Chapter 12
Chapter 12
“ D o you have friends?”
When their hug ended, they resumed their trek. Now Juniper seemed to be making a study of him, if the barrage of innocuous questions was any indication.
“I have one friend,” John said. He could tell he’d surprised her, and he enjoyed the feeling. He had no idea why and added it to the mounting pile of confusion where Juniper was concerned.
“Tell me about him. Her?”
“Him. We met at West Point, his name is Ben.”
“Is he like you?” she asked.
He darted her a glance. What did that mean, like him?
“A soldier’s soldier, the job,” she explained, deepening her voice and flattening her expression to mimic him. Despite himself, he smiled.
“No. People like him. He has grand aspirations that will probably succeed.”
“Don’t you have aspirations?” she asked.
“I suppose, but not the same as his. He wants it all: wife, family, glorious career.”
“And what do you want?” she asked.
He opened his mouth to answer and found he couldn’t. What did he want? A few days ago it had seemed so clear, and now it was as if he could see his goal across a long distance with a fog between them. That fog was Juniper, he knew. She was putting his head in a muddle, making him feel, remember, and question things. What did he want? To stay alive? To have successful missions? To make a lasting impact? On whom? For what reason? “To do my duty,” he said at last, satisfied to have latched on to something. “To serve with honor.”
“I guess since you’ve already done that, you’ve accomplished all your life’s goals,” she mused.
“That’s not…I don’t…” He grunted, annoyed. He was not a person who floundered, stuttered, or questioned himself. Juniper made him do all those. The more flustered he became, the happier she looked, annoying him further. “You take great delight in plaguing me.”
“Since the moment we met,” she beamed, squeezing the hand that was still joined to hers somehow. How was it possible to be trotting through the jungle of Honduras, Juniper tagging along behind him? So easily had he slipped into old habits, they might have been back home in Alabama. Any moment now he expected to stumble out of the woods and head home for supper, could almost taste the fresh biscuits and blackberry jam her mother set on the table every night. His mouth began to water, and that was so infuriatingly embarrassing he missed the vine he’d been aiming for and embedded his machete in a tree trunk instead.
“You seem a little tense,” Juniper noted as he used both hands to yank the machete.
“I’m not tense. I don’t get tense,” he snapped.
“Hmm,” she said, her placid tone a contrast to his sharp one.
“Confound,” he exclaimed, using both hands to yank the stuck machete. It jerked free with a rebound, swinging hard to his right, exactly where Juniper was standing, slicing through her shirt like water.
For a stunned second they looked at each other, blinking in shock, then he dropped the machete and reached for her, tugging her shirt upward, ready to staunch the wound. His panic was so overwhelming and immediate it took him a moment to realize he didn’t see the bloom of blood, the gaping entrails he expected. Frantic, his fingers smoothed over her skin, staunching a hole that wasn’t there. She said his name three times before he finally responded.
“ Bear, ” she yelled shaking him.
His head snapped up, his too big pupils unable to focus on anything but the vision in his head—Juniper, injured and bleeding, because of him.
“I’m fine,” she said, tone soothing and gentle. “It barely touched me.”
“It…it cut your shirt.”
“I always hated this shirt,” she said, and it was such a Juniper thing to say he expelled a sharp breath that was half laugh, half gasp.
“I thought I killed you,” he said. His gaze fastened on her stomach as if still unable to believe he hadn’t filleted her.
“No, look, you didn’t even break the skin.” She took his index finger and traced it over the line the machete had made, so faint it was barely pink. “You didn’t hurt me. You would never hurt me.”
The way she said it, with so much definitive authority, made him wonder if she was privy to the visions in his head—his mother, broken and bleeding at the hands of his father. “I…I might,” he whispered, the confession leaking from him unbidden.
“Have you ever hurt a woman?” she asked.
“No.” He paused. There had been female soldiers, female insurgents. “Not in that way, at least.”
“See? You wouldn’t,” Juniper said, triumphant.
“I’ve never…” he paused and cleared his throat. “I don’t get close to women.”
Juniper digested that tidbit, blinking, then reached up and stroked the side of his face. “You would never hurt me, ever.”
“You don’t know that,” he said.
“I know you.”
He started to argue that she didn’t know him, of course she couldn’t, not after a fourteen year absence. But the truth was she did know him because she knew the one thing about him he kept hidden from everyone else. She knew his beginning, the shameful truth of his parentage, his father’s brutality, his mother’s weakness.
He regarded her again, that unfathomable feeling blooming through him. He couldn’t yet put a name to his emotions, maybe they would always defy definition. But he began to recognize the odd sensation the feelings provoked, a worrisome combination of relief and annoyance. It was at once aggravating and soothing to be known by her, to have revealed what he had so long tried to keep hidden. Absolutely no one knew the truth of his parents, not even Ben, who had become like a brother to him in so many ways. But Juniper knew and, what was more, didn’t think less of him because of it. The only explanation he could find for that was her youth and inexperience. Too long sheltered by her eccentric family, she hadn’t seen or known enough of the world to understand how much his upbringing had set him apart from others.
“I will never be like other men,” he informed her.
“Why would you want to be?” she countered.
He scowled. “You worry me, Juni, you really do.”
Contrary to everything rational, she beamed. “Now that’s the first sensible thing you’ve said in an age.”
Smiling a little in spite of himself, he picked up the machete and faced forward. “Come on, pest. And next time I swing a machete at you, jump out of the way.”
“It’s cute how you think telling me what to do is less dangerous than a machete,” she said. Her expression turned ponderous. “Although I was taught to respect my elders. This is a conundrum.”
“I’ll elder you,” he said and, barely breaking stride, tossed her over his shoulder and continued on his way, smiling when she giggled in delight.
