Letting My Brother's Best Friend Take My V-Card (Jessie and Luke)

I blinked, sitting up. "What's going on? I just woke up."

She flinched, pushing open the curtains to let in the bright morning light, and sat on the bed. "How's baby this morning?" She asked and I smiled down at my belly. "Growing like a gremlin." She nodded and took my hand, a tear falling down her cheek.

I prepared myself for the worst...

"There's news. Honey - they found a part of the aircraft. Some

268 Vouchers

cargo ship en route to Australia found it."

"What do you mean?" My stomach dropped as the words settled in, each one like a cold weight.

"They searched that area, and well - they are flying the bodies to the States, and they need us to - we need to identify them." She swallowed, holding herself together but barely.

A whirl of emotions swirled through me, but I could barely feel them. It was like my body was working overtime, just trying to process this information and make sense of what I was supposed to do next.

"Are they sure?" My voice was a tremor of disbelief.

Laura shook her head. "I don't know. They haven't told me much. Just that we need to talk to someone in person, and they're asking for us to come as soon as possible:"

I sat up, blinking a few times to escape the fog. "Australia? They weren't anywhere close to Australia..." I mumbled more to myself than anything else.

A small part of me - the selfish part didn't want to go. I wanted to call my other and ask her if she could go or let Luke's parents identify... identify...

But that's not how the world works, is it? I don't get to outrun this because it's catching up with me anyway.

I sighed - fully aware that I must return to my life anyway. Paris

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has been wonderful. The lights, the city, the people - but these people, especially Marcelo, have learned to live with their grief. Even Laura has more light by the day in her, but I still feel like this gaping black hole sucks the light from everything around

1. me.

I swallowed down the knot in my throat and wiped the tears on my cheeks. "Alright I guess we have no other options, right? This is closer -

we need closure." I mutter and pull Laura into a hug. The little light in her that started to shine was now dying again, and if we find our boys back home... I don't know if her light will ever shine again.

Even if we didn't admit it out loud to each other, I knew she was clinging to the granule of hope that they could have survived and had been drifting on a life raft somewhere or stuck on some island. But this wasn't a movie, and those things rarely happen.