Chapter 3
Chapter Three
“ Y ou okay, buddy?”
“Fuck no, but I’m here. Hey, Brick.” Lance found the back of the chair and eased himself around and down, swallowing hard as he fought the urge to wince, his thigh screaming.
“That was a close call, but from where I sat, you and Abby did amazing.”
“Thanks.” He hated being praised for being barely functional. Lance was damn frustrated with how long it had taken him and Abby to even be in tune enough to go out in public, let alone cross the street without being hit…
“Yeah. I ordered us coffees and ham and cheese croissants; that work?”
He nodded. Sandwiches were easier than a lot of things. Soup, for instance. Pasta was damn near impossible in polite company. He felt like a toddler just learning to eat ‘spasketti’ every time he tried to have anything that wasn’t penne. At least that stuck to the fork.
Sandwiches he could pick up.
“Sounds great. ”
“Yeah. I thought so. I remember how pissed off it used to make me, when I was learning to use my new arm. I was a walking time bomb.” Brick snorted.
“You were?” That was a surprise. Brick really seemed to have his shit together, and he could organize stuff within an inch of his life.
“Oh, Jesus. I was trying to pick out a birthday card for my mom at the HEB, ripped two, and ended up losing my shit and destroying the entire display.”
“Shit.” Lance chuckled, letting himself relax in the chair. He didn’t even care if it was true—although he believed it. There was a reason they were friends after all. “I can kinda imagine that. Brick smash.”
“Yep. The cards fluttered everywhere, the cops came, and my momma ended up paying the store to not press charges.”
“Oh man. That bites. I’m sorry. I just disappeared into small-town Texas.” He didn’t ever want to see anyone—ha! see!—who he knew, not like this.
He wanted his disability check and to function without embarrassing himself.
“It’s kind of nuts, huh?” Brick chuckled, the sound warm and amused. “But whatever gets us through the day.”
“And now you’re a den mother to assholes in crisis.”
Of which he counted as one of three other soldiers who lived in a simple, comfortable ranch house, retrofitted to be accessible and a way to get ready to re-enter society.
He was so fucked.
Brick snorted softly. “DMAC? I like it. Although that’s Dan, not me. I’m totally going to get that asshole a sign.”
“You should. Make sure it has a Braille thing at the bottom.” Though really, thank God for audiobooks while he learned.
“You’ve got it. Here comes the food.”
Please God, don’t let me make a mess. Please .
“Remember. Breathe. If you do something you think is weird, just reset. It’s not the end of the world. And most people are not as into watching us as we think they are.”
“Right. I mean, you have a hook for a hand, right Stumpy?”
“You wish! I’m wearing the fancy flesh-colored arm today. I look like heaven.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He was glad, some days, most days, he couldn’t see much of his own face. Every so often he caught a glimpse in the mirror in his peripheral vision, and he just wished he hadn’t.
Some things nobody needed to see. Nobody at all. He rubbed his cheek, the scars talking to his fingers.
“Just focus on the food, man. On being out and having a good day.”
“Yeah.” He saw the shadow as someone dropped off the food, and he heard the plates clatter on the table. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome!”
He tried not to wince. One of his therapists had told him that it was probably not that people were talking loud because he made them nervous. It was that they sounded loud because he didn’t have the visual clues to go with his hearing.
“It’s okay, man. She’s just being friendly.”
“I know.” He’d thought so. See? He was learning.
“Cool. If I overstep, just tell me. But I know how wild it all seems in recovery.” Brick was a good guy, and he got it. That was what made him special.
“Sure. Okay, where is the food?” They had been working on this together for a few months now.
“The plate is directly in front of you. The sandwich is at nine o’clock. The coffee is above the plate at high noon. And there are fries all around at three and six.”
“Thank you.” He tried his damnedest not to sigh, because he wasn’t an asshole. He wasn’t this piece of shit who just sat around and whined.
He really wasn’t.
Fuck, he felt like he was, though.
“You should feel the coffee cup. It has the tiniest handle ever. If I’m going to use my prosthetic I’ll have to be damn careful.”
“Do you think it’ll ever be natural? The prosthetic, I mean. Do you think it will ever feel like yours?”
