Fly With Me (Wild Aces #1)(56)

My voice got tight.

“What’s up?”

Did he meet someone else? Was he tired of long distance? Was he just not into me anymore? What the ever-loving f*ck?

“I’m PCS-ing to Korea.”

That was one I hadn’t heard before.

“PCS-ing?” I squeaked the word out, my mind racing, everything off.

Noah cursed. “Moving. It’s my next assignment.”

I couldn’t.

“For how long?” My voice sounded like it was far away, like part of me was drowning.

“Two years.”

I was going to be sick.

“I don’t understand. You told me you weren’t going to move for another year.”

“I wasn’t supposed to. But they need guys to go to Korea and it’s not necessarily a popular assignment right now. Especially for guys with families. So they’ve started nonvolling guys, which basically means in my case, that because I’ve been in Oklahoma for two years, they’re able to move me to Korea even though I wasn’t in the cycle to move and I didn’t volunteer for the assignment.”

I couldn’t get my bearings, couldn’t even come up with anything to say in response. It all just sounded so bizarre. I mean, yeah, I’d accepted that he lived in a world that was unlike any I’d ever known, and one I’d probably never understand, but this was just so unexpected, so f*cked up. I couldn’t process it. It felt like he was delivering this news to someone else. I heard the words, but I couldn’t wrap my head around how they related to me.

“When?”

How much longer did I have with him?

He was silent for another beat, which I’d already figured out was his precursor for bad news.

“At the end of July.”

My stomach sank.

“That’s in three months.”

More silence.

Another thought occurred to me. “You’re going to Alaska for a month and a half.”

“Yeah.”

His voice sounded as bad as I felt.

“I—”

I struggled to calm down, to organize my thoughts, struggled to get my shit together.

“I don’t know what to do with this.”

“I know.”

Maybe it was a good thing for him. Maybe it was good for his career. I should have been happy for him. Shouldn’t have been as freaked out as I was. But we’d just said, I love you. We’d gotten to the point where this no longer felt like a casual fling, or a relationship in that awkward phase of where-do-we-stand, and instead felt like something. Something that was us trying to build a life together. And now he was leaving.

And it felt like my heart was breaking. And, oh God, I was going to start crying.

“Listen, I, uh, need to go, but I’ll call you later, okay?” I pushed the words out, my voice cracking, heart hammering.

“Jordan.”

God, this sucked. So freaking much. Why couldn’t I have fallen in love with a dentist? Someone with a nice, normal job. My mother was right. I was a romantic shitshow.

“Jordan,” he repeated.

“I can’t talk about this,” I whispered, the first tear trickling down my face. I didn’t want to put my own shit on him. Didn’t want him to hear me completely fall apart. And I was like a minute away from completely losing it.

“We need to talk about it.”

I wiped the tear off my cheek. “I’m not sure what there is to talk about.”

He sucked in a deep breath. “Us.”

“What us?”

He was silent again. When he finally did speak, his words brought more tears.

“I don’t want to lose you.”

God.

I closed my eyes, unable to stave off the onslaught of tears any longer.

“I don’t want to lose you, either.”

He groaned. “I can’t stand the thought of you crying.”

I sniffled, the sound nothing like the cute, birdlike sniffles you heard when girls cried on TV or in movies. I was an ugly crier in the extreme.

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to make this worse.” I wiped at my face again. “I just wasn’t prepared for this.”

“I know. I wasn’t, either.”

I closed my eyes. “Is this good for you? Professionally, I mean? Are you excited about it?”

I remembered that he’d been stationed in Korea before. Maybe this wasn’t as weird for him as it was for me. He was probably used to the moving and everything that came with it.

“A year ago, it would have been fine. Now . . .” He sighed. “I love you.”

That was the part that made it even worse. I could see myself being with him. Really being with him. If you stripped away the military stuff, I had no doubt that I would want to marry him. That he would be it for me. Even with the military stuff . . .

“I need to know what this means for us,” he continued, his voice thick with emotion.

“I—”

I didn’t know what it could mean for us. Long distance was hard, but doable, when we were a somewhat short plane ride away. But flying to Korea? Maybe we could do it a couple times, but nowhere near as often as we saw each other now, and even that didn’t feel like enough.

How did you make a relationship work if you never saw each other?