Tybee Island, Georgia June 2014
“Seven ball, corner pocket,” I called out, flipping my ball cap backward before leaning over the pool table and making my third shot in a row.
“Damn it, Phelan,” Rowell muttered, his head falling back as our friends howled with laughter, bottles lifting all around me. “You gotta run the table on me like that?”
“Hey, you were the one pushing me to play.” A smirk turned up the corner of my mouth as I surveyed the table in the corner we’d commandeered at our favorite beach bar on Tybee Island. There were three other tables nearby, a dance floor that always seemed to have sand on it, and a bar that opened to the ocean breeze, a lifesaver in the Georgia summer, even at ten p.m. “Three, side pocket.” I sank the shot as the beat changed in the obnoxiously loud speakers behind me, and from the resounding squeal, I could only guess that a group of women took the floor.
Couldn’t argue with the music choice, though. “Miss Jackson” wasn’t my favorite Panic! at the Disco song, but it was up there. The favorite? Now that was “Northern Downpour” . . . which was the last song I’d listened to before boarding flight 826.
Fuck, why had I just thought about that? Flashes of breathtaking brown eyes invaded my memory just like they had my dreams over the past two and a half years. Isabeau.
“There goes another twenty.” Rowell leaned back against the wall, clearly resigning himself to his wallet being a little lighter after this game.
“You going to show the man a little mercy?” Torres asked, running his hand over his dark, close-cropped hair as I scanned the table. After two years in the same platoon, and one of those spent in the sandbox, he was the closest thing I’d ever had to a best friend.
“Why the hell would I do that?” I lined up another shot. “Six ball, corner pocket.” And there went another one of Rowell’s twenties. “Wishing you’d bet a little less?” I asked Rowell over my shoulder.
“I thought you were a farm boy from Illinois.” He looked around the rest of our platoon who had come out tonight. “Did anyone else know he’s a pool shark?” Everyone shook their heads.
“He’s a real chatterbox.” Torres laughed and threw back another swig of his beer.
“Damn,” Fitz remarked, leaning his lanky frame sideways to see past me as I studied the table. I’d given it a little too much spin and left myself with a shit angle for the one ball. “Pretty sure an entire sorority just took to the floor.”
Almost every head in my platoon turned, but that didn’t surprise me. It was only us single guys out tonight. Most of the married men preferred to spend their last weekend before deployment with their families.
“That’s a bachelorette party,” Torres said, a slow smile spreading across his face as I moved to the other side of the table to line up the best shot I had. A group of women danced into view, a bunch of hot-pink tank tops surrounding one in white with a light-up veil.
Yeah, that was a bachelorette party, all right.
“You would have helped me out if you’d managed to clear a few of your balls out of the way, Rowell,” I said, bending low to concentrate.
Rowell grunted in reply.
I glanced up as the closest woman on the floor spun, her arms raised and blonde hair flying as she danced to the chorus.
It was only a glimpse, but my heart stuttered and my grip slipped, causing me to miss the shot completely. The cue ball went skittering across the green felt, and I startled.
“Guess your luck had to run out sometime.” Rowell laughed as I stood, scanning the dance floor with single-minded focus.
That wasn’t her. A different blonde had taken the edge of the floor. Or was it the same blonde? Had my head pulled the ultimate trick on me?
Was it the music? The way it made the memory surface again?
There was no way it was her.
But the surge of adrenaline in my veins screamed that it was. I threw my pool stick at whoever was closest and moved.
“Phelan!” Fitz called out, but I was already in the thick of the dance floor before I even thought of replying.
The strobe light kicked on as the song changed, and faces blurred all around me as I turned left, then right, then left again, searching the features of every woman in a pink tank top who danced near me in the momentary flashes of light. There were six . . . no, seven.
And none of them were her.
Shit. Was I losing it? I’d seen some shit on deployment, and it wasn’t like the plane crash hadn’t screwed my head in ways I tried not to linger on, but hallucinations? I wasn’t that screwed up, was I?
“You okay?” Torres asked, coming up on my left as I stood in the middle of the pulsing dance floor.
“I thought I saw someone.”
That woman was brunette. That one was redheaded. Blonde. Wrong smile. Not her eyes.
“Apparently. You took off like your ass was on fire.”
“Scared I’m going to clean you out now that it’s my turn?” Rowell asked from my right, but there was a concerned tilt to his brow despite his shit-giving tone.
Like it was an act of fate or some other equally fortuitous force, the crowd parted for a length of a heartbeat, but that was all I needed.
Standing at the bar was Isabeau fucking Astor. She tucked her hair behind an ear, giving me a full view of her profile, and my heart jumped into my throat.
