“Calm down, copilot. We’re in the clear.” He tightened a harness around my chest. “Do you trust me?”
I relaxed as he ran his palms up and down my thighs. “Of course.”
“It’s gonna be great.” He beamed, leaning forward to place a reassuring kiss on my lips. “And remember, what goes up must come down.”
“Fuck off,” I groaned.
Frankie buckled himself in beside me and started flipping switches. It’d been months since he started flying again. Training at the base had begun almost immediately after he was hired at the end of January. I watched his first flight from the sidelines with a rock in my stomach and he nailed every single spec like we all knew he would.
It was amazing to see that shine of confidence back in his eyes, his reinvigorated love for his career and the talent that had been shrouded in shadow rise to the surface again. I was so proud of him and the progress we were making, both apart and together. Still learning new things about ourselves and our relationship every single day.
Bringing home a complete stranger after a few weeks away was an…adjustment for my family, to say the least. Dad was skeptical picking us up from the airport. It was a long, interesting ride, but he softened easily to Frankie’s mature station and infectious personality. They got along like best friends in no time, my brothers clung to him like a hero, and my sisters batted their lashes and had him in the palm of their hands.
My mom knew right away that Frankie was my person. She told me she could see it in the way we found one another in every crowded room. He put me first, and continued to, and we fell further and further into the deep cushion of life mixed with love until they became the same word. There wasn’t one without the other. There wasn't me without him.
“You ready, baby?” Frankie’s voice crackled to life in my ears through the helmet.
“Shouldn’t you close the doors?” I looked to my side at the wide-open edge of the helicopter.
His modulated laughter rang out as the first tip and lift of the chopper took us off the ground slowly. “Frankie.” We rose rapidly, leaving a plume of dust below us, the wind swirling the branches and leaves in the trees off the tarmac. “Francesco.”
“Don’t threaten me with my government name like that. You know how it turns me on.”
He took us over the city and circled the mountains. The sun setting and kissing the peaks so perfectly all the snow reflected into kaleidoscope-like bursts. A sea of purple sky and the seam of night collided at our altitude. It was the single most amazing thing I’d ever seen.
I’d lived in Colorado all my life and never experienced it like this. Like we were sitting on the pinnacle of heaven and earth.
“Holy shit,” I gasped. “This is beautiful.”
Frankie’s lips curved into a pleased, radiant smile. “Pretty incredible, right?”
“You bring all your girlfriends up here?”
“I’d never bring a girlfriend up here,” he said. “This is wife territory.”
My gut panged and my neck snapped toward him. If not for being strapped to a chair my knees would have probably gone soft underneath me as well. “Wife, huh?”
Those tantalizing muscles in his jaw twitched and he nodded toward a zippered compartment in front of me. “Mind opening that?”
I looked from the bag and back to him frantically. “Are you proposing to me right now, Frankie Casado?”
“Just open it, Trouble. Let me have this. C’mon.”
“I can’t.” My heart was in my throat, adrenaline buzzing through me.
“Then I guess I’ll just have to take my hands off this control and go digging myself.”
“Don’t you fucking dare.” I shot forward, fumbling with the zipper and opening the bag to reveal a little black velvet box sitting inside. My stomach knotted into a ball, and tears sprang freely into my eyes.
“Because you asked.” Frankie looked over. “Yes, Ophelia. I am asking you, the love of my life, the turbulence to my calm, the brightest fucking sun I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing in all my time in the sky—will you drive me crazy forever, baby? Will you marry me?”
My life was a series of downward slopes, plateaus, tiny upticks of brightness in a mostly underwhelming gray. Then I met him. He wrapped me in gold and pulled me to the highest peak he could find, and I would be damned if I ever spent another day denying myself what it felt like to truly touch the sky.
“Yes.”
THE END.