Chapter 24 #2
“How can they not hate me for that?” he asked. “They will never be uninjured as I am.”
Jacob reached behind himself and pulled out the pillow that had been thoughtfully placed by one of the matrons. Then, he used the pillow to wallop Aaron over the head.
This was fitting. Surprising but fitting.
“You numpty,” his friend said with a fond sort of irritation.
“They don’t envy you—or hope to be like you—because you don’t wear your scars on the surface.
Trust me; men like them—men like me, we know that there’s more than bloody meets the eye when it comes to injury, and none of us made it out of those wars without bearing wounds.
No,” he continued, looking Aaron pointedly in the eye, “you give them hope because of Phoebe.”
“What?” Aaron asked. He’d been asking this a lot today, he realized.
Jacob heaved a put-upon sigh.
“When I got here today, half the bloody house was talking about her,” he informed Aaron. “And do you know why?”
“The fellow out there said something about cards?” Aaron knew this couldn’t be the right answer.
“Jesus Christ,” Jacob muttered. “No. It’s because—and I must have heard it a dozen times already today—they wonder if their old admiral can find a woman, a beautiful, kind woman who doesn’t look at them with pity, who treats them like people not objects of scorn…
They wonder if you can find a woman like that, can they not perhaps do the same? ”
God. God. Aaron had come here hoping to feel the pain that seemed like his due, but this.
Jacob’s words stabbed and burned like a bullet through the body.
They struck him like a blow to the chest, the kind that left a man flat on his back, gasping and heaving for air, certain that this breath was going to be his last.
“I’ve ruined it,” he choked out, the tightness in his chest so violent that surely his ribs were about to crack under the pressure. “They shouldn’t look at me because—fuck, Jacob, I’ve ruined everything.”
And then, in hacking gasps and half-formed sentences, he got out the whole story—from the very beginning.
He explained how he’d been engaged to Miss Hannah and how Phoebe had come into his life with more fury than the storm she’d ridden in on.
He told Jacob of Hannah’s refusal, her flight, and of chasing Phoebe into the snow.
He kept some of the details to himself—there were some things that were between a man and his wife alone—but he told Jacob of the pull he felt toward his beautiful wife and how he kept pushing her away despite it.
He even, because he trusted his friend implicitly, told him, in a quiet voice, of Hannah’s pregnancy and of how he’d reacted to Phoebe’s revelation of this fact.
By the time he was done, his friend was leaning back in his chair, his hand cupped thoughtfully under his chin.
“Wow,” Jacob said after a long enough silence that it became clear that Aaron was really, truly finished this time. “Warson, I… You really fucked things.”
At some point in the narrative, Aaron had stood and started pacing. Now, he paused and looked down at his friend.
“What the hell? How does that help me?”
Jacob frowned. “It doesn’t. I don’t know how to help you with that.”
Aaron gaped. “Where’s the pithy advice full of quips about how I’m an idiot?”
Jacob shrugged. “Don’t have any. That’s really bad. She’ll probably never forgive you.”
Aaron clenched his fist at his side. He would not hit his friend, no matter how unhelpful Jacob was being.
“You don’t know that,” he said through gritted teeth.
“It’s true that I don’t know it,” Jacob agreed. “But she trusted you with a really dangerous secret, and you threw it back in her face. I don’t see you making up for that one. It’s no surprise she hasn’t come home.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m not going to bloody well try,” Aaron seethed, downright furious at his friend’s fatalistic attitude.
“For Christ’s sake, where would you be if I saw a challenge and said ‘ah, well, too late for that one?’ You’d be at the bottom of the ocean stitched up in sailcloth, that’s where! ”
His fists still itched with the urge to wallop something, so he went back to pacing as this seemed like a better outlet for his energy.
“But I dragged your sorry arse back from being blasted by French muskets, and I’m not giving up now, either. I may have behaved badly—no, I did—but I’m going to figure out a way to make it up to her. I’m going to do my best, my level goddamn best to make her come home.”
He whirled on his heel—
And saw Jacob staring at him with a smug grin on his face.
“Bastard,” he muttered.
Jacob shrugged, this time in amusement rather than fatalism. “You always did like ideas better when you thought you came up with them yourself.”
“One of these days,” Aaron warned, though there wasn’t any real anger in the comment as he was already feeling lighter, “I’m going to beat you bloody.”
Jacob looked decidedly unthreatened. “Go home and apologize to your wife, man. That way, when I trounce you handily, you’ll have someone to fuss over your bloodied nose.”
Aaron shot his friend a rude gesture, but there was a new energy in his body that felt, for the first time in days, like something he could use. It felt good.
Nothing was fixed, at least not yet, but he would try. He had to try.