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From This Day Forward
Sarah wasn’t going to do anything about it until Tom blew off her father’s retirement party because Mav was coming through town.
It was understood, then, that you couldn’t get between a Navy man and his men in arms. She hadn’t been overseas. No one in her family had ever been in the military that anyone could remember. Yet, Sarah hadn't even met the man for all that Tom rearranged his life around him.
“How is the old man holding up?” Tom asked.
She scoffed and twirled the phone line around her finger. “Dad is god knows how many cases of beer in, and we all got him new clubs as a gift. Mom is afraid he’s going to break a window swinging them around.”
“Tell him I said congratulations.”
“You could tell him yourself, you know. We’re all going to the club tomorrow if he’s not too hungover. He’ll try out the new clubs and pretend like he has any clue what he’s doing while Benny tries not to wreck the golf cart and Mom drinks us all under the table.”
The line crackled before Tom said, “You know I want to—”
“Forget it,” Sarah said, pacing the length of her bed, phone line uncurling and curling.
“Sarah, come on, I wish—,”
“Christ, is it going to be like this all the time—”
“Sarah…”
“I’m going to be in labor, or maybe you’ll be late to our darned wedding, Tom—”
“Sarah!”
She huffed into the line.
“That is not fair.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, you’re right, it’s just that, you drop everything for him.”
“I don’t.”
“You do,” she sighed. “This was important to my dad. You knew he wanted you to–to meet everyone. Now they’re all wondering where the hell my fiancé is and all I can say is that his Navy buddy is in town so I won't hear from him until he leaves and I can just be a single girl and Benny will never like you and forget about Jessie and you haven’t even introduced me to your parents! Tom, what are we doing?”
“It is not at all like that,” Tom said, steadily.
She took a shaky breath, receiver bearing down on her shoulder. Hot pink, just like she had asked for when she was sixteen and her parents finally got her her own line in her bedroom. She bit her lip, and sat down on her bed.
“So tell me what it's like.”
In Sickness and in Health
Sarah and Ice had planned his funeral together. They had started when the cancer came back—after they’d decided to pursue palliative care. The irony was as much as he had arranged, the doing of it all—the marshaling people, the shaking hands, comforting, soothing—that last stretch was all Sarah.
She had practice enough, anyway, helping her mother plan her grandmother’s funeral. Sarah knew Ice’s wishes like the back of her hand. Over thirty years of life and marriage, neatly parceled and arranged like gifts. The kids were given his mid-life crisis Porsche and motorcycles, still wanting to spoil them, the house went to Sarah, and Mav he’d left to Penny.
I’m hoping Penny will keep him in line, he’d texted Sarah.
“You can keep dreaming,” she yelled from the kitchen.
The guys will check in on you.
Sarah scoffed. “Mind your own business, Ice.”
You are my business.
She’d rolled her eyes and wandered over to the study. Ice had been at his desk furiously typing. He glanced at her when she walked in, paused for a moment and took a fortifying breath before rasping, “You’re being impossible.”
Sarah sat on his desk and tapped his leg with her foot. “Don’t strain!”
He huffed a breath and—
“I know, I know,” she said with a grin, dropping her voice, “don’t nag.”
He flicked her knee and resumed typing, fingers flying. She could see the all-caps as far away as she was even without the readers.
Ice turned the screen towards her.
Let me take care of you one last time, PLEASE.
“I believe that’s what the pension is for,” Sarah said cheerfully, patting him on the shoulder.
Ice glared at her—an exasperated look honed over the decades that she didn’t need words to understand—before returning to his typing.
It had been a sweet sentiment, almost naïve—the idea of Ice taking care of her. To wit, as much as they tried to carry each other, she hadn’t been able to take on the pain of chemo while he was in it. The sheer deterioration of his body happened right before their eyes all the same. Still, he stubbornly approached his death like it was another threshold they could walk across together as long as he was armed with enough spreadsheets. They could walk to the finish line together all they wanted but she had known, intimately and early, that they walked this earth alone in more ways than one.
