Page 85 of Burning for Alexander
“Bourbon, but this is the last one since I’m not strong enough to carry the bastard.”
Their dog, Chickie, lifted her head up from her spot under Tommy’s chair. I leaned over and gave her long ears a little bit of love. “Good girl,” I murmured. “And a treat for you, hm?”
Just as I was headed back with their drinks and a dog biscuittucked in my apron pocket, I overheard Monroe say something about Kincaid again.
“And he’s ARFF. So I asked him, what the fuck are you doing working here instead of on an airfield someplace? He used to work with big planes, like index E–level shit.”
I stopped and stared. Then I carefully set down the drinks and asked Monroe to repeat what he’d said. I probably sounded deranged, but I didn’t care. “What’s ARFF, and what’s index E?”
“Oh, aircraft rescue and firefighting. And index E means big planes. That’s the indicator that an airport serves mostly planes longer than two hundred feet. Like 747s and 777s and MD-11s. It means the airport has to have at least three big-ass trucks with over six thousand gallons of water for foam production.”
I already knew this, of course. I’d asked IndexEcho the origin of his username at one point and had gotten an explanation very similar to this one.
“How do you know all of that?” I asked, like I was just making casual conversation. “I thought you were mostly a helicopter pilot.”
“I am.” Monroe took a quick sip of his beer. “But my brother’s a United pilot out of Denver. He’s super-nerdy about all this stuff and bragged like a bitch when he got rated to fly MD-11s.”
My stomach felt hollow, and my toes tingled with a strange kind of numbness. “That’s cool,” I said. “How do you know all of that about Chief Kincaid?”
“He told me about it one night last summer. And, honestly, I got the feeling he was probably just taking a break before finding another big ARFF job somewhere. Sounds like he needed a temporary gig until jumping back in the fray.” Monroe grinned and winked. “Why the interest in the chief?”
I felt like my face was made of stone. “No reason. I just didn’t realize that about him.”
Tommy shot me a look, like he heard the strain in my voice, but he cleared his throat and summoned a smile. “Alex is probably fishing for some dirt on the chief. Guy’s been a total pain in Alex’s ass with inspections every week and shit.”
The chief had definitely been a pain in my ass.
But he’d quickly become something else—the man I was falling for.
And now, it seemed, he was something way, way worse.
A fraud.
I didn’t have the brainpower right now to figure out what this all meant, but I could feel in my bones it wasn’t good.
“You guys need anything else?” I asked.
Tommy’s smile dropped, and so did his voice. “Hey, you okay?”
I nodded and tried to smile. “Amazing.”
And then I walked back to the kitchen like I was going to fetch something, found Karim and begged him to take over, raced up to my bedroom to crawl into my bed, and cried for two straight hours over the mess that Monroe’s simple words had made of my love life.
Was it possible Judd Kincaid wasIndexEcho?
If he was, then he wasn’t dead, which was a miracle…
Except it also meant my sisters were right and he’d ghosted me four years ago, which would rip my heart out all over again.
And…oh, fuck. Did Judd know I wasDrunkenPoet? Had he known all along and hidden it from me?
Months of our exchanged conversations flowed through my memories as I fought the temptation to pick up the phone and call him to clear all this up. That would be reactionary and foolish. Accusing Judd of beingIndexEcho—even asking him ifthey might be the same person—would damage our relationship if it wasn’t true. What would that say about my trust in him?
And if I made the accusation and itwastrue…
I closed my eyes and tried not to cry again because I’d already cried enough for this fucking man. But it was hard not to feel like fate had it out for me. I’d had something amazing at my fingertips, and it had been yanked away four years ago. And now here I was again, on the verge of losing the very next man I’d let myself fall for…
Either that or I’d been screwed twice by the same man.
