Team Prime, Part Four
CW: Two idiots in love; mutual pining; Bob is a unicorn of a man. Slight angst, but far less than earlier installments.
Word Count: 5227
Other pieces: This is part of a mini-series.
When the wedding weekend arrives, Bob finds himself so excited he can barely keep himself from acting like a fool. He’s a grown man, a lieutenant in the Navy. It wouldn’t behoove him for someone to catch him grinning like a fool or kicking his feet like an excitable child.
An entire long weekend with you, though. Of course he’s happy. Of course a hundred different scenarios are bouncing around his head, since weddings are so romantic by default. He gets to spend time with you, walk into the reception with you on his arm, dance with you—
You fly in with Hannah and Eric, and Bob is the one who picks you up and drives you to the rental near the venue. When he sees you in baggage claim, you seem unexpectedly collected.
“How were the flying jitters?” he asks you in the car, and he’s surprised by your laughter.
“Gone!” you exclaim, and you throw up your hands, make a “poof!” gesture as if you’re a magician making something disappear. “I haven’t been afraid to fly since…well, since we flew to Vegas, I guess.”
Bob arches a brow at you, smiles at your glee. “Side effect of the accident?”
He hears Hannah inhale sharply from the backseat, but you ignore her. You laugh again.
“Maybe. Maybe getting life-flighted cured me.” You pause, glance over and make eye contact with him. “Or maybe I understand flight now. You know…lift and thrust, yaw and roll…”
“You remember!”
Another laugh, and it makes his chest feel like it’s full of light to hear you so happy. “I kinda remembered the flight to Vegas, but when I got on the plane this morning, I remembered some of the stuff you told me after all.”
“You’d told me that flight was illogical. That humans weren’t meant to fly.”
“The wrong thing to tell a fighter pilot,” you chuckle, shaking your head.
“Oh, I’m just a back-seater,” he clarifies as he navigates onto the freeway. “I don’t even have a cool call sign.”
“What is it?”
“It’s, uh, Bob.”
“No, I mean, what’s your call sign?”
He winces. He’s never wanted a cool call sign so badly in his life. “My call sign is…Bob.”
His admission makes you erupt into fresh gales of laughter, and even if he’s the butt of the joke, it doesn’t feel mean-spirited, so he laughs too. It is ridiculous.
“Oh, it’s too good. Bob Floyd, also known as Bob.” Your laughter dies off, but then you reach out and poke him gently in his flushed cheek, and it’s so much like that day a year ago that he suddenly can’t speak for the tightness in his throat.
-----
The first evening, Thursday, everything goes perfectly. People are trickling in from all corners of the earth, so you and Bob have a long stretch of just the two of you. You’re in the AirBnB and he’s in a nearby hotel, but he comes over to your rental to help you fold programs over take-out.
“Team Prime, reunited,” he says, and you hold out your hand for a high-five.
Over Pad Thai and drunken noodles, the two of you catch up, though you text and talk on the phone so much, there isn’t much untrod ground. You hesitate, then ask him how he’s feeling.
“I’m great,” he replies, a little confused at your somber tone. “Why?”
“Well, you were engaged too. And now you’re…not.”
He smiles down at his noodles. “You think this wedding is going to stir up sad thoughts?”
“How could it not?”
He’s touched, as he always is, that you remember to be concerned for him. To check in with him. As the two of you eat, he tells you that he plans to only marry once, that marriage is for keeps with him. That if he had married Jessica, he’d probably be miserable already.
“And she probably would be miserable with me too,” he points out.
“Oh, who could be miserable with you? You’re the best,” you say, and your head is bent over your food so he can’t see your expression—and you can’t see his own expression of pleased surprise.
He thinks this might be a side effect of your injuries. You seem to have less guile now, less benign cunning to flirt or hide your feelings or hedge what you’re saying. You often blurt out the truth with him, he finds.
“You don’t have to worry about me anymore,” he tells you. “I’m good.”
-----
The next day is the rehearsal, and Bob is given a glimpse of your newfound anxiety.
He helps Eric run errands all day. He presses the wrinkles out of his dress uniform, gets a haircut, helps ferry guests to and from the hotel. He doesn’t get to see you until the rehearsal, and he can tell from your expression—the tight quality of your face, like you’re clenching your jaw—that you’ve had a rough day already.