It had all felt so surreal and awful the day of—after the Gun Salute with Mav looking as lost as she’d ever seen him, and Sarah in her dress feeling like the Barbie doll she never really was and all the young sailors buttoned up in their best not even knowing Ice. Not really.
She hadn’t been able to dredge up a single tear.
She had hated every wretched second.
That feeling had followed Sarah back to the house for the wake, had suffocated her. Didn’t let up until after the kids absconded with half of the liquor cabinet to spend the night with their cousins down the street. Benny and Jessica had shot her more concerned looks that day than they had when she’d dropped out of college right after the engagement—and had only barely agreed to go back to their hotel rooms, with their spouses alive and well—not that Sarah was bitter about that. Not at all.
All she wanted to do was sit in stillness and the new expanding amount of space around her. She would have to downsize. Ice had planned for that, too.
Sarah was almost asleep, her head back on the sofa and legs stretched out in front of her when she’d heard the sharp then muffled click of heels nearing.
Penny leaned over the sofa and kissed her quick on the cheek. She was still dressed for the funeral. Sarah wasn’t sure she’d seen her at the wake.
“Penny, you look like a dream,” Sarah said drowsily, stretching her neck. “I think you’re aging backwards.”
Penny rolled her eyes. “What? Is it too much?”
“You look fresh as a daisy,” she yawned.
“It’s the water and the sleep,” Penny said as she walked to the kitchen. She came back with a bottle of red and two glasses, “and the botox,” she said with a wink as she kicked off her heels and poured them each a glass.
Sarah smiled and clasped Penny’s hand in hers, cool and calloused.
“Thank you for coming today.”
Penny raised her glass. “To the Iceman,” she said.
Sarah winced, struck by the sharpness of her longing.
She took a sip of her wine—a sweet and earthy Port Ice always kept in stock once he figured out how much she liked it. I don't even know where he gets it, she thought hysterically. Sarah took a deep shuddering breath. “To the Iceman,” she repeated, biting her lip because she really thought she was done with all the crying, at least for today.
“Oh, honey,” Penny squeezed her hand. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Sarah blinked and wiped under her eyes. “I’m fine, really. It’s the wine,” she said.
“Well, I’m fine to just sit here in silence either way,” Penny said, smoothing her dress.
Sarah sighed. “How is Maverick doing?”
Penny went for her wine and finished it in two big gulps.
“That bad, huh?”
“You know how he is.”
“How do you put up with it? I never understood why either of you…”
“Well,” Penny started, “have you seen that motorcycle?”
“Penny!”
“You asked!"
Sarah chortled.
“What? It’s very erotic!” Penny folded her legs underneath her and turned to Sarah, head resting on her hands. “It doesn’t hurt that I’ve been half in love with Mav since I was seventeen. Admiral Benjamin has been trying to kill him since about then, too. I will deny it if you try to expose me.”
Sarah smiled. “Seventeen, huh? That’ll do it.”
Penny shrugged.
“It never bothered you? The thing with Ice,” Sarah asked softly.
Penny looked at her for a moment. “I always had too much on my plate as it was. And, my tolerance for men who act like children dropped down to zero when Amelia was born. And, the ex-husband.”
“Ah.”
“There was never really a chance for me to be bothered. Were you?” Penny asked in one breath.
Sarah sipped her wine. “I was… and I wasn’t. I don’t know,” she sighed. “I was young, too.”
Penny scooted in closer and leaned her head on Sarah’s shoulder.
“Did you have someone, too? All those years ago?”
“Not like them,” Sarah replied.
“What was he like?” Penny asked.
“Dumb."
Penny grinned at her. “God, aren’t they always?"
“Can you believe that David Shepherd, valiantly attempting to make love to me in the janitor’s closet of the Navy Federal in San Diego was not the star-crossed love of my life?”
“I bet he was surprised,” Penny laughed.
“The man tried to hold my hand during our morning meeting. I have never been more mortified.”
Penny’s hand drifted to the back of Sarah’s neck, kneading lightly. “Can you blame him for being taken with you?”
Sarah scoffed and shook her head. “He knew what it was. He knew who I was. Who Ice was.”
