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4
Paul
It was Will’s day to drive—we alternated—so I hopped into his truck after work and shut the door with maybe a little more force than I meant to. “Sorry.”
“Rough day?” he asked, putting the truck in reverse and backing out of the parking spot outside my hangar.
“Yeah. If it could go wrong, it did.”
As a Marine Airborne and Air Delivery Specialist, my job wasn’t all about jumping out of planes. While I still got to do that from time to time, my daily tasks were a lot less exciting yet incredibly important. I was responsible for air delivery, equipment maintenance, and parachute packing. And today, for some odd reason, luck wasn’t on my side with anything I tried to accomplish.
“That bad?” Will asked as he pulled onto the highway toward Bluffton.
“That bad. It was like everything I touched turned to crap.”
Will blew out a breath and adjusted his grip on the steering wheel. “Uh-oh. You sure you wanna go through with this whole proposal thing, then? Doesn’t seem like the right day if you ask me.”
“I didn’t,” I bit out, then swore under my breath. “Sorry.”
“It’s cool, man. We all have bad days.”
I nodded but didn’t reply. I didn’t want today to be a bad day. I wanted today to be thebestday. I wanted to have woken up this morning with some kind of giddy pep in my step that carried me throughout the day instead of metaphorically stubbing my toe at every turn. I wanted to have walked around my shop all day singing show tunes. Not that I knew any, but still.
After a few moments of silence, Will shifted in his seat and tried again. “For real, though, are you sure you’re ready to propose to Roxy? Maybe you should wait until you guys have been dating in the same zip code for a little longer.”
I swallowed. Will knew I’d been worried about how Roxy had been acting ever since I moved back to South Carolina. It wasn’t really anything I could put my finger on, but it was like all of the sparks between us and the butterflies in my gut (or like, a manlier version of butterflies—vampire moths, yeah, those are tough) had just vanished into thin air.
If I were a self-conscious kind of guy, which I hadn’t thought I was, I would wonder if it had anything to do with me. Like, not just who I was, since I felt like we’d connected really well when we were texting or talking on the phone. But maybephysicallywe didn’t connect?
It wasn’t that way on my end. Roxy was hot, no doubt about it. She had long blonde hair that she always curled at the ends and clipped back to keep it out of her face. Her blue eyes were the kind that people wrote country love songs about, admittedly the ones lamenting over a broken heart. And full, pouty lips that were as soft in real life as they’d looked in the million pictures she’d sent me over the course of our long-distance year together.
But since there didn’t seem to be the same level of…enthusiasmcoming from her as I felt when we were together, I wondered if maybe there was something about me she didn’t like now that she saw me up close and personal. But that wasn’t exactly something I felt comfortable talking to Will about.
“No, this is good. We talked about it before I got home. This is the next logical step for us.”
He bobbed his head up and down like he was processing that. “Okay.”
“Besides, she told me last night that her friend in Texas asked her if she wanted to go out there to work, and she turned her down.”
“Because she wanted to stay here and be with you?”
I shrugged. “Well, yeah. I mean, that’s what it seemed like. She didn’t explicitly say that or anything, but it was implied.”
“Right.”
“And you know, she doesn’t think she’d like Texas, either. But yeah, also I think because of me.”
Will scrunched his face up. “Don’t kill me, but what about Shelby?”
“WhataboutShelby?” I asked, my traitorous heart skipping a beat at the mention of her name.
“Well, I know she shut you down all those years ago, but have you guys talked about it since then? You’ve been friends all this time, and you’re not teenagers anymore. Maybe you should explore that again before you marry Roxy.”
I shook my head back and forth, vigorously enough to bat his words right out of my brain before they could take root and manifest any false hope. “Nope. No way. That’s not a thing.”
“Right now it’s not, but maybe itcouldbe.”
“No, Will, I really don’t think it could. She looked me straight in the face that night and told me that she would never feel that way about me. That I was like family to her. Come on, man, that would be like you falling for Aria for crying out loud.”