He can guess that some of it is stress from the wedding, but the rest could be family related. As he stands with Eric for the ceremony run-through, he can see how your mother fusses with you. She keeps brushing your hair away from your face, keeps leaving her seat to whisper in your ear. You’ve alluded to the issues with her in your endless phone chats with Bob: how your parents have infantilized you since your accident. How Hannah stepped in and whisked you away to southern California so that you’d have a shot of independence.
The rehearsal reaches its end, and the bridal party practices its walk back down the aisle. Bob gets to link arms with you, and he reaches with his free hand to grasp your hand that’s lightly gripping his arm.
“How are you holding up?” he asks low near your ear. He can feel how you’re dragging your feet a bit, slightly unsteady even in your white sneakers.
“Tired,” is all you can manage at that moment.
“Want to skip the rehearsal dinner? Or we could get our meals to go. I could take you back to the rental and we could eat there…”
You glance at up at him. Your smile is lop-sided. “I think that’d create a minor scandal, the maid-of-honor and best man disappearing.”
“Not disappearing. Our whereabouts would be known.”
You hesitate to answer, and Bob can see that you want an out. You’re tempted to take him up on his offer, but you want to be a good sister too…
“I think I should probably stay. But thank you for looking out.”
Bob squeezes you hand. “Always.”
-----
The dinner goes well. Bob and Eric catch up, chat about Navy gossip, about deployments of mutual friends. Through it all, Bob smiles inwardly to see his friend so obviously happy. Eric and Hannah have been together for a long while, but the love has only grown deeper through the years.
Halfway through the meal, after Bob catches another indecipherable look from Hannah, he asks his friend what the deal is.
“She’s just protective of her sister,” Eric says.
“Protective of me?” He’s mildly offended; he’d never knowingly hurt anyone, and he’d certainly never hurt you of all people.
Eric looks at him askance. “No, dude. Protective of situations that could hurt her.” At Bob’s baffled expression, he adds, “she likes you a lot, but she thinks no one will want to date her now.”
“She likes me?”
His friend snorts. “Yeah, she liked you before too. She had it bad for you. It kinda crushed her when she found out you were engaged.”
“Wait, what?”
“Oh, yeah. You turned on that whole Bobby Floyd charm too much and she fell for you. I guess you being engaged didn’t come up until that weekend in Vegas.”
There’s a hundred other questions Bob could ask, but all of the missing puzzle pieces fall into place in sudden, startling clarity. Your sudden shift in mood in Vegas—after that night at the club when he told you about his engagement. When he went on and on about Jessica…
Your decision to skip the flight back to California with him. Your decision to rent that car and drive back. Your decision that put you on a literal collision course that nearly killed you.
What happened to you—it is his fault.
“Excuse me,” Bob manages to choke out, and he rushes out of the restaurant, makes it as far as the edge of the parking lot, then throws up from the sudden, awful realization.
-----
Hannah is the one who finds him.
He’s outside in the parking lot, sitting on a concrete curb. His elbows are on his knees, and his head is in his hands. The guilt is so sharp that it feels like he’s been flayed alive, and he almost misses the sound of heels clicking on the asphalt. He looks up in time to see your sister making her way to him, and she plops down beside him.
“You blaming yourself?” she asks without preamble. Bob nods miserably, feels another acid burp creeping up his throat.
“I blamed you too for a while,” she continues. She hooks her hands around her knees, draws them up to her chest. “When she was out of the coma but non-verbal, I just kept thinking, ‘why did she have to fall for you?’ Of all the people in the world, the two of you just clicked. Why not some other guy? Some guy that was available?”
“She skipped that flight to avoid me, didn’t she?”
Hannah nods. “Mostly. She thought driving back might clear her head.”
“If I’d known—”
“But you didn’t. And you were engaged, so it wasn’t on you. I stopped blaming you because of course it’s not really your fault.”
“Does she…” He trails off, struggles to get the words out. “Does she remember?”
“No, but we talked about it.”
“And she’s not mad?”
“At you?” Hannah barks out a peal of laughter, then elbows him sharply in his side. “Fuck, Bob, she could never be mad at you.”
