She pulled the sheet around herself. The cool night air was nippy enough that it bit a little. She brushed past him, asleep, his breathing deep and peaceful. She sat down next to the window, didn't quite close it. The fall air wafted in and ticked her legs, but she didn't mind so much. The trickle of air was enough to remind her she was alive, awake.
She found her smokes by the window. He always insisted she at least smoke by the window. It was enough to be infuriating if she'd let it. A quick flick of the lighter, the refreshing burn of nicotine, seven less minutes of borrowed time. She took a long drag and looked out over the fields.
It was off-base housing. It was cheap. It was a dump. It was all hers, at least through the end of the current rotation. The wind blew the wheat into waves under the light of the full moon, almost like the sea, but not.
"What are you doing up?" he asked groggily. He hadn't brought the blanket with him. The moonlight struck his skin, his body, the slight frame that belied his mother more than the tanks that his father and brother were. She liked that, smiled. So different from what she was used to. Maybe that's why she was taken with him.
"Hey, you know," She said, motioning with the cigarette, "I go without for more than a few hours I get more bitchy than normal."
"Well, we can't have that now can we?" He asked, tugging at the sheet.
"Hey!" She hissed, pulling it back. They played a sedate version of tug of war for a few moments until she almost lost her cigarette and he stopped. He just looked at her for the longest time, with those big puppy dog eyes.
"What?" She asked. He just shook his head.
"You. Me. I mean..."
"Well. Out of words? That's a first." She let the sheet drop a bit, an invitation.
He went quiet for a minute, looked out at the fields as she did. "You ever wonder Kara? About us? Why we found each other?"
"I thought you were just sleeping your way to the top," She joked.
"I'm serious. Of all of the places I'd rather be, why did I end up here, with you?" He asked, not looking at her. He seemed melancholy.
"Cause you'd have to swing the other way to get any of the other IP's in the sack?" She asked, a joke. Of all the other places he'd rather be? All the other places he'd rather be, where she wasn't. She was wrong to have trusted him, to have let him in, well, as much as she had let him in. It would end just like all the others. It would end like it always did.
"No. I mean, why am I so lucky? I didn't want to be here, at flight school, but here I am. Here you are," he looked at her. "You understand don't you?" The moonlight played tricks with his hair, turning it the color of platinum, casting obscenely black shadows on his forehead.
"I... I don't know," She said quickly, taking a drag from her cigarette. She flushed a bit, her instinct to take him back to bed and make his stop asking questions. Yeah, that was it. Shut him up, they didn't need to think like this, especially both being pilots. It was too early. They still had a lot of really hot sex to go before they started asking these questions. She stabbed out her cigarette and was about to stand up and pull him to bed.
"What do you want out of life Kara? What do you want to be?" He was in one of those moods. He got in them more often than any guy she'd been with. Why was the world this way, why were people like this? Deep questions that she didn't have the time or the courage to ask. She stood up, letting the sheet drop to the floor and held him gently around the chest from behind. She pressed herself against him. He was so warm, another odd thing.
"I don't know. I just want to get through to the next day," She said, a truth. She half expected to die on any given day. Hell the crazy shit she pulled in a Viper she should have been dead long ago. Maybe she wasn't trying hard enough. "You?" She asked, burying her face in his slight but well muscled back.
"If I didn't have to do this, if I didn't owe it to my father? I don't know, a writer, a gardener? Anything away from the military I suppose." Was he rejecting her? She'd always known that he didn't quite fit in. Sure, growing up in a house with Bill and Lee he could talk the talk and walk the walk, but there was always something that wasn't quite... She didn't know how to describe it.
"You probably think I'm crazy," He said, turning around. His hands found her back, stroked it, giving her goose bumps.
"Certifiable," She said, winking. She reached up and kissed him, finally quieting his unsettling questions. She felt his attention divert between them. She couldn't help but smile.
"Come on, it's late. You've got to be up at 06:00 for your Hop, and I'm not done with you yet," She said.