What a fucking day. It was well past midnight before I finally made it home to Badd’s. I’d had to stop to refuel and to eat. I hadn’t been hungry, but I knew I couldn’t fly on an empty stomach, so I forced myself to eat a burger and some fries at a diner near whichever local podunk airport I’d stopped at. I wasn’t even sure where I’d stopped—I’d been functioning on autopilot, going through the motions.

All I knew was pain.

I’d told her I loved her…

And she’d let me walk away.

That was all I could fathom. All I could think about, all the way to Ketchikan.

I stumbled into the bar, haggard, exhausted, and feeling like I’d been beaten up. I made my way to the service bar, where Zane was mixing drinks for Lucian. They both took one look at me and swore, almost in unison.

“What the fuck happened to you?” Zane asked.

“She dumped me.”

Zane’s eyes went wide. “She…what?”

“She fucking dumped me. Said she couldn’t do it. She didn’t deserve me.” I shook my head. “I don’t wanna talk about it. Just…give me a bottle of something.”

“What’s your poison?”

I shrugged. “Don’t fucking care. Something that’ll burn this shit out of me.”

“Burn what out of you?” Lucian asked, his voice quiet, his eyes seeing far too much.

I stared him down, unwilling to let him see how badly I was hurting. “Everything.”

Zane returned with a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label and a tumbler. I took the bottle, ignored the tumbler, and lurched upstairs. Sinking into the couch, I flicked on the TV, tuned it to something with boobs and explosions on HBO, and set about drinking myself into a stupor.

I was more than halfway through the bottle when Sebastian, Zane, and Lucian showed up. Zane plopped onto the couch on one side of me, Bast on the other, and Lucian sat on the coffee table facing me.

“Why the fuck did she break up with you?” Bast asked.

I peered at him. “Because she’s stupid.”

“Brock, come on,” Zane said. “This isn’t you.”

“Yes it is.” I slugged off the bottle, taking three long swallows.

“You’re the smart one, the stable one. You’re not the drink yourself out of your problems brother.” Bast took the bottle from me, took a swallow, and passed it to Zane, who took a drink and passed it to Lucian, who took two swallows and handed it back to me.

At which point it was mostly empty, so I knocked the rest out with four long pulls. “You don’t know shit about me.”

Lucian took the empty bottle from me and set it aside. “Explain that statement.”

I was fucking hammered, now. I rarely drank more than a few beers or a glass of wine or whisky now and then, and never like this, not after…fuck, I couldn’t even think her name.

Yet when I opened my mouth, words just sort of fell out. “I was engaged, you know. Before I came back.”

All three stared at me.

“You fuckin’ what?” Bast demanded. “Say that again.”

I swiveled my head sloppily around to stare at him, nose to nose. “I…was…en-gaged. Like, gonna marry someone.”

“And you never told any of us?” Zane snapped.

“Who was she?” Lucian asked.

I shook my head. “Need more whisky for that question.”

“You’ve had enough, I think,” Zane said.

“Fuck you, Zane,” I snarled. “You don’t decide when I’ve had enough.”

Lucian met Zane’s stunned gaze; I never snapped, never snarled, rarely even got irritated. This was a side of me no one had ever seen. Whisky-wasted and heartbroken Brock was a monster.

Bast stood up, went into the kitchen, and got a bottle of Blanton’s from the cabinet over the fridge. He uncorked it and set the fancy cork on the counter, probably so I wouldn’t break it. I took a slug of the bourbon, and then another, and finally handed it back to him.

I heard a door open, and Dru shuffled out of their room, wearing a white button down of Bast’s, blinking sleepily at us. “Whass goin’ on?” she slurred, still half-asleep.

“Brother time,” Bast said. “Sorry if we woke you.”

She smiled at him, one eye closed, the other squinting. “I woke up to pee and you weren’t there.” She squinted at me. “Brock? Hi, honey. You okay?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

She shuffled to me and pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “I’m sorry.”

“Women are stupid,” I mumbled. “You excluded.”

“No, I can be stupid too, and so can men.” She turned and shuffled back to the bedroom. “I expect you to be on that couch in the morning, Brock. I want to make you pancakes and give you my stupid woman’s opinion on another stupid woman.”

“’Kay.” I waited until the door was closed and then eyed Bast. “She’s pretty amazing, bro. You got lucky.”

“I married way up, man. I’m a lucky fuckin’ bastard, and I got no intention of ever letting her go.” He slapped my shoulder. “Now. As the ladies say, dish.”

“Dish?” I couldn’t remember what that meant.

