22
Saturday, December 21
3 days until the wedding
Jenny
What was that?” I ask Dean later, when I wake from a nap to find him propped on one elbow, staring down at me.
“I believe it’s called sleep.” He presses his cheek to mine, then tenderly kisses the soft spot right below my ear. The feeling of it almost makes me forget my question, which I think is what he’s hoping, but I’m a reporter through and through. Asking questions is my job.
“No. Not my nap. What happened before. When you freaked out.”
He sighs and rolls onto his back. “It’s nothing.”
“Didn’t seem like nothing to me.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Dean,” I say, drawing out his name and meeting his gaze so he’ll see that I won’t back down.
There’s a long pause. He opens his mouth, but no words escape.
“I can take whatever it is,” I tell him. “I promise.”
His eyes are shadowed, haunted, when he says, “What if you can’t? What if it changes how you see me?”
That makes me pause, my mind spinning into overdrive. A million possibilities rise in my imagination, all of them terrible. What could scare a man as strong as Dean?
Then a thought, a bad one about why he won’t open up, occurs to me. Hesitant, I tell him. “If you’re worried that I’ll tell someone else, I won’t. You can trust me.”
A quick shake of his head. “It’s not that.” He squeezes his eyes shut and I will myself to be patient. I don’t want to badger him.
“I was…” He passes his hand over his face and rubs his eyes with his fists. “In the military for a while.”
I sit up and cross my legs. “I remember that you mentioned it before. Where were you stationed?”
“Afghanistan.” Another pause. Just when I think that’s all I’m going to get from him, he says, “Sounds like that, loud ones, make me feel like I’m right back there.”
I swallow and stare into space as I come up with my next questions. He’ll shut down if I press too hard, I know that, but I need to understand what’s happening. Seeing him so tortured was agony to me.
“But there’s no war in Afghanistan.”
His laugh is shockingly bitter. “No war? There’s always war, even if reporters like you don’t call it that.”
Ouch.
He continues, “We were over there dying, just one by one rather than a thousand in a day, but no one cared about that. Who’s going to cry over a couple of soldiers blown up by an IED someone forgot to defuse?” He snaps off that last part, as if he didn’t mean to let it out, then clenches his jaw tight.
The silence following his outburst is deafening.
“Is that what happened?” I ask gently.
Tears well in his eyes. They gather and pool together until one breaks free to trickle down the side of his face. Dean nods mutely.
“Who?” I lower my voice to a hushed whisper, scared he’ll close up and won’t tell me. “Was it your squad?”
A terrifying thought occurs to me. “Were you hurt?” My eyes scan him, searching for wounds, and, sure enough, there it is. High on the side of his right arm, a gnarly scar, long, thick, and twisted, mars his beautiful skin. That’s why I hadn’t noticed it before. He always wears long sleeves.
He sees my gasp of horror and my hand cover my mouth. “It’s nothing. Just a scratch,” he tells me, dashing away his tears as if they offend him. “Nothing compared to the rest of my crew.”
“That doesn’t look like nothing,” I say. I zero in on the last part of what he said, my reporter sense telling me this is the meat of his story.
“What happened to the rest of your crew?”
His tears have dried up. No emotion is left in him besides a simmering anger. “Dead. All of them.”
I’m crying for these nameless strangers. I feel each of their passing like a blow to my chest.
“Who?” I breathe out, desperate for answers. “What happened?”
His throat works, but he doesn’t make a sound. He keeps staring up, like he can avoid this conversation as long as he doesn’t look at me. It’s a pivotal point in our relationship. I can sense it. Either he lets me in now, or I’ll be locked out forever. Dean’s not a man to waver. He’s decisive, driven, deliberate with every word and action.
I’d love to think that when we had kissed earlier it was because he was overcome by desire for me, but that’s not true. I saw the calculation in his eye, the moment when he decided it was worth the risk. This is an even bigger chance I’m asking him to take, to let me into his memories, his mind.
He won’t answer. He stays rigid and unblinking. I place my hand on his arm and squeeze. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to or if you aren’t ready, but I’m here to listen if you are. I want to know. To understand you better.”
When he opens his mouth to speak, I almost weep with relief.
“Five years ago, I did two back-to-back tours in Afghanistan. It was my last week, our last week. We were about to head home for a break when it happened.” His voice is toneless, with no change in his expression as he tells his story. “They sent us into the Kandahar Province to help train Afghan security forces. There were five of us. Me, Espinoza, McLaughlin, Gee, and Hoover.”
He takes in a ragged breath. I commit those names to my memory, to be held forever. Those brave men and women who paid the ultimate sacrifice for my freedom. I imagine the people they left behind: mothers, fathers, spouses, children.
I try to stifle my tears. I can’t lose it now. He hasn’t even gotten to the bad part yet.
Dean drones on like he’s talking about the weather. His robot face is back on, and who could blame him for it? For needing to put some distance between himself and something so horrendous. “They were supposed to have scouted our route beforehand, to get rid of mines and IEDs and assess for snipers. They told us the way was clear. We should be fine. An easy day, in and out.” He swallows audibly.
