Chapter Four #3
Polly’s brow arched. “Is that how it is?”
Vivian flushed. “I just wanted to thank him for introducing me to Graham Carlson. I didn’t get a chance the night we met, and there wasn’t an opportunity when he arrived today to do more than say ‘hello,’ but I wanted to express my gratitude.”
“Hmm. Well, I think he went out on the balcony.” Polly grinned. “And you have my full support should you be so inclined to not just express your gratitude for the work introduction. He’s a nice man. Frank couldn’t speak more highly of him.”
Vivian wove her way through the crowded living room, where most people were still watching the television and the coverage of the Freedom 7 launch. She walked past them and headed toward the small balcony off their apartment.
Joe stood outside, his back to her as he took in the city skyline before him.
As far as views went, it wasn’t the most beautiful one, but it was theirs, and Vivian often found herself going out there when she needed to think or take a moment to herself.
Joe appeared to be deep in thought because he startled when she opened the door.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” Vivian replied as she closed the door behind herself, feeling guilty for having intruded on his private moment.
“It’s no trouble.” A self-conscious smile flashed across Joe’s mouth.
“I’m out here feeling sorry for myself, if you must know.
I think I’d prefer the company to my wallowing.
” He glanced back up at the sky. “It’s amazing to think of all that’s out there above us, isn’t it?
I studied engineering, so I’m supposed to look at this space business with a scientific, practical eye, but damn, it’s hard to do so when you think of all the possibilities, of the vastness of the universe.
The absolute heartbreaking beauty of it all. ”
“There you go being romantic again,” she joked, although the words escaped on little more than a whisper that was nearly lost to the wind, because he was close to irresistible when he talked like that.
She needed to thank him quickly and then she needed to go back inside.
Before she had a chance to collect herself enough to speak, Joe broke the silence between them once more.
“When we met at the bar, I told you I was going to test pilot school.”
Vivian didn’t understand the significance of what he was saying, the nuances between a test pilot and the fighter pilot unclear to her, but she could see that whatever those differences were, they were incredibly important to him, and he wanted her to know it.
“When I graduated from West Point and commissioned in the Air Force, I knew I wanted to fly. Hell, I’ve known I wanted to fly since I was a little boy and my uncle took me to a fair.
I was six years old, and there was this man doing stunt flying in his little biplane, and it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
The pilot was nice, and he took me up with him, and I never wanted to come down.
“From that moment on, there was nothing else I wanted to do. I used to run around the fields of my aunt and uncle’s farm with my arms out in the air pretending I was an airplane, used to sit on hay bales and imagine I was piloting my own.”
This really had been a terrible idea.
Because as he said it, she could envision it—a little boy whose exuberant smile matched the fairly devastating one on his face now. And it was that enthusiasm, that passion, that tugged at her once more.
“If I’m being honest, it’s why I joined the military—so I could fly. I love flying, have been lucky enough to do it now for over a decade,” Joe added. “But when they announced that they would be sending astronauts into space a few years ago—that was it. I was hooked.”
He wanted to be an astronaut.
Of course.
Now she understood why he had looked at Alan Shepard’s launch the way he had, the longing in his gaze.
A thought rose in her unbidden—
That it must be an extraordinary thing to be loved by a man who felt things so deeply, so passionately, that he devoted his life to a vocation with such singularity.
Or was his love for flying, for his dreams of space, so great that there was room for little else?
She really should thank him for the introduction and be done with it.
And still, she stayed, ensnared.
“There are a few requirements to becoming an astronaut. You have to be under forty—I’m thirty-three.”
He was a full decade older than her.
Vivian wasn’t surprised, necessarily. The thing about your first job out of college was that you frequently found yourself to be the youngest person in the room.
She’d gotten used to that part. More alarming was the fact that many of her friends from college were already engaged or married, and she definitely didn’t feel ready to be married now—or possibly ever.
“You can’t be taller than five feet, eleven inches.” Joe grinned. “I’m pushing that one a little bit, but I’m good to go.”
