Chapter 16
Chapter 16
Tanner hadn’t stopped in to check on his condo and pick up his mail in several days. So, on Tuesday, after his session with Dr. Jones, he drove by to get a few things. Most of his clothes were over at Lance’s already, but Lance had planned a date night for that week, and Tanner wanted to pick up a new sweater his mother had given him.
Stopping by his mailbox on the way out, he found a large manila envelope from the Department of the Army. He grabbed the entire stack of mail and dropped it on the passenger seat of the truck, not bothering to open anything, and drove straight to work. He didn’t even touch the envelope from the Army because he didn’t feel brave enough to read the contents. Just looking at the sender’s address freaked him out.
Rationally, Tanner knew the envelope most likely contained a notice of deposit of his back pay along with an official letter stating the terms of his medical discharge. But then again—what if? What if they were calling him back to active duty? What if they’d decided he hadn’t fulfilled the terms of his current contract? What if they ordered him back to the sandbox because of a shortage of pilots in war zones? What were the chances that he’d end up facing enemy combatants again?
By the time he got to work, he’d begun to spiral. Bypassing the secretaries without returning any of their morning greetings, he went straight to his office and closed the door. Thankfully, he had administrative work to do, and no meetings scheduled that day. But every hour spent behind his desk made him dread quitting time. What would happen when he saw the envelope again? Hell, what if he was ordered to report for active duty? Could he face that again? His thoughts grew progressively wilder. He went from the thought of facing deployment, to wondering how he could get across the Mexican border without getting caught. Suddenly, he was hyperventilating as he stared blankly at his screensaver. He glanced at the clock again, shocked to see that nearly three hours had gone by since he’d last checked. He’d been at work for nine hours, and it was time to go home.
Panic. It flooded him again, and that stupid analogy resurfaced. Tanner was taking on water. He felt surrounded and alone, and the panic increased tenfold—like he was back in his dark cell, facing a lifetime of loneliness.
There was a knock on his office door, and Tanner looked up to see Mark standing there. He frowned as soon as he saw Tanner’s haunted expression.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, but he didn’t give Tanner a chance to answer as he grabbed the cellphone on Tanner’s desk. Mark hastily unlocked his phone using facial recognition and placed a call.
“Don’t call her, I’m f—” Tanner responded, but was cut off when the call was answered.
“House of God, God speaking, how may I direct your prayer?” a deep masculine voice inquired teasingly.
“Lance?” Tanner asked.
Mark smiled and handed Tanner the phone. “I’ll be outside when you’re ready to go, okay?”
“Tanner? Sweetheart? Are you alright?”
“I think—” he shook his head and tried to breathe through the panic. There was no reason to panic. It would all be alright. “I’m spiralling.”
“What happened?”
“They sent me an envelope.”
“Who did?” Lance asked when Tanner didn’t volunteer it. He didn’t want to volunteer it. He didn’t want his fears to be fully realized and saying it out loud would make it all so real.
“I don’t want to go back,” Tanner’s voice cracked as tears formed. He wiped them away with rough, jerky movements using the sleeve of his shirt.
“You’re not going back, Tanner. We talked about this, and you don’t have anything to worry about. You’re here permanently now,” Lance promised in a hard, confident tone.
“You don’t know that!” Tanner exclaimed, fighting for control over his rising panic. “Whatever they say goes. If they tell me I have to go back—”
“Tanner, sweetheart, please slow down. You were medically discharged right? You were determined to be unfit for active duty, remember? They’re not sending you back,” Lance said calmly and carefully.
“Maybe they changed their minds. Maybe they need pilots and I’m the only one they could find—”
“Tanner, breathe for me.”
“I’m breathing,” he said, even as he felt the room shrinking, the lights dimming, and the walls closing in.
“Is Mark nearby?”
“Yes.”
“Call Mark for me,” Lance ordered, and it was issued so authoritatively that Tanner obeyed immediately.
