“Torres knows.” I shrugged again.
“Okay, now that just hurts.” He got all melodramatic, staggering like I’d wounded him. “You told Torres, but not the rest of us?”
“Maybe I was saving the story.”
“For what? This deployment instead of the last one?”
“This deployment?” Izzy asked, and the worry in her eyes made my chest clench. No one worried about me except my mom.
The mood immediately changed.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “We’re leaving soon.”
“When?” Two little lines appeared between her brows.
“Really soon.” The day after tomorrow, but that wasn’t public knowledge.
Fitz cleared his throat. “Well, I’m going to head back inside so I can watch Rowell beat the shit out of Torres on the table. It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Phelan.”
“Technically, he’s Mr. Astor,” she corrected him with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.
“Not surprised. My man’s a good guy. Always been a true feminist.” Fitz clapped me on the shoulder and headed inside.
For a moment, the sound of crashing waves overtook the music from inside the bar.
“Can you tell me where you’re going?” she asked.
“Afghanistan.” It had been all over the news, so it wasn’t like I was violating OPSEC over here.
Her face fell. “And you’ve already been there once?”
I nodded. “We got back a little under a year ago, but I joined the unit a little late, and left a little early, so I wasn’t there the full time.” An IED had ended that deployment a month early for me, but at least I was alive.
“And you’re already going back?” Her eyes flared. “How is that fair?”
“Fair isn’t a word that really plays into military life.” I shifted my weight.
“That’s what you’re doing here, huh?” She gestured to the bar. “Letting loose before you leave?”
“Yeah. We’re stationed at Hunter. It’s about a half hour from here.” I took the obvious opening for a subject change. “And you live in DC, but you’re here for a bachelorette party?”
“I just moved to DC for law school.”
I did the math, and it didn’t add up. “Shouldn’t you be a senior this upcoming year?”
“I graduated a year early.” She shrugged like it was no big deal, but then she looked away, concentrating a second too long on her soda, and I knew it was, and not in a good way. “Anyway, Margo is from Savannah, and she wanted her bachelorette party to be close for her sisters, since the wedding is in Syracuse next month. We fly out tomorrow morning.”
“And we just happen to be in the same place at the same time for all of twelve hours.” I couldn’t stop looking at her, taking care to memorize every detail of her beautiful face. There were subtle changes here and there, the result of two and a half years passing, but she looked exactly like I remembered her. “Talk about coincidence.”
“Serendipity,” she said with a smile that went straight to my dick. Any other place, any other time, I would have asked her out.
But she lived over five hundred miles away, and I was deploying.
“I didn’t want to leave you.” The words slipped out.
Her eyes widened.
“At the hospital,” I clarified. “I wanted to stay until you were awake, to know you’d made it out okay. But the recruiters showed up for me.”
“Serena told me.” She sighed. “I couldn’t remember your name. Everything was a little fuzzy thanks to the concussion. I made out Nathaniel on my hospital records—your handwriting is something else, by the way—and then your bag showed up, and under this little flap, N. Phelan was written. The airline wouldn’t give out contact information, and you . . . you don’t exist online. No social media. Nothing. I looked.”
“Not a fan of random people watching a highlight reel of my life.” She’d looked for me. Me. A guy whose parents didn’t even bother to show up for my graduation from basic or ranger school, not that I blamed Mom for that.
“Did you at least get a phone?” She arched a single brow.
I shifted to the side and pulled my phone from my back pocket, sliding it across the table as proof.
She caught it and grinned, hitting the home button. It lit up her smile, and she tapped at it. “There we go.” She handed it back. “I texted myself—that way I can at least get your address to return your stuff. And can we talk about your taste in music?”
“Keep the stuff. You have a problem with Panic! at the Disco?” I asked, sliding the phone back into my pocket.
“No, actually. That’s one band you turned me on to, but Radiohead? Pearl Jam? Did you ever leave the nineties?” she teased.
“Hey, half the music on that iPod’s from this century. I think?” My brow furrowed. “Shit, I can’t remember.”
“I do. I can name every single song.” She sipped her drink.
“Can you, now?” Damn, it felt good to smile, and not one of those fake ones, but to really, honestly smile. This was the only thing I’d forgotten about her: how effortless it had been to talk to her in those minutes we’d been delayed on the tarmac.
She put her first finger up. “Panic! at the Disco, ‘Northern Downpour.’” She put up a second finger. “Radiohead, ‘Creep,’” she started, then shocked the shit out of me by naming every single song.
“And out of all those, what was your favorite?” I asked.
“‘Northern Downpour.’” She smiled. “I remember you doing that too. Asking me questions to distract me.”
“Maybe I was just trying to get to know you better.”
“Fine. Then it goes both ways. Which out of those is your favorite?”
“Same, ironically. ‘Northern Downpour.’”
We spent the next few hours out there, talking about music and books. She filled me in on how college had gone for her, and I told her about the classes I’d managed to take during the year we hadn’t been in the sandbox.
I deflected every single question about the deployment, not because she didn’t deserve reciprocity as she shared the details of her life, but because I didn’t want that shitty year to claim so much as a second of the time I had with her.
The hours passed with the ease of breathing, and when everyone was ready to leave—everyone except us—we somehow managed to say goodbye.
I hugged her close, the girl I’d survived the impossible with, the girl I would have given my right arm to actually have a shot with. “Fly safe tomorrow, okay? I won’t be there to haul you out through the emergency exit.”
“I’ll try my best.” She sighed and hugged me back, fitting against me with the kind of perfection that didn’t exist in my world. “Don’t die over there.”
“I’ll try my best.” I rested my chin on the top of her head and closed my eyes, breathing in the scent of salt air, lemons, and a perfume I couldn’t place but would never forget.
It felt like she’d taken back the missing piece I’d found when I saw her tonight as she walked away with her girlfriends, headed toward the vacation rental she’d told me about earlier.
She was nearly out of sight when Torres and Rowell finally walked out of the bar after paying their tabs.