Chapter 2 #2
I eat slowly, methodically, letting the heat ground me in my body.
This is a technique the Army therapist taught me—focus on physical sensations when your mind starts spiraling.
The burn on your tongue. The texture of the rice.
The weight of the fork in your hand. Be here, in this moment, not lost in memory.
Five years of MREs and local food and whatever we could scrounge.
Five years of not knowing if I'd make it home, if "home" even meant anything anymore.
Five years of watching people die—enemies, allies, civilians caught in the crossfire.
Five years of being the one who pulled the trigger, made the calls, carried the weight.
Brennan.
I don't let myself think about Brennan. Not usually. But something about today—being back, seeing Robin happy, meeting that pride of lions—has left me raw in ways I wasn't expecting.
He was a wolf shifter. Part of my unit for three years, our best tracker and scout.
We weren't supposed to be anything—fraternization rules, operational security, all the reasons it was a bad idea.
But combat does things to you. Proximity does things.
We told ourselves it was just stress relief, just survival instinct.
It wasn't. We both knew it wasn't.
Two years ago, an IED took him away.
I learned something that day. Don't get attached. Don't let anyone matter. Keep it quick, keep it clean, keep it meaningless. Protect your heart the same way you protect your body—with armor, with distance, with the understanding that everything ends.
Two years of following my own rules. Quick fucks with strangers who don't want names or numbers. Nobody who could hurt me by leaving, because I leave first. Nobody who looks at me like I'm worth keeping.
Until today.
Until Jason looked at me like I hung the moon, and my rules felt less like protection and more like prison.
I finish the vindaloo and pay in cash, leaving a big tip for the waiter who remembered me after five years. The evening has cooled down, that perfect September temperature where you can ride without a jacket and feel the wind on your skin.
I take the long way home. Through downtown, past the library where Toby apparently still works, past the park where Robin and I used to play when we were kids.
The city has changed in five years—new buildings, new businesses, construction everywhere—but the bones are the same.
I know these streets the way I know my own body.
It helps. Being somewhere familiar. Reminds me that I exist outside of combat zones and forward operating bases and all the places I've spent the last half-decade trying to survive.
---
My house sits at the end of Maple Street, dark and quiet.
I bought it six years ago, right before deployment, with some vague idea that I'd need somewhere to come back to.
Somewhere that wasn't our parents' rotating houses with their rotating boyfriends and girlfriends.
Somewhere that wasn't a barracks or a tent or a hole in the ground. Somewhere permanent.
The realtor thought I was crazy. Single guy buying a three-bedroom house with a detached garage, paying cash, barely even looking at the other rooms before signing the papers. She kept trying to show me the updated kitchen, the renovated bathroom, the nice backyard.
I didn't care about any of that. I cared about the garage.
It's got three bays, a lift, built-in storage along the walls, everything I'd need to work on bikes.
Good ventilation, good lighting, enough space to spread out.
I spent two days before deployment getting it set up—tools organized, workbenches installed, fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling.
Even bought a mini-fridge to keep drinks cold and a beat-up couch to crash on when I didn't want to go inside.
Then I left for five years and let it all sit empty.
Robin doesn't even know it exists. I never told him—never told anyone.
Bought it quietly, paid a management company to handle everything, kept it off the radar.
At first it was operational security, habit from years of keeping my life compartmentalized.
Then it became something else. Superstition, maybe.
Like if I told Robin about it, I'd jinx myself.
Die in some shithole country and leave him with a house full of nothing and a brother who never came home.
Easier to stay a ghost. Easier to let him think I had nothing to come back to, so he wouldn't wait for me. So he'd build his own life instead of holding space in his for mine.
Stupid, probably. But I've made worse decisions.
The house itself is another story. I never furnished it properly.
Never hung anything on the walls or put pictures on the shelves.
There's a mattress in the master bedroom—new, bought online, delivered last week—a coffee maker in the kitchen, and not much else.
I paid a service to keep the lawn mowed and the pipes from freezing, but no one's lived here. No one's made it a home.
I'm not sure I know how.
I pull into the driveway and kill the engine. This is mine. All of it. Paid off, no mortgage, no landlord. A place that belongs to me.
So why does it feel like I'm trespassing?
I head inside through the side door, flipping on lights as I go. Each room exactly as I left it this morning, barely touched.
I should unpack. The duffel I brought is still sitting in the bedroom, everything I own crammed into one bag.
Clothes that need washing. Toiletries. A few paperbacks with cracked spines.
The watch Brennan gave me for my birthday the year before he died—silver band, simple face, still running perfectly.
That's it. That's the sum total of my life.
Ten years in the Army and I fit everything that matters into a bag I can carry.
Instead of unpacking, I stand in the middle of the living room and try to imagine what this place could look like.
Really look like, if someone lived here.
Couch over there, maybe—something big and comfortable, the kind you can sink into.
TV on that wall. Bookshelves, because Robin will want somewhere to put his cookbooks when he visits.
A kitchen table where people could actually sit and eat. Where I could invite people over. Where Jason could cook, if he wanted to. If I let myself want that.
I scrub a hand over my face.
I need sleep. That's what I need. Thirty-six hours without rest and I'm having domestic fantasies about a guy I met three hours ago. Imagining him in my kitchen, at my table, in my life. Exhaustion and relief and too many feelings I don't know what to do with.
It's not real. It can't be real. I don't do real.
I strip down and fall into bed. The mattress is comfortable enough but the sheets are stiff and unfamiliar, that crisp new-cotton smell instead of something lived-in.
Nothing smells right. Nothing feels right.
The house is too quiet, no ambient noise of a base or a city or other people existing nearby.
I lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling and think about Jason's pulse under my thumb. The way he shivered when I said his name. The want in his eyes, naked and obvious, like hiding wasn't something he knew how to do.
I could wreck him so easily. Push him up against a wall, pin his wrists above his head, take everything he's so clearly offering. He'd let me. He'd probably beg for it, all that eagerness turned desperate, that pretty voice saying please and more and yours.
And then what?
Then I'd have to figure out how to be something I've never been. Gentle. Present. The kind of person who stays for breakfast. The kind of person who deserves someone like him.
I'm hard. Have been since I left the bar, if I'm honest. My body knows what it wants, even if my brain is still trying to talk me out of it.
I don't touch myself. Don't let myself have even that much.
Because if I start thinking about him that way—really thinking, really letting myself want—I'm not sure I'll be able to stop. And Jason deserves better than being someone's relapse. Someone's exception to the rule. Someone I'll hurt because I don't know how to do anything else.
I roll over and close my eyes and try to think about nothing.
It doesn't work.