Chapter 35
RANGER
He’s staying. He loves me. It’s still hard to wrap my head around, even though I see on his face he means it. Not that he would ever joke about something like this, but the love is radiating off his face in such a way that I wonder how I could’ve missed that before.
“I love you,” I say. How right those words feel on my tongue.
His smile has never been so beautiful, and my heart flutters all over again. “I like hearing those words.”
“I like saying them.”
I’ve always laughed when couples got all lovey-dovey with each other because it seemed so cheesy and corny, and yet here I am, embracing it with all my might.
A romantic dinner, slow dancing, and saying I love you…
It’s a Hallmark movie come true. Not that I’d ever choose those.
My mom did, and so we were forced to watch them with her. Oh, the horror.
She’s always been a sucker for a happy ending, and mine is happening right now. Only one thing is missing…
I take a deep breath. “I want to tell you about Alex…”
He nods instantly. Then he takes my hand, and we sit down in the hay, nice suits and all.
Where do I start? It still feels so raw in my head, in my heart, but Julian deserves the truth.
Julian raises our joined hands and presses a kiss on mine. “Take your time.”
I sit in silence, searching for the right words.
“We became friends the moment we met. He was a couple of years younger, new to the Rangers, and since he was under my command, I was tasked with showing him the ropes. Brooklyn, we called him, because he had a heavy New York accent. Pretty sure he played it up, but that was Alex. Always the clown, making jokes at the most inappropriate times to relieve the tension.”
I can’t help but smile as the memories flood me. We shared so many laughs, the two of us in stitches like teenagers over the crazy stunts he pulled.
“Underneath, he was a damn good soldier. Fearless. And when everyone else was asleep, I saw his other side… We’d talk about him growing up with a single mom and five siblings. How he learned to cope with dyslexia in school. And the Yankees. God, he was a die-hard Yankees fan…”
“That’s why you wear a Yankees cap…” Julian says.
“Yeah. It was his. His mother sent it to me, at his request.”
Julian frowned. “How could he have requested that ahead of time?”
Sweet summer child. “We’re soldiers, baby.
” The word falls from my lips as if I’ve said it a million times before.
“The Army requires us to have our affairs in order before we ship out. After our first tour together, he made some changes to his last wishes, and one of them was that he asked his mom to send me some of his personal effects.”
“Did she know?”
“I didn’t even know. I knew he was gay, and so did his mom.
He’d told me he’d come out in high school, and obviously, I was fine with it, but he didn’t shout it from the rooftops.
The Army has changed, but being gay can still cause a backlash, especially in a special unit like the Rangers.
But I didn’t know…” My voice breaks. “I didn’t know he was in love with me. ”
My throat is tight now, and every word hurts. “And I didn’t know I was in love with him. Not until… Not until it was too late…”
Julian clenches my fingers, tears shimmering in his eyes. I love him all the more for it. Lesser men would’ve been jealous of a previous love, but not him.
“My unit was on a mission, and we walked straight into a trap. One moment, everything was fine, and the next he was dead. He got hit by a sniper. The bullet came out of nowhere. Clean shot. I’ll always be grateful for that, that it was instant.
But as I held him in my arms, I knew I had lost the man I loved… ”
Julian doesn’t say anything, and that means everything. No clichés can ever comfort me, but that he’s with me in my pain and grief is enough. Just knowing I’m not alone.
I take a few minutes to compose myself. “At first, I stayed, but my CO quickly realized I was in no condition to serve, so he sent me home. It was supposed to be temporary, but after four months, I received an honorable discharge with the official diagnosis of PTSD. The Army shrink said that the unexpectedness of the attack was what messed me up. I’d had everything under control, and then he was ripped away from me, and that fucked up my sense of safety.
That’s why I have a hard time dealing with sudden, unexpected moves… ”
Julian’s face lights up with understanding. “That’s what happened the first time you had an episode with me.”
“Yeah. You went down all of a sudden, and my brain decided that you had been shot, even though I knew it wasn’t true. It happened too fast to override that reaction.”
“That makes total sense.”
“I thought it was stupid. My whole life I had trained for the unexpected, and yet when it happened, I was unable to deal with it.”
“Yeah, but it was much more than that. You lost the man you were in love with before you had the chance to tell him or even realize you loved him. That’s not something you can train for.”
I slowly nod, pushing out a deep sigh. “So I’ve finally come to accept.
It’s not so much the ambush that fucked with my head.
It was the guilt afterward, all these bottled-up emotions I couldn’t tell anyone.
And that got even worse when I received his letter.
His mom shipped it to me with the things he wanted me to have.
All I could feel was this deep regret that I had never known, that we’d never even had the chance to kiss or hold hands.
If only I hadn’t been so blind to my feelings… ”
A tear drips down Julian’s cheek, and I brush it off with my thumb. “I’m sorry I’m making you cry.”
Julian waves off my apology. “Was he afraid of how you’d react if he told you how he felt?”
“He wrote he was scared to lose our friendship and that he’d decided to wait until he was certain I felt the same way. And that if I was reading his letter, it meant he might never have had the chance, and that was okay too.”
“Maybe he did know.”
I frown. What does he mean? “How could he have?”
“Because of the way you looked at him, how you treated him, how you acted around him. If he loved you, he would’ve picked up on it.”
“Then why didn’t he say anything?”
“Because he was waiting for you to be ready. He knew you always thought you were straight, so my guess is that he figured you needed more time…and he was willing to wait for you.”
Why did that thought never even occur to me?
Now that Julian has brought it up, it fills me, replacing guilt with something else.
Joy. Gratitude. I’ll be forever glad and grateful that I met Alex and that, for a few years, we were together, even if it was never in the way it could have been.
And if Julian is right and Alex knew what he meant to me, he died knowing he was loved. And that changes everything.
My eyes well up, and then they spill over. The next second I’m in Julian’s arms, and he’s holding me while I cry. I bawl like a baby as I mourn what I lost, what could’ve been, while at the same time letting go and embracing my second chance at love.
“I promise I’ll tell you I love you every chance I get,” I whisper when I’m finally done, exhausted. This is not how I intended to end this date, and yet it seems strangely fitting. You can’t fully embrace the future until you accept and let go of the past.
“And I’ll say it right back as many times as you need to hear it until you believe it.”
“I love you.”
Julian kisses my tear-stained cheek. “I love you too.”