Kyler
Fort Bragg
The roses look like shit.
Crushed a little from the ride, wrapped in crinkled plastic, already starting to brown at the edges from the ridiculous August heat. I stare down at them in the passenger seat like they’re going to turn this around. Like they’ll undo the fact that I didn’t call. Didn’t text. Didn’t even try.
I grip the steering wheel until my knuckles pop. Fort Bragg’s housing district is quiet. Neat rows of pale brick and chain-link, like normal lives are possible here. I turn the truck off and stare at our front door. Ivy’s car is in the driveway. Lights on. She’s home.
She’s always home lately. That’s new. And it’s not good.
She used to come and go, light and kinetic, full of stories about the company, the girls she rehearses with, the choreography she’s helping set for next season. Lately, all I hear is how tired she is. How sore. How she’s not sleeping.
And it’s not the dancing that’s draining her.
It’s me.
I told myself I was in another country, out on a mission, busy. All of that is technically true. But it’s not why I didn’t call.
The real reason is curled tight in my gut, cold and hollow.
I didn’t want to hear her voice.
Not because I don’t miss it. I do. I dream in it.
I replay the way she whispered my name the first time I touched her, and the zombielike way she said it on the medevac.
But hearing it now, angry and aching and laced with everything I’ve failed to give her that was too much. So I took the coward’s way out.
Radio silence. Which seems to be a language we’re both fluent in.
She won’t talk about it. The kidnapping.
Not the first night. Not the first week. Not the first year.
Not really.
I know the bare bones of it, what I pieced together from the rescue, her injuries, the debrief, and the after-action report once command had redacted some of what Ivy shared. But that’s it.
She won’t tell me what they said to her.
What they did. I know something happened, more than the logistics, more than the bruises.
There’s a fracture in her now, like something was cracked in the dark and never set right.
And I can't force her to tell me. So I carry it too.
Quietly. The way I carry every damn thing.
But it’s there. In everything. It touches every part of our life now, like fucking static, impossible to tune out.
Some days she’s fine. She goes to rehearsal, dances like her ribs were never broken, like someone didn’t use her body against her. She teaches her ballet classes and tells me about the girl who finally nailed a clean pirouette.
Other days she’s somewhere else. Locked down. Fragile. Mean. Not because she wants to hurt me, but because she’s drowning and lashing out is easier than admitting she needs help.
She picks fights over dishes. Over toothpaste. Over the fact that I folded her tights wrong. It’s never really about those things. I know that.
It’s about control.
And fuck if I don’t understand that.
When she can’t sleep, she paces. I hear her feet on the floor in the middle of the night, bare and blistered from class.
She opens and closes drawers. Folds laundry that doesn’t need folding.
She moves around the house like she’s looking for something she lost, but we both know she left it behind in that compound.
Sometimes she wants me. Desperately. Claws at me in the dark like I’m the only thing anchoring her. Her hands grab my shirt, my hair, my dog tags like she needs to feel me, fast and hard and now, just to prove she’s still here and so am I.
And I give her whatever she asks for.
Even when it breaks me.
Because afterward she always cries into the pillow, and I lie there staring at the ceiling, trying not to lose my shit while my wife curls into a ball and shakes beside me. And then, the next day, she pretends it didn’t happen. That we’re fine. That she’s fine.
Other times, she won’t even let me touch her.
She flinches if I come into a room too fast. If I raise my voice, even when I’m not angry. Once, I dropped a pan in the kitchen and she hit the floor faster than I’ve ever seen. Like she was back there again. Like someone was coming for her.
I sat down on the cold tile and held her for thirty minutes that night. She didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Just shook like a leaf.
She showered after that with the door locked.
Didn’t let me in for days.
That’s how it’s been.
A year of silence and screaming and pretending and fucking surviving.
The one-year mark hit two months ago.
I knew it was coming. I felt it coming. The air got heavier in the house. Her eyes sharper. Her fuse shorter. She went into this autopilot mode, like if she just danced hard enough, long enough, she could sweat the memory out of her bloodstream.
She didn’t want to talk about it. Of course not.
But on the exact day—the anniversary of her abduction—I woke up to find her sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor in one of my T-shirts, just staring at her hands like they weren’t hers.
She hadn’t slept.
Wouldn't eat.
Didn’t want me to touch her.
She didn’t cry. Ivy doesn’t cry anymore unless it leaks out of her body without warning. She just looked at me and whispered, “It’s today.”
I nodded. Said nothing. What could I say?
I sat with her. Gave her my silence. My presence. My fucking soul, if she wanted it.
Six days later—the anniversary of her rescue—she ordered me to fuck her on the living room floor. Her word. No love. No lights. No foreplay. Just two bodies, bruised and broken and desperate to forget. She didn’t kiss me. Didn’t say a word.
And I let her.
I let her use me. Because that’s the only thing I know how to do anymore, show up with my body when my words aren’t enough.
