Fireside by Susan Wiggs (pdf e book reader txt) 📗

Applied Physics—took everything he had. And on top of that, he was in the ROTC for the Air Force, so he could afford the degree that was sucking his life dry. The reserve officer training for the Air Force was a huge commitment, but not as huge as the tuition bills for an Ivy League college. Some people thought he was out of his gourd, signing up for the military. But the the military had a concrete plan, something he’d lacked all his life. There was a certain satisfaction in knowing exactly what was expected of him.

Besides, when he considered the alternatives, there was no question that he was doing the right thing. If he hadn’t worked his butt off to get into college, he’d be in some greasy spoon in a no-name suburb in Southern California, wearing a disposable paper hat at work instead of a parachute pack.

Daisy was scared for him on this J-term training mission. She knew he was going to practice, among other things, how to jump out of an airplane at 20,000 feet, and survive.

And of all the things the ROTC demanded of him, all the mental and physical challenges—the early-morning wakeup calls, punishing endurance training and numbing drills—this was surely the coolest.

The kid next to Julian shifted restlessly in his seat. Julian could tell he was anxious about something. No, scared. That was what Julian sensed, and he grew mildly curious. The boy exuded a kind of toughness most people would find off-putting. Not Julian. He had no idea who the kid was, but he recognized him, because not so long ago, he’d been there. He’d been alone in a crowd and scared shitless, and he covered his fear with that same tough, slit-eyed reserve.

“How you doing?” he asked. Not in a phony-interested way. He was just cracking the door open a little in case the kid felt like talking.

The boy turned and eyed him briefly. Julian knew he intimidated some people. He was biracial, but he looked a hundred percent black. He was naturally big, and had grown broader and more muscular from the Air Force’s relentless physical training. His head was shaved like an eight ball. He used to have dreadlocks but, of course, they were anathema to military training, so he’d left them on the floor of a barbershop the day of his induction into the program.

The Latino kid merely shrugged. “I been better,” he said.

Julian didn’t want to push, but his curiosity was piqued. “Yeah? How’s that?”

“I’m okay,” the boy muttered, obviously thinking better of trusting a stranger.

“You headed to the city for a visit?” Julian inquired, still casual, not pushing at all.

“Yeah.”

Julian wasn’t sure how he knew, but the kid was lying. Or hiding something. Or both. “Me, I’m headed down to Montgomery, Alabama,” he said, then stuck out his hand. “Julian Gastineaux.”

“AJ,” the boy replied. He shook hands, though he leaned away from Julian.

All right, I can take a hint, thought Julian. He tried one more time. “You from around here?”

“Nope.” The kid’s hands tightened on his backpack.

Okay, then. Julian decided to make one final attempt to draw the boy out. “I grew up in New Orleans.”

No response from Mr. Happy, so Julian sat back, shut his eyes for a few minutes, thinking about New Orleans. It was just Julian and his dad, back then. The two of them against the world. A physicist at Tulane, Maurice Gastineaux had raised Julian in a loving but haphazard fashion, pretty much what you’d expect from an absentminded professor. Maurice had been a rocket scientist, same as Julian aspired to be. Except unlike his late father, who was all cerebral, Julian hungered for action. He didn’t simply want to be a rocket scientist. He wanted to be the rocket.

He dozed a little, then was awakened by the vibration of his mobile phone, indicating a text message. He flipped it open. Miss you already, Daisy had written.

There was nothing to say to that. She already knew the way he missed her. It was the kind of missing that felt like a limb blown off, a huge void of hurt beyond imagining. His roommates at Cornell told him repeatedly that he was nuts. What guy in his right mind fell for a girl who lived a three-hour drive away, and who had another guy’s baby, for Christ’s sake?

Then Julian would show them a photograph of Daisy and they’d be like, oh. Now we get it.

She had the kind of looks that made people stop and stare, dropping whatever they were doing for a few seconds. She had that yellow-haired goddess thing going on; you could picture her in a Renaissance painting, surfing on a half shell, her long blond hair twisting in the wind. But the thing Julian’s roommates didn’t get was that, even if she looked like one of the gorgons, Julian would still probably be into her.

But her life was complicated. She had a baby. And not just any baby. Charlie had the red hair and blue blood of his father, Logan O’Donnell. Logan was the opposite of Julian in every way. Lily-white, he’d grown up surrounded by wealth and privilege. The only thing Julian and Logan had in common was that they were both in love with Daisy Bellamy.

Agitated, he opened his eyes again. The kid next to him was watching intently out the window. Julian studied him for a moment, remembering the seminar in military intel he’d taken as part of his training. The boy was exhibiting signs of stress—jiggling his foot, chewing his lip. Something about this boy reminded Julian of himself when he was younger. He’d been about the same age as this kid when his dad had wrecked his car, eventually dying of his injuries. Julian used to deal with his own stress and uncertainty by taking physical risks, anything from jumping off a high dive to skateboarding a dry concrete spillway, knowing it could flood without warning at any moment.

“So you’re headed to the city