“Better things to do,” I said to Rowell, barely sparing him a glance before walking through the crowd.
“Better than winning a hundred and sixty bucks?” he yelled over the music.
“I forfeit!” I shouted over my shoulder. “The money’s yours!”
The crowd converged again, all jumping in rhythm to the music as I eased my way through the dancers until I’d made it to the other side of the floor.
The bride had joined Izzy near the curve of the bar, and a riot of emotions assaulted me as I took the space across the corner, where I could
see her entire face. I opened my mouth once, then twice, but couldn’t think of what to say.
There was every chance in the world she wouldn’t remember me, not with the concussion she’d had. And as often as I’d wondered about her, dreamed about her, I’d never once let myself even imagine actually seeing her again, or what I would say if I did.
Izzy was thoroughly distracted in the opposite direction, trying to flag down the bartender, but the bride glanced my way, then hoisted her eyebrow when she noticed me staring at her friend.
Time to speak before the bride accused me of creeping, and this already had the potential for being awkward as hell.
“I must have dreamed of you a million times,” I said loudly enough to be heard over the music. Smooth, Nate. Real smooth.
Izzy rolled her eyes without even looking my way.
“She’s not interested.” The bride leaned into my line of sight, blocking Izzy, and shook her head. “Trust me, she just got out of a shitty relationship, and you aren’t interested either.”
“Trust me, she’s interested.” I grinned. Had to give it to loyal friends.
Izzy scoffed and turned her head away even more, purposefully ignoring me. She was just as beautiful—even more so—as I remembered, in a bar full of frat boys on summer vacation and soldiers preparing to deploy. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how many times she must have been hit on tonight.
“What could you possibly know about what interests her?” The bride glared with slightly glazed eyes. “We’re having a girls’ night. So just go back to whatever”—she gestured at the plain black T-shirt that stretched across my torso—“gym you crawled out of.”
“I like you,” I told the bride, then leaned farther onto the counter so I could see Izzy. “And I know she likes to read and hates to fly.”
Izzy stiffened and her gaze shifted, but she still didn’t look at me. “Random guess,” the bride huffed, crossing her arms.
“I know she’s allergic to shellfish and penicillin,” I continued. Izzy’s eyes widened as she slowly turned my direction. “And she keeps Tylenol and antibiotic ointment in her purse.”
Izzy’s gaze locked with mine, her gorgeous brown eyes flaring with recognition as her lips parted. She looked as shocked as I felt.
“Oh, and her blood type is O positive.” My smile somehow widened. “Am I forgetting anything?”
She sidestepped the bride, and my breath stalled as she came closer, until only a matter of inches separated us. “Nathaniel Phelan?”
“Hey, Isabeau Astor.”
She cried out and jumped at me, throwing her arms around my neck. I caught her easily, splaying my hands over her back and hugging her tight. Forget awkward. This felt like coming home.
The last time I’d felt this relieved, this whole, was the moment we’d made it to shore after the crash.
“I have your bag,” she said as she pulled back, studying my face like she was looking for the scar my ball cap hid.
“What?” I set her back on her feet and forced my hands to let her go.
“Your bag.” She flashed a smile, and my chest constricted around my heart. Shit, I hadn’t imagined that instantaneous connection I’d felt with her on the plane. It was all too real, shining brightly in my face. “The airline sent it to me because you’d been sitting in my seat.”
“No way.” My eyebrows hit the ceiling.
She nodded, her grin just as big as mine. “I have your hoodie and your iPod, which I can’t believe you actually put in a ziplock bag, but it worked. My mouth just about hit the floor when it powered on. I don’t have them with me, of course—they’re all at my apartment in DC—but I’m not really sure what box they’re in, since I haven’t even had time to unpack between graduation, moving, and now Margo’s bachelorette party,” she babbled, yelling to be heard over the music.
She still babbled, and there was nothing better in the entire world. “Holy shit, this is Plane Guy?” the bride—Margo—asked, staring at
me like she’d seen a ghost.
“Yes!” Izzy nodded. “Can you believe it? Nate, this is Margo. Margo, this is Nate.” She hooked her arm through Margo’s elbow. “She was with me when I got the backpack.”
“Hi, Margo.” I managed to rip my gaze from Izzy long enough to nod at the bride.
“Hi, Plane Guy!” She smacked a kiss on Izzy’s cheek. “If you need me, I’ll be out on the floor!” Arms up, she ran back out to the other bridesmaids.
Izzy and I stood there, the beat pounding all around us, and stared at each other.
“You want to grab a drink?” I asked, suddenly remembering that she’d been at the bar for a reason.