“She should be.”
Her laughter dies off, and she sighs. They sit in silence for a long moment, and Bob sits with his guilt. You’re not mad at him, but you’ve always been kind. Gracious. You should blame him. You should be so angry that you write him off forever—
“I went to therapy, you know. When she was in the hospital and rehab. It helped a lot.” Hannah offers him a rare glimpse into her usually-staunch persona. She glances at him and shrugs. “It’s a cliché, but dwelling in the past does no one any good, but especially not her. She gets depressed that she has no future.”
“She’s doing so well, though.”
“Yeah, she is. But she focuses on where she struggles and ignores how far she’s come.”
Bob nods, and Hannah gazes at him for a long beat. She has that same inscrutable expression, but Bob understands it now.
“She doesn’t think she has a future,” she repeats. “So I guess I’m saying, if you care for her too, she’s not going to make it easy for you. If you’re not willing to fight for it, then you need to cut her loose gently before she gets too deep in it again. I will not see her hurt. Understand?”
He nods again, swallows despite his dry mouth. “Yes, ma’am,” he manages to croak out.
*****
The dinner is a disaster insofar as your mother will not stop babying you. You want to remind her that you graduated from college, that you have a master’s degree, that you held a good-paying job in Silicon Valley for years. That a single bad day in the desert surely didn’t erase all of that.
She tries to cut up your chicken piccata for you. She presses you to drink more water. She asks if you’ve taken your medicine for the day, if you’re getting a headache, if you need to go back to the rental to sleep.
She asks if you’re ready for the bridal party dance, if you’re ready to give your speech. She frets at the possibility of you embarrassing yourself, asks if maybe you should pass off the speech to someone else—
You stand up, sudden, and announce that you need some air.
Outside, you see a pair of people sitting together, and once you’re closer, you see that it’s Bob and your sister. They look deadly serious, and Bob looks pale and sweaty. You wonder if he is upset about his failed engagement, and though your instinct tells you to turn around and go inside, to leave them to their private moment, you find yourself walking over to them.
Hannah sees you first. “There she is,” she calls out in a sing-song, and Bob looks up too—though he can’t quite seem to meet your eyes.
“Everything alright?” you ask.
“Of course.” Hannah stands up, brushes off the seat of her skirt. “Escaping from mom?”
“Of course.”
“You wanna head back to the rental?” She turns and glances down at Bob. “I think Lieutenant Floyd could probably handle that.”
He finally looks at you, and his eyes are glassy. You swear he’s about to cry. Though he doesn’t, not right now. He swallows audibly, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and he says that yes, he can drive you home if you’re ready to leave.
-----
The ride is silent. Bob is silent, which normally isn’t an issue, but there’s tension in the car. The companionable silences the two of you typically have seems to be gone. His pallor hasn’t improved, and he has such a death grip on the steering wheel that his knuckles are white and shiny.
At the rental, he puts the car in park, then pauses before he kills the ignition. He climbs out of the car, and when he comes around to your side to open your door and help you out, you put a hand on his arm, tentative. To still him.
“What’s wrong?” you ask.
He shakes his head, and he pulls his arm from your gentle grip, but then he turns to face you. In the fading light, you can see how distraught he looks—his mouth a frown, his blue eyes swimming behind his thick lenses.
“How are you feeling?” he counters, ignoring your question and asking his own.
“Tired. Nervous.” You worry at your lower lip as you think about your mother’s fussing. “What if I mess up the speech? And hell, what if I mess up during the bridal party dance?”
He chuckles, and it makes his grim expression soften. “Do you remember in Vegas, we had a dance lesson? Trust me, we were the best dancers then, and I bet we’ll still be the best tomorrow.”
“Team Prime, huh?”
He holds out a hand for a high-five, but when you go to slap him, he captures your hand instead. Shifts his hold like he’s about to lead you out onto a dance floor, his warm palm gently gripping yours.
“We can practice the dance, if you want.”
“There’s no music.”
“Sure there is. Here.” He releases you, then pulls his phone out. He fiddles with it, and you hear the opening strains of the song Hannah and Eric picked for the bridal party’s dance. He turns the volume up, then sets the phone on the hood of his car.
