Chapter 11 #2
“Get it up. I don’t know if I can. Neither do the doctors.” Talk about harsh. Damn.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Emotionally? I guess it’s blown.”
“Shit, babe.” Sloan turned to face Lance, stopping his forward momentum. “I love you, not your dick. Although, I always did love your dick too…”
“You deserve someone functional.”
“Did it get blown off?”
“What?” Lance’s eyes went wide.
“Your dick. Did it get blown off?” His granddad had lost his in an industrial accident. It had been coated in molten metal. Granny had still loved him.
“No! Jesus, Sloan!”
“What? You’re the one who brought it up. No one is here. I’ve sucked your cock, stroked it, adored it. I can ask about it.” Sloan loved to watch Lance’s face, see the emotions crossing it.
“It’s still there. It’s not physical. There’s nothing wrong with it that way.” Lance shook his head. “And I don’t know how much therapy it will take to make me functional.”
“I don’t care.”
“What?”
“I jack off alone now. I would rather jack off with you. I would rather be with you impotent than not be with you. I love you, asshole. I can get a dildo anywhere. I need you.”
Lance’s eyes shimmered, and he sucked in a shaky breath. “I want to see you.”
“I’m sorry, babe. You can touch me, though. If you want to know what my face is doing.” Hadn’t he seen that in movies?
“Not in public.” Lance winced. “I hate this.”
So did he. “You can in Santa Fe. If and when you’re ready, you can in Santa Fe.”
“I—” Lance took a deep breath, this one calmer. “I don’t want to invade your life.”
“Why not? I waded right into yours. I want you with me.”
“I—I’m scared,” Lance whispered. “Here—everyone is broken. I am not more fucked up than anyone else.”
Sloan had to laugh. “I swear, you need to come to New Mexico. Everyone has a damn dirty little secret up there. It’s live and let live, I promise.
” Sloan had to do more than just hold Lance’s shoulders.
He touched that scarred face, his body on fire.
But even alone on a golf course, he knew he had to be careful.
“Are they ugly?” Lance’s eyes moved furiously, trying so hard to see him. “Can you tell?”
He shook his head. “They’re just scars, babe. They are just a set of scars.”
No more, no less. They were healed skin.
“But—”
“Nope. I have some all over my right leg. Burns and shrapnel. Makes my leg hurt when it snows. But it’s just scar tissue.”
“I hate that you’re hurt. I wanted it just to be me.” Lance dropped his shoulders. “I feel like shit that I didn’t ask.”
“You were caught up in your own shit, and it was big. I wish…” Sloan chewed on his bottom lip a second.
“I wish that you could have let me help, but I’m trying to understand why you couldn’t.
I’m trying to be here for you now, not in a ‘oh, I want to take care of you’, or ‘oh I feel sorry for you’ way.
Fuck, man, I just love and miss you. I missed hanging out, and hanging out with you now?
It feels right. It is right, because we’re together.
I still love you. I still like this—just being together and bullshitting and knowing that I’m with my person. I missed my person.”
Lance nodded, once. “Me too, so bad. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a shit-ton of hard things in the last year—last few years even. That was the hardest. I dreamed for months that I would wake up, and I would be able to see, and you would be sitting there.”
“They wouldn’t let me,” he said.
“No?”
“It’s not like we were married. They wouldn’t let me in, once you said I couldn’t visit.”
“I wish we had been.”
“Had been what?” Sloan didn’t follow.
“Married. I wish we had been. I wish you could have just said, ‘no fucking way’. You know, I never did open my eyes and be able to see again. I never opened my eyes and it was okay.”
“Well, anytime you want to open your eyes and know that I’m right there beside you, all you have to do is say the word. There will never be a time that you call where I am not there. Not so long as I am alive. Not one time.”
“You can say that, but do you really want to take care of a blind guy for the rest of your fucking life, Sloan?”
Sloan blinked. “You’re getting pretty good at taking care of yourself.”
“I’m working on it, but I’ll never be able to drive. I’m not sure I’ll work again.”
“Yeah, I bet you do. Work, not drive.” He chuckled. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does though! I don’t want you to resent me.”
“Babe, you’re putting the cart before the horse.” Sloan started them moving again to catch up with Abby. “I just want to be with you. We can work out all the hard life stuff as we go. We were always both good tacticians.”