It took far less time for Mark to return to his office than it took for Tanner to remember where exactly he was. Tanner was suffocating. He pulled at the shirt he was wearing, snapping the first few buttons right off. Then he sat back in his chair, trying to get enough air. When that didn’t work, he got up from his chair and walked around his office. Well, at least that had been the plan, but his bad leg wasn’t holding up very well. He stumbled and reached for the wall to keep his balance. He found the wall cold and reassuringly solid, as he slid down until he was sitting on the floor, pressed into a corner next to his desk.
“Right, yeah, okay.” Mark’s voice was barely audible. He was too busy trying to breathe to care.
“Hey Tanner?” Mark said, as he knelt in front of Tanner. “Lance is almost here, okay?”
Here. Tanner found the word puzzling. Where was he right now? Was he—was he home? Or was he back there? His panic was primal and absolute. It also felt familiar—like an old friend coming to greet him. But some instinct told him to push it back.
“Please don’t leave,” he whispered.
“Just breathe for me, alright?” Mark encouraged him in a gentle voice.
“Where am I?” Tanner asked, fighting to stay in the present.
Mark laughed, which, oddly enough, broke through Tanner’s ennui. “You’re here at your boring office job. You’re here in the US. You’re home. For good.”
He was home, but they were trying to get him back. They were going to pull him away from home kicking and screaming.
“I don’t want to go back, Mark. I don’t want—I can’t!” He hiccupped as fear grabbed him from beneath and pulled on him so hard that he felt sunken halfway through the floor.
“You’re not going anywhere, Tanner. No one’s taking you anywhere. Lance is on his way and will be here soon. You’re going to be fine. You’re home and you’ll stay right here with us.”
Tanner didn’t know how to get the truth across to Mark. He didn’t know how to explain that his world didn’t work that way and that he didn’t deserve a happy ending. He’d always known they’d come for him in the end. He’d outlived himself. Deep down, somewhere inside him, was a man who’d died in a cell thousands of miles away from here. Tanner was meant to be dead, and they’d make sure to bury him where he belonged. His time was up and there wasn’t anything that Mark could do to stop it.
“It’ll kill me this time,” Tanner said. “Not the pain, not the beatings, not the—” he stumbled over the words. “It’s the loneliness that kills you in the end. It felt like a lifetime, and it was only three years—” he hiccupped, trying to hold back the sobs that threatened to rip him apart.
“Tanner,” a voice called out, not Mark this time, but Lance.
It had the same bracing effect as a bucket of ice water. He blinked rapidly, trying to clear his vision when Lance’s hands gripped his shoulders.
“Hey, T. Talk to me. Tell me what happened.”
“I think I’m panicking.”
Lance nodded, wrapping his right arm around Tanner and pressing his head against his chest.
“I think so too,” Lance whispered calmly.
“I don’t want to go back. I’m so fucking scared of going back—” he confessed with a muffled sob.
“Where’s the letter, Tanner?”
“The letter?” Tanner asked, still so overwhelmed with panic that he couldn’t think straight.
“The letter, sweetheart. You said they sent you a letter. Where is it?” Lance asked, firmly grasping Tanner’s jaw and forcing him to meet his eyes.
“A letter,” Tanner repeated blankly.
“Where is it?” Lance’s tone was sharper, more insistent this time.
“The truck.” Tanner replied, finally remembering where he’d left it.
Lance turned and spoke rapidly to Mark, who took off running.
“Can you breathe with me for a minute?” Lance asked, returning his attention to Tanner and working on getting him to calm down.
“In,” Lance said as he inhaled deeply, waiting for Tanner to respond, but Tanner thought it was pointless and stupid and refused to cooperate. He knew he could breathe—it was just the heaviness sitting on his chest that made it difficult.
“I don’t want to go back,” Tanner repeated.
Lance didn’t say anything. Tanner blinked rapidly, bringing the room back into focus, noticing that Mark had returned with the manila envelope.
Lance released his hold on Tanner to take the envelope and pull out the letter.
“Tanner—Tanner, sweetheart, look!”
He was jostled back to the present as Lance put the letter from the Department of the Army in front of him. The embossed letterhead of black and gold was a blur, the white paper covered in words that all ran together.
“Official notice of medical discharge from duty,” Lance read the top part of the letter for Tanner. “You’re out. For good. You’re not going back. Look. You’re not going back, Tanner. Never. Never again.”