Sometimes she calls it love. Sometimes I think it’s penance.
And maybe that’s why I didn’t call on our wedding anniversary.
Because deep down, some part of me thinks I don’t deserve her anymore. Not when I couldn’t stop what happened. Not when I can’t fix it now.
She’s alive.
But she’s not the same.
And I don’t know how to reach her.
I’m standing right in front of her, and it still feels like she’s a thousand fucking miles away.
And worst of all, I think she wants it that way.
I grab the flowers, get out of my truck, and walk up the front steps like I’m approaching a goddamn IED.
I’m trained for explosives. I’m not trained for her.
The door isn’t locked.
That alone tells me everything.
Inside, it smells like citrus and sweat. Her pointe shoes are drying on the bench in the entryway, ribbons untied.
She’s in the kitchen, barefoot, back to me, stirring something on the stove like she didn’t hear me come in. There’s a half-eaten protein bar on the island and a cup of tea beside it.
“Hey,” I say, voice low.
Nothing.
I set the roses down on the counter between us like they’re proof I remembered.
She doesn’t look at them. Doesn’t look at me.
“I brought you these.”
She stirs once more, then turns off the burner and finally looks at me. Her eyes are wide, dark, tired. Rage lives there now, tucked beneath the surface like a second heartbeat.
“You missed our anniversary,” she says. No preamble.
“I know.”
Her amber eyes scan me, like always, looking for injuries. “You didn’t call.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You wouldn’t.” She turns fully, arms crossed, jaw tight. My old Army sweatshirt slides off one of her shoulders. The skin there is pale, almost bruised-looking in the low light. I’ve kissed that shoulder a thousand times.
I swallow. “I was gone. The mission ran long, and—”
“Kyler.” Her voice is sharp. Like she’s ready to draw blood. “Don’t you dare try to dress this up. Just say it. You didn’t call because you didn’t want to talk to me.”
My chest tightens. “That’s not fair.”
“No?” she snaps. “Because I spent the whole night on the couch staring at my phone like an idiot. Thinking maybe you’d call.
Even if it was just for thirty seconds. Even if you were whispering into a burner phone halfway across the world.
I would’ve taken anything. But you gave me nothing. Not even a lie.”
I should lie now. I should make something up. I know how. I’ve done it during every debrief where the truth of the mission was too messy for the paperwork.
But this is her.
This is Ivy.
And she deserves more than my silence and more than a polished excuse.
So I give her the truth. Ugly as it is.
“I didn’t know how to talk to you,” I admit. “I didn’t want to hear the disappointment in your voice. I didn’t want to hear you say it was okay when I knew it wasn’t. And I didn’t want to hear what I already knew, that I let you down again.”
Silence.
She walks past the counter, brushing my shoulder with hers. No kiss. No hug. She grabs the flowers, looks at them like they’re foreign, then drops them gently into the trash.
My heart caves in on itself.
“You don’t get to check out, Kyler,” she says softly. “Not when you’re mad. Not when I scare you. Not when it’s easier to pretend you’re still in control. You left me. Not in South Africa. Here. In this house. Alone.”
I don’t mean to raise my voice, but it comes out like a bark.
“I’m trying, Ivy! I am. Fuck. I am trying to hold it together.
But you want me to talk about feelings I haven’t even figured out how to name, and every time I look at you, all I see is that fucking compound and the way I almost lost you. ”
She flinches like I hit her.
And I feel like I did.
I take a breath. It shakes. “You came home. But you’re not really here. You dance like you’re fighting something. You don’t sleep. You don’t let me touch you anymore unless you’ve had wine or nightmares. And I don’t know how to fix it.”
Tears spring to her eyes, and she turns away. Wipes them quickly. She hates crying in front of me now. Says it makes her feel weak. “I don’t want you to fix it,” she says. “I just want you to see me. And if you can't do that, then don’t pretend to be the man who rescued me.”
That cuts deep.
Because sometimes, I wonder if I am still that man.
I cross the room in two steps and grab her wrist, not hard, just enough to get her to stop. Her breath catches. I lower my voice.
“I never stopped seeing you. But I think maybe...you stopped seeing me.”
Her eyes meet mine. They’re drowning.
“I don’t know who you are anymore,” she whispers. “I think you don’t either.”
Maybe she’s right.
Maybe all I am is a weapon that’s outlived its target.
I let go of her wrist. Step back.
We stand in the wreckage of everything we haven’t said for months.
And still, somehow, neither of us walks away.
Because love isn’t soft. Not always.
Sometimes it’s the scream in your throat and the ache in your chest and the moment you choose to stay anyway.
I reach out. She doesn’t stop me.
I pull her into my arms, and this time, she lets me hold her like she used to. Like she still wants to believe we can survive this.
And maybe we can.
But not if we keep bleeding in silence.
Not if I keep disappearing and I’m not sure I’ll ever stop.