The Secret of Flying Read online

  The Secret of Flying

  E. L. Phillips

  Published: 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-62210-442-0

  Published by Liquid Silver Publishing. Copyright © 2017, E. L. Phillips.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

  Manufactured in the USA

  Email [email protected] with questions, or inquiries about Liquid Silver Books, Liquid Silver Publishing, or Ten West Publishing.

  Blurb

  From the moment Henry Sparrow sees Magnus Sørensen—his roommate Jenna’s father—at the airport, newly arrived for his daughter’s imminent wedding, sparks fly. A long drive to Magnus’ hotel and some tentative flirting turns into a sudden and deeply passionate encounter in Magnus’ suite, one that both parties agree should never, for Jenna’s sake and their own, happen again. But that’s easier said than done when destiny—and Jenna—seems to have a way of throwing them together, until their desire and need reaches a point they can no longer ignore.

  Having given in to what seems like the demands of fate, Henry and Magnus plan to slowly explore their burgeoning relationship without Jenna finding out, in the hopes of discovering if what’s between them is even worth telling the woman they both love. But interference from Henry’s calculating mentor, Professor Rodgers Remmick, an old friend and rival of Magnus’, may throw a disastrous monkey wrench in their plan and their relationship.

  In the end, Henry Sparrow will have to rediscover his own once-clipped wings and somehow—some way—learn to fly…even when the life he’s so carefully constructed begins to crash around him.

  Dedication

  For Alice, again: You represent all things both good and Danish, and I love you very much.

  For stitch, and their never-ending support, grace, humor, cheer, and love. You’re one of the best humans in the world.

  For The Overbun: You are the undisputed Master of Synopsis-Fu and Prologue-Do, and my dear and beloved leader.

  For Marcela, again: You set an amazing example to me, as a writer, editor, and human being. I’ve learned so much from you that I can never repay, except by trying to live up to your amazing and positive example.

  For Lacey: Without you, the prologue of this story wouldn’t exist and the beginning would be beyond sucky.

  For Mitzy: Thank you for being prologue beta-extraordinaire, with regards to detail and content.

  For Thomas, again: You not only are an awesome cheerleader, but you literally saved my life. If not for you, I’d be spinning on that Great Underground Rotisserie before my time.

  For my mother, again: Thank you for listening to me ramble about a completely different novel I’m also writing. Then I went and wrote this one, and told you nothing about it because I’m just that awesome. Thank you for awesome birthday cards and desserts, unconditional love, and space in which to be who and what I am.

  For Professor Carr, again: Your perfect embodiment of everything a professor should be helped me to create a character who was everything a professor should not be, just by contrast. Also, thanks for lighting a fire under me, yet again, and being directly responsible for me daring to get a fourth novel published.

  For the Hudson Valley Writers’ Group: We only meet once a month, but I’ve learned so much from both your advice and your examples. This novel wouldn’t exist without your gentle, humorous suggestions on all the pieces I’ve workshopped with you through the years. You prepared me for not only writing The Secret of Flying, but taking it on the chin for any plot holes and screw-ups that needed fixing. Special thanks to Linda, Giles, Ian, and to you, too, New Guy—I mean Ryan.

  To The Writer’s Block: Every last one of you. You guys helped me conceive this baby and were there for its calamitous childhood, awkward adolescence, terrible teens, and tentative adulthood. Every step, every moment, every word. Cheers, my friends.

  To my patient, dedicated, and superhuman editor, Andrea Blundell: This novel is better and stronger because of you. Thank you for putting up with my angst and for your amazing work.

  And last, but never least, for Julia: Thank you for reading this damn thing and still suggesting it could be a novel. I guess you were right.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to everyone who read the original version of this story—you know what it was and you know whom you are—and gave honest, detailed, and incredible feedback and constructive criticism…as well as unfailing encouragement. You all rock.

  Prologue

  THE Price of Flight

  “Flying might not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.”