“C’mere.” He holds a hand out, and you can’t resist skipping over to him, taking his hand. You settle your other hand on his shoulder, and your stomach does its usual fluttery flip-flop when he puts his free hand on your waist and draws you closer.
“See? You’re already doing better than before.” His soft voice is low, right by your ear. “You kept trying to lead. The instructor had to set you straight. You told me it was an affront to feminism that you had to follow me.”
You laugh. “I don’t remember that.”
“Hmm. Convenient.”
He leads you in an easy circle, slow and steady. More swaying than actual waltzing, but you think it probably looks okay. You stumble once or twice, you step on his foot…but being in his arms calms your anxiety, and you feel some of your angst about tomorrow melt away.
The song ends but then repeats, and Bob doesn’t release you. He keeps leading you in that easy circle in the driveway, and halfway through the second attempt, he clears his throat and glances down at you.
“I’m sorry about Vegas,” he says.
“It happened.” You shrug in his arms. “The more time passes, the less angry I am.”
“I’d probably be angry forever.”
“You? No, I don’t think so. You’re too good to wallow in bad feelings for long.”
He sighs, and that close, you can feel it fanning over you. “You give me more credit then I deserve, honey.”
Honey. Sometimes when the two of you talk on the phone, when he seems comfortable or tired enough for his faint midwestern drawl to surface, he calls you different pet names. Sweetheart. Honey. Every time, it makes you feel all light and airy, like you could float away.
“I give you exactly as much credit as you deserve,” you reply.
He grumbles good-naturedly but doesn’t respond. The song repeats a third time, then a fourth, and he doesn’t let you go once—he only turns you in lazy circles, keeps you tucked close to him.
*****
In the course of planning for his own wedding that never happened, Bob was told time and again by vendors, by friends and family—hired a good photographer, because the day flies by so fast, there’s no way to remember everything.
He finds that even when it isn’t his own wedding, the same applies.
The morning is a blur that he won’t remember in the days and weeks to follow. He runs last-minute errands for Eric. He showers, shaves. He dresses in his carefully-pressed dress uniform, and he wonders idly if you’re the type of woman who likes a man in uniform. Jessica told him once that the white Navy uniforms made him look like an ice cream truck driver.
His first real, tangible memory that he’ll revisit over and over? When he finally gets to see you again.
You don’t see him just yet. You walk in with your sisters, a bustle of female activity and chattering, but he zeros in on you: in your navy blue dress, your matching canvas sneakers. The single white flower pinned in your hair.
You’ve always been beautiful to him, before and after. You’re beautiful now, but there’s something insecure in your bearing—the way you walk so carefully, the way your shoulders are drawn up by your ears—that makes him want to run over to you, wrap his arm around you. He wants to protect you from world, keep anyone who might gawk at your scars or your unsteady gait far away from you.
He knows he loves you. He knows it to the marrow of his bones. He’s laid awake many nights, turning it over and over in his head. With Jessica, it hadn’t been certainty as much as habit: his girlfriend from middle school, they just fell into the habit of being together. He considers it a blessing that they realized their growing detachment when they did.
You, though? He knows it’s love. He’s certain. He knows that there’s challenges. You get headaches easily. You can’t drive yet. You have an overbearing mother who wants to protect you too. You have various therapies to help you regain what you’ve lost.
But the real challenge is what both Hannah and Eric said: you think your romantic life is over. You only see yourself as a broken thing, not someone worth loving.
If you’re not willing to fight, Hannah had warned him. People may look at him and see an unassuming man. With his thick-lensed glasses and baby-face, Bob Floyd puts no one in mind of a fighter…and yet, he’s exactly that.
He’s ready to fight you, for the sake of being with you.
-----
The ceremony flies by. Bob finds that he can’t quite tear his eyes from you. You make it down the aisle without tripping (he catches your visible sigh of relief once you’re by your sister’s side), and you manage your duties—taking your sister’s bouquet, straightening out her veil—with aplomb. It’s Bob who messes up, fumbles the rings, drops them with a clatter onto the small dais.
But then…then, after the couple are married and share their first kiss as husband and wife, Bob gets to offer you his arm and walk down the aisle with you. He gets an entire hour with you and the wedding party for all the photographs.
