Eyes Turned Skyward

“Keeping tabs on all the flight school students, sir?” Josh asked with a grin.

He placed his hand on my shoulder. “Just the ones in my family. You need to know that you got through to her. She’s going ahead with the pacemaker; we’re just waiting for a date.”

“What? She did? Thank God.” Relief nearly took me to my knees, but a pit grew in my stomach. Paisley had been more than adamant. “What changed? How does she feel about the decision?”

“She’s quiet,” General Donovan answered. “Quiet is better than dead, right?”

I nodded but couldn’t say the same. What was wrong with me? I’d pushed her for this, so why did it feel like I’d lost something?

“Walker, take him home. Oh, and I didn’t tie your class rank to his. That threat was just to scare the crap out of you.”

“Well, it worked.” Thank you, Go— Yeah. I might have screwed my own rank, but I hadn’t tanked my friends’.

He laughed, which scared me more than the original threat. “Right. Well, two things. The first is that she’s in room 824 at Birmingham.”

I looked away. First he told me to stay the hell away from his daughter, and now I was basically being ordered to her bedside when she clearly didn’t want me there. “Second?”

He leaned forward, clearly changing into general mode. “I’ve known your father for years. I actually happen to think he’s an asshole. An influential asshole, but the same.”

“Sir—”

“All that goes to show you, Lieutenant Bateman, is that you’re not a measure of the people you come from or how you grew up, but who you’ve chosen to be.” His voice dropped. “Knowing Senator Mansfield, I can say you are your own man.” I flinched. “Fathers want the best for their children. I can tell you that it only took a phone call to get both Peyton and Will an appointment for West Point, but I also know that your father made no such phone call to get you into flight school. I checked, Jagger. You got here on your own, as a Bateman, not a Mansfield, and for what it’s worth, I would have kicked a Mansfield out over the polar bear, no matter how mildly amusing I found it.”

“Eat it.” Grayson shoved the plate of eggs at me.

“Yeah, that’s not going to happen.” I pushed them across the table and finished fixing my coffee, not that I was sure that would stay down, either. Fuck, my ribs hurt. The new tattoo was the size of my outstretched fingers and was about as comfortable as being rubbed continuously with sandpaper, but it was worth it. The pain wasn’t helping the nausea, though.

“You nailed the check ride yesterday, and everything else is out of your hands. There’s no reason to be nervous. It is what it is.”

“You’re not even a little nervous?”

He’d already consumed half his plate, which might have contained a full chicken coop’s worth of eggs. “Nope. My name is already somewhere on that list, and I can’t control what the people ahead of me are going to choose. If there’s no Apaches by the time my name is called, then I’ll deal.”

My stomach flipped again. “I’m not sure I can.”

He nailed me with a look that called me out as an idiot. “You need to make peace with your demons and decide what’s most important to you. Flying Apaches? Or being a pilot in general?”

My phone buzzed. Maybe it’s…nope. “Josh just got there. Inhale the rest of that like the good little vacuum you are and let’s go.” I stroked my thumb over Paisley’s picture on my contacts list, opened a new text message, and closed it out before typing anything. I’d be there in seven hours, in her face where she couldn’t ignore me.

He flipped me off but hoovered it while I stole the check and paid. He’d be pissed, but he’d get over it. He stayed silent as we drove toward the airfield. It felt like I was walking to my execution.

I couldn’t wrap my head around it or separate the two. I’d fallen in love with the Apache when I was a kid. It was the whole reason I wanted to fly. I wanted the power, the precision, the firepower. When I thought about flying, that was all I saw. Not that Blackhawks and Chinooks weren’t useful, but they just weren’t…mine. Where did this leave me?

I parked Lucy, and Josh met us at the door. “I thought you’d be here before dawn.”

“Ha-ha. Very funny.” We were actually close to the last ones there. There were two giant blackboards in the front of the room. One gave the makeup of the available aircraft for selection—six Apaches, three Chinooks, and fifteen Blackhawks. The other, completely blank for the OML. “Why the fuck can’t they just tell us?”

Josh laughed. “Just the first lesson that the army can fuck with you just for the fun of it.”

Grayson slid into his chair and stretched out like nothing was bothering him. “Relax.”

What did it say? Where was I? Twenty-three pilots and six Apaches, not that everyone wanted one. But I did.

But what if I didn’t get one?

Nausea rolled through me. Thank God I hadn’t eaten.

Was I here to be a pilot or to be an Apache pilot? The answer was easy to me—an Apache pilot, and I was about 99.9 percent certain I wasn’t getting one. So what did that mean? If they got to my name and all the Apaches were gone, would I say Blackhawk?

No. This dream had started with an Apache, the way the rotors looked against the sky from the cockpit. Anything less was failure, a half of a dream—a half life.