Chapter 9
Noah lost his shit.
There was no other way to put it.
He’d made it to the rank of Staff Sergeant in the Marines, which was not nothing. He had been prized by his superior officers for his cool head and calm, considered response no matter what situation was developing around him.
In other words, he had made it his life’s work to remain fucking cool under any circumstance or pressure, and he had always been good at it.
And yet here, in this hotel room filled with boxes from her former life, while she lounged there on the bed where he’d learned every inch of her beautiful body, Raemy Miller actually made him lose it.
He didn’t even know what was coming out of his mouth. It was...everything. Everything that kept him up at night. All the things he remembered that tore at him. Her brother, yes. But he’d been in the Marines a long time. Twelve years. He’d seen too many things. He’d lost too many people.
Or worse, they’d lost themselves back here at home and he couldn’t help them.
Truth was, there wasn’t a worse. It was all bad. Veterans committed suicide in numbers that were far too high for his peace of mind. Many of them couldn’t deal with the PTSD, so they ended up on the streets. He cited statistics. He told her stories.
Combat killed some men on the field. It killed others slowly, by increments, back home.
The men who came here to Wild Rose Point were brave, because they’d survived the battle, but knew that they needed help with the various wars they’d be fighting inside themselves for the rest of their lives.
That didn’t make him brave. Just lucky.
He went on and on.
And it wasn’t until she moved from the bed and came over to wrap her arms around him that he understood that this was what she’d been talking about. This was exactly what she’d been getting at.
This was all the terrible weight of too many lives and too many losses that he’d been carrying around inside him, all this time.
It was grief. It was sorrow. It was fury that no one had saved his brothers, and a terrible, deep resignation, because he’d known them. He knew them. He’d known that every one of them had, like William Miller, chosen the path that they were on.
And every single one of them had known that it was possible to go off and not come home. Or to go and become so ruined out there that they couldn’t ever really get back home, even if they were out of the combat zone.
Through it all, she had listened. She had nodded along in some parts. Sometimes her eyes had spilled over. And then, when it seemed like he’d actually lanced the worst of the poison out of himself, she didn’t run.
She came over and she hugged him.
And it was possible that Noah lost track of things for a while there. The time. Himself. There was only Raemy holding him as if she would carry him if she could.
There was only the way her arms wrapped around him, strong and sure.
Until, somehow, they were sitting in the chair. She was in his lap, but he didn’t pretend that she wasn’t the one holding him. Because she was. She was curled up against him and she wiped moisture from beneath his eyes—
That he couldn’t conceive of, because it couldn’t possibly be—
But he let it go.
Noah rested his forehead against hers, and it took him a long while to realize that he’d stopped talking. Stopped ranting. That all he was doing was breathing.
That maybe, she was helping him breathe. Just by being there, alive and warm and his, sitting with him and breathing for the both of them. Holding him together when he would have argued—at length—that he was perfectly fine and needed none of this.
He couldn’t conceive of arguing that now. Or anything else.
“Thank you,” Raemy said softly, and her lips brushed his forehead. His temple. The crook of his neck. “I know that was so hard. But thank you for telling me those things. For trusting me with them.”
Noah shook his head, but she made a soft noise, a soothing sort of noise, and he subsided.
With a shudder that seemed to come from a deep, dark place inside him that he hadn’t even known was there.
Like it was some locked box he’d shoved down inside himself and had forgotten about—or had forgotten he couldn’t open.
And now it was wide open, like that sunshine she carried around with her made it all the way down there, too.
So it made sense that it felt a lot like he was burning alive.
“I’m not the only one who loves you,” she told him, still doling out those kisses.
He shook his head again, but when he opened his eyes and looked at her, she was smiling.
“Those veterans you take into your home, you do know that they could go other places, don’t you?
We can debate the efficacy of the VA, but they exist. There are other places they could go, but they come here.
And they stay, and they work, and they figure out how to act human again.
And do you know how it is that they figure that out? ”
“Time,” Noah said at once, frowning at her. “They need time.”
“They need you.”
He started to say something, but then he saw the hint of her smile in her eyes, and he made himself stop. And she kissed him for it, a sweet press of her lips between his eyebrows.
“You’re stern and gruff, and they need that,” she said. “They don’t need anyone crying at them, or trying to make what they went through soft or palatable. You give them that, and you give them structure. You give them purpose. And all the while, there you are. Somehow managing it.”
He let out a noise of disbelief, but she didn’t take it back. “You make it seem not only possible, but doable. Those men adore you. Tank was telling me the other day that they all send you updates once they leave. That you get letters, cards, pictures of the lives they’re building when they go.”
“It’s not…” Noah stopped, and sighed. “Tank is making that out to be something bigger than it is.”
“I don’t think so.” She kissed one cheek, then the other. “When they thought that they were too dead, too ruined, to have anything like a life, you were there. You give them a roof over their head or you throw up a tent in your backyard, and you make it happen.”
“My grandfather would have wanted the land to be used, and I’m sure as hell not a gardener.”