  ―Amelia Earhart, The Fun of It

  Fifteen Years Ago

  “…so, I’ll have to find someone to cover for me, Leda. It’s the only way,” David Smith concluded wearily, one hand on the steering wheel, the other wrapped around his third cup of coffee in as many hours. “I’m not gonna put you and Enrique on a bus all the way to Yellow Sand, to stay there by yourselves at the hospital for almost two weeks, before having to come back on a bus with a seven-year-old who’ll just have had corneal transplants and will probably still be in pain!”

  “Oh, really, David,” Leda Greco-Smith dismissed, laughing, as her husband frowned out at the night-dark road. That road seemed to simply appear a few yards beyond the headlights of their ancient jeep as they sped down the highway between Yellow Sand and Santa Fe. “It’ll be fine. It’s not like we’ll be sleeping in the hospital linen closet! Everything’ll be fine. Absolutely fine. Right, ‘Rique?”

  Enrique Albert Smith grinned, displaying more gaps than teeth, distracted for a moment from the miniature fighter plane that’d come with his Argle-Bargle Burger mini-meal—plastic, almost featureless, and a cartoonish green and pink, but ready, nonetheless, to conquer the skies.

  “Right!” he agreed brightly, then continued to fly his airplane above his head and his car-seat, making engine noises. His mother laughed again, watching him with warm affection, smiling her pretty, rosy-cheeked smile. Even in the night-dark car, she, like everything in Enrique’s sensitive vision, had a noticeable halo…like she was an angel. His earliest memory of her was of a bright smile and dark eyes, indistinct, blurred features, and that yellow-gold halo. “Doctor’s gonna fix my eyes!”

  In the rearview mirror, the area bracketing his father’s tired, worried eyes crinkled in a way that meant he was smiling. “Is that so, string bean?”

  “Uh-huh,” Enrique confirmed without a shred of doubt or worry. Though he was only seven (and a half), Enrique was already more than smart enough to know that this time, when the doctors in Yellow Sand fixed his eyes, they’d finally be just like everyone else’s.

  Enrique still occasionally struggled just to pronounce the name of the eye-disease—keh-ruh-toe-COE-nuss—which he’d suffered from since he was a baby. But that didn’t matter, anymore. It was to be corrected, at last. And he would, at last, be able to go to regular school like the neighbor kids, play outside with them in the daylight, and not be trapped in his house—sometimes for days with headaches that got so bad he couldn’t keep any food down and even had to go to the emergency room or see the brain doctor. And, maybe, he could even—

  A sudden flash of light from outside the windshield caught his eyes, causing him to wince as that light shot through
his pupils like an arrow to his brain. Sharp, instant agony made him whine and hurriedly cover his face with his tiny, sticky hands. The small, brightly-colored plane fell to the floor somewhere just before he shielded his light-sensitive eyes.

  Enrique’s parents had already turned away from him—his father’s eyes shifting from the rearview mirror to the road, his mother’s head just starting to whip forward—more annoyed than alarmed. Then, all was dark, created by Enrique’s small, ketchup-smelling hands…darkness that was almost immediately pierced by bright white lights so intense, they shone through both hands and eyelids.

  Tires squealed—like that time his father had jammed on the brakes to avoid hitting the Hidalgos’ stupid poodle, Jojo, which had wandered into the middle of the street—and a sudden lurch rocked not just Enrique, but the entire car. A moment after that, something struck the car, head-on. Enrique was slammed forward in the booster seat, his tiny body held by the straps. Glass shattered, followed by a metallic, screaming-crumpling sound, and the car slid backwards …pushed, spinning and…and falling. He had no more control over his limbs than a rag-doll. His mother’s frightened screams filled the car. “David? DAVID!”

