Dalton
Langley AFB
I close the door behind me and the silence hits harder than the jet lag. It’s bone-deep. Heavy. The kind of quiet that fills in all the cracks and makes you feel like you’re the only person left on the planet.
I drop my bag just inside the entryway. I showered in the terminal in Germany and again in D.C.
, but I still feel like I brought the desert back with me.
South Africa is clinging to my skin. The heat, the fear, the sand, the silence that came right after the rescue call went out.
Even though I didn’t know her, didn’t fly the mission, the whole base went still when word spread about the girls who got taken.
And now I’m back in Virginia like nothing happened.
My boots echo on the hardwood as I cross to the kitchen, open the fridge, and stare at nothing for a full thirty seconds before grabbing a beer and popping the cap with the edge of the counter.
I need something to cut the edge.
But more than that. I need her.
I scroll to Noa’s name in my favorites. My thumb hovers.
We haven’t talked much the last five weeks.
A couple of texts. One video call that got cut off when my connection died.
But she’s still there. Still my person. I just need to hear her voice.
Get grounded. Remember there’s a world beyond the perimeter fences and briefing rooms and that dusty base chapel with the hastily scrawled prayer list pinned up behind the altar.
I press the call button before I can think better of it and lift the phone to my ear.
It rings once. Twice. Four times.
Then she answers. Her voice is sharp. Flat. “Dalton.”
I swallow. “Hey. I’m home.”
“Congrats.” Her tone makes something inside me tense.
I sit down on the arm of the couch, running a hand through my hair. “That was…” Why is this awkward? “It was a rough one.”
A long pause. “Yeah? Sounded like it.”
I frown. “What does that mean?”
“I mean, you barely called. You disappeared, Dalton.”
“I couldn’t exactly keep my phone on me twenty-four seven,” I mutter. “It wasn’t a vacation.”
“No kidding. It’s always some classified thing, isn’t it?” Her tone is brittle. “You come back, all haunted and half broken, and I’m supposed to pretend I didn’t notice?”
I shift forward, tension rising in my shoulders. “I’m not trying to keep secrets from you. That’s just how it works sometimes.”
“You chose this,” she snaps. “And I’m tired of acting like that doesn’t matter.”
“I’m telling you it was bad. I don’t need to spell out the details for you to believe that.”
“You don’t tell me anything, Dalton. You want me to be patient and understanding and hang on through weeks of silence while you vanish off the grid and come back like a stranger.”
I clench my jaw. “I just needed to hear your voice. That’s it. I thought maybe...Fuck. I don’t know. It was a hard trip. I’m tired.”
“Then maybe it’s time to reevaluate what you’re doing.”
There’s the dagger.
I let out a slow breath. “You know I can’t do that.”
“You mean you won’t.”
“Noa,” I say, my voice low, trying to keep it from cracking wide open. “This is my job. It’s not some wild phase or something I can just walk away from because it makes you uncomfortable. I’m doing something that matters.”
“To who, Dalton? The government? Your little club of adrenaline junkies?”
My chest tightens. “You know it’s more than that.”
She laughs. Sharp and bitter. “I used to think that. Back when we still had a shot at a normal life.”
“We can still have that.” I stand now, pacing. “Your program’s online. You could come here. We could be together. Start fresh. Really give this a chance.”
“You want me to move across the country for a life I hate so you can keep chasing your Top Gun fantasy?” I can picture her barefoot, pacing the length of her small apartment.
“It’s not a fantasy, Noa!” I yell, and immediately regret it. “Damnit. Do you even hear yourself? I’ve bent over backwards trying to make this work!”
“Don’t yell at me, Dalton.”
“Then stop pushing me away every time I try to find a way for us to stay in this.”
There’s a beat of silence. And then her breath comes through the phone, sharp, like she’s bracing herself for a hit.
“You’re not trying, Dalton,” she spits. “You’re pretending. Like if you just say the right thing or show up enough times, I’ll magically wake up and be okay with your life being a war zone.”
I flinch. “It’s not—”
“Yes, it is!” Her voice cracks. “You disappear for weeks or months and come back like I’m supposed to just smile and pretend I haven’t been sitting here wondering if I’m going to get a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Or a phone call I can’t come back from.”
“That’s not fair.” I’m on my feet now, pacing the length of my dark apartment, fists clenching and unclenching. “You knew what I was when you met me.”
