Chapter Seventeen
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
H E WAS EXPECTING her bright and early, so when she showed up with her giant backpack already on, and a grim, determined expression, he wasn’t surprised, but he was a little bit amused by the intensity.
“How was the date?” he asked while he began to assemble his own pack to put in the truck.
“It was fine,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Just fine.”
“Check anything off your list?”
“I don’t know that we’re close enough to have automatic list disclosure occurring.”
“Weird. I thought we were. Considering I bought your dress for the event.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“Which one did you wear?”
“Why? The green one.”
That made him want to smile. Because the green one was pretty, but not the one he would’ve picked when he thought she was trying to signal she wanted to be taken to bed.
“Good choice.”
“I don’t think you mean that.”
“What do you care what I mean?” he asked.
“You’re so rude.”
“Yeah, I know.” He lifted his backpack up off the table and gestured toward the door. “That’s kind of why I needed the flirting coaching. The safe word.”
“Snowy plover.”
“I’m not being mean,” he said.
He marched her out the door and hefted his pack into the bed of the truck. Then he went up to her and without thinking unclipped the belt from around her waist.
His hand skimmed that spot just beneath her rib cage.
He was suddenly focused on that spot, there beneath her breasts.
His stomach tightened, his blood getting just a little hotter.
Then he grabbed the top of the backpack and pulled it off, putting it in the back.
“All right. Get in.”
He knew he was being a little abrupt now.
She didn’t respond to that, though. Instead she went around to the other side and got in.
“Here we go. Climbing the damned mountain.”
“Climbing the damned mountain,” she reiterated.
“But you didn’t kiss him.”
She looked at him, eyes narrow. “How do you know that?”
“Because you didn’t wear the black dress. You wear the black dress if you want something specific.”
“Is that what you would wear if you wanted to hook up with them?”
“Probably.”
“Fine. I realized that I didn’t want to kiss him. I thought it might be nice. He was...legitimately awful to me in high school. And I wanted to do something about that. Change it into another story, I guess. But that’s not wanting somebody. And I realized that I want to want the person that I kiss. I want that more than I want to write a good narrative. I want that more than I want to laugh at him and say now you think I’m good enough.”
“That’s good, Rory.” His chest felt so tight he could barely breathe.
He hadn’t realized how much he hadn’t wanted her to kiss him.
“I kept thinking about what you said. About the parade. About how wanting a parade isn’t enough. It’s not... That it doesn’t sustain you. Or whatever. And I get it.”
“It just only gets you so far. When I didn’t have the roar of the crowd, I didn’t have anything left. And even worse, I realized I couldn’t handle the roar of the crowd anymore. I don’t have the answers. I just know which things I was holding on to didn’t have the answers, either.”
He felt closer now. With her. Watching her look for answers inside herself. This time with Rory had been the only time in his life he’d connected with someone, and it hadn’t been about him being great.
It was different.
It wasn’t a parade.
It was better.
“I think I understand that now.”
“What did he do to you in middle school? You mentioned other bullying.”
She shrugged. “Just normal stuff.”
“I would never have known. I drove you every day. Until the diary thing, I had no idea.”
It hurt. To realize that he’d been used to hurt her.
It wasn’t a happy thing, or even funny.
He was the guy that drove her to school every day. And she’d had a little crush. And that had been used against her because people thought something about him that wasn’t even true or fair or real.
“Oh that was just...one of the many things but that was the thing that hurt the most. Because if it was about my knees or my boobs, at least it wasn’t really me. But that diary...that was me. It was why it hurt so bad. Thank God your sister is such a good person because we used to make fun of the way girls acted about you, and then I would go home and write these furtive, ridiculous things. She could have been hurt by that. She could have said I was a liar, which would’ve been even worse than the whole school just thinking I was sad. Or stupid. She didn’t. She just understood. She said it was okay. She was so nice to me.” She sucked in a sharp breath. “And then you stepped in and you told everyone to stop, and if you’d been anyone else, that would have made it worse but you were you. So they respected you and they listened to you. Maybe that’s the real reason I wanted to have a parade. I just wanted... I wanted it to matter the way it did for you.”