Tanner grabbed the letter with shaking hands. Although he scanned it from top to bottom, he couldn’t comprehend anything. His eyes filled with tears again, and he turned to Lance, still clutching the letter like it too was a life raft.
“I’m not going back?” he asked with a broken sob.
“Never. Not ever again.”
And Tanner burst into tears.
*****
Lance had brought Tanner back to his house. He’d passed out on the way home, drained from the panic attack. After helping him into the house, Lance pulled him into the shower, held him upright, washing away his tears and nervous sweat. By the time Lance guided him to the bed and tucked him under the covers, Tanner was no longer confused or fearful. Gazing at Lance with a worried frown, he felt deeply ashamed of his behavior.
“I’m sorry,” Tanner finally broke his silence just as Lance headed for the bedroom door. He paused, wondering if Tanner would say anything else, but he just sighed and closed his eyes, drifting off to sleep.
Lance left the room to head downstairs to wait for Mark and Cameron. He’d asked Mark to bring her with him so the three of them could form a plan to help Tanner. When Mark and Cameron knocked on the door a few minutes later, Lance invited them in, wondering if Cameron was going to light into him for not taking better care of her brother. But she hugged him instead. Fiercely.
“Thank you,” she said, words muffled by his shirt. Lance returned her hug, sighing with relief that there would be no ass kicking after all. Then she stepped back and sat down next to Mark on the couch.
“What happened?” Cameron asked.
“Guess we’ll know more in the morning,” Lance said, rubbing the back of his neck. “But from what I can tell—he got a letter from the Department of the Army and panicked. He wasn’t making much sense but—it sounded like he thought they might be sending him back.” Lance looked over at Mark to get his take on the situation.
“That’s also what I understood. He kept talking about not wanting to go back. That they’d force him—that he didn’t—” Mark stopped and swallowed hard.
“That he didn’t what?” Cameron asked worriedly.
“He said he didn’t think he’d survive it this time. That the loneliness would do him in. He was terrified of being sent back.”
Shivers ran up and down Lance’s spine. It was so easy, when things were going well, to forget exactly how traumatized Tanner was. Knowing even a small fraction of the terror that Tanner felt because of what the enemy combatants had done to him was enough to drive Lance to his knees. It was impossible to understand how Tanner managed to cope with life now as well as he did.
Lance couldn’t sit still anymore. He jumped to his feet and began to pace, wondering how to go about helping Tanner.
“No one would blame you for walking out,” Cameron declared out of the blue.
He spun around to face her. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
“No one would blame you for walking out. He’s not—sane. He probably won’t ever fully recover from what happened to him. It wouldn’t be fair of anyone to ask you to—”
But Lance didn’t want to hear it. His hand shot up to motion for silence, and he hoped his gaze was sharp enough to dissuade her from continuing.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Cameron shook her head as if Lance wasn’t getting her point.
“It’s not going to get better,” she warned with a frown. “Some days he’ll fucking fall apart for no reason at all. He’ll be violent, estranged, unrecognizable. You can’t—you can’t want that.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Lance repeated.
“Cameron has a point, though. He’s barely—” Mark jumped in, but Lance cut him off.
“I know—I know he’s not stable, or—whole, even. I just don’t give a flying fuck,” Lance explained, putting all his cards on the table. Or—almost every card.
“That’s the thing! I don’t think you know!” Cameron’s sudden outburst stilled Lance’s pacing as she stood up to face him. “The last time he fucking spiralled like this he ended up in the corner of his apartment waving around a fucking steak knife. There was blood everywhere—we had to call Dr. Jones—it was a fucking mess! You can’t want that, Lance! I love my brother, but you’re shackling yourself to a time bomb.”
Her advice to him could have been perceived as cold and mean-spirited, but Lance knew that was not her intent. Rather, it was merely the heartbroken plea of a sister who loved perhaps more than was wise. It was barely surviving the loss of a brother you cherished, and then having to learn to love a shattered version of him.
Lance considered her views and wondered how he could make her understand his position. There was so much concern there. For him, for Tanner. It was—inspiring, truly, the fight she was willing to put up for both their sakes.