God, his grin was infectious.
It transformed his whole face, his entire demeanor, and the recipient of it—well, she was pretty sure she felt it all the way to her toes.
“You have to be in excellent physical condition…”
Thankfully, he didn’t say anything, but then again, he didn’t need to. No one would look at him and question that one.
She could feel her cheeks burning.
Joe didn’t take his eyes off her, and the heat in his gaze told her everything she needed to know—he enjoyed her reaction, knew she wasn’t immune to the figure he cut.
Joe took a step forward, as though seizing on the opportunity, just as Vivian took an answering step back, putting more distance between them.
Confusion flickered in his gaze, but he remained where he was, giving Vivian the space she needed.
“You must have a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent,” Joe added. “Luckily, they were nice enough to give me my engineering degree at West Point despite my best efforts to get into trouble.”
That he was smart—and self-deprecating—only made everything worse.
Vivian gripped her champagne flute more tightly, needing something to occupy her hands, to keep from reaching out—
“You need fifteen hundred hours of flying time,” Joe continued, reciting the list of NASA’s requirements for the astronaut program with the familiarity of someone who had gone over it many, many times. “That one was easy, all things considered.”
“Where have you been stationed?” Vivian asked, wanting to know more about him, about his life, even about his career, because she now understood that the two could not be separated, that being a pilot wasn’t just what he did, but who he was.
And perhaps he did have an ego about his job, but there was more to him than just his swagger, and it was those parts of him—the depths he showed her the more they spoke, the emotions he wore so plainly on his face—that made her want to know more, cockiness be damned.
“I started flying T-6s at Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi. I got lucky and tracked to fighters, which was always the plan, but considering how competitive it was, I worried a time or two that I would end up flying something else.”
He said the part about worrying whether he would get fighters with the same self-deprecation he’d adopted throughout their conversation, but there was a false note to his words, the sentiment not quite aligning with the determination in his gaze when he spoke about his career.
Vivian would have bet anything that as soon as Joe decided he wanted to become a fighter pilot, he moved mountains to do so, and given the intensity that radiated off him, she didn’t really believe that he’d ever considered failure to be a possibility.
“I found myself doing what I’d always wanted to do, what I loved. I bounced around several bases, flew a few different airframes, spent some time flying in Korea. Before my assignment to Edwards, I was at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix flying the F-100.”
How much longer would he be here? His injuries seemed mostly healed. Surely, he would be returning to his home on the other side of the country soon.
They’d likely never see each other again.
“And of course, the last requirement is that an astronaut must be a graduate of test pilot school.” Joe gestured toward his injured arm.
“I was out here on leave visiting family right before my class started. Thanks to my recklessness, well, I missed the class because the doctors still haven’t cleared me to fly. ”
He delivered the “thanks to my recklessness” line as though he was parroting something that had been said to him.
The military probably didn’t take too kindly to their pilots injuring themselves racing motorcycles, although she had to imagine that in his line of work, Joe wasn’t the first or last fighter pilot to take such risks.
“Did you get in trouble for the accident?”
Joe grimaced. “Let’s just say it wasn’t the best thing for my career.
They’re talking about sending me to a fighter squadron in Europe since they don’t want to keep me sitting around waiting for another opening in a test pilot class, and my dreams of going to space, well, I don’t think it’s meant to be.
I always knew an astronaut slot wasn’t a guarantee, and as much as that was the end goal, I’ll admit test pilot school was compelling in its own right. ”
“What was it that inspired you to want to be a test pilot?”
Strange how badly she wanted to know.
“I confess, I don’t really understand the distinction,” Vivian added.
“The flying we do now, the limits that we test—it came from the pilots—military and civilian—who were risking everything to push the boundaries of human flight by testing new technology and possibilities. Men like Chuck Yeager who were daring enough to break the sound barrier, who were willing to risk their lives to test new aircraft and systems, evaluate their—and our—capabilities. I want to be part of that legacy. I want to push the limits of what I can do.”