Raemy smiled. “You teach them, every single day, that love is the only thing that matters.”
And he really couldn’t think of anything to say to that. He just shook his head.
“You feed them. You make them do those horrible calisthenics on the weekend and they groan through the entire thing and can’t wait to do it again.
They love you for it.” When he made a sound, she shifted so she could look down at him.
“You’ve shown them how to be real again.
You’ve shown them that they can put their darkness somewhere else.
Not to deny that it’s there, but to decide how to handle living with it. ”
“Raemy.” His throat actually hurt. “It’s the least I can do. The least they deserve.”
“No, Noah,” she said, in that third-grade-teacher voice of hers.
“It’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. And it’s only possible because of you.
” Her mouth curved, and her eyes were so intensely bright that it should have hurt to look at her.
But it didn’t. “Do you really think that Tank would have discovered his baking abilities anywhere else?”
He actually smiled at that.
“You don’t have to keep paying penance,” she whispered fiercely. “Who are you even paying it for?”
All the usual responses to that bubbled up in him.
But for once, he just...didn’t let them out. He didn’t let them take hold.
He gazed at her instead. This beautiful, impossible, perfect woman curled up in his lap, looking at him with that same openness that he’d seen from the start.
She was so pretty. Her hair was tied in a messy knot on the top of her head. Her eyes were so impossibly blue. Her face was open, as always, like she wasn’t the least bit afraid what it showed or what anyone else might see on it. Her smile was aimed straight at him, and all for him.
And she loved him. She was in love with him.
He couldn’t claim that he understood how that was possible, because he didn’t. There was no possibility that he was good enough for her. There was no mechanism that could ever allow him to deserve her.
There was just no way.
But somehow, the fact that she said those things, with that same directness and confounding honesty that had poleaxed him from the start, seemed to rearrange things inside of him. And she hadn’t asked him if he thought she deserved him.
What she’d said was that she loved him, was in love with him, and was staying.
Noah reached over and fit his hand to her face.
“Surely, you deserve something—someone—who isn’t this broken,” he made himself say, because he was a hideously selfish man and he wanted to take her at face value. How deeply he wanted that, how desperately, should probably have scared him.
The very least he could do was make sure she knew that he was aware of how little he was bringing to the table.
But instead of rethinking things, she gave him her full smile. The warmth of it, the sweet sunshine.
“Haven’t you been listening to anything I say?” she asked, but she was looking at him as if he made her unbearably fond. As if she could barely contain it. “We’re all broken, Noah.”
“There’s regular broken and then—”
Raemy rolled her eyes, but it was a gentle thing.
“I’ve had to accept that there will always be these pieces.
There will always be a moment I’m not expecting that will make me cry or a memory that seems to sideswipe me out of nowhere.
That’s never going to change.” She looped her arms around his neck.
“I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t grieved, or that the grief of losing him just goes away, because I have and it won’t. ”
He wanted to retort, but suspected that she would cut him off again. So he let that go too, and figured it was probably time to let go of all those kneejerk responses.
Like she could read his mind, she nodded approvingly.
“But in the meantime, I have to remember that I’m alive,” she said, sounding bright and fierce at once.
“I’m alive, and the world is big and complex and so overwhelming, and astonishingly beautiful, and I don’t want to miss any part of it.
And I think that you should try living, too. ”
He searched her face. “I can promise you, I’m alive.”
“I know you are.” And her smile took on that glint that he particularly liked, because it usually ended up with both of them naked.
“But you can decide to really live, Noah. Here and now. It doesn’t diminish what you went through, or who you lost. Don’t you think they all would do the same if they could? ”
That went through him like a shot. Like a long, deep blade, straight through to the other side. A kind of clarity, as shocking as it was necessary.
As if everything inside him, locked boxes and painful memories, was suddenly on fire. As if something in him finally…woke up.
He felt himself shake with it and then he was kissing her, again and again, like he couldn’t get enough. Like he could never get enough.
“I love you, Raemy,” he said against her mouth. “And I feel sorry for you, because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t let go of anything. Ever.”
“I’m counting on it,” she replied.
And he could feel her smile against his mouth as he kissed her. He could feel hope, because that was what it had to be. That bright, fizzy thing that moved inside him, and made him feel hopeful. And like he could be bright too.
It made him wonder.
If he really could have the life that she made seem so simple. If he really could have her.
If he could move forward, never forgetting, and never pretending that he hadn’t lost people, or that he wouldn’t make different calls with the benefit of hindsight, but still.
Moving. Breathing. Living.
Figuring out a way to bask in that sunshine she’d given him and taught him to crave.
Where, maybe, with her help, he might find a way to make his life worthy of all of those he’d lost. All those he missed.
But the first thing was that he loved her, it was like an avalanche he’d been trying to hold back with his hands, and he told her so.
Again and again.
It crossed his mind that maybe, deep down inside of him and kiss by kiss, she was teaching him how to believe that he deserved this life. His life.
And better still, the one he intended to build with her.
Starting now.