“Hey,” Penny said cautiously, “you did good today, you know?”
Sarah’s lips twisted wryly. “Admiral Kazanksy’s wife reporting for duty one last time,” she said.
Penny tutted. “I know today was hard.”
“Yeah,” Sarah laughed wetly.
Penny pulled Sarah towards her and Sarah went easily, folding herself into a shape Penny could hold. Penny ran her hands through Sarah’s hair, rested her chin on Sarah’s head muttering comforting words Sarah couldn’t make out over Penny’s steady heartbeat and her own light sobs.
For that moment Sarah allowed herself to feel everything. The sheer cliff of life without Ice. He wouldn’t retire and get underfoot, there would be no grandchildren, graduations—they could never know each other better than they had. Maybe the wine had been a bad idea, she thought, because she was being more maudlin than she liked to be.
Sarah looked up at Penny, who held her gaze steadily, making heat crawl up her spine—tangled with guilt, defiance, and desire—a heady knot that unmoored her. She sat up quickly and patted her cheeks, vigorously wiping at her tears with a chuckle.
Sarah cleared her throat. “Goodness,” she said, sitting back a little.
Penny hummed and reached over to wipe under Sarah’s eyes, then trailed that same hand, always cool, down to Sarah’s cheek. A barely-there graze down her neck and across her collarbone. Penny raised an eyebrow. Sarah felt all of fourteen again, secreted away in her room with her best friend and the dolls she swore she had gotten rid of strewn about one last time.
Penny sat patiently. Sarah knew it was her choice, and she had the fear in her gut, the strange overwhelming sadness coupled with the simple pleasure of a soft touch. It had been, neither natural nor unnatural to reach behind her and unbutton her dress, only simple and immediate after the last few years when the only constant had been the forward motion of keeping Ice alive, staying strong for the kids—for him, and staying ahead of every cough and ache. Never able to relax for the sword of Damocles swinging over their heads.
But this moment of pleasure, like sweet honeysuckle hiding in the weeds, was something she could get lost in. Penny’s lips were soft as they gasped open—sweet and gentle, teasing even. Her sweet Jasmine perfume was full all around Sarah. She marveled at the way Penny's hair curled so easily in her hands—just like her own and the deft way Penny had unclasped Sarah’s bra— thumbs quickly at Sarah’s nipples, then tongue and then Sarah’s rough gasp—knowing she was embarrassingly wet as Penny fervently hitched up Sarah’s dress. Then Penny had moaned into her mouth, urgent and needy—not anything like the pity fuck Sarah was hoping it wasn’t. Her kisses were messy and hungry—deep sucking kisses—devouring. Penny had rubbed her clit, teasing and stroking, just—a reminder, then barely fingering and then Sarah came suddenly, too soon, with her head buried into Penny’s shoulder gripping her skewed blouse with Penny’s nails digging into her back and her still, stocking-clad leg between Sarah’s thighs and an expert finger in her rubbing, pulsing, wanting.
“Christ,” Sarah panted.
Sarah had thought she was wrung out before—hadn’t known she had anything left to give. She took staccato breaths on her carpet, laughed and felt light and exhausted. Like she could finally sleep but for the way the floor would fuck up her back and she needed to ask the housekeepers to dust the underside of the coffee table because the glass really showed everything. Penny had been snickering at her, too, then. Stripping down completely—unselfconsciously naked as the day she was born. She crawled over Sarah’s body, kissed her deeply, distractingly and fondly—both of them breaking off to giggle. Sarah ran her hands over the smooth athletic planes of Penny’s body and nudged her up and up and she, obligingly, kept crawling and looked down at Sarah, smirking—hovered right over Sarah’s mouth before Sarah urged her hands down Penny’s thighs, thinking only of sinking into her tight, wet heat.
To Have and to Hold
Sarah Kazansky was party to a great deal of classified information she didn’t have the security clearance to know and that OPSEC dictated that, for her own safety, she shouldn’t know. But it had seemed silly to Tom not to tell Sarah what happened at work. There was only one person who knew his whole self and if she asked how the day was, he answered.