J ohn could have walked through the night. He had made his body a tool, a weapon, a trained machine that only occasionally needed fuel. It slept when he told it to sleep and ate when he told it to eat. But Juniper, hale and hardy though she was, was still a normal girl who needed sleep and food.
“Let’s rest here,” he said, reaching into his pack for water and food. She took a few sips and handed the canteen to him, smiling as she inspected the MRE he gave her.
“I’ve never had one before. Are they good?”
“Would they replace your Mama’s cooking? No. Are they passable enough to be edible? Also no. But they’re all we’ve got,” he said. John hated army food, a secret he’d never admit to anyone. But he’d grown up at the feet of two amazing southern cooks, first his mother and then Juniper’s mother, both of whom had spoiled him with their talents. Subsisting on the army’s diet of bland cafeteria food and MREs the last decade and a half was more of a trial for him than anything else had been.
Juniper laughed and tore open her packet, giving it a sniff. “It doesn’t seem so bad,” she said.
He could argue with her, tell her it wasn’t bad the first time but after the fortieth day in a row it felt almost unbearable. But instead he remained silent, observing her with a smile. It wasn’t his way to complain and bellyache about things, but it was more than that. Juniper had a sense of adventure he found endearing. Most women in her position—beaten half-senseless by a gang of rogues who’d kidnapped her, on a forced march through the jungle—would be exhausted at the least, grumpy and overwhelmed at worst. But Juniper had found her inner sparkle, and he realized in that moment it wasn’t because youth was on her side; it was just Juniper. She embraced life, had no fear of living in a yurt in the wilds of Honduras, didn’t care a whit that she’d been hours without food, water, or rest, and had already resolved herself to move on from the kidnap and assault. If John were looking, Juniper would be exactly the sort of woman he’d go for, all sparkle and sunshine on top, all grit and substance beneath. But he wasn’t looking, he reminded himself as he forced his lips to stop smiling, his eyes to stop staring. He wasn’t looking at all.
“Where’d you go?” she asked.
He raised his head, staring at her in question.
“Just now, you went all John Caruthers on me, disappeared inside yourself. What are you thinking about?”
When was the last time someone asked him that question? Certainly his men didn’t want to know what went on in his mind, probably figured they were better off not knowing. And they were correct. But the Dunbars liked to know the inner workings of a man. John could almost hear Dustin in Juniper’s words, could almost see the tilt of his head as he made his inspection. What’s going on in that quiet but powerful brain of yours, John? Dustin had a way of making people want to be the best version of themselves. He would slip observations and compliments into conversation so you ended up wanting to live up to his words. Under his tutelage, John came to think of himself as someone intelligent, someone who gave thought before action, both things Dustin seemed to value in him.
Juniper waited him out, staring at him with the same considerate intensity her father used to, back in the day. “You’re so lucky,” he blurted, not what he meant to say at all.
She blinked at him, confused. “Pardon?”
“You’re so lucky, Juni, to have a father like yours, a mother like yours, a family like yours. Do you know how lucky you are?”
“I do,” she agreed, nodding.
“Do you, though? Do you know how many kids I see come up from basic who have nobody? Who join the army because it’s all they can think of to do with their lives?”
“Boys like you were, you mean,” she clarified.
He gave a curt nod.
She ate her MRE in thoughtful silence a few beats before she spoke again. “But you always had us, John. We were always there, backing you up, surrounding you, loving you. When you went away, it left a hole in our family.”
“For you, maybe.” He had always been Juniper’s inexplicable favorite. An entire family of loving, delightful people, and she’d chosen the standoffish, recalcitrant teenager as her own.
“No,” she shook her head hard. “My parents set a place at the table for you every holiday, hoping you’d come home. They bought you presents that became a pile in the hall closet. Sometimes I’d see them glance at the door, sort of expectant, and I’d know they were looking for you.” She paused and shook her food packet. “The same as me. I don’t think I ever stopped looking at the door. And then…”
He watched her intently, waiting for her to continue. A shadow passed over her face, and she shuddered. John felt a prickle of alarm, but he quickly dismissed it. Nothing bad could have happened to her, not really, not with her loving family on standby. “And then what?”
She took a breath and pushed the dark mood away, giving him a smile. “And then at some point I suppose I stopped waiting, stopped jumping every time I heard a car in the drive. At some point I guess it sank in and I accepted that you didn’t claim us the same way we claimed you.”
He finished his meal, chewing each bite the precisely prescribed number of times. When that was finished, he folded the MRE packet and slipped it back in his pack. “It has nothing to do with claiming or not claiming, Juni. It’s just how it is. It was time for me to move on, grow up, do other things.”
“We loved you. Didn’t you love us?”
She looked so much like the little girl she had been then, plaintive and pouting, her pretty face turned up to his in silent supplication. Back then it had been an invitation to pick her up and hold her close. He felt the same urge today and balled his hands into fists, resisting the temptation. “I can’t love. You know that.”
Her lashes fluttered. “I don’t know that. Of course you can. You’re a man, the same as every other.”
The same as my father, his mind filled in the unspoken rejoinder. “What happened with my parents, all those years ago, it…broke something inside me. Made me unable to connect in that way.” He thought she understood, but maybe she was too young back then to realize how it had been, how hard her family tried to love and mend him, how useless and wasted their efforts had been. He remained unable to feel, unable to love, unable to attach.
Juniper watched him a moment in shocked silence, her mouth slightly ajar. He could feel the weight of her judgment as her mind ran the information through its new filter. So that’s why he’s like that, why he’s always been like that. That’s why he behaves the way he does, why he rejected us all. He could practically hear her thoughts, so it came as something of a surprise when she wadded up her empty food packet and tossed it hard at his face, pelting him between the eyes. Her eyes flashed fire, and she stood up as she yelled, “Nonsense, you forsaken idiot.”