Page 43 of Come Back to Me

It’s the urge that makes me miss flying.

It’s the urge that makes me hate flying.

How can you love and hate something equally?

Easy.

You see the guy that’s practically a brother to you be incinerated at sixty thousand feet.

You almost perish in a crash four weeks later.

And all that eighteen months after watching your best friend die via a surface-to-air missile.

To fuck with me, Colt soars overhead in the family plane.

When he offered to let me handle the flights over the ranch, not just today but the whole schedule, I had to accept that I wasn’t ready.

But I also am.

I miss flying like a crackhead misses his next hit.

And yet, I dread it too.

Man, it’s fun to be fucked up.

Thankfully, Colt zooms off, leaving me the hell alone as I pull into the parking lot of the not-as-rundown-but-still-a-shithole lot. Habit has me watching it fly past.

In a letter, Tee once asked me about becoming a commercial pilot, but the bitch of it is, I can’t make myself get into the cockpit of our private fucking plane, so how the fuck am I supposed to take holidaymakers to Cabo?

The thought has me digging my thumbs into my eyes.

Getting annoyed about my current limitations will only cement them further into place.

If the months of agonizing cognitive behavioral therapy and physio taught me anything, it’s that my brain is my brawn.

Because the morning heat’s climbing, I push open my door even as I mutter under my breath, “I am strong and capable. I can deal with this. I will deal with this. This too shall pass.”

When the doctors figured out that there was nothing goddamn wrong with my arm, that it was some fucked-upphantom injury and that I was going through something called ‘conversion disorder,’ I’d managed to make shit worse by falling out of bed one night and shattering my knee, adding to the list of woes that kept me tied to a hospital bed.

Apparently, I’m a poster child for conversion disorder. A history of childhood abuse, depression, and does watching my brother-in-arms blow up count as a recent ‘stressful’ event? Yeah, I think it does.

My jaw works at the memory, even as I’m rolling through every mantra Dr. Beaulieu taught me and that my current shrink, a dude who prefers to be called ‘Mike,’ insists I repeat a gazillion times a day.

Finally, annoyed by the trigger and telling myself it’s dumb to be annoyed about being annoyed, I clamber out of my ride, shaking my head at the new logo that takes up half the side panel and all the front.

Never figured I’d be a lawman, and as I stroll over to the bar, the urge to be the responsible adult failing me as that childhood longing to be in the sky consumes?—

“You scared or something?”

The interruption, proffered with no aggression and in a gentle voice, has my brows lifting as I turn to find it.

The kid’s a teen, but her face, her expression, fuck.

I stare at her.

I can’t help it.

My gut gets tangled in a knot as I?—

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