AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Is it too much to ask what part of the Navy you were in?” Grace pursed her lips. “I don’t need to hear details of the missions or what you did if that’s too much, but what your job was.”
“I actually learned how to fly in the Navy. I ran a lot of search and rescue missions to make sure that people or soldiers who’d gotten marooned could be rescued and get home,” I revealed. “It was one of the most honorable things I did in the Navy. I helped save people who otherwise would have drowned or starved. That’s… that’s always been one of my points of pride about my time in the Navy.” I couldn’t help but let a smile wash over my face at this point.
There was nothing more to the missions themselves, but I had run so many of them that I could have applied to the Coast Guard and been accepted, I supposed. They always needed more people to help them make sure that everything was running smoothly. However, nothing beat flying in the clouds for me. It had always been my favorite part of the search and rescue. That, and the fact that it would always remind those we had rescued that they were not alone.
No man was left behind as long as we could do anything to save them.
“I believe that your time in the Navy is responsible for your realism,” Grace said after a few moments of thinking. “I’ve met quite a few veterans. You all have a generally realistic outlook on life, though some are much bleaker than others. I must admit that I appreciate that the bleakest thing you’ve said about our journey has been about the plane going down in the weather we had on our way here, which I do understand.”
“I was… attempting to make a point, and I think I made it a little too clearly,” I said with a nervous laugh. “I forget that not everyone has faced death as often as I have. Even those in the Navy have differing experiences, depending on when they signed up and what was going on at the time.”
Grace nodded.
Our conversation stalled again, but this one didn’t feel like it had been because the conversation had been forced. It felt more like the natural end to our conversation. She didn’t appear to have any other questions or observations about my time in the Navy. That much, I appreciated. While I did enjoy sharing that I was able to help rescue others in the Navy who had been lost at sea, I did not enjoy how some people who hadn’t served sometimes glorified war or the military, putting veterans on a pedestal for doing jobs we fought hard to do.
Given that Grace was my age and had not served, it appeared she had no interest in knowing more. That was a good thing. She didn’t need to know the more spectacular horrors I had seen in the Navy, especially since there had been times it looked as though I would have to be deployed elsewhere instead of moved from base to base here in the United States.
“One more question,” Grace said suddenly. “This one has less to do with your service in the Navy and more to do with what you’re doing now that you’re out. Why did you decide to start flying private charters around?”
I smiled a little. That was a question I was more than happy to answer for her.
“There are a few skills that carry over from the Navy. Since I wasn’t trained to be a medic, I decided I would take the piloting skills I’d learned and find a way to use them in civilian life. It wasn’t that hard once I knew where to look.”
“Why not fly commercially?”
I shrugged. “Too much bureaucracy. Flying has enough paperwork as it is, and I really liked the freedom of being my own boss.”
While there was more to it, I didn’t want to tell her more about my family just yet. Her knowing that my family lived in Texas and that I had brothers was enough for me right now. If she wanted to know more, I would tell her, but there were a few things I just didn’t know how to bring up – things that I felt uncomfortable sharing unless we actually started some sort of relationship. I was not going to tell her at all unless I had a feeling that our relationship would get more serious.
After all, you don’t just go around telling people that your family is insanely rich. Even though searching the internet for “Texas Delaney” brings up a lot more than I’d like the world to know, our family’s estate – Chandler Ranch – was started by my great-grandfather and later expanded by my grandfather – on my mom’s side. So, you can only find the details of my family’s net worth if you include the Chandler name. Thankfully, no one automatically connects you to one of the wealthiest families in the country when you’re living in Oklahoma. I just felt safer this way; I didn’t have to worry about attempted robberies or people trying to blackmail me. Or a woman who was just interested in me for my money.
“That sounds about right, and along what I was thinking had happened,” Grace said. “I just had to make sure I understood the logic right. Sometimes, you can think someone has done the most logical thing for the most logical reason, and then learn that there’s another reason entirely for the choice that person made despite the ones you had thought of.”
“That is true,” I agreed. “But you have me pegged right. I did it purely because it was the most logical thing to do. It took a while to find where my true passion lay in flying, but I found it. It’s what I do now.” I smiled.
That much, I didn’t have to worry about hiding. I liked my job and wanted to share that with the rest of the world.
With the last question of Grace’s answered, she was more than happy to pick up her hot chocolate and take another sip. I wondered how much it had cooled off, considering it had been sitting by a window with a ton of snow piled up beside it. Since she continued to drink it in one go, I had to assume that it had been cooled enough to be tolerably warm, not hot enough to scald her.
Chapter fourteen
Grace
That night, Gabe and I had to share a room again. There was a good chance the power would come back on tonight or early tomorrow morning since the snow was starting to melt, thankfully. I hoped that it had warmed enough that it wouldn’t re-freeze overnight, turning the roads and runways into solid sheets of ice.
We had hoped the sun would warm the room up a little. We even opened the curtains to allow the sun to do its job, but it had only managed to melt the snow off the windows. I frowned as I walked into the room, shivering. It had gotten colder. The generator must have been running on almost empty when the storm knocked the power out, and now the heater was starting to struggle.
“Well, that’s going to be a bit of a problem,” Gabe said. “I’ll go see if the front desk has any extra blankets. We might need more than one each, and I don’t want to make you feel bad about sharing the bed if that’s not what you want to do.”
He walked out of the room before I could stop him.
I snuggled up under the blankets on the bed, glad that men’s sweatpants were warmer than any of the pajamas I had originally packed. If this continued, I would have to take an ice-cold shower and borrow more of Gabe’s pajamas. Part of me now wondered if he had any laundry detergent to wash clothes with once we arrived in Corinth.
While I had hoped the power would come back on today, I could understand that the hotel had nothing to do with when that happened. I wondered what we would do if the power didn’t come back on before we were supposed to leave. How would we get my stuff out of the locked room? Could we break through a window somehow?
Gabe returned with four blankets in his arms. I already had one that the front desk had given me, in addition to the blankets on the beds. He gave me one more and dumped the other three on the floor.
“Since you have the ones supplied with the bed, I thought you wouldn’t mind if I took the others,” he said. “Is that all right with you?”
