He shrugged his shoulders. “Again, is that a problem?”

“Keith, how can you-”

The tune of Come Fly With Me rang in my purse.

My cell phone. I smiled when I heard it and saw the ID for MAstar, the nonprofit medevac company Bruce worked for. And just in time to prevent me from an irreversible setback in my so-called friendship with Keith.

“We’ll talk later,” Keith said, turning on his heels, clearly too important a man to be standing around waiting for me to take a call.

“And a good day to you, too,” I said to Keith’s back, but not loud enough for him to hear me.

“Huh?” Bruce, who did hear me, asked.

“Not you,” I said.

“Come on out and visit me,” Bruce said.

How tempting. Not just to see my guy, but because the temperature at the airfield was always about fifteen degrees cooler than in town.

“I’m outside the dean’s office.” I whispered, though I was sure no sound penetrated the thick door between me and my superior.

“Uh-oh.”

“You said it.”

“Any idea what she wants this time?”

“Not a clue, but Keith just walked out of the office.”

“Uh-oh squared.”

“I love when you talk math.” I looked at the big clock. “Up from your nap?”

“Starting to think about dinner,” he said.

Bruce kept a pretty predictable routine on the days he worked. He’d have an early dinner, relax for a while, and then go into work for his twelve-hour shift as an EMS helicopter pilot. “Officially, it means Emergency Medical Services,” he’d say. “Unofficially, it means Earn Money Sleeping.” It was Bruce’s way of trying to convince me that his job of touching down at crash scenes amid telephone poles and power lines wasn’t as dangerous as it sounded, simply because he could sleep or watch movies between heart-pounding incidents.

I started when the dean’s office door opened. I clicked the phone shut with a soft, hasty, “Gotta go. Love you,” to Bruce.