So Sarah knew.
He told her about the bogeys and the fear in his chest—about everything that hesitation could cost him. How he hadn’t felt fear like that since he was ten and heard the sharp pop of the gunshot ricocheting in the garage—a sound he’d never heard before and wouldn’t ever forget. He talked, too, about how his father’s war stories seemed to blend into his and no one was really around who could divide the lines between Junior and Senior. His mother refused to speak about his father after the fact.
Tom told Sarah about Goose and Maverick. About reaching out and wanting to touch Maverick—one of the few times he’d ever felt tender before he met her and not the first time he’d felt inadequate. About how he wouldn’t learn how to touch Maverick for years yet. About how the Cessna that Sarah’s dad flew on weekends, taking the family to the lake house, was nothing like the earth-shattering weight of G-forces, the sun cresting over the horizon and Maverick on his wing in an F-14. About what it felt like to reach out and touch him, like the deepest most settling breath Tom had ever taken. About realizing that Maverick was goddamn slippery. That there was no holding him, only hoping to get a touch or moment back but always knowing there would be a shadow of himself walking the world—part of him carved from those hellish two weeks at TOP GUN.
Sarah had looked at Tom all the while, understanding the words but not the feelings. She’d been out on the Cessna half her life. It felt like home and her childhood. Like her brother flicking her knees and her sister always a baby, still and rooftops and treetops that seemed so close she could touch them.
“Wingman,” Sarah said once, rolling her eyes. “You say that like it means something.”
“It does,” Tom replied, “it means everything.”
Wedded Husband
When Sarah first met Maverick she wore the engagement ring that she’d deemed too big for daily wear, her favorite sundress with a hemline that would have made her mother swat her bottom, and her hair curled long and loose around her shoulders.
Maverick rode up in a motorcycle so loud she knew it would be the subject of conversation for the next couple of weeks. He wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a t-shirt even though they were meeting at the club for brunch.
Does everyone have to love a bad boy? she lamented, looking at Iceman in his plaid shirt and khakis with the loafers her parents had gotten him for Christmas—the same kind her dad wore.
Maverick held his leather jacket awkwardly in his hands. It looked supple and worn-in and she could recognize some of the patches decorating the jacket from Ice’s office. She wanted to reach out and touch it, but refrained and only shook his hand when he extended it.
Maverick gave Ice a teasing grin but smiled softly at Sarah and called her “ma’am,” which just made her feel all the more like her mother and all of the ladies who lunched at the club.
They sat at a table for four: Sarah directly across from Maverick and Ice in the middle, beaming between the two of them. Ice held her hand on the table, and she could tell when he leaned over to run his hand on Maverick’s thigh from the way Maverick flinched.
“He didn’t tell me you were shy,” Sarah said over her soup.
“Only when I want to make a good impression.”
Ice scoffed, but he had a twinkle in his eye.
“I swear I’ve never seen him like this, Sarah.”
But she could tell Maverick was nervous from the glances he kept throwing at Ice.
“I have an older brother and a younger sister,” she said, leaning forward and putting her hand over Maverick’s, “I don’t think I’ve ever had a thing I didn’t have to share.”
Maverick barked a laugh and winked at her. “Ice, I think you’re batting out of your league,” he said.
Ice reached over to smooth her hair and squeeze her shoulder. “Yeah, I think I am,” he said, quietly.
To Love and to Cherish
The rule “Never in the House" didn’t come until after the arrangement when Sarah had been smarting and a little sensitive. It had only been a year after Tommy Junior was born and she was still looking and feeling like she was stuck in the third trimester—staring longingly at her old blue jeans and shirts with buttons that didn’t pop or stretch over the boobs she’d never had before. More than a year of her body not her own that no one had ever had the decency to warn her about.
Really she shouldn’t have been mad. They’d come home early because TJ pitched a fit in the library—screaming his head off during story time, and she’d been embarrassed then even though the librarians looked sympathetic. She had hustled them out of there with the giant stroller groaning and creaking and she damn near broke down in the parking lot getting it folded into the trunk of the giant Seville that Ice insisted she drive. They had gone straight home—the only place where TJ could scream his head off in peace or, rather, that Sarah could find peace while he screamed his head off. Only TJ had fallen asleep in the car like he always did not even five minutes into the drive, so then what was the point of all that she wondered.
