“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.