Chapter 12
Twelve
“So I believe we had a deal.” Across the table, Ivy leaned back in her chair, a glass of wine in her hand. “A question for every ten thousand words. I’ve earned a question and three quarters.”
Damn. Harrison had hoped she’d forget. Not that he wasn’t willing to share with her, but he was a little afraid of what she’d ask. “You can’t ask a partial question.”
She wrinkled her nose in a little snit that bordered on adorable. “Fine. I’ll bank those seven thousand words for next time. I still get one.”
You made the deal. Bracing himself, he picked up his beer. “So you do. Ask away.”
“This has been circling around in my head since you dropped me off.” She ran a finger around the lip of her glass, angling her head to study him. “What is it you do for a living that you can stick around here waiting on me?”
Of all the things she could’ve asked, that wasn’t what he’d expected. Relief and mild embarrassment had him settling back in his own chair, rubbing a palm on his thigh. “Oh, that. Well, as it happens I’m also a writer.”
Ivy blinked. “What?”
The stupefied expression on her face made him wish he’d said something sooner.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
Self-conscious, he shrugged. “I’m not in your league.
You’re all multi-New York Times best seller, and I’m self-published.
I mean, I do well enough. I make a living.
But I figured you get all kinds of requests and shit from other aspiring or newly published writers who want an introduction or an in to the big leagues.
I didn’t want you to think I was one of them. ”
She waved a hand. “Oh, that whole snobby traditional vs. self-published debate is so five years ago. The indies have more than proven themselves savvy businesspeople. To my mind, you have it harder. You have to be author and publisher. I can’t imagine doing more than I’m already doing.”
“I’m not, really. I hire out my editor and cover artist. And I wager I do a lot less social media and fan stuff than you just because I don’t have that kind of fan base.
I don’t have the acclaim, and I’m totally fine with that because it also means I don’t have the pressure.
There’s no agent breathing down my neck, and my editor works on my schedule, not somebody else’s. It’s not a bad gig.”
“No, I don’t guess so.” She dropped her head back and sighed. “No wonder you were so insightful about the problems I’ve been having. You get it.”
“Well enough.”
When she straightened, her eyes held a gleam of interest. “So what do you write?”
Harrison hesitated.
“Oh, come on. You can’t just tell me you’re a writer and not expect me to want to talk shop. This all still falls under the category of the first question I asked. Do you write thrillers, too? You’re awfully damned good at helping plot them.”
He shook his head. “I write science fiction.”
“What kind of sci fi? Like…Dune or Aliens or space opera or what?”
“It’s kinda Firefly meets Game of Thrones meets Star Wars.”
Her eyes brightened. “That sounds epic. Why scifi?”
It was a logical turn of the conversation. She’d told him why she wrote thrillers. But the whys of his fiction skated a little too close for comfort to the ghosts he’d been struggling to escape.
Ivy’s expression softened as she reached out to lay a hand over his on the table. “It’s fine. I’ve used up my question.”
What kind of coward was he, making her earn the right to know him?
He wanted more with her than the physical, and that meant sharing more of himself, even the less than sterling parts.
It meant choosing connection instead of avoidance and deflection.
He wouldn’t tell her all of it. Couldn’t. But he could give her the gist.
Turning his hand over to curve around hers, he swallowed.
“You weren’t wrong in your profile. I left the Army three years ago.
It was…a rough transition.” Captain of Understatement.
But he couldn’t bring himself to revisit those first six months out.
“I’d enlisted when I was eighteen, worked my way through the ranks.
It’s all I’d really known in my adult life.
Those men and women were my family. And I’d lost three of them because of a call I made. ”
Her fingers tightened around his but she said nothing, offered no false platitudes. And somehow that made it a little easier.
Harrison sipped at his beer to wet his parched throat.
“I didn’t handle it well. I kept replaying it over and over, trying to see what I’d missed, what I could have changed that would’ve altered the outcome.
” He’d relived it too, for about eighteen months.
But those attacks had come fewer and farther between.