She had been irritated when she saw the motorcycle in the driveway. She didn’t feel like being particularly nice that day, angry in a way she couldn’t pin down. She walked in like she was walking to the gallows with TJ’s chunky, warm, sleepy self hefted in her arms—half as a shield—and she’d heard a moan and froze, is the thing. And Sarah had known what she’d heard but told herself she wasn’t sure before walking further down the hall, closer to the living room, when she’d heard it again, clear as a bell. The sharp rhythmic slap of skin on skin. Over and over, and then she immediately thought of the last time she and Ice had made love—they fucked?
Did we ever fuck? Sarah thought hysterically. Tom was always so respectful, so gentle. Just like her mother said a man should be. And she was there in her extra forty pounds, in slacks she hated and hoped to burn and a stupid shirt that was worn through—soft and stained with TJ’s vomit. Her own tears bit her cheek as she wondered, frantically, if her husband had ever fucked her. If she had ever been fuckable. Because she certainly wasn’t now. He’d never taken her with the raw passion they described in the Harlequin books you didn’t even have to check out from the library because they were so trashy. He’d lay her down—gently, playfully, softly, but he took from Maverick, and maybe that’s what they gave to each other, not just that he was hiding in the closet like Benny insisted—being an ass every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter when he could in the name of his younger sister.
Sarah walked out of the house and got back in the car and drove around the block once, twice, before that seemed stupid, and she ended up at the park until it got dark and she went back home.
Ice had been smiling in the kitchen when she walked in. Motorcycle gone from the driveway. He was humming to himself and making dinner. He grinned when he saw her. Pulled her and TJ into his arms. He smells like he always does, she thought. Does this mean he always smells like Maverick? He was gone in a second, back to the stove, asking how it was and if she got a good book or talked to the other moms and frankly she’d wanted to throttle him. Smug and slim with his James Dean fucking pilot that he fucked asking how the library was when she couldn’t even—
“You can’t fuck him in the house,” she’d said, angry and shaking.
He stopped stirring. All his motion rendered still like a movie on pause. His eyes were wide when he turned to look at her. She never ever swore.
Ladies didn’t.
“Sarah—”
“You-you can’t fuck him in this house where you don’t even fuck me!”
Feeling like a lunatic, she’d turned and stormed upstairs with TJ now crying because she was yelling and because she was a terrible mother. Worse, somehow, than her own mother who had, through Protestant will, gotten a grandchild out of an unfuckable daughter. The new pathetic conception. She’d gone straight to their bedroom and slammed and locked the door and sat down on the floor and joined TJ in his wailing— starving, too, like an idiot because she had a point to make, even though she didn’t quite know what it was. She had been all anger and resentment—thinking of herself as a fool because Benny had tried to warn her. After the wedding—the fucker.
It had been the summer after the honeymoon. Fourth of July at Benny’s and the whole family back together—first time since the wedding because she’d missed Memorial Day weekend at the lake and Jessie was off, down the street, with her friends like she always was.
Sarah and Benny sat on the porch steps watching his kids run under the sprinklers. Ice had been helping her dad with the grill and Benny’s wife, Julia, was in the kitchen with their mom.
“Jesus,” Sarah had said. “What are you saying?"
"I’m not saying anything,” Benny stressed, “For god’s sake, you’re my sister.”
She thought of her parents, her mother’s distant kindness towards Tom. “Does everyone-does everyone think—”
“No!” Benny barked. “I’m just saying I won’t let you be made a fool of.”
Sarah’s shoulders sagged. “It’s not… It’s not like that.”
Benny threw his arm around her shoulder, both of them sticky with sweat and bug spray in the Georgia heat.
"You wanna talk about it?” he said.
"Not really,” she replied, head tucked between her knees, feeling all of fourteen all over again.