Lance snorted. “I don’t feel like I was sometimes.”
“Why?” It didn’t make any sense. Lance had been their medic, the first one in and last one out, absolutely freaking unafraid.
“It doesn’t feel like any of it was real. Not you, not the downtime, but the job, the actual service. They say that’s the PTSD. They say that’s how this works sometimes. It doesn’t feel real.”
It was real. That wasn’t how he handled it. He didn’t guess because he remembered it every second.
“Do you miss being in?”
He shook his head. “God, no. I thought I would, but, I like my job. I like being a cop. Now I feel like I’m doing good things.
” He had no idea if he was going to do it forever.
He might go to work for a private security firm.
Maybe he’d take a welding class and start making fascinating pieces of art and giant mailboxes.
He didn’t know, but he knew he liked what he was doing right now.
“I can’t decide if I miss being in, or if I just miss who I was when I was in. It’s all so fucked up and melded together. It doesn’t matter, you know?”
Sloan could see that. No matter what, none of them were the same people they’d been when they went into the service. Lance was just a huge example of the difference between when a man enlisted and when he mustered out.
“Makes sense man.” What else was Sloan supposed to say? Some shit was hard. Some shit was easy.
“Did you see it when it happened? Like did you see it all?”
Sloan froze.
Because he had. He’d seen every fucking second as if it were in slow motion.
They’d been clearing out some rubble trying to get to a school where there were families needing medical attention, their vehicles lined up along the road.
He and Radar had been doing their job searching for danger, and the light coming off the sand and the stone and the vehicles had made it so fucking hot his brain had felt as if it was melting in his helmet.
“Hate this shit, Sarge.” Yarrow swallowed hard, the kid’s eyes rolling, showing their whites.
“We just have to get Simpson in to assess the situation. Keep it together and we’ll be out of here in a hot minute.
” He glanced over at Lance, who shot him a shit-eating grin.
Two more weeks and then they were on leave.
They already had their hotel rooms in Japan booked.
They were going to the mountains to cool the fuck off and then fuck like bunnies. Two more weeks. “Radar, seek.”
“Yavar! Yavar!”
Sloan saw the woman run out, her brightly colored clothes covered with blood like some sick, wet addition to the embroidery, a screaming infant in her arms. Jesus.
How could a little baby have that much blood in it?
Lance frowned, and Radar barked once, alerting. “Wodariga!”
The land mine had been planted right in front of the school, the fucking thing right there. Right there, and he swore it was glowing, throbbing as if it was a cartoon character, laughing at him.
Warning him that everything was about to change forever if he didn’t move fast enough.
If he didn’t fix it.
“Simpson! No!” Yarrow’s scream had him whipping his head around and he’d be damned if Lance wasn’t heading right for the mine and the civilian.
Lance hit her at a run, trying to push her and the baby to safety.
Radar was barking furiously, warning them all to back off. Lance was running. The mine was laughing at him.
Laughing at him as the world went white and stones rained down.
Stones and bodies and fire, as if God Himself had called them down, and all he could hear was barking as he lost his best friend and his lover.
“Okay, Abby. Find the chair. Find the chair.”
Someone was pulling him, tugging his arm, and all of a sudden he was sitting on a bench, and Lance’s hand was on his chest, solid, grounding him.
He gasped for breath, sweat dripping into his eyes. “Oh, fuck. Fuck, babe. I’m sorry.” His lips felt stiff and hard, the movement not quite right. He gagged, and Abby fucking climbed up on him, her upper body on his legs, weighing him down .
Lance kept touching him, coming around behind the bench to rub his shoulders, digging in to make his muscles relax.
Shit, he was just—losing it.
“Lance.”
“I got you. That was a stupid thing for me to ask. I’m sorry.”
He whooped for breath. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” It was his job to not be freaked out by shit anymore, dammit. Sloan couldn’t be a cop if he couldn’t cope with this.
“It’s not okay. I should never have asked that.” Lance patted his shoulder.
Way to make things awkward, Ferguson.
Lance kept rubbing his shoulders, fingers digging in. “I didn’t think.”
He started petting Abby, rubbing her ears and her forehead. When he got to her chest, though, he found her harness and that brought him fully back out of his nightmare of memories.
Abby was working.
Not only was Abby working, but Lance had managed to get them across the golf course and onto a bench.
