Epilogue
EPILOGUE
Five Years Later
Flynn
I check my watch for the fifth time. Then I adjust the telescope Jackie got me for Christmas this year, making sure the coordinates are set.
I drove to the ranch for this, so I’d have less ambient lights mucking up the sky.
I’d already driven Holt crazy asking him repeatedly if he’d cleared the north field of cattle for me, turned off all the motion and flood lights around the property, and had him double and triple check the strength and batteries of three different portable internet sticks I’d bought.
He finally pushed me out the door twenty minutes ago and I drove out in the middle of one of the fields.
Nothing but grass and sky for miles. Forty minutes ahead of schedule.
I pull out the origami heart from my wallet I never took out. It’s become a sort of talisman I touch whenever I miss her, or I’m nervous for her. So it’s gotten a lot of wear.
Jackie’s done a lot of exciting but scary stuff these past few years on her way to fulfilling her dream. And tonight is a big part of it. I check my watch again.
I don’t want to miss her.
Five minutes pass. My leg starts bouncing, shaking the fold-out chair I’m sitting on.
Another five minutes.
I’m about to slug back the flask of whiskey I brought when Elton John’s “Rocket Man” lights up my laptop, the sound drifting across the empty field.
I toss the whiskey to the ground and pounce on the accept call link.
“Flynn?”
And there she is, the most beautiful girl in the world.
Now the universe. Her long hair is pulled back in a ponytail that’s floating away from her head.
She’s grasping a handhold mounted on the wall, trying to keep herself centered on the camera.
Her titanium wedding band that matches mine, but thinner, encircles her left ring finger.
I had them custom made. Titanium, the material used in spacecraft, with a strip of meteorite in the center.
Even on land, she’ll have a piece of space with her.
“Yo.” Thankfully my voice sounds calm and collected and not laced with the anxiety I was drowning in just seconds ago.
Jackie rolls her eyes at my greeting. “You all set?” she asks, floating the camera over with her to the window. I see darkness and stars and then the camera lens adjusts and the Earth comes into focus.
“Wow.”
“I know, right?” Jackie sighs. “I still can’t get over it.” She’s looking out a window in one of the International Space Station modules, nose almost touching the glass. She’s in profile, so I can see both the view and her. And though the view is amazing, it’s her that captures my attention.
The bright, fluorescent lights of the station highlight the freckles dusted across her cheek. The slender slope of her nose is more pronounced without her sexy glasses perched on top.
To be a mission specialist in the ISS you need twenty-twenty vision.
So Jackie opted for Lasik. She got a raft of shit from her fellow astronauts when she continued wearing her frames after the surgery with just glass for lenses.
But she’d said she felt naked without them and seeing how I love getting her naked when she’s wearing them, the teasing hadn’t bothered her.
This is the first time she’s gone any length of time without them. And though I truly love those sexy-as-fuck glasses, I love her more, and the expression of awe and wonder so clearly displayed on her face right now.
“You should see it soon,” she says, breaking my train of thought.
I look up at the sky. “I don’t see it yet.” I scan the stars. “I see the Big Dipper.”
“That’s actually Ursa Major.”
“Listen here, Miss Smarty Pants,” I say, looking down at my laptop, “everyone knows that’s the Big Dipper.”
She nods, as if conceding the point. “I guess it is the Big Dipper, but the Big Dipper is really an asterism, which is part of the constellation Ursa Major.”
“Oh yeah?” I love the way she tilts her head when she gets sidetracked on one of her brainy tangents.
“Yep. It’s also called the Big Bear. Roman Mythology states that the god Jupiter fell in love with a mortal, Callisto.
Juno, Jupiter’s wife, turned the woman into a bear in a jealous fit.
When Callisto’s son saw her as the bear and tried to kill her, Jupiter intervened by turning him into a bear as well and casting them both into the stars to keep them safe. ”
“Well, speaking of casting into the stars, I think I see it.”
She perks up, checking her watch. “Yes, we’re heading over right about now.” Her voice is giddy, and if it weren’t for the lack of gravity, I bet she’d be doing that adorable jump/clap right about now.
She turns the camera to the window again, and on my laptop I can see North America, dark except for the concentrated lights from urban areas.
I glance back up, a light streaking across the sky.
I prop my laptop so that she can still see me as I look through the telescope. There, among the stars, is the International Space Station, traveling over seventeen thousand miles per hour, roughly five miles a second.
Though crazy expensive and probably the most technically advanced on the market, considering the lecture she’d given me about it on Christmas morning, my telescope can only make out the basic shape of the ISS, and not Jackie peering out a window. But I know she’s there.
My girl. My astronaut. My wife.
“Hi, Flynn,” she says softly.
“Hi, darling.”