Lucian took a pull off the bourbon, and then fixed a look on me. “Talk. Who were you engaged to and what happened?”

I took the bottle from him and drank until my throat burned. “We trained with the same aerobatics instructor. She was better than me. Better reflexes, a more instinctive feel for things. Just…better than me in every way. Yet she looked at me like I’d…like I’d hung the moon and stars. It was…seeing her look at me that way was like a drug. I couldn’t get enough.” Another long drink, because this was the second time I’d spoken of this in one day, and that was more than I’d talked about it in a long time. “I wasn’t keeping it from you out of, like, spite, I just…I wanted it to be mine for a while. You know?”

Bast nodded. “I gotcha, bro.”

Zane nodded too. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“She crashed,” I said. “I watched her crash. I pulled her charred corpse from the wreckage with my bare hands.”

“Jesus, dude,” Zane said. “Having been around burned bodies, I know exactly how horrible that is.”

“Her name was Beth.”

Zane lifted the bottle in salute. “To Beth,” he said, and then drank.

Bast and Lucian did the same in turn, and I followed suit, although I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

“So what are you going to do about Claire?” Lucian asked.

I shook my head and shrugged. “Hell if I know. There’s nothing I can do. She said she just…can’t do it. Can’t be with me. That she’s too messed-up.”

“She has been through a hell of a lot,” Zane said.

“I know, but why can’t she figure it out while being with me? I could help.”

Lucian cleared his throat, and we all looked at him. “Sometimes, being alone to figure yourself out is the best thing for everyone.”

“Doesn’t feel that way,” I grumbled.

“Of course not,” Bast said. “I’m sure that shit hurts.”

“I told her I loved her,” I admitted.

“Damn.” Zane clapped a hand on my shoulder. “And she still dumped you?”

“Yep.” I closed my eyes and sighed. “What really sucks is that I can’t even wish none of it ever happened, because it was amazing.”

“I wouldn’t give up yet, Brock,” Lucian said.

“What if she never figures herself out? What if I…what if she—” I groaned instead of finishing my thought. “Fucking sucks. It just sucks.”

My brothers were around me, keeping me from floating away on a river of whisky. I let myself drift, and eventually I felt hands lower me to a reclined position, and then pull my feet up on the couch. A blanket covered me.

“You’re good brothers,” I mumbled.

A deep laugh. “Shut up and go sleep, you drunk dickhead,” Zane said, laughing.

“You’re…dick.” I couldn’t manage anything else, and then I passed out.

* * *

I woke up to the smell of frying bacon, brewing coffee, and pancakes on a griddle. I cracked an eyelid, and caught an eyeful. Bast had Dru pressed up against the counter’s edge, facing away from him, his arm around her waist—and judging by the way the muscles in his arms were moving, he was fingering her. She had her hands braced on the counter, her head thrown back. He was in a pair of gym shorts and nothing else, his tats bathed in the morning light filtering in from the window over the kitchen sink.

I cleared my throat so they’d know I was awake; the sound of my own voice made my head throb.

Bast pulled away from Dru and put his back to the counter while Dru rearranged her clothing and emerged from behind him.

“Hi, Brock.” Her voice was far too bright for this early in the morning.

“Ung,” I grunted.

Bast rumbled a laugh. “Hungover, huh?”

I managed to pull myself to a sitting position, and immediately regretted it. The world swam, and my head throbbed, and my mouth was full of cotton balls, and I wanted to die. “Shoot me.”

He just laughed. “Nah. We like you too much. How about we feed you instead?”

I stood up and shuffled into the bathroom for an epic piss, the kind that lasted for a solid minute and required a hand braced on the wall. When I emerged, there was a plate of pancakes and bacon on the table with a mug of steaming coffee. My head throbbed, but my stomach told me to eat. So I sat, and tried a piece of bacon.

“Crispy, almost burnt,” I said. “Perfect.”

Dru laughed. “I had to learn how you Badd brothers like your bacon. I grew up eating it floppy. Meaty, as my dad calls it.”

I shuddered. “That’s not bacon, then, that’s just a sin.”

“Amen to that,” Bast said. “Bacon should be just this side of black, and so crumbly it just dissolves in your mouth.”

“Damn straight.” I tried the pancakes, and discovered that those were damn near perfect too. “Jesus, Dru. You do breakfast like a pro. Thanks.”

She plated pancakes and bacon and put it at the place next to me, and then shoved her husband into the chair, pausing to kiss his temple. “My dad is a cop. Breakfast was often the only time I got to see him, so I learned to make breakfast count.”