Hannah and Eric, subtle as bombs, make sure the photographer gets one of just you and Bob, and your sister drops him that cool gaze of hers that he now understands.
“You okay?” you ask as the two of you are posed by the photographer. Your voice has a teasing lilt to it. “I think the videographer caught the ring drop on camera.”
“Oh, that was intentional,” he jokes.
“Yeah?”
“I didn’t want you to be the only one worrying today. I also plan on tripping into the cake at the reception.”
You laugh, and you do your signature move—you poke him gently in the cheek. That’s the shot the photographer gets, the moment right after: neither of you looking at the camera, each of you looking at each other with obvious affection. It’s the photo that Bob will eventually save as his phone’s lock screen, once Eric sends it to him with the winking emoji.
It’s the photo he’ll look at when he’s on an aircraft carrier, months from now, about to carry out an extremely dangerous mission with an uncertain outcome. It will be a tangible reminder that he needs to survive, he needs to get home to you.
-----
At the reception, your speech goes better than you probably thought it would. You do stutter, a bit, but Bob doubts anyone really notices. He knows you do, though. When you finish and sit back down, he sees how you drop your head, how you bite your lip.
So he’s does what he planned to do. He starts his speech, then drops his small stack of index cards. He spends a long beat putting them back in order. He makes a joke, asks the assembled guests if they feel safe knowing his steady hands are on the weapons systems of billion dollar fighter jets, and it earns him a good laugh.
It also earns him grateful smile from you.
Then comes the dance. It feels so natural after last night. He took you through it five times, ostensibly to make you comfortable but as much for how it felt to hold you and dance with you without everyone watching.
“I know you dropped your index cards on purpose,” you murmur as he leads you across the dance floor. A beat, and you add, “thank you.”
“I don’t know what you mean, honey.”
You snort. “Oh, so Bob Floyd is a shameless liar now. You’re not the man I remember from before.”
“I thought you didn’t remember me from before. Sounds like you’re the shameless liar.”
You cluck your tongue in mock disappointment. “It’s such a happy day. Why are we fighting about who’s the bigger liar?”
“Is that what this is? Fighting?”
“Yup.”
He pulls you closer. “I think I like fighting with you.”
You don’t reply, but you tilt your head up to look at him, and your expression is so much like your sister’s—slightly narrowed eyes, studious, cool.
-----
He decided last night to talk to you at the reception. After dinner, after the speeches and first dances. After the cake-cutting when Hannah and Eric cut into it with his ceremonial saber (“Overkill,” you whisper to Bob, making him chuckle).
Once the lights dim and the dance floor fills, Bob finds you. He takes your hand and leads you outside, and it’s almost as if the universe is conspiring with him because the night is perfect. Balmy with a cool breeze, a perfect crescent moon hanging low in the sky. A million stars.
“Take a little walk with me?” he asks, and you nod.
He scouted the place out earlier. He leads you now to a small arbor with a bench under it, and the two of you sit. He turns to face you, and he takes your hand in his own.
“I had a whole speech in my head,” he starts, “but I’m drawing a blank now.”
“A speech about what?”
“I l-like you,” he stammers. “I liked you before. I shouldn’t have because I was unavailable, but I did. And then…well, you had your accident, and in the meanwhile, my engagement fell apart. And when you came back in my life and I was free to have feelings for you, I…I fell for you.”
“Oh. Oh, Bob, I don’t—”
“Let me finish. Please.” He squeezes you hand. You look stunned, but you finally nod for him to continue.
“Maybe you don’t believe me, and that’s okay. I just want a chance to prove it to you. How I feel. I’m not…I’m not great at this stuff, but I know how I feel about you. I fell for you. I’m in l-love with you, honey. And I just want a chance. That’s all I’m asking for.”
She’s not going to make it easy for you, Hannah told him, and she was half-right. You do fight him here—you shake your head, you start to list out reasons why you can’t be with him—but Bob finds that it’s an easy victory in the end. You don’t put up that much of a fight.
“Make a list,” he cuts in gently. “Make a list of all the reasons why we can’t be together, and we’ll work through them together.”