  The straps of the booster seat bit into Enrique painfully and for an eternity, burning like hellfire…until there was another impact that drove him forward again, and the straps, or perhaps the buckles, gave suddenly…

  And he was falling out of his booster seat—no, he was launched out of it. He was airborne…

  Enrique Smith was flying and flying. This, at last, was the secret of flight—it started out as falling and fear and pain, and ended with freedom and weightlessness and a strange, confused joy…until he wasn’t, anymore. Until he crash-landed on his right side in a dry, sandy place, overgrown with scrub and home to several startled lizards.

  Landing hurt. The only upside was that consciousness, and thus the agony, was snuffed out like a candle in a tornado.

  By the time it dared—inexplicably, miraculously—to return, his broken arm and ribs, and his punctured spleen and fractured skull were mostly healed. The boy who shouldn’t have lived, let alone woken up, was both alive and awake. And…his mother and father were long buried…long dead.

  Chapter 1

  FAST Times in Yellow Sand, N.M.

  “The secret of flight is this—you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.”

  —Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World

  Present Day

  After watching his best friends be utterly absorbed by each other for, like, ever—to the point that even he, their soon-to-be best man, felt like he was intruding, though he’d long since thought himself inured to their…eye-fucking or soul-gazing, or whatever it was they did when they gazed into each other’s eyes like that—Henry Albert Sparrow made a rude noise. Incidentally, while making said noise, he spat out crumbs from his mouthful of cookie, covered his mouth, and then said, “Oh, c’mon, you two! I’m tryin’ to eat my freakin’ madeleines!” He shook the small packet of cookies meaningfully.

  No response. Unless one considered completely ignoring Henry a valid response.

  Henry sure didn’t.

  So, he turned his scowl to damn near anything else in their apartment to distract from the grossness of his best friends being all heart-eyes, motherfucker. He gazed longingly at the forty-two-inch television, which was bolted to the wall perpendicular to the sofa, loveseat, and coffee table. Below it was the tall, faux-rustic, oak armoire that held the components of their entertainment and gaming systems, as well as their movie and music collections.

  Neither television nor stereo were in use, however, because Frick and Frack on the loveseat didn’t need even background noise when they were together.

  Just each other’s love.

  His scowl turning into a dark glare behind his prescription shades—a staple of his life in the fourteen years since a corneal transplant when he was eight—Henry’s gaze swung from the television, past the doofs in the loveseat, to the bank of large windows directly opposite the entertainment center. Wide and equipped with wooden shutters that almost exactly matched the armoire, only the ones for the center window were open, since the sun had long since set and indoor lights had been turned on.

  There wasn’t anything to be seen outside except the rest of the complex, even on a moonlit night. And said complex didn’t even have a pool to make it a little more interesting.

  Halfway between the loveseat and the window was the arched entryway that led to the hall. Directly across that hall was the kitchen, which was currently dark, as Henry hadn’t felt like making dinner and they’d ordered a pizza from Biondi’s, so no one had to go pick anything up.

  But then, Henry had wound up going out, anyway. If only to get a break from his lovebird besties. Of course, considering that more of the same had been awaiting his return, going out had been, at best, a mere stop-gap measure.

  After once more watching those best friends stare deeply, intently into each other’s eyes without speaking for, like, ever, plus five minutes, Henry had had quite enough, please and thank you, and he was obliged to say something scathing about it. Once he finished his current cookie, that was.

  “You two are the grossest pair of douche-canoes in New Mexico. And that’s saying something,” he added after a pause to push his shades down his nose a bit. Even the dim lighting of the living room was like sudden daylight to Henry’s sensitive eyes. Blinking away slight tearing, he gave his friends the stink-eye and then sipped his extra-fat, extra-caf, whip-topped mochachino. He was a connoisseur of chocolate in all its many splendid forms. “Definitely puts you in the running for grossest douche-canoes on Earth.”

  “Shut up, Henry,” they both said at the same time, her in a light, sweet, lilting alto and him in a burring, grave baritone. Henry rolled his eyes, noting that they hadn’t stopped staring into each other’s to give their rude, absent replies.