“I like your dad,” I said. “He seems cool.”

She smiled at me. “I like him too. He’s actually considering taking his retirement and moving up here.”

“That’d be cool,” Bast said. “He have any desire to work in a bar?”

She laughed. “You know, he just might. Hell, he’s spent enough time in bars that he should know the ropes already.”

A few moments later, she had her own plate of food and mug of coffee, and now it was the three of us chowing down in companionable silence. The food was exactly what I needed, reducing the severity of my hangover by several degrees. When we were all done eating, Bast cleared the dishes, poured more coffee, and set another pot to brewing.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I filled Dru in,” Bast said to me.

I shrugged. “None of it is a secret.”

“I’m so sorry about your fiancé,” Dru said, sympathy in her voice.

I nodded. “Thanks. It was…the hardest thing I’ve ever been through.” I glanced at Bast. “How I was last night? That’s how I was pretty much constantly for a good three months.”

He shot me a look of shock. “You flew like that?”

I shook my head gingerly. “Hell no. I grounded myself after Beth died. Couldn’t stomach the thought of getting back into a cockpit again.”

“How’d you get yourself clear of it? Obviously you’re flying again.” Bast sipped coffee, tapping the table with a thumb and forefinger.

“A buddy literally dragged me out of my trailer and into his, forced me to dry out, and then took me to a therapist. I resented it at first and was an asshole about it since I was in booze withdrawal, but I went back the next week, and the next.”

“So a few months back when I was being a dick and said you’d probably been to a shrink, and you said yes, you actually had…” Bast prompted.

“That was why. I saw Dr. Patel every week for two months. Three months of drinking myself to blackout every single day, two months of sobriety and therapy, and another month of working around aircraft and pilots…it was a full six months before I could even sit in the cockpit again.

“When I finally went up, it was in a trainer plane with a double set of controls and my buddy was in the plane with me, and good thing because I had a legit panic attack. I kept seeing Beth’s plane go down. Her wing catching mine, toppling and spinning, hitting the ground, and going up in flames. Her body, all—fuck.” I squeezed my eyes shut against the memory, felt both Bast’s and Dru’s hands on my shoulders. “Took me another three months of easing into it before I could fly on my own again. In a weird, freak turn of events, my first performance after her death was on the one-year anniversary of her death.”

“Goddamn, man. That’s fuckin’ rough.” Bast’s hand squeezed my shoulder. “Why the fuck didn’t you call us in? We’re your fuckin’ brothers, dude, we shoulda been there for you.”

I shook my head. “Couldn’t. At first, I was too ashamed of how clobbered I was getting every single day, and I didn’t want you guys to see me like that. Then it was because I wanted more time to heal before I told you. And then…too much time had passed for me to be like, yo, guys, guess what?” I got up and poured us all more coffee, and then resumed my seat. “After that, I just didn’t want to bring it up, couldn’t handle the thought of talking about it.”

“I guess I don’t blame you,” Bast said. “Wish you’d have told us though.”

Just then Zane pounded up the stairs, drywall repair equipment in hand. “I’ve come up to re-mud those holes our dear idiot brother Bax pounded into the walls a couple weeks ago. They need to be mudded properly before I paint everything.” He left the door at the top of the stairs open, and I knew he was listening.

Dru was eyeing me thoughtfully. “I have a question, which may or may not be out of line.”

I sipped coffee, holding up a hand to forestall her. “I’m not an alcoholic. I chose to drink that way because I didn’t know how to deal with Beth dying, and with the guilt I felt even though it wasn’t my fault. It was too much pain and I couldn’t handle it, so I drank myself stupid. I didn’t touch alcohol again after Eddy pulled me out of my trailer, not for—god, how long? Eighteen months? A long time. And when I did, it was with Eddy so he could kick my ass if need be.

“I was scared of that same thing, that I’d be an alcoholic. But I’m not. I know my limits. I usually don’t like drinking more than a few at a time. Being hammered to excess, like last night, it reminds me of that period of time, and I hate that side of myself. I’m a nasty drunk. I like a drink now and again, and I can stop myself whenever I want. Last night was a choice. I guess when extreme pain hits, it’s the only way I know how to escape it.”

“Well, thanks for answering my question and being so honest about it,” Dru said. “Now I’m going to have a shower and get cleaned up. I’ll see you guys later.”

“You lived in a trailer?” Bast asked.