“No, I knew who I thought you were. The guy who loved philosophy books and asked me about my thesis over coffee. Not this—” She chokes on a laugh, bitter and raw “—this version of you who suits up and flies off like some avenging angel and expects me to be grateful when you come back in one piece.”
I bite the inside of my cheek hard. “So what, you want me to quit? You want me to just give all of it up, my entire career, my dream, because you can’t handle the stress?”
“No,” she says, low and lethal. “I want you to stop acting like I’m the crazy one for not wanting to follow you around the country while you chase something that’s never going to love you back the way I did.”
“Did?” The word knocks the breath out of me. “You’re already speaking in past tense?”
“Maybe I have to,” she says, her voice shaking now. “Because every time I picture a life with you, Dalton, it ends with a folded flag. And I can’t live like that.”
My mouth goes dry. I stare at the floor like it’ll tell me how to fix this, like there’s an answer buried in the fucking hardwood.“Honestly, Noa…” I begin in a whisper, but it comes out broken.
“You want honesty?” she snaps. “Here it is. I don’t want to spend my life waiting on casualty reports. I don’t want to flinch every time a jet flies overhead and wonder if it’s yours. I don’t want to be second to a machine that could kill you.”
“I’m not asking you to love the jet, Noa. I’m asking you to love me enough to try.”
She’s silent. Just breathing on the other end of the line. And then.
“It’s true. I did love you.”
What. The. Fuck.
“And I think part of me still does,” she adds quietly. “But you make it really hard, Dalton.”
My hands are shaking. “That’s not fair.”
“What’s not fair is you calling me the second you’re lonely and expecting me to fall in line like nothing’s changed. I’m not your emotional support animal.”
I close my eyes. “That’s not what this is.”
“No? Then what is it?”
“I miss you,” I say, voice breaking. “I just...I miss you.”
Another silence. Then, like a dam breaking, she screams, “You don’t get to miss me! You chose this! You picked a piece of metal over me a long time ago!”
I lose it. “You don’t get to make me feel like the villain for doing what I love! I’ve earned this life!”
There’s a pause. One heartbeat. Two. And then her voice slides in, low and lethal. Cold. “You don’t get it, Dalton. You never have.”
My stomach twists. “What the hell does that mean?”
“You think effort is the same as love,” she says, slow and deliberate. “You think showing up when it’s convenient, when you finally have the time, earns you some medal. You think calling me after vanishing for five weeks like it’s normal makes you a good man.”
“I didn’t vanish. I was deployed. You know that.”
She laughs, just once. It's short, humorless. “Right. You were off saving the world. Again. And I was here, pretending I didn’t care you couldn’t be bothered to call. Pretending it doesn’t kill me every time I hear a jet scream above me because for a second I wonder if you’re still alive.”
My chest tightens. “I’m not out there trying to hurt you.”
“No,” she says. “You’re just too selfish to notice that you are.”
I stop pacing. The silence between us burns.
“I want this to work,” I say. “I want you. And if that means figuring out how to make long distance suck less, or—hell—getting you out here, then I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever it takes, Noa.”
She exhales like she’s tired. Bone-deep tired. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
“Then explain it to me.”
“You’ve always had it planned out, Dalton. You. Your career. Your perfect, polished future. You’ll land on your feet no matter what.” Her voice goes quiet, but the words cut deeper. “But me? I’m just the girl you expected to orbit you. Grateful to be near the sun, even if I’m burning.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is.” She pauses. “You want to be the hero. The one who gets the plane and the girl and the glory. But I’m not your reward for surviving. I’m not some fucking footnote in your story.”
“Noa—” I start, but she barrels on.
“And maybe if I’d been smarter, I wouldn’t have let you pretend for so long that I was okay with this. With you.”
The words hit harder than a punch. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” she says, steady now. Almost detached. “I look at you and I don’t see the boy from the bookstore anymore. I see a stranger in a uniform. A man who expects me to rearrange my entire life but keeps proving he doesn’t know how to stay.”
The breath goes out of me in a rush. “That’s not fair.”
“Neither is being in love with someone who always chooses the sky over you.”
Silence crashes in around us.
She inhales, slow and final. “Don’t call me again, Dalton.”
“Noa—” The line goes dead.