The scramble sirens went off at thirteen o’clock, and if anyone noticed Carter arriving from the direction of Vic’s tent, no one made any mention of it. He was still warm from her skin, wet from her, drunk on her—except that he was technically sober. That’d been a first for him, coming to her without the soft armor of drunkenness and its excuse. It was different.
The alarm had been nothing. Chasing ghosts. Vic had lain for a time, not knowing, watching the path Carter’s plane had followed at takeoff as if its motion had torn a hole of emptiness in the night that she could still see—the fading track of his passage from her and into the sky. She’d been naked, of course, and chilled by the suddenness of his absence as if something almost precious had been taken from her.
The planes all came home and Vic, dressed now and aching, had put her boys under the whip—lighting the strip, flagging down pilots, wheeling machines into bed. She motivated them like they were under fire. Drove them, stopping only every now and then to look up into the cold, hard sky, barely lit by the shards of the double moons, to try and spot Carter’s plane. It was no good, though. Painted up for night fighting, she was as good as invisible.
In the air, Carter was doing the same thing, trying to pick Vic out of the play of harsh shadows, the severe glare of runway lamps, and shifting beams of nightsticks. He knew she was down there somewhere in the baffling dark. He could feel her and imagined that, circling, stacked up six deep, now five, that he was circling only her. Like there was a string tethering him, its knot tied high in his throat like something he couldn’t quite swallow.
On the ground, Vic counted three planes, then four. The accounting was in her head—the order of things, tomorrow’s busywork—but she didn’t allow much room to this collection of simple numbers, mental spreadsheets, constantly pressing against the soft walls of the movie playing behind her eyes.
The sex hadn’t been nice. There’d been nothing friendly about it. It was rough and it was hard and that’d been fine. It’d been good because that was what he’d needed and she’d wanted and, so, what she’d taken from him. After the longhouse, he’d followed her back to her tent like a puppy—slinking, shy—and that’d been a disappointment. But once inside, behind a closed door, there’d been a moment. A spark like a starbursting short. The closing of a switch. She’d been doing something. He’d been doing something else—moving across the tent, talking some kind of nonsense. And then suddenly he’d stopped and she’d stopped, and their eyes had brushed each other and his hips had twitched around as though she’d caught him with a fishhook in the belly and pulled.
It was all in the tilt of her head, the turning angle of his body, and the coils of barbed wire that looped along the trajectory of their gazes—into each other’s eyes, electric with the sure knowledge of what was coming next.
Vic was there in that moment. She knew that. And then she wasn’t there because she became like a doll to him, an object to be used and bent and turned this way and that; a target on which he could spend some terrible rage.
He fucked her without sweetness and that, too, had been fine because he had no sweetness to offer and none that she wanted. And when it left her hot and sore and breathless and (at least temporarily) mindless of anything but his skin and his mouth and his cock and the sound of his breath in her ear, she was happy because that was what she’d wanted from him and because she knew that, as she’d been there, fully present, in that first charged instant of connection, so, too, would she be there on the other end, as what would be waiting for him on the other side.
And she was. He hadn’t been sleeping when the scramble siren had gone off, but he was peaceful, something she knew he hadn’t been in a long time. That was her gift. What she knew she was capable of giving.
“I know what they say about me, you know,” she’d said to him in the moments before the quiet was split by the siren’s grinding wail. “It’s not true.”
Carter’d known exactly what she was talking about. He hadn’t lied and pretended he didn’t. She’d appreciated that.
Eventually, Carter brought his plane down. Second to last. And when his postflight was done, he followed Vic again, back to her tent, without hesitating. He’d followed her down to the ground already. Had felt her reel him in safely, dragging him from the sky to the earth. This, then, was just more following. He hadn’t yet been cut free and didn’t fight the hook at all.
She was taking her clothes off before even getting inside. Undoing buttons, rasping zippers. It was need, same as his. Not even desire. The bite of cold against her bare skin only served to remind her of the heat she now craved like water, like oxygen.