I nodded. “When I wasn’t flying from show to show, I had an Airstream I lived in, hooked up to an old Power Ram. I’d just bum around between shows. I’ve driven all over this country, and what I haven’t driven through, I’ve flown over—especially in the Pacific Northwest.”

“You still have the trailer?”

I nodded again. “It’s in storage, along with my aerobatics plane.” I traced the rim of the mug with an index finger. “It’s down in Juneau. I’ve thought about bringing that stuff up here, using the airport here, spend some time doing the old tricks, and the trailer would come in handy for weekend getaways or something.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Bast said.

“Maybe you and I and Bax can drive down, leave Zane and the others here to run the bar. You and Bax drive back, and I’ll fly my Staudacher up.”

“Sounds good.”

Zane popped up at the top of the stairs, drywall mud smeared on his forehead, working on the hole Bax had made near the door frame. “So…you and Claire are really done, huh?”

“Seems like it.”

“Why, do you think?” he asked.

I studied the bartop. “She’s scared. Messed-up. All that shit with her dad not being her dad, everything she’s been through, she just…can’t handle being with me right now, she said.”

“Ah. The old ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ bullshit, huh?” Zane said.

I nodded. “Pretty much. I’m not sure it’s completely bullshit, though. It sucks, but I get the feeling she was telling the truth. But she’s also just scared of being in love.”

Zane glanced at me, dipping the scraper into the mud. “That’s really what it is for you, huh? For real?”

I shrugged. “Yeah.”

“And for her?”

“She won’t admit it, but I think so, yes.”

Zane kept his gaze on the drywall he was mudding, but spoke to me. “Well, it may suck, but you just have to wait for her. Either she’ll figure her shit out, or she won’t. And if she doesn’t, then you’ll just have put on your big boy undies and get over her. It’ll hurt, and it’ll take time, but it’ll all work out.”

I gaped at him. “Okay, then, Dr. Phil.”

Zane laughed. “What? I have a little bit of wisdom stored away, okay?”

“From your extensive experience in long-term relationships?” Bast said, laughing.

Zane lifted the scraper. “You know I can bury this in your chest from here, right?”

Bast held up his hands. “Just sayin’, man. You’re an ex-Navy SEAL, not a love expert.”

Zane’s gaze darkened. “Tell another soul and I swear I’ll bury you two fuckers, but…when I was bored, which was a lot, I’d read romance novels on a Kindle. You can only read so much Patterson and Grisham and Clancy, you know? I bought some steamy romance shit by accident, thinking it was something different, and I figured what the hell, I’d paid for it, might as well try it. And to my surprise, I enjoyed it. And that shit is actually fun to read, and pretty informative.”

Bast and I stifled laughter. “Fuck you, dude. You’re pulling our chains,” Bast said, past coughs of restrained laughter.

Zane kept mudding, and then he was done, and joined us at the breakfast bar, stealing my coffee, which was now cold. “No, it’s true. Don’t believe me, I’ll show you my Kindle.”

“Hard to believe you even own a Kindle,” I said, “much less that you’d read romance.”

“Hey, that shit gets downright erotic, okay?” He twisted the mug in circles. “When you’re alone with a bunch of dudes in the ass-end of Kandahar waiting out a bunch of asshole guerrillas, you want something to take your mind off the boredom. My Kindle fit nicely in my gear bag and I could load it with hundreds of books, and then easily stow it when it was go-time. Whenever I was somewhere with decent Wi-Fi, I’d buy dozens of books at a time so I had them ready when I wanted to read. It’s like having your own library in a piece of plastic barely bigger than my own hand.”

I conceded with a laugh and raised both hands. “Okay, okay. I just would never have guessed.”

“Well, no shit. That was the whole point. Not even the guys in my squad knew about that.” He chuckled. “They’d never have let me live it down, had they found out.”

I let out a breath, slowly. “So, I just wait, huh?”

Zane clapped me on the back. “You went after her. You said your piece, so she knows how you feel. The rest is up to her.”

“Fucking sucks.” I sighed.

“Fucking sucks,” both Bast and Zane agreed in unison.

Dru came down, then, dressed, hair twisted up in a damp knot, a mug of coffee in hand. She waved her hand at her husband and Zane. “Shoo, boys. I want to talk to Brock.”

I thunked my head on the counter. “Oh, yay. More talking about shit.”

Dru laughed. “I’ll do most of the talking, don’t you worry. I’ve also invited Mara over for extra moral support.”

“Yippee. Is it too early to get drunk again?” I asked. Dru didn’t laugh, though, instead she eyed me suspiciously. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I have no desire to drink right now. Except maybe more coffee.”