She nodded, and we both turned back to the bar, our arms brushing as I lifted my right hand to flag the bartender. Fuck, it was like I was sixteen again—that was how quickly that innocent touch went straight through me.
“You’re not drinking either?” she asked after I’d paid for our sodas.
“I’ve already had a couple.” I shrugged. There was no chance I was going to dull a single second of seeing her again. “Want to grab a table outside?”
“Absolutely.”
We made our way through the bar crowd and onto the beachfront patio, where we scored one of the two-seater high-tops at the edge.
Then we stared at each other again, this time in the relative quiet. “It’s nice out here,” she said.
“You look good,” I said simultaneously. We both smiled.
“Thanks, but it’s probably just the fact that I’m not bleeding out internally.” She shrugged playfully.
“You were looking a little pale there for a minute.” I flashed a smile and took a sip of my Coke.
“I don’t remember anything after getting to the edge of the river,” she said quietly, wiping the condensation from her glass.
“But . . .” My brow furrowed. “You swore your eternal love and devotion to me. You promised we’d have three kids and everything.” Shit, it was hard to keep a straight face.
She didn’t even try, her eyes dancing in the soft outdoor lighting. “Very funny.”
I took a deep breath, sorting through my memories of that day. This was all so incredibly surreal. “We got you to a tree so you could sit down,” I began, and then I told her everything I could remember.
“You saved my life,” she said when I got to the part about the ambulance.
“Nah. Technically that was the paramedics.”
“There you are!” Fitz called out, coming across the patio. “You disappeared.” He glanced at Izzy’s shirt. “With a member of the bridal
party, I see.”
“Izzy, this is Fitz.” I took a drink.
Izzy stuck her hand out, and Fitz shook it. “Hi, Fitz. I’m Isabeau Astor. I’m Nate’s wife.”
I slammed my hand over my mouth to keep from spitting Coke across the table.
“His wife?” Fitz raised his brows at me. “Do Justin and Julian know about this, seeing as they’re his best friends?”
Rowell and Torres definitely didn’t know I’d lied my way into an ambulance for a woman.
“According to my medical records,” Izzy said with a laugh that woke up every emotion in my body, even the ones I’d done my best to shut off when we’d deployed.
Somehow, I managed to swallow without making an ass out of myself. “I thought you said you didn’t remember anything.”
“My sister told me.” She leaned back in her seat.
“Your sister had to tell you that you were married?” Fitz asked, leaning his elbows on the table. “Please, do go on. Phelan over here tells us next to nothing about himself.”
“I lied to the paramedics so I could get into the ambulance with her,” I explained.
“After the crash,” Izzy finished. “We were sitting next to each other when the plane went down.”
Fitz’s head whipped in my direction. “You were in a fucking plane crash?”
I shrugged.
“How did you think he got . . .” Izzy leaned over the table, reaching for my hat, and I dipped my head so she could take it. She removed my hat with one hand and pushed the short strands of my hair up with the other, no doubt showing Fitz the scar he’d seen multiple times over the last two years. “That? I knew you’d have a scar!”
“Eleven stitches,” I told her.
“You got that scar in a plane crash?” Fitz’s voice cracked. “Yep,” Izzy said, putting my hat back before sitting down. “I thought we were friends!” He clutched his chest.
“We are,” I assured him.
“Friends tell friends when they’ve been in plane crashes,” he lectured.
“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.
“Dude!” Fitz exclaimed. “You guys missed Plane Crash Girl!”
“What?” Torres took one look at my face and then tracked my line of sight.
“That was Izzy.” I watched until she turned the corner.
“No shit?” Torres’s eyes flared wide. “I missed meeting the one and only Isabeau? I saw you out on the patio, but I didn’t want to interrupt if you were hitting on . . .” He shook his head. “That was seriously her?”
“Seriously her.” I nodded.
“What fucking plane crash?” Rowell asked, and we headed to the car.
I told them the story as I designated drove half their asses back to post while Fitz took the others.
It took me hours to get to sleep that night, and once I did, I dreamed about her. No plane. No river. No ambulances. Just her.
My phone rang the next morning as I finished my run, and I didn’t recognize the area code, but I answered, my chest heaving from the nine miles I’d just covered. “Hello?”
“Nate?”
The smile on my face was instantaneous. “Izzy?”
“Yeah.” She laughed nervously. “Look, you’re not leaving today, are you?”
“No.” I stared at the stack of boxes in my barracks room, already packed for storage. “Why? Everything okay?” Juggling the phone, I stripped off my shirt and threw it in the pile of the last load of laundry I’d do tonight.
“I didn’t get on the plane.”
