“That was a really great Just One Night,” Ramsey says, as we’re in his Jeep again, heading back towards Billy’s so that I can get my car.
“I was thinking of that earlier,” I tell him. “Our new song title, I mean.” I wouldn’t want to sound like I was thinking of him, of us. “We have to change it to Just One Night, and Just One Morning.”
“Did we break our pact?” He grimaces.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “We just found a loophole.”
He grins. I look out at the beautiful, scenic mountains, lit up by the morning sunrise.
I will remember this trip for a long time. This time with Ramsey. Sure, some of it was crazy— his night terror, his… eccentric… mother. But I’ve been able to relax and have fun more than I have in a long time. And I certainly can’t complain about the sex, either.
“Think we have enough time for me to stop by my hotel and change this uniform?” I ask Ramsey.
My sense of distance is usually pretty good, but since I’ve only been in Albuquerque for less than 24 hours, I’m still not sure how long it takes to get where.
“You should,” Ramsey says. “And that’ll be good, too, because then we won’t arrive at training at the same time.”
“Ha!” I laugh. “That’d really give them all something to talk about, other than my pink, sparkly plane.”
“How do you deal with all those comments?” Ramsey asks. “It must get difficult.”
I shrug.
“It’s to be expected,” I finally say. “And it just makes me tougher. No one should be in the Air Force if they can’t be tough. No matter their gender.”
Ramsey nods, as if seriously considering what I’ve said. I’m glad for that. One reason I don’t usually date military guys is that they don’t really understand either the similarities between us or the differences. But it seems that Ramsey understands both, or at least that he’s trying to.
He reaches over and touches my knee. A spark of electricity runs down my body to meet his hand, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to find out how well my body still responds to his touch, even though my mind knows that our time together has come to an end.
“We never got around to talking about what kind of music you like,” he says, which seems to be a complete change of subject, but really isn’t. “We have a few minutes for you to play Jeep DJ.”
I sense it’s his way of saying, we still have a few more minutes left in our Just For One Night and One Morning. Let’s make the best of it. But maybe that’s just what I hope he’s thinking.
“Jeep DJ, huh?” I say, laughing, in an attempt to keep the mood light.
“It’s a very coveted position,” he says. “Rarely bestowed on anyone but me.”
“Oh, you know,” I tell him, “I’m a child of the 80’s. A teenager of the 90’s. I love me some Guns N’ Roses, some Third Eye Blind.”
He nods, and smiles, in apparent approval. He turns on Guns N’ Roses’ “Patience,” which I notice he already had in his Spotify starred playlist.
“Good choice,” I tell him.
“I thought it’d be fitting.”
I smile, but I don’t say anything. I can’t take his comment as anything else but an admission that he will miss me. It’s amazing how music can be used to say what we can’t, or are afraid to.
“You know they say that the music you grow up with, as an adolescent, will always be the music you think of as the best,” he says.
“So that’s why my dad was always playing his hippie music. The 5th Dimension, and Bob Dylan. And whining about how ‘kids these days don’t know what good music is.’”
“Exactly,” Ramsey says. “And why we don’t get Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber.”
“Oh my god,” I say, covering my face in fake mortification. “Can you believe that that’s what this younger generation thinks good music is?”
“Now you sound just like your old man,” he says.
We laugh, but then Third Eye Blind’s “Motorcycle Drive- By” starts playing.
“Good choice,” I tell him.
“Hey now— you’re the DJ. You gave me the suggestions.”
“But this song, I mean. It’s not one of their well- known ones. So I’m surprised you…”
“Know it?” he guesses.
“Ha. Yeah.”
And suddenly I’m second- guessing everything. The song is sad, but in a different way than “Patience” is. Since I thought he had played “Patience” to tell me that he’ll miss me, then, applying the same logic, I would have to think that he’s playing “Motorcycle Drive- By” to tell me that we’re over. That we are never really going to be anything but what we just were.
Ramsey pulls up to my car— one of only a few in the parking lot, at this early hour— and says, “Well, it’s been fun.”
He leans over and kisses me, passionately, but pulls away more quickly than he usually does, which could be explained by the fact that we’re in kind of a rush.
“I sure would love to get another breakfast and blowjob, if you’re ever out this way again and I’m not, you know, in Afghanistan or something,” he says.
I laugh, but a part of me wants to cry. I won’t let him see it, though.
I’m just confused about how he can go from so romantic to so blasé. Like flipping a switch.
“You’re lucky we had such a short time together, because I really pulled out all the stops,” I say.
“Ha.”
I can’t decipher the look on his face.
I get out of his Jeep and say, “See you on base, stranger.”
“It was nice knowing you, stranger.”
My heart feels a little crushed as I trudge towards my car.
Well, that was that, I think.
Whatever that was.