Zane and Bast left to go down to the bar, leaving me alone with Dru, who made us a fresh carafe of coffee, which she used to fill my mug, and then Mara breezed in, belly bump first.

“Damn you both for having coffee when I can’t,” she said, awkwardly climbing into a high-top chair, sipping from a giant Tervis full of ice water with half a dozen lemon slices floating in it. “I’m allowed a single eight-ounce cup of coffee a day, and lemme just say, that is nowhere near enough.”

“I can’t imagine not being allowed to have coffee,” I said. “Would it help if I didn’t have it around you?”

Mara laughed. “It’s coffee, Brock. I’m not a recovering alcoholic, here.” She leaned over and inhaled. “Just let me sniff it a few times.”

I laughed as she inhaled the scent of my coffee, and then went back to sipping from her pink-and-leopard-print Tervis via a foot-long pink straw.

“That there is a whole hell of a lot of water, Mara,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t even get me started. I’ve already had one of these, and I’ve peed roughly fifteen times so far. I’ll probably have to pee another fifteen times just while we’re talking.”

I sipped coffee, and then kicked my feet up against the front of the breakfast bar, tipping back in my chair. “This feels like an intervention.”

Dru chortled. “It kind of does, doesn’t it?” She patted my hand, and adopted a soft, simpering, lisp. “Now Brock, I want you to know we’re all here because we love you. There’s no judgment here. This is a judgment-free zone, so you can say whatever you need to, all right?”

I went with it. “Hi, my name is Brock, and I’m a Claire-aholic. It’s been—” I glanced at my watch, “sixteen hours since the last time I saw her.”

Mara fiddled with her straw. “What happened, Brock? All I know is that Dru texted me saying you and Claire had broken up.”

“She freaked and bolted on me.” I rocked back and forth in the chair, feeling off-kilter and uneasy and trying to contain the pain. “You guys saw how she was the other night, wasted and being impossible. I thought it would pass, I thought she’d—I thought we’d wake up and talk it through. But when I got up, she was gone. Her stuff was gone. I flew to Seattle, but she wasn’t there. That’s when I called you. I flew to Michigan and found her at her mom’s place. I was so pissed, you know? Like, what the fuck? She told me she couldn’t do this anymore, couldn’t do us. Nothing I said was getting through. She was just…I don’t know. Already gone, in a way. I even told her I loved her.”

“Damn.” Mara poked at the lemon slices with her straw. “Not how I saw this going.”

I laughed bitterly. “Yeah, me neither.”

“So she was just like, this is done, it’s over?”

I tilted my head from side to side. “Sort of. She kept saying she was sorry and that she didn’t want to do this, but that she had to. I got the sense that she wasn’t trying to close me out completely, like end us forever, just that she needed to…” I shrugged. “Figure herself out, I guess.”

Mara ruffled her long, loose hair with one hand. “We all know she’s been through a shitload, especially recently. But I can tell you she was never even sure she wanted a real relationship, but you guys just seemed to work, almost like it was…I don’t know, inevitable, sort of. I don’t think she even really thought of it as a relationship, as such. And then it became obvious that that’s what it was, and she couldn’t deny it, so it freaked her out.”

“If she feels too fucked-up to be able to even know where to start,” Dru said, “it would make sense that she felt like she had to put you guys on pause, more or less. Maybe try to think of it as a break rather than a breakup?”

Mara said, “I think that’s right, though. Give her some time and space.”

I nodded. “That’s what everyone is saying, and it makes sense. I understand it, but I don’t like it.”

Dru patted me on the back. “I wouldn’t expect you to like it. But it might be a good thing. Once she has some time to chew on things a bit, maybe she’ll be in a better place to be able to think about you guys, and you can keep going with your relationship and it’ll be even better than it was before.”

I sighed again. “Well, I think that’s all I can really hope for, right now, I guess.”

It fucking sucked, but it was what it was.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket, opened up the thread with Claire, and typed out a message.

I haven’t given up on you, or on us. I need you to know that. Take time and space, if that’s what you need. I’ll be waiting on the other side for you. I don’t expect you to even reply, just maybe let me know you’re still alive every once in awhile, ok? Just know that I love you. I also don’t expect you to feel the same way or say it back or anything. Just know it’s true.

The message switched to “read” after a few minutes. The gray bubble with the three dots popped up, the dots rippled a few times, and then the bubble vanished. This happened twice more, as if she was trying to figure out what to say, but couldn’t. Eventually, a reply popped up from her.

It was a single letter:

k