Chapter 9 #4
Beck blinked, sharp and fast, like he was trying to shake himself out of whatever current had caught him.
He cleared his throat, the sound cracking down the center.
Then he stepped forward, a little too stiff, and crossed the room to set the tea down on one of the nightstands.
His movements were off; they were robotic, like muscle memory was the only thing keeping him moving.
“You’re gonna be cold,” he said, and his voice was rushed, uneven. “Heat doesn’t always reach the bedroom too well, especially at night. Especially when the weather is—“
He cut himself off with a sigh and scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck.
She watched his fingers dig into the muscle there, that familiar gesture she’d seen a dozen times behind the counter at Rise.
He looked around the room, searching. His eyes landed on the sweatshirt strewn across the armchair, the same one Hazel had spotted earlier.
Without a word, he moved toward it. He lifted it towards his face and sniffed it once, just enough to make sure it wasn’t dirty, then he turned back toward her.
He didn’t meet her gaze as he moved in towards her. He simply lifted the sweater in the space that separated them, a silent offering.
“Here,” he murmured, nodding. “Put this on. It’ll help you keep a bit of heat.”
Hazel took it carefully, without a word, her fingers brushing his. The fabric was soft, worn down by years of washing and wear. It smelled like him— like clean cotton, cedar soap, and something she couldn’t name but had come to associate with the quiet way he was.
She pulled it over her head without hesitation, her arms vanishing into the sleeves, the hem falling long over her shorts. It swallowed her up, but she didn’t care. It was warm and it was his. And when she looked up again, he hadn’t moved.
Beck stood rooted in place, watching her. His eyes flicked over the image of her— bare legs, flushed cheeks, swallowed up by his sweatshirt in his room— and something shifted behind his expression.
He stepped closer, his movements slower now. Less startled and more… gentle.
Then, without speaking, he reached out and tugged her hair free from the collar where it had been trapped, his fingers grazing the nape of her neck as he pulled the dark waves forward and let them fall loose over her shoulders.
The touch was small, barely there, but it crushed her.
She felt the contact all the way down to her ribs. Her breath left her in a soft, involuntary exhale.
He lingered for a second and his fingers brushed her skin. And then his hands dropped, his shoulders pulled tight.
His throat worked around another swallow, this one more visible than the last. And his gaze… dipped.
Just a beat. Just a flicker of his eyes to her lips.
And Hazel swore her heart stopped. Her muscles pulled tight, her body going still.
But in the next breath, he stepped back. Quick. Too quick. She wanted to pull him back in; reach out and grab his arm, force him to move forward again. But she didn’t, she couldn’t.
She turned instead, just a small pivot. Her socked feet shifted against the floor as she stepped toward the side table next to the bed, her hands reaching for the tea he’d left there as if it might steady her, anchor her back into herself.
Her fingers curled around the warm ceramic, but before she could lift it to her lips, something caught her eye.
A picture frame. Glossy and black, a little worn at the corners, with a photo fixed at its center.
She reached for it automatically, grateful for the distraction— desperate for it, even. Something ordinary, something harmless. Something to point at and name and talk about, because the air between them had grown too thick with things she didn’t yet have the language for.
The photo inside the frame was small and worn, the corners softened by time.
In it was a group of men, standing shoulder to shoulder in desert sand, arms slung around one another’s backs, uniforms rumpled and eyes squinting in the sun.
She picked it up with a gentle touch, her thumb brushing across the glass, and turned toward him with the words already forming.
But they died on her lips. Because she saw the shift before she even finished moving.
The frown, barely there, but enough. The way his mouth flattened.
The way his shoulders seemed to pull back, his chest folding ever so slightly inward.
His hands slid into the pockets of his jeans and he rocked back on his heels, like something inside him had gone still, like the photo had pulled a current over him, dragging him beneath the surface, threatening to steal what little control he had left.
Hazel froze. The frame weighed heavier in her hands now.
“I—“ she started, voice quiet. The words faded, drifting away, uncertainty and regret causing her mouth to run dry.
She didn’t know what she’d been about to say. Didn’t know what words could possibly undo the shadow that had just passed across Beck’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said instead, softer than before.
Beck shook his head once, barely perceptible, like it wasn’t her fault. Like it was just the past, still clinging. Then he stepped forward, wordless, and took the photo from her hands with a careful touch— his own thumb grazing the edge where hers had rested a moment before.
He didn’t say anything for a minute, just stared down at the photo like he hadn’t seen it in a long, long time. Hazel followed the line of his eyes, taking in the image again, this time searching for one face in particular.