“I love him,” Lance said, feeling ridiculous to be confessing it for the first time to Cameron instead of Tanner. “I was with my ex for three years, Cameron. And there wasn’t a single moment in those three years that I came close to feeling what I feel for Tanner after barely a month. Life was rolling along smoothly. I have the house, a growing business, a healthy 401(k), and up until a few weeks ago, I couldn’t have told you a single thing that I truly wanted in life. But things are different now. I want to be with your brother. I love your brother, Cameron. With or without a few loose screws. I’m not na?ve. I know it won’t be easy—hell, it isn’t always easy now, but I’m able and willing to help him through it. Fuck—I don’t think I have a choice, because I love him. I fucking love him—” he breathed out, the confession both freeing and startling in its power to change the way he viewed everything.
Whether that finally convinced her or simply gave her pause for thought, Cameron sat back down and sighed.
“You’re a good guy, Lance. Maybe a bit too good,” she said with a sad smile.
“Then that will be my cross to bear.”
After they left, Lance returned to the bedroom, planning to grab some pajamas and sleep on the couch downstairs.
“Is Cam okay?”
He jumped a foot in the air thinking Tanner was still asleep.
“Worried, but fine,” Lance answered truthfully.
“Are you coming to bed?” Tanner sounded so small and lost, like he was worried that Lance would abandon him.
“If it’s alright with you,” Lance replied, pulling his shirt off and unzipping his jeans.
“I’m literally in your bed.”
“No, sweetheart, you’re in our bed.”
Tanner snorted and lifted the covers in invitation. Lance hesitated at the edge of the bed.
“How are you feeling?” Lance asked.
“Mortified.”
Lance sighed and tenderly brushed some of Tanner’s hair off his face. He couldn’t do much about Tanner’s shame. There were no quick fixes for that. Lance would just have to be there for him every day, proving to him that he was worth loving.
“You had a panic attack, Tanner,” Lance said, carefully. “You didn’t murder anyone.”
“Yeah, but it was over a damned envelope.”
“If you’re waiting for me to say that you were being overly dramatic and way out in left field, you’re going to be waiting a long damned time, T.” Lance had no intentions of playing any fucked-up word games with Tanner. This back and forth was a waste of time.
With a tired sigh, Tanner eased back under the covers.
“I’d rather not sleep alone.”
Lance couldn’t resist the invitation—besides, he didn’t want to—so he slipped under the covers. Spooning Tanner from behind, Lance placed gentle kisses across his shoulders.
“It’s official, you know. You’re a civilian now. You’ve served your time. You’re done.”
“I know,” he acknowledged calmly. “I knew that I was no longer fit for active duty. Any kind of military duty. I knew—but I got so scared—” he trailed off. Lance hugged him tighter and remained silent.
“Over there—it wasn’t like the movies, you know. There was no torture chamber. No one tried to deprive us of sleep or starve us—we just—we sat around, for years. They kept us in this tiny little room with no windows. It was dark, and damp, and we only had light when the guards left one on in the next room and it would shine under our cell door, or when they’d feed us and turn on the lights for a few minutes at a time. They beat me for the first few days until it became clear that I had no good intel for them to use, so they held me as a possible bargaining chip. It was just dark, and lonely, and months and months of boredom made me feel like I was—clawing at the walls of my mind.”
Lance just listened, not trying to analyse anything for now. There would be time for that later.
“When I say it like that, it seems like nothing. And I guess it was nothing—but I’m so fucking scared—so fucking scared of ever being sent there again. I’d rather die, Lance. I’d much, much rather die.”
“You’re home, T. You’re home, and there’s light anytime you need it, and I’m here, anytime you need me. You’re home, okay? And no one—not the Army, not the devil, not even God, is ever going to send you back, you hear me?”
“I know,” Tanner agreed, nodding. “I know.”
Lance tightened his hold and kissed the back of his neck. There were still ghosts to be put to rest. Questions left unanswered. Trauma yet unresolved, but none of that mattered. They were together. They were whole. That was all that mattered, and if it was all they had, then it was more than enough.
“Get some sleep, sweetheart. We’ll still be home in the morning.”
“I know,” Tanner said, once more, sighing and burrowing deeper into Lance’s hold.