"Well, the Browns down the street got their kids a slip and slide, and it’s all I’ve heard about all summer,” he rubbed her back. “But, I put my foot down about the trampoline and I’m not giving in this time either. You know how embarrassing it would be to see my own kids in the ER.”
She looked up at him with wet eyes.
"Oh sissy,” he said, squeezing her tight, “Should I take him out back?”
“Benny, you’ve never won a fight in your life,” Sarah hiccuped.
He pinched her nose.
“What did I just say about the trampoline,” he said, and she laughed wetly into her older brother's cheek.
“Sarah?” Tom asked from the other side of the door. By then both she and TJ were worn out. She had joined TJ in crying with a headache pounding at her temples while TJ vacillated between whimpering and dozing off.
Still, she hadn’t been able to resist cracking the door open—wide enough for Tom to crawl across the floor and pull them both into his arms, stroking her head, shushing her and TJ as they struggled to breathe around their sobs.
“Remember when I told you about my father?” Tom asked.
She did. She had ached for him. For his young shock and terror. For how he’d felt frozen until he went to the academy where people told him how to feel. For how he didn't really feel alive until he got into a jet.
Tom had whispered this to her, in the dead of night—so deep in the hour of sleep that she hadn't known he was crying until she reached out in the dark to cup his cheek.
“I think you are the only person that I've ever told. Mav doesn’t know—or maybe he doesn't want to? I never know, but it’s never come up. It’s... you held me when I cried about it. I hadn't ever cried about it. I couldn’t. It's been so long and I...I know you think—”
She shuddered.
“I’ve never had home until I met you. You are bright and funny. Like sunshine all the time. I didn't know it could be like this. Ever. And he's…he’s…” Tom sighed, “a part of me so deep I hardly know what to do with it. But he’s out there where he’s meant to be, and I'm right here where I want to be.”
He looked at her very seriously. “If you want me to rip your bodice, I will.”
She hid her embarrassment. “Tom!”
He laughed. “I will.”
Till Death Us Do Part
Mav, in his fine fashion, went AWOL after the funeral. Reasonable enough, with the mission he was leading. He’d been out of their loop until Ice forced the issue with Bradley, so Sarah hadn’t much expected him to be at her front door with Penny in the coupe with the top down at the end of the driveway, waving before she drove off.
Mav looked sheepish—like the first time they met, both hands clasped in front of him like the boys when they were in trouble. Only he hadn’t ever really owed her anything. He and Ice had something she hadn’t quite ever understood as much as she tried—at best only drawing circles and lines where she could be with Ice like he had promised her that he would. Not knowing until the end when Ice was gone that Maverick wasn’t ever going to be able to steal what couldn’t be owned.
She gestured him inside, and they sat on the kitchen island, and she waited him out because she still didn’t know what he wanted, and he said,
“You know I asked him to leave you once?”
And the shock of it—a hellish line drawn in the sand. Her worst fear. The thing that would have cracked her wide open back then, laid in front of her to hold.
He smiled ruefully and said, “Ice told me that I was being stupid.”
At that she grinned back. “I bet.”
“He said that I was running away from something… that I was only ever running and he’d been lucky to love two people…” Mav shrugged. “I mean, I thought for a long time…that I should have said something more. I thought that he was just making do. Because I didn’t want to do the picket fence thing and he thought he had to or I thought that he thought—anyway.”
Mav shrugged again like that was an answer. An excuse.
“Is this you being generous?” Sarah asked. “Like, are these meant to be your condolences?”
He laughed.
She hadn't been joking.
He reached out to lay a hand on top of hers and leaned forward, eyes slowly closing, and she barked a laugh.
He grinned good naturedly—boyishly. She really could see the appeal.
“Ice told me that I might have missed my shot.”
She laughed deeply, “It’s not you, it’s just that—”
Mav rolled his eyes. “That’s what they all say.”
“No, no. It's not. It's just—that,” Sarah chuckled, “it’s just that twenty years ago it might have done.”
He smiled. “I’ve got time, yet. Penny says you love a Port.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “Oh jeez. I bet she told you what I like, alright.”