While he was freaking out.
In a place Lance had never been.
That was pretty fucking impressive and super cope-y.
He rolled his eyes at himself. Way to take care of his lover. “I feel like an idiot.”
Lance squeezed his shoulder. “I feel like an idiot all the time. It’s okay, honey. I didn’t see a thing.”
He stiffened, not believing that Lance had made that joke, when he heard Lance chuckle.
“Too soon?”
“I’m going to kick your fucking ass.”
“You’re going to try. You imagine what kind of trouble you’d get in? A cop beating up a blind cripple?” Lance’s voice was dry as the desert dust.
He started laughing, the sound tearing from him so huge it almost hurt, but it was exactly what he needed.
Because for the first time since the bomb had gone off, Lance sounded like himself. Completely and utterly right.
“I love you.”
The hands rubbing his shoulders stuttered and then started again. “I know. I love you too. That hasn’t changed. Not a bit. You’ll always be my person.”
“And you’ll always be mine, man.”
“So, that’s cool.” But Sloan had to wonder where that left them. He got the feeling Lance still felt as if they shouldn’t be together. As if Sloan needed— no deserved— more.
At some point he was going to have to prove to Lance that he gave no shits if his dick didn’t work anymore. For whatever reason.
Now was not that time, though. He scooted over. “Want to come sit? No one is out here but us.”
“Sounds good to me. Hell, to be honest, it would probably be more awkward if there were people here, huh? Me rubbing your back and all?”
“Probably. Who the fuck knows, man?” Sloan didn’t care. He’d scream his love for this man at the top of his lungs.
Lance came around and sat, leaning against him. “I appreciate this. You coming out. Taking me away from the craziness.”
“You’d appreciate more if I didn’t have a complete panic attack on you.” His cheeks were never going to cool off. Never.
Lance shrugged. “This is part of the deal. Especially with me being here now, with us being together. There’s a whole ’nother level of dealing with shit.”
He frowned. “Do you think so?”
“Yeah, no question. I talked to my therapist about it when you showed up, because the dreams were way worse for a while.”
Oh shit. “I’m sorry?—”
“No. No, it’s not—I mean, they’d probably be worse if we came across other guys in our unit for a little bit. But we’re so much more than just dudes who were in our unit together. There’s a ton of life and love and complications between us, you know?”
Sloan snorted, the sound wild and worried. “I do know. This is fucked up.”
“Would you be freaked if I suggested I thought you might want to see somebody? I mean, not my doctor, but…” Lance seemed to be looking right at him. “If you talk to Luke, he can help arrange things and maybe get you a dog. Maybe even a former police dog.”
He didn’t know if he could talk to someone—a stranger. He’d done the mandatory therapy so he could clear his eval, but he’d never been one hundred percent honest. “I don’t know man.”
“You don’t have to commit right now. Think about it.
I’m not gonna be one of those guys who says you’ve got to just suck it up.
You’ve got to just deal with it and do that.
Be a man.” Lance’s lips went tight, the edges almost white.
“I hate that be a man thing. It’s baloney.
We did scary shit. We lost friends. We saw people die.
We’re allowed to hurt.” Lance stopped, inhaling deep then blew it out. “And we’re allowed to heal too.”
“So, are you going to do that?” He didn’t know if he wanted to ask, but the words slipped from him. “Are you going to heal too?”
“I’m trying. I’m not planning my suicide.
I’m not—” Lance clasped his hands, rubbing his thumbs together, and Abby immediately came to him, pressing his leg hard.
“I can’t tell you that I’ve got anything figured out.
I don’t. I literally have nothing figured out.
I don’t know what I’m going to do in a month or in a year.
But I know what I’m going to do tomorrow, and I know what I’m going to do next week.
That’s better than I had. I mean, I called, didn’t I?
Instead of just sitting in my room and hiding out, I called you and we’re here on the golf course. ”
Sloan covered Lance’s hands with his own. “You did, and when I panicked, you dealt and you found us a bench and we sat.”
“Yeah, I so did.” Lance’s smile was the sun breaking through the cloud. “And once we’re done sitting here, we’re going to go have Mexican food together. My treat.”
Sloan had never been more in love. “I like a man with a plan.”
Lance nodded and turned his hand, twining their fingers together and holding on. “Me too.”