That earns him a smile. “A list?”
“I’m a WSO in the Navy,” he points out reasonably. “I’m used to tackling problems logically.”
“So I’m a problem?”
He moves closer to you and loops an arm around your shoulders. He pulls you against him, and he chances a near-kiss, his cheek pressed against your hair.
“No, you’re a menace, but I love you all the same.”
The words just slip out, unintentional. His heart is thudding so loud in his chest that he almost misses it entirely—your shaky exhale, and your own mournfully whispered “I love you too.”
*****
With Hannah and Eric on their way to their honeymoon, the brunch the next morning is a sedate affair. Most of the bridal party is hungover and half skip it altogether. Your parents, blessedly, left early to beat the traffic. You’d hate for your mom to be hovering as you present your list to Bob.
The man himself settles right beside you at brunch, and you get the same butterflies you always do. He hardly seems real. He’s too kind, too perfect. You know he’s not naturally extroverted, yet he made himself the butt of the joke at the reception to take the attention off of you. Before that, practicing the dance the night before. And before that, just him, being perfectly, wonderfully Bob.
You want nothing more than to say yes. To be with him. To even try. You love him too, yet isn’t it the truest sort of love to set someone free?
“You have your list?” he asks once the waitress brings your drinks. “Let me see it.”
You stayed up most of the night to list out every conceivable reason why you can’t be with him, yet when you hand over the piece of paper, Bob only nods and reads it over as he sips at his coffee.
He doesn’t call you ridiculous. He only addresses it point by point.
“Number one. Therapy.” He glances at you. “That’s vague.”
“I have multiple therapists. A lot of appointments.”
“So?”
“So…people feel a certain way about therapy sometimes. They judge.”
“I don’t.” He reaches into his breast pocket, pulls out a pen, strikes a line through number one. “Okay, number two…”
Back and forth. He reads through your list and shoots down every reason as you eat your eggs and he eats his waffles. He teases you gently, but he never makes you feel bad about it.
“Okay, so number twelve. Children.” That earns you an arched brow, and his cheeks tinge with pink. “Eager to get me into bed?”
You own face burns in embarrassment. Of course you’ve entertained the idle (and not so idle) thought of what it’d be like to sleep with Bob, but you can’t admit that over brunch.
“We should follow out the natural progression of relationships. Marriage, kids. There’s a very real chance I can’t have kids. Any pregnancy would be high-risk, and I—”
“So follow out the progression. We get married, we don’t have kids. Or we adopt or foster. Or we become that couple in the neighbor who adopts old dogs to give them a good life in their elderly years.”
Your hands tremble at how easy he makes it sound. How easy it could be. Thing is, you can picture it: you and Bob married, childless, but happy. Maybe with a house of old dogs as he said, the house full of dog beds and old shelter dogs with white faces lazing in the sun, the two of you taking slow walks with them, enjoying the evenings together…
You set your fork down and fold your hands in your lap. “You’re being glib.”
“I promise I’m not.” He looks at you in earnest, his blue eyes wide. “There’s nothing on this list that’s scaring me away. Like…” He glances down, revisits number four. “Unsteady hands. You really think your struggles with threading a zipper is that big of a deal-breaker?”
You sigh and turn to face him more directly. “Bob, you’re career military. I know what that means, okay? Follow the progression. Military wives…there’s a lot of pressure there. I wouldn’t be able to support you the way you’d need.”
He chuckles, shakes his head. “What do you think you’ve been doing for the past few months? When you talk to me on the phone every night and cheer me up after a rough day? That’s support, honey. That’s all I need.”
You stare back at him, half-mesmerized by his gaze. His eyes are so wide behind his thick lenses, he looks comically bug-eyed. It’s hard enough to not smile, but then he starts nodding at you encouragingly, obviously trying to sway you.
“Say yes,” he pleads quietly. “Say yes. We can take is as slow as you want. But just say yes.”
How can you resist him? You can’t, so you decide not to even try. You fell for him before, and you lost your memories but fell for him again. You’ve never believed in fate or destiny or soulmates, but that has to mean something—falling for the same man twice, in two separate, very different epochs of your life.
“Okay.” You nod back, mimicking him. “Okay. Yes.”
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