He was glad he’d done that. It was maybe the only thing he could feel a little heroic about at this point. But it still made him mad that she’d ever been treated that way.
“I don’t understand how this town treated you that way. You didn’t do anything to anybody. There’s nothing inherently wrong with you. Just like there’s nothing inherently good about me. It’s bullshit. When things fell apart for me, they fell apart. When I couldn’t be the best anymore, I just wanted to make it go away. I just wanted... I didn’t handle myself well.”
Hypocrite.
Yet, he was. He didn’t want to share all that yet. All guts, no glory.
Because he already knew what it was like to have a woman look at him like he was the biggest disappointment on the planet, and he couldn’t bear it if Rory Sullivan thought he was a disappointment.
Maybe that was his real problem. Maybe he was drawn to Rory because she had looked at him like he mattered. It was more than hero worship.
He was also tired, though, and he didn’t want to excavate his entire soul to answer these questions. He just wanted to be with her right now.
And he wanted to keep protecting himself.
“I don’t know. But whatever that thing is that you have, Gideon, I just don’t. And I’ve known forever.”
“I don’t anymore, either,” he said.
“Maybe we’ll find it here on the mountain.”
It was as good a plan as any, he supposed. The mountain might hold some answers. Or maybe it was just a rock. But either way, he was doing something.
They parked the truck at the trailhead and got their belongings together.
He helped her clip her backpack into place and then moved away quickly because he didn’t need to encourage the intensity of the feelings that were pounding through him.
“All right, we ought to make it to a spot by sunset. Then we can get the camp set up and make a meal.”
“Sounds good. I hope you know how to cook camp food,” she said.
“I’m okay at it. We were in charge of dealing with our own rations when we were on assignment.”
“Right.”
They started up the trail. It was narrow and uneven, big rocks protruding up through red clay. The pines on either side towered above them, scrubby madrone trees interspersed between them, and ferns and other plants that loved the shade clinging to the forest floor beneath all that green coverage.
It was beautiful out here. He had forgotten. He had never really let himself sit in the stillness, in the silence of nature, all those years that he had lived here.
He hadn’t done it in the desert; he hadn’t done it in Georgia. He was so driven to be around noise.
Around people.
And then these last few years had been like being in a sensory deprivation tank. Cut off from all of it. But worse, cut off from the enjoyment of it. Because it was all there. He could’ve gone out and found that life again, except he didn’t like it anymore. So he was just alone.
But this didn’t feel like quiet isolation. It felt like peace. Walking with Rory felt like peace.
Rory stopped and picked a leaf off a branch, then twisted up and tore a piece off. Then another. “A couple of times I’ve seen a look on your face, and I feel like I know who the soldier is.” She tore another chunk out of the leaf. “The man who went out on deployment. You were different. Different than when you left.”
She let the leaf fall to the ground.
“Yeah,” he said.
He had never talked about this, not to anybody.
Cassidy hadn’t wanted to hear about the military, and his father-in-law had told him very seriously that one of the most important things he could do was protect his wife from the reality of what happened overseas. It was what he had done, protected his wife and his children from the gritty truth of war.
It was the job of a soldier to keep civilians separated from the horrors of the big bad world.
You had to do it most of all for your own family.
Gideon had taken that very seriously.
Rory had said something about noticing a difference. Noticing a change. No one else ever commented on it, and he wanted to know more. What she saw.
This change he’d brought back with him overseas, no matter how hard he’d tried not to.
“What did you want to know?”
“Was it different than you thought?”
“Yeah. I thought it would be like a football game. I mean I knew that it was life or death, on some level, but I didn’t think that it would be that for me. You can get badly injured playing football, and I never did. I felt like I was golden. And you know, years in different combat scenarios, and it was true. I was always lucky. But I also learned some hard truths. That it wasn’t because I was special. Because I watched good, special, solid men and women lose their lives out there. I saw death in a profound way that I never had before. And as I rose up the ranks, they were my men. And I felt responsible for every single death. I felt destroyed by it. It’s not romantic. It’s not about playing hero. And so many men went out there, and they were still playing Army man, you know? They laughed when they took out an enemy, but at a certain point, all I could see was that they were all boys. For the most part. Doing what they thought they had to for the thing they believed most in.
