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“I know,” he says, nodding. “I agree with you there. That’s another reason this is so exciting. We get to be one of the good guys.”
“If I stop jumping out of planes.”
“If you have to do it, don’t record it,” Julian says, then sighs.
“What?” I say.
He smirks. “What?”
“I know that sigh. But, whatever it is, you know you can say it.”
“I just wish…our lives, I guess, were more similar.”
I’m not sure what to make of this. I stare at him, and he goes on.
“It was the same for us, in the beginning, just two young men and a video camera and a whole lot of adrenalin. But I found Tessa. We had the kids….”
I walk over to the window, standing at the very edge, imagining tipping forward and soaring toward the street below.
Opening my arms, flying, darting through the buildings.
With nothing to hold me back. Nothing to tie me down.
Nothing to trap me. Never again.
“It’s not like I never tried,” I say.
“Your last date was at least ten years ago.”
I grind my teeth from side to side, trying not to think about the awkwardness and the…this is worse, theangeron my side. It was like this hunger inside me, howling out for the right woman.
A woman who’ll make me want her with everything I have.
“I didn’t say I tried recently.”
“Don’t you want a family?” Julian asks. “Kids?”
“I want kids,” I tell him gruffly. “But I’m not going to meet and marry some woman I don’t love just to get there.”
“It’s like you think you’re just going to, what,poof, like magic, fall in love.”
I turn back to him. He’s staring at me with his arms spread like he’s pleading with me to see sense. It’s not the first time we’ve had this conversation about family, about finding a wife.
But there’s no way for me to explain it to him. It wouldn’t be fair to a woman unless I feel it, the lightning strike or maybe the magic like he said.
“I don’t know,” I sigh. “But I can’t fake it. I won’t. It wouldn’t be fair to anybody. Let’s say I marry some woman I’m only half sure about, and then I get bored and become distant. I might inflict that on her, my kids, or my whole life.”
“Do you really think you’d do that?”
There it is again, that stuff from when I was a kid. My ability to detach, like my mind, was an orb, and I could throw it out of my head.
It lets hours pass like minutes or minutes like hours. It allows me to dream I was someplace else.
Free. Not caged in.
“I’m scared I might,” I say quietly. “That’s why I have to be sure.”
Julian nods. “I get it. But please, no more videos until the deal is finalized?”
