Page 127 of Boiling Point
I shot him a sideways glance. “I’ll remind you of that when I’m ready for wingovers and negative G maneuvers.”
“Before you do that…” He inhaled sharply. “Keep in mind that I’m putting my life completely in your hands.”
I laughed, but his eyes were fixed on me. I went to answer him—to fire back some clever retort, but he got there first.
“But that’s rather the point, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“That I trust you completely with my life in your hands. Which is as it should be if”—he snapped open a black box—“I’m going to ask you to trust yours in mine.”
The diamond glinted in the intense summer sun. My throat went dry as sandpaper. I had no words.
“I know we’ve talked about this, but the last time I proposed, it was all a bit spur of the moment. So, I’d like a chance to do it properly.” The headset crackled behind his beat of silence. “Gabrielle Suzanne Clark—will you marry me?”
I choked, my voice wavering between a laugh and a sob. I looked down at my trembling hands on the yoke. I tried to center myself on the horizon line—how the world was always straight and true if you knew how to read it—but my vision blurred. “I already said yes.”
Cal pulled out the ring—a princess cut with channel-set diamonds on a gold band—and held it out. “Humor me. Say it again.”
I grinned until my cheeks ached. “Yes.”
Cal took my left hand from the yoke—always with that impossible gentleness—and slid the ring onto my finger. His hands were cooler than mine. My pulse moved like a slowtidal current under my skin. The diamond caught a sunbeam, scattering rainbows across the instrument panel.
I stared at it—at the certainty of it—as the horizon leveled. Below us, the world blurred into a patchwork of green, brown, and blue—boundless, impersonal—but in the cockpit, it was just us and this impossible, shining future.
“How long have you been sitting on this?” I managed to ask, as I flexed my fingers, watching the stone catch the light.
He smiled, faintly embarrassed. “Picked it up in London, actually. Just before we left. I wanted it to be…proper.”
I swatted his shoulder, letting my fingers linger on the soft blue of his shirt. “You liar. You said you had to meet your father’s solicitor.”
He gave a theatrical sigh, but the corners of his eyes crinkled. “I did. But the appointment was conveniently next to a charming jewelry shop.”
I nudged his thigh with my knee, the control stick trembling with the motion. “You didn’t have to risk death by turbulence to propose. You could have just…I don’t know, knelt at dinner like a normal person. Dropped the ring in the champagne.”
He arched an eyebrow. “And then I’d be every other man. Is that what you want?”
I considered it, then shook my head. “No. I couldn’t stand it.”
“Precisely.” He glanced at my hand, now heavy with promise, and the tension in his jaw eased. “Besides, it’s more poetic this way. Permanently affianced at three thousand feet, entirely at the mercy of your piloting.”
I rolled my eyes and angled toward the cloud bank, letting the sky swallow us in blue. After a minute, the adrenaline ebbed, and with it the mad, shimmering disbelief. In its place came a weightless kind of happiness—the kind I’d never trusted before. I flexed my left hand—the ring foreign, yet oddly reassuring—and just for a moment, I let myself forget about what waited for us on the ground.
“How did you know my middle name?”
He gave me a faux-wounded look. “Darling, I spent an entire term staring at your name on my roster. I memorized every detail.”
Chapter 47
Callum
Ipushed a thumb drive across my desk. Bill stared at it, scratching his beard before picking it up.
“That’s all my course content: syllabi, slide decks, lecture notes, exams. Everything.”
“You’re really leaving, Cal?” He tucked the thumb drive into his shirt pocket.
“It’s for the best.” I stacked another three volumes—Griffiths, Feynman, and a battered copy ofThe Road to Reality—into a white banker’s box. They thudded against the corrugated cardboard like bricks mortared into a wall.