“It is mine. I picked it out. Tested it. All the things. It couldn’t be more mine.” Brick’s voice was sure and firm.
“Yeah?” He pondered that. Maybe… Maybe he could think about that later.
“Yeah. I mean, it’s easier now, you know. I don’t have to mourn anymore.”
“No? It stops?” He didn’t believe that a bit.
“It eases. Normal life takes over and gets…normal.” Brick snorted softly. “I mean, I’m not going to learn how to knit or anything, but the wild aching? Yeah. It’s better.”
“I hope you’re right. Sometimes it feels like I’ll never be right again.”
“Change your definition of ‘right’.”
“Fuck off.” He found a French fry. “Save the psychobabble for someone that gives a shit.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Laughing, Brick munched his sandwich. The lettuce crunched a lot. “There’s a toothpick holding the sandwich together, and it’s cut in half.”
“Thanks. It’s good to know. I don’t need impaling.”
“No one needs that, man. But it does have that fuzzy plastic on the end.”
“What color is it?”
“Red.”
“Okay.” He remembered red. Blood was red. Roses. Muscle cars. Apples. He had to remind himself every chance he got, because eventually that sense memory would fade.
He gritted his teeth against the surge of headache accompanying that thought. Breathe. In. Out. It was nothing but stress, tightening his scalp.
“Try your coffee, hmm? The sugar and caffeine should help.”
“I hope so. Just don’t let me spill it.” He’d lost so much—his sight, a career, a lover, a life—he didn’t intend to lose another fucking thing.
“If you start to tip, I am here with my good hand.”
That got him chuckling, and that calmed him as much as anything could.
He’d lost a lot, but he had Abby at his side, and he had a damn good friend. Maybe more than one, if the other guys in the house bore out the way they seemed they would.
It wasn’t everything, but it was going to have to be enough. If he missed stuff from his former life… well. So be it.
Though today he’d heard a blast from the past for a moment, a voice that had sounded so much like—like his. It had squeezed up his insides.
It hadn’t been. It couldn’t have been Sloan.
But it was a delicious fantasy.
“You okay?”
“Huh?” He tried to peer at Brick, and of course he couldn’t.
“You’ve got your coffee halfway to your mouth.”
“Do I? I was thinking.”
“Ew! No fun!” Brick’s laugh was loud and happy. God, he couldn’t remember when he’d been that carefree.
It had happened. He knew it had, and Brick insisted it was going to return, but he didn’t know.
Okay, he was getting maudlin, and his belly was rumbling. He just needed to eat. He could do it .
And if he couldn’t, then he had a dog to steal what he dropped.
Okay. It was gonna be all right. He knew about this. His brain was fine. His brain could learn. He took one deep breath, and he sipped his coffee, the sweet bitterness of the whole liquid on his tongue familiar, right, and blessedly normal.
“It is the littlest handle in history, isn’t it? Thank God I don’t have arthritis. I don’t think I could deal with that.”
“Yeah, I have to use my other hand. There’s no way my prosthetic can do it.”
“Sorry.”
They set to eating, and at some point he realized he’d eaten the sandwich and his fries and had two cups of coffee, and he was just sitting there talking to Brick.
Just sitting and talking.
For a second, he’d forgotten he couldn’t see. That things weren’t what they had been. He kind of wanted to scream with horror. It wasn’t right that it could happen that way. That it could just all go away and, for a second, it wouldn’t even matter.
“It’s fucked up, isn’t it?” Brick said, his voice low.
“I think… I tell myself it’s like getting convicted and sentenced to a life term in jail.
That’s what it’s like in my imagination, going to jail forever, and one day I woke up and realized, this is the way life is.
And that you just keep on keeping on because that’s how we’re built.
It sucks. It’s scary as hell. But it’s the way we’re made. ”
Lance nodded, the words ringing with truth. Yes, that was it. That was one hundred percent it. Wherever you were, you coped, even though it sucked. He hated it, but it happened, because it was how they were built.
“Here’s to life sentences, man.” He lifted up his cup, then he heard and felt the clink of the ceramic.
“Amen, brother.”