Beck was standing in the center, his arm thrown around a man with a thick beard and silver threaded through the dark hair at his temples.
He wasn’t just smiling, but grinning, wide and easy in a way she didn’t recognize.
There was something softer about him, then, his shoulders relaxed, his cheeks fuller, eyes squinting into the sun, filled with something she couldn’t name.
Not peace, not joy, but something close. Something warmer.
He looked so young. So… unguarded. So unbelievably unlike the man who stood before her now.
“You’re smiling,” she said, her voice quiet. It wasn’t a question, exactly, more an observation, a soft accusation rooted in disbelief.
There was a long, hollow pause. Her gaze lifted to his, chest strained with the heaviness that still darkened his expression.
“I was different back then.”
Her gaze moved back to the photo, taking in each of the faces one by one. Sunlit, close together, squinting in the brightness. They looked tired and proud, like men who had lived ten years in a day.
“Different how?”
“Lighter, I guess.”
There was a weight to the way he said it, like the word didn’t quite fit but it was the closest he could get. His voice had softened, just slightly, shrouded now only in a heavy sort of exhaustion, like something frayed had come loose and couldn’t be tucked away again.
“You know,” he went on, thumb drifting across the frame again. “Some of us trained together from day one. Zach, Griff, Danny. And the others came later. Transfers from different units, strays, guys who didn’t have anywhere else to land. But we stuck.”
He sucked in a long breath that stretched the silence.
“We lived in each other’s pockets for years. You don’t get through something like that without becoming something more than just friends. The bond was… different. Permanent.”
Hazel’s throat ached. She didn’t know these men, had never met them, but somehow, through his voice— through the quiet reverence threaded through each of his words— she could feel the loss settle deep.
She could feel the shape of it inside him, how it probably curled around his ribs and lived there, constant.
Not unlike her own, for other people and other lives that had faded, leaving only the ache of them behind as a reminder of what had been.
She looked at the photo again and her eyes landed on the man beside Beck.
He was slightly shorter than Beck and grinning wide with a thread of mischief that all but spilled out of the frame.
He was different than the rest, somehow.
She could tell. Perhaps it was his closeness to Beck, or the way the rest of the men in the image were almost angled towards him.
“And who’s he?” she asked, unable to help herself.
Beck let out a faint, breathy laugh, but there was no humour in it, just memory. “That’s James. James Griffin. He’d smack anyone who called him that, though. He went by Griff.”
There was a pause, then, as Beck’s gaze seemed to fade from the picture in his hands, drawn instead to something else— memories, maybe. Things that had happened long ago but had gotten lost along the way.
“He was the reason I made it through basic training, and the first year after that, too. He could pull the worst day into something survivable just by cracking some stupid, nonsense joke.”
Hazel’s chest ached, her eyes beginning to sting with a threat of emotion she refused to give in to. “Is he…” she whispered, the words drying up at the back of her throat.
Beck didn’t look up. “No,” he offered, after a pause, with the shake of his head. “He didn’t make it back.”
His grip on the photo tightened, knuckles paling. His other hand stayed buried in his pocket. “None of them did.”
Hazel stood still beside him, feeling the storm outside mirrored within her.
There was something devastating in the way he said it— not raw, not bleeding, but quiet.
Settled. Like the grief had long since stopped screaming and started whispering instead.
And she realized, slowly, achingly, that she was beginning to see him not just in the way he showed up, but in all the places where he’d been left behind before, too.
In all the people he’d carried back in memory, but never in body.
She swallowed, the ache rising in her throat like a tide. And still, she said nothing. She just stayed beside him, as he had for her, many times before.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, eventually, when the sharpest of the pains had begun to dull. “I didn’t mean to—“
“It’s okay.” Beck’s voice was quiet, almost too quiet. His eyes still hadn’t left the frame. “It’s… nice, sometimes, to think of them. To remember what it felt like before.”
He held the photo there for a moment longer, one thumb brushing absently over the edge of the glass. Then he stepped forward and returned it to its place on the nightstand facing outward, like it had been before she’d reached for it.
“If you need anything,” Beck said, his voice ragged, like he was hardly holding himself together. “I’ll be in the living room.”
He turned before she could answer, but paused at the door.
“Try to get some sleep,” he added, one hand wrapped around the frame of the door. The skin of his knuckles was pulled tight over the bone, flushed white with the effort. “Your body needs the rest.”
And then, carefully, he pulled the door closed behind him.
Leaving her in the center of the room. His room. In his sweatshirt.
With her heart beating loud enough to drown out the rest of the storm.