“We never made it. The jeep drove over an IED about 45 minutes into the trip.” His eyes lose focus, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I think about it all the time…all the time. I was at the wheel.” My stomach sinks at those words and the guilt they carry. “If I had driven differently, would they still be alive? Would Gee have gotten home to see her baby? He was only two years old.”
He’s crying again, slow tears that roll down his cheeks, his nose. His eyes, wide with recollection, search for mine. When they find me, he holds me prisoner in that tortured gaze. “He won’t remember her,” Dean says, his face crumpling in on itself. “He won’t remember his mom, who was like a mother to all of us. She was always scolding us, telling us to clean up after ourselves. We were a bunch of cocky, crude jerks, but she put up with us and now she’s gone forever because I didn’t move the car an inch to the left.”
He holds up his left hand, displaying the large watch he constantly wears. The one he only took off when he showered earlier. “This was Espinoza’s. His parents insisted I take it as a memento. After the funeral, they forced it on me. I couldn’t believe they’d give it to me. Not after I got their only son killed.”
I want him to stop. I can’t take it—the pain in his voice, the anguish in his eyes—but he needs to get it out, to release this toxin before it kills him.
“It was so loud, Jenny. When the bomb went off. It was so loud. The metal of the jeep coming apart. The screams. So loud.” A ragged sob from him. “Every time I hear a noise like that, I’m back there, watching them die all over again. Bright flashes of light set me off too, like the burst of white when the bomb detonated.”
His eyes drift closed, tears leaking from under his lashes. “I have PTSD. I wish I didn’t, but I can’t stop it.”
His confession doesn’t surprise me, but still it’s daunting to hear it said out loud.
I crawl to him and lay myself over his body like I can protect him from this pain, even though I can’t. He stiffens beneath me, and I brace for yet another rejection, but his arms come up and wrap around my waist.
His voice is muffled, his lips pressed to my hair. “I told Caleb I’d be no good. What kind of bodyguard gets scared so easily? He wouldn’t listen. He said it’d be fine.”
“Shh,” I soothe, knowing there are no words that will erase the horror he’s witnessed. But still, I have to try. “I’m sorry, so sorry that happened to you. I’m sorry for your friends and their families.” He shifts me in his arms so he can bury his head in the crook of my neck, shaking from the force of his tears.
“It’s a terrible thing you went through, but I’m proud of you for telling me. I understand how hard that was.” He nods against my collarbone, his tears slowing. “I don’t know how you get over something like that.”
A harsh laugh from him. “I’ve tried it all—therapy, pills.”
I pull back to see his tear-stained face. “Did they help?”
A small shrug. “Some, but not enough.” Dean reaches up and tucks my hair behind my shoulder. “This is why I wanted to stay away from you.”
“What?” I roll off him and sit up, not understanding what this has to do with me.
“You’re sunshine walking around on two legs, and I’m—I’m broken.”
“You are not,” I say, my voice echoing in the room. That’s how loud I say it.
“Yes, I am,” he argues. “I don’t have a television at my place because I can’t handle shows where there’s shooting or scary noises or bright lights. I won’t go to the movies for the same reason. Last week, a motorcycle backfired outside my building, and I barely made it inside before I had a panic attack.”
I can’t believe my ears. To think this is how he sees himself, something so at odds with the man before me. I tell him, “While working for a newspaper, I’ve heard some sad, awful stories. What you just told me, what you went through, I thought that was one of the worst, but I was wrong.”
He jerks back at that, scowling, angry I’m downplaying his experience. I ignore him. What I have to say is too important to be distracted. “Of all the stories I’ve heard, the most awful is the one you’re telling yourself. It’s a lie. You are kind and brave and strong. A broken person only cares for themselves. That’s not you. You always look out for others, even when you’re not on the job. I don’t want to hear any more of that. You need to open your eyes and see yourself how I see you.”
“You see me like that?” he asks, so vulnerable.
“I do,” I say firmly. More gently I add, “It’s not your fault, what happened. Do you honestly believe that they would blame you? Your crew? That they would want you to blame yourself?”
“No,” he says, his voice hoarse. He looks away, his throat working. “I understand that, but when the nightmares come or when I hear those loud noises, logic goes out the window. I try so hard to hold on to it. I tell myself the fear isn’t real, but my body doesn’t listen. My heart pounds and I can’t breathe, and it feels so—so out of my control.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I wish I did, that there were magic words I could speak to make everything okay, but that’s not real life. Some problems can’t be fixed. Some hurts can never be fully healed. All I can do is hold him.
He kisses me, hesitantly, like he’s not sure I’ll want him anymore. I kiss him back, firmly, pouring my emotions into it, determined to prove he’s worth my affection. Soon we’re a tangle of lips and soft sighs. Sometimes, when you live with the shadows of the dead, you need to be reminded you’re alive. I distract him from his grief with every breathless kiss. I’ll heal him too, as much as I can, with talking and support, but there’s time for that later. For now, there’s just us and the snow outside, falling gracefully to the ground.