured out how to pay back Will’s sacrifice.
God, I didn’t deserve her. Not after what I’d put her through…what I would undoubtedly put her through again. But I was too selfish to let her go.
“What can I do?”
“I…” I couldn’t find the words. I just needed her wrapped around me, holding me together. Just her. I needed the haven only she could provide, the moments where nothing existed besides us, where I was lost in her soul, her mind, her body—so deep that I forgot everything else. “Just let me touch you.”
She tilted her head up for a kiss, and I took it, an edge of desperation chasing me that I’d never felt before. My hands were too insistent, my kisses a touch beyond passionate, but she met me with the same driving need. Urging her on top of me, I used my mouth and hands to bring her to climax, savored the cry of my name on her lips. Then I sank into her, burying my demons with each thrust, losing myself in everything she was, as if by loving December some of her goodness would wash into me and cleanse the dark away.
Afterward, she fell asleep against me, her body as spent as mine. I contemplated the bottle of pain medication she kept in the nightstand to ease the throbbing in my thigh, the dull ache in my chest, but knew, just like my orgasm, its relief would be only temporary.
So I slept…and waited for the nightmare to claim me.
This time it was Ember’s voice in my head, accusing me of killing Will, and her blood on my hands.
“Dude, you look like shit,” I said, crutching into Jagger and Paisley’s townhouse the next day. He was stretched out on their sectional, pillows under his legs to keep them elevated.
“Take a look in the mirror, asshole.” Jagger grinned. “At least my complexion doesn’t make me look like a ghost. Can you touch your fiancée with those hands, or do they just slip right through?”
I laughed, since his skin was paper-white, still recovering from the massive blood loss. “Oh, yeah, you’re Miss Tropicana over here.”
He chuckled and smacked the seat next to him. I took it, lifting my leg to the coffee table. Paisley would kill me if she saw, which I had no intention of letting happen…or seeing her in general. “Where did your wife run off to?”
Jagger tossed me an Xbox One controller. “She went to fill the prescription for my meds.” He adjusted, grimacing as he shifted his weight back with his arms.
“How are you feeling?”
“Like I crashed my fucking bird and have six pins in my legs. You?”
I nodded. “Yeah, about there.”
The home screen flashed on the TV, and Jagger sighed. “I don’t remember seeing you in Landstuhl.”
“Yeah, well, you were pretty out of it.”
“That’s what Paisley said. Did she tell you we’re having a boy?” Jagger’s grin was contagious.
“No! Congrats. Little mini-Jagger, huh?” My mind flashed to a son, to strapping tiny skates on a toddler, handing him a stick for the first time while Ember lectured me on safety from the box.
“God help us.” He laughed, but it faded quickly. “Look. I love you like a brother. I just…I just need to know a few things.”
My stomach twisted. “Yeah.”
“Did you know it was me? Was that all in my head?”
“Yes, I knew. We were on our local area orientation flight for Carter, and we heard you go down. I recognized your voice on the radio.”
Our eyes locked for a second, and his slid shut. “You saved me.”
“It was never a question, Jag. You are my brother. What do you remember?”
He looked off into the distance. “We lost our tail rotor —RPG—and then everything started to spin. It was like being on that teacup ride at Disney, except you figured it was going to kill you. I knew it. All I could think as the side of the valley came closer was that I’d never kiss Paisley again. I’d never see our son. Then the first impact came.” His eyes narrowed. “The sound was…”
“Yeah.” I understood, because it was a sound like no other, crumpled metal and death.
“We hit a few times along the valley wall, end over end, I think…and I swore I heard you call my name. That’s when I figured I was dead, except you’re no angel.” He gave me a wry smile.
“Yeah, that was me.”
“Did you know the site wasn’t secure?”
I swallowed. “Yes. Your wingman was still taking fire.”
“And you came anyway?”
“It was you. I mean, I’d like to say that I would have done the same for any downed pilot, and I think I would have, but when push came to shove, it was you, Jagger. I wasn’t going to let my best friend die at the bottom of a valley in Afghanistan, not if there was the slightest chance you’d lived through the impact.”
He nodded. “Did…did Will know?”
Anguish ripped through me, freezing my lungs, my heartbeat, the very blood in my veins. His face flashed through my mind, seeing him above me right before the shots rang out, his relieved smile that we’d made it.
Except we didn’t.
“Yeah,” my voice croaked. “Yeah, he knew.”
His head hit the back of the couch, a ragged sigh forcing its way through him. “Of course he did.”
“He agreed. We all agreed to go in. Carter…he was the one to pull me out, and he was the first to get to you, to tell me that you were alive.”
Jagger’s eyes were trained somewhere on the ceiling. “Thorne?” His copilot.
“He was gone by the time we got to your crash site.”
He nodded. “And then the firefight?”
“That’s when we lost Carter.”
“Fuck. I didn’t wake up, not completely. I thought I heard your voice, but I wasn’t strong enough to open my eyes. Where…” He swallowed, and I fought back the misery clawing its way up my throat, the tears I wouldn’t let near my eyes. “Where did he die?”
“Right next to you,” I answered. “He…” My head dropped into my hands as my heartbeat escalated, and I rubbed at my temples, like it would keep the images at bay so I could just tell Jagger what he needed to know. “Rizzo couldn’t get the bleeding stopped. Carter had been hit in an artery and his stomach, just beneath his Kevlar. You guys were less than two feet apart, and he…”
It was too much. My throat closed, nausea rolled through me, and my brain felt like it might explode if I didn’t keep pressing inward with my hands.
“It’s okay. I got it.” Jagger squeezed my shoulder.
I took deep breaths, picturing Ember’s face, her laugh, until the tightness in my chest faded and everything else became manageable.
“Thank you. I’ll never be able to say it enough, Josh. Thank you.” He squeezed my shoulder harder, and I leaned over, pulling my best friend to me in the hug I’d been terrified I’d never have again.
“Never say it again. You would have done the same. I’m just glad you’re alive.”
“Yeah, I would have come for your dumb, foolish, courageous ass.”
“I know.” We did the awkward back-pat thing, and I relaxed against the couch.
“So, I’m not really feeling Call of Duty,” he said, picking up his controller.
I pointed to my shoulder with my controller. “I think the Kinect golf game is out.”
He shrugged. “Lego Jurassic Park?”
Just like college, except we weren’t nursing morning-after hockey game bruises or chasing no-name girls out the door. We weren’t healed, weren’t close to any standard of what normal might look like from now on for either of us, but we’d both made it out alive. That was more than we could say for our friends.
“Legos.”