The one he’d had at the cabin had been his first in more than a year.
But even that hadn’t been a full-blown flashback. Thank God.
“My therapist suggested I write about it. She meant journaling, but that was too…close. Too personal. I couldn’t look directly at it without ending right back up in the same place.
So I ended up creating this character and shifting the whole damned thing to another world.
Pretty soon, I’d come up with at least a dozen different variations for what could’ve happened differently.
And most of them involved tech that doesn’t actually exist, intel I didn’t have.
One impossibility after another. Because the reality was that there wasn’t anything I could’ve done differently. Because I’m not God.”
Those silver-green eyes shone with empathy.
“Yeah, you were right about that, too.” He grimaced.
“Knowing it doesn’t make it any easier to live with.
It doesn’t changed what happened. But writing about it like that…
it let me be God in some small way. And I found myself taking the strongest scenario of the lot and following what happened to those men, if they’d lived. ”
Her thumb stroked the back of his hand, a soft, soothing rhythm. “Did it help?”
“Some. I was always into adventures and scifi as a kid, and it turned out I had an aptitude for writing it. Since it meant I could set my own hours and avoid people, it seemed like the ideal job.” He sighed. “Or it did. You aren’t the only one struggling with writer’s block.”
“That’s why you came up here? Same as me?”
“Something like that.” He thought of Ty and wondered how his buddy was holding up. But he wasn’t ready to talk about the funeral or the ghosts it had stirred up.
“Well, you were a hell of a plot doctor for my book. Maybe I can return the favor. Where are you stuck?”
“I have to decide if I can keep going.”
“With the current book?”
“With any of it. I’m three books deep and the war they’re fighting isn’t over.
I’m not sure it’ll ever be over.” Because he didn’t know if his own ever would be.
“The fourth book is dragging because I don’t know how it ends.
I don’t know if my hero can keep fighting it.
I don’t know if I can keep fighting it. So I’ve been considering that maybe he goes out in a blaze of glory and I wrap the series. ”
Catching the look of distress on her face he squeezed her hand.
“That’s not some kind of metaphor. I’m not considering suicide.
I just think maybe the writing thing has run its course.
It started out a way to figure out how my men could’ve lived, and ended up being a way to sort of let them live on.
That part was good. But it hasn’t exorcised those demons, and I’m not sure putting all my thoughts and memories of that shit on paper—even with lasers and spaceships—is a good thing. Keeps them…too close for comfort.”
Ivy was quiet for a long moment. “Maybe the answer lies in not trying to rewrite the past but in writing a different future. I don’t know your story or the context for your hero, but maybe in order for you to leave the war behind, your hero does, too.”
Harrison frowned. “Just have him walk away? What the hell would that even look like?”
“I don’t know. But it’s the third option that doesn’t involve staying in the fight or making the ultimate sacrifice. It gives you room to write more stories. If that’s what you want to do.”
The idea of it circled around the back of his brain as they finished their meal.
Did he want to write more stories? If he wasn’t writing about the horrors of war, he didn’t know what stories he would tell.
But as he helped Ivy on with her coat and offered his arm to escort her back out to the Jeep, he knew the only story he was positive he wanted to continue was theirs.
Harrison stayed quiet on the drive back to the inn.
Ivy worried he was too much in his head.
Maybe her questions had pushed those things he’d been trying to forget to the forefront.
Her heart twisted at his unexpected decision to open up to her, at the knowledge of what it had to have cost him.
She understood his reticence. Who would want to talk about going through hell?
And yet, clearly the experience was still with him.
He’d been living with it, by turns circling around it and attacking it head-on.
And none of that had quite helped him accept it.
Maybe nothing would but time, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to help.
Her gut said he shouldn’t be alone tonight.
She was the one who’d circled into that territory and brought it up.
He’d said himself she was a good distraction.
She could do that much for him, at least. Keep him in the now, with her.
So when they got to the inn, she reached out to take his hand. “Come up.”
For a moment, she thought he’d demur. Then his fingers closed around hers.