Fly With Me (Wild Aces #1)(60)
I winced.
“I kind of freaked out. It wasn’t exactly my finest moment.”
“Understandable.”
“I don’t think he understood. We’re sort of taking a break right now to figure out what we want.”
“He’s a guy and a fighter pilot. Sometimes it’s hard for them to see beyond the target,” Dani answered, her tone sympathetic.
“So you don’t think I’m crazy?”
“I’d think you were crazy if you weren’t a little scared. Marriage is a big step. Military marriage is a leap without a net to catch you. It’s all or nothing, and that’s a lot to ask. Especially when you guys haven’t known each other that long. I don’t blame you for being scared. We all are.” She made a face. “I’m still scared.”
It was strange to hear Dani confessing to being anything other than completely comfortable with this lifestyle. To the outside eye, she thrived here. I envied her ability to manage everything with the kind of aplomb I could never adopt. I needed some kind of military wives handbook, or at the very least, advice from a really good friend who’d run the gauntlet and come out the other end unscathed.
“So how do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Any of it. All of it. How do you stay sane?”
“The truth?”
I nodded.
“I don’t know. I just do. I’m scared every second of every day. Always. That fear is a knot that lives inside me. It never goes away. It never shuts off. It just is. When he’s gone, when’s he up in the air, it’s like I’m underwater holding my breath. The world around me ceases to exist. Everything hinges on the moment when I know he’s safe. And when he’s back, I can breathe again.”
“Do you ever . . .”
“Wish I’d fallen in love with someone else? An accountant? Someone who doesn’t take his life into his hands every single time he goes to work?”
I nodded, a lump settling in the pit of my stomach.
“Yeah. I do. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a part of me that thinks this would be so much easier if I didn’t love him so much. If I loved him a little less, maybe the absences and the constant fear that I’m going to lose him wouldn’t hurt so much. But then again, if I loved him any less, I’m not sure I could do this. Not sure the life would be worth it. I love him just the right amount to make it hurt so much that I can’t walk away.”
“I’m scared.” I whispered the words I hadn’t been able to tell Noah, the feeling inside me that I was afraid to give a voice to.
She squeezed my hand. “I know. I wish I could tell you that it’s going to be easy, or that you have nothing to fear. Wish I could tell you that this life won’t take a chunk out of you; but as hard as it is to be in a relationship, it’ll be that much harder to be in a military relationship. I know it sounds tough to believe, and it isn’t easy to comprehend until you’re in it, but in a lot of ways this is the most difficult thing you’ll ever do. Still, there are two kinds of military wives. The ones who lean on their men, and the ones who are strong enough to give their men somewhere to lean when they come home after a six-month deployment that has beaten them down or a week of working twelve-hour days.
“If you love him, really love him, and you can’t be the second kind of wife, then you really need to think about whether or not you guys can make this work. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, or that you won’t have days when you’ll just sit and cry for a few minutes, but you’ll have to be strong for him. Stronger than you think you can be. Because at the end of the day, his mind can’t be on a fight you had that morning or on whatever problems you might be dealing with at home. It has to be on the mission. On coming home safely. Because in their line of work, the smallest mistake can be the difference between life and death.”
“I’ll always be second to the Air Force.”
She nodded. “Some wives resent that. It’s a hard pill to swallow, and believe me, I’ve struggled with it. But if you find a good man, one who loves you—and Noah loves you—he’ll put you first every time he can. And the other times when he can’t, when he doesn’t have a choice, those moments when he does choose, when he chooses you, will have to be enough to get you through the times when you feel like your entire life revolves around something you didn’t sign up for, when you start to lose parts of yourself and the only thing you have to hold on to is him.
“It’s corny, but true—military marriages make a good marriage stronger and a bad marriage worse.”
“How do you know? How do you know if your marriage is going to be one of the ones that makes it?”
I was so over my head. I’d always had a messy approach to dating. Romantic guru, I was not. I’d screwed up my fair share of relationships, but this one—the stakes were so much higher this time. I didn’t want to hurt him. And I really didn’t want to get hurt. And I had no clue what the f*ck I was doing.
“When I decided I wanted to marry Joker, I thought about the life we’d lead together. I tried to envision what military life would be like, but to be honest, I had no clue. No one does. Being a military wife is a lot like getting thrown into the deep end to learn how to swim. You just have to deal with things as they come and adapt. But I did make myself a promise.