“I could never feel better anymore. And I couldn’t think of why we were there sometimes. Just killing. And being killed. And it started to wear at me.”
He stopped for a moment and stared off the edge of the trail. He’d come close to this truth before, but he’d never let himself say it out loud. He’d never even let himself verbalize it in his own mind. Because it hinted at a truth that sat uncomfortably in his gut.
That he might have ended up here even if he’d never been injured.
That something had gone awry inside him before his brain injury.
That he’d started to realize the world wasn’t golden, after all.
“I think I was broken before that bomb went off. I shoved all my doubts aside, and I forced myself to carry on. To keep with the mission. It was important. The most important thing. And if nothing else, I felt like I was protecting my family, because even though it was impossible for me to not humanize the people we were fighting, I did know that they presented a real threat if left unchecked. I don’t know. But it wasn’t a game to me, that much I can tell you. And then... That day, we were all doing a pretty routine patrol. But there were some high-ranking officials from the US who had come to visit a village. That was a dangerous situation, but we had been in it many times before. Me and a few other men decided to go offer protection. We were there without weapons, but it was routine like I said. I still had one earbud in my ear. With my music playing loud. We were keeping an eye on the horizon for insurgents. We didn’t expect there to be a bomb in the middle of everyone.”
He started walking again, feeling like a heavy boulder that had been sitting on his chest had shifted. The pristine surroundings were at odds with the words that were coming out of his mouth.
“It wasn’t the first time I was adjacent to an explosion, or to all the damage that it could cause. Ten years in the military, five deployments, and I had been gone more often than I was home. I had seen all those things. But not that close. Not where it could’ve easily been me. And it was luck, fate or a divine joke. Just the noise rattles your brain around. Gives you a concussion. But there was the impact as well. I had some burns. Some physical injuries. A good friend of mine lost his arm and two legs. We were lucky. I don’t know why. I still can’t figure out why. I went home and I just wanted to be myself again, and I wasn’t. I couldn’t find me . I was in pain, and I couldn’t make the healing go any faster. I tried... I tried to just be okay. My father-in-law was okay. After the Gulf War and... He was okay. I don’t know why I couldn’t fucking be okay .”
Rory didn’t say anything. Instead, she came alongside him on the trail and touched his wrist, then slowly moved her hand around so that her palm was touching his, before she wove her fingers between his own. She said nothing; she just held his hand. And they kept on walking.
It burned there. Where she was touching him. But not in a bad way. He’d been burned in a bad way. This was different.
They didn’t speak. But it was like the wilderness around them had all the words they didn’t have between them.
The birds were chirping, and the wind blowing through the pines made a distinct comforting sound.
It was music, and not the kind that triggered flashbacks.
And more than anything, it was an out-of-body experience to have somebody simply walk with him. Not ask anything of him. Not trail behind, not run ahead. Just walk with him.
“This is the easy part,” he said, talking about the trail, but felt like it could mean something more. Even though he hadn’t meant to infuse it with a double meaning. They were holding hands. They were getting a little bit too close.
“I know. It gets pretty rough up ahead.”
“Yes. It does.”
“I think I can handle it,” she said.
“I know you can.”
He wondered if they were still talking about the trail. She was strong. Stronger maybe than she gave herself credit for. But she didn’t need to be strong for him. He couldn’t bear to put another woman through that. It wasn’t fair. It would be the same shit he’d already been through. He already knew all the places he fell short. All the places he didn’t come through when he needed to. He never wanted to do that to Rory. He’d been honest with Fia when he’d said that.
But he also didn’t want to let go of her hand. Right now, the trail was easy. Right now, they could hold on to each other. Right now, it was okay. And that was what he would hold on to. While he held on to her.