  “Aaaaaaaaand now, you’re doing the identical-twins-speaking-at-the-same-time-thing, again. Can I just say ew? Mostly because the twin-thing is uber-creepy considering all the sex I hear you guys having in the bedroom right across from mine.” Snorting, Henry crunched on another madeleine, angry-chewing the poor, defenseless confection with real asperity. “Seriously, I can’t wait ’til you two’re married and back from your honeymoon in a few weeks. After the honeymoon, married people never bone. Or so I’ve been told.”

  Without looking away from his fiancée, Caspian balled up a napkin—which Henry had been selfless enough to go get, along with the beverages and assorted, dessert-type munchables, since his bestest friend, Jenna, was too busy being a douche-canoe with her douche-canoe fiancé—and shied it at Henry’s head like a small stone at a complaining crow. Henry tried to dodge it, but still got hit dead-center on the forehead.

  “Fuck, how the hell do you do that, Cas? I freakin’ ducked!”

  Henry was, indeed, complaining, as he had frequently since meeting his roommate and best friend’s ex-military boyfriend. His habitually shapeless, loose clothes hid a body that was all coiled, ready, SEAL-muscle. He could and had benched Henry—who, though he’d put on some inches and pounds since his final growth spurt, was still an unimpressive five feet ten inches tall and one hundred fifty-eight pounds, soaking wet—more than once when the pair of them had gotten into good-natured wrestling matches after evenings spent getting piss-drunk off Caspian’s expensive rum.

  And yet, even now, all Henry knew about Lieutenant Caspian D. Castillo’s past was that the man had been a Navy SEAL for over ten years before retiring and moving to Yellow Sand, New Mexico, eighteen months ago. He’d barely been in town three months before he’d met a pre-law student named Jenna Sørensen, who’d been fresh out of jail for disorderly conduct during a protest march.

  “Let’s just say a good aim and steady arm are parts of my skill-set, and leave it at that, eh, Hank?” Caspian suggested in his smoky, low voice and faint Spani
sh accent. Henry rolled his eyes.

  “I wish I didn’t know you guys.” He sighed.

  Caspian merely smirked. At his side, Jenna—who was Caspian’s physical opposite in every regard, small and curvy to his almost gangling leanness, fair and auburn-haired to his olive complexion and dark-brown hair—gave Henry a brief, but eerily similar smirk.

  Henry—himself, a man of average, non-threatening build and looks—sneered right back, knowing it looked lame on his boring, boyish face. But despite the sneering, he was, not so deep down, in awe of the speed and depth of the bond that’d formed between the mutually fiery and rather hard-headed couple. Especially considering that, if anything, Caspian was even more fiery and emotional than Jenna by a country-mile, but Jenna was by far more hardheaded and bloody-minded—the Irish in her, she liked to claim, while thickening her barely-there lilt.

  Yet when the pair were together, though it wasn’t easily spotted by others, they had this strange way of opening-up like flowers toward the sun the other represented. And that opening-up created a hermetic bubble around them that no one else was able to inhabit, or even penetrate, so to speak.

  Henry both marveled at it and resented it.

  To his way of thinking, that sort of exclusionary affection was just plain jerkish in mixed company. He, himself, would never be that involved with someone, to the point that others felt uncomfortable, intrusive, and left out in the presence of he and his paramour.

  Not that Henry currently had a paramour. Or had ever really had one.

  At the ripe old age of twenty-two and a half, Henry Albert Sparrow—who’d focused all his energy, personal and professional, on studying engineering, specifically to design navigation systems for various aerospace technologies—had barely dated, let alone had a relationship. And having only, at the late age of nineteen, grown out of the scrawniness and shortness that’d plagued him during his teen years, he wasn’t used to thinking of himself as particularly attractive to others. Not in a sexy way, at least. His foxlike features and smooth, burnished-copper complexion weren’t homely. But he’d never be mysterious and sexy the way Caspian was.