“I’m not asking you to. Wait. Listen.”
The desperation in his voice tore at something bigger than her job, bigger than school, bigger than her life. But she stumbled through the kitchen, blinked through tears, and counted the steps to the front door, to her regularly scheduled life.
“Anna. Please.”
She had a hand on the door knob. Two strides out the door, then across the porch, down those steps, around the cute little curved sidewalk to her car on the driveway three paces away from where she’d seen her first live armadillo, and she’d be free.
Empty.
But free.
And alone.
She hadn’t had to think about alone for a while. That was a hole her fish couldn’t fill. She slowly swiveled back to face him.
A deep groove wrinkled between his eyes. His lips turned low as she’d ever seen them. He reached for her, then shoved both hands in his pockets and went up on the balls of his feet. “I’m not good at this, Anna Grace. I don’t know what it means, and I won’t pretend I have all the answers, but I love you.” The husky note in his voice, the longing, the uncertainty, it was all so un-Jacksonlike.
But it wasn’t something she could fix. “For how long?” she asked.
He blinked. “How long?”
“When does it expire? When do you get tired of me?” She didn’t mean to shriek, but once she got going, she couldn’t stop. “When does my label maker start giving you heartburn, and my calendar and my plans and mylifenot fit into yours anymore? What happens when you get orders? What if I get a job in Minnesota? Or California? Or—or—I don’t know, Iceland? What then?”
Radish whimpered and covered her nose with her paw.
Jackson stiffened. “I’m not him, Anna.”
“No, you’re not,” she agreed. “But you don’t believe in forever either.”
“I believe in you.”
He reached for her. She backed away and grabbed the door handle. “Please stop making this worse. I have to take care of myself. You can’t do it for me.”
He ducked his head. “More to life than work and school, Anna Grace.”
“I have friends and I have family. That’s enough.”
“Never pegged you for an ‘enough’ type of woman.”
Her tears threatened to spill over. It wasn’t enough.
Not by a long shot.
“You’re a good man,” she whispered, “but I can’t do thisanymore. I’m sorry.”
And she turned and fled the man she wished she’d met first.
In his elevenyears in the service, Jackson couldn’t think of another day he hadn’t been all there at work. He walked around the office, talked to his program managers, briefed the colonel, but he felt like his arms and legs and chest were empty tubes on strings being tugged by someone else.
The colonel suggested he take the afternoon off.
He wondered if Brad would be around to give him some payback. Instead, he texted Lance about lunch.
Should’ve specified he meantalone.
“Oh, sugar, you went and fell in the L-word, didn’t you?” Kaci clucked the minute the honeymooners arrived at the Mexican dive just off Gellings. Her eyes went wide, and she paused without leaving room for Lance to scoot into the booth after her. “You didn’t hurt my Anna, did you? Lance, kick his ass.”
Lance flashed a cocky grin that went too well with his flight suit. “Man’s kicking his own ass, Kace.”
