The commander had spoken.
No wonder Shelby was pulling her hair out to get her father's attention. Just leave? Julia wanted to scream. How like a man to think this was only about sex, Zach and John both, when nothing had been solved. She knew too well sex only complicated life all the more.
Shelby yanked on her jeans, muttering as if already planning her next great escape. She grabbed a brush off the bathroom counter and yanked it through her tangled hair with brutal swipes.
No way were they leaving until Zach and Shelby battled this out once and for all. Julia shut the door and plunked down in a chair.
He frowned. "Julia?"
She ignored his question and plowed ahead. "Shelby, what's really going on here?"
Shelby hurled her brush into the sink. "John and I were running away to get married."
"Like hell." Zach moved in front of the door, boots braced apart, the officer standing sentinel.
Why couldn't they see past what the other said to the real meaning? "You had to know we'd find you before then."
Shelby charged across the room and pitched a half-eaten pizza in the trash. "At least I'd get a few hours away. Then maybe he—" she paused in the midst of shoving the leftover six-pack of sodas into her suitcase to shoot a glare at her father, "—would understand that John and I are in love."
Zach's low snort sparked defiance in Shelby's eyes. She shot an exasperated eye-roll Julia's way. "See what I have to put up with?" She flung a handful of T-shirts on top of the sodas. "John's the only one who understands."
Julia leaned forward, hoping to defuse the tension by enticing them all to relax their toe-to-toe battle stances. "Understands what, Shelby?"
"What it's like living in a gypsy caravan on high speed. Pulling into some Podunk town just long enough to make friends you'll miss forever when you have to haul ass to another hole in the wall for your father's I-Must-Save-the-Planet freaking job."
Shelby stopped in front of her father, fists jammed on her hips. "Most of all, I hate living with everybody always watching me."
Julia nudged Zach's boot with her foot. Twice.
Finally, he uncrossed his arms, working the back of his neck with his hand. "That's what parents are supposed to do. Watch their kids."
Shelby's shoulders raised and lowered with a beleaguered sigh, which carried some weight for once when coupled with her trembling jaw.
Her frenzied ranting tempered to restless pacing. "I don't mean all that parent garbage."
She flicked the trailing edge of the spread up onto the bed. "I mean everybody. I can't go anywhere without people knowing who I am, watching everything I do and telling you about it. Being a military brat is like living in some kind of fishbowl." She waved a hand to encompass her father's flight suit. "Except everybody wears green."
Zach stepped closer, head dipping as he listened. "Go on."
Knee bumping the bed, Shelby picked at the polyester spread, flicking aside one fuzzy pill at a time, an endless task on the cheap coverlet. "I don't get a say in anything. Ever.
Nothing stays the same. You're already making plans to haul us all to another state this summer. Just when I get to liking it somewhere, we move. You change jobs. You change wives."
Julia kept her eyes fixed on Shelby. The weight of Zach's insistence that they give the marriage a try whittled away at her already shaky and weary resistance.
Shelby tugged at the hem of her jersey. "It's like I don't count. John understands." She angled a wobbly smile his way. "I mean, geez, it's even worse for him. He's a military brat and a preacher's kid."
Julia waited and wondered if Zach would pull it together. She willed him to be the father she knew he could be.
Slowly, he closed the distance between himself and his daughter, absently circling his wedding band round and round. "Your mother and I started seeing each other when we weren't much older than you two."
"Oh, great." Sarcasm dripped from Shelby's words like water condensing on the ice bucket. Flopping on the edge of the bed, she swept up a pillow and clutched it to her stomach. "Thanks for the big, fat endorsement, Colonel."
"Remember what Julia said, Shel. Everyone gets a turn. So hush up and listen to mine for a minute." Zach pulled the pillow from her and tossed it aside. "You think you're the only teenager to pull a tough road? Your mother had to deal with bringing up four younger brothers and sisters while her mom supported them."
His jaw tensed, and Julia could almost see him working to draw the words from inside himself.
"By the time I was fifteen, I'd moved twice as much as you have now. We followed my father from rig to rig because that's how he put food on the table. Then my mother died."