Chapter Eight
Hunter
The apartment was quiet when I walked in, keys hitting the counter with a dull clatter. That was the thing about living alone. The silence pressed in, heavier than any sandbag I’d ever carried. Tonight, after hours of her laughter and the hum of a parlor, it felt suffocating.
I kicked off my shoes, dropped onto the couch, and leaned back.
Her face wouldn’t leave my head. Those curls falling into her eyes, the way she smiled when she teased me, the way she looked right at me when she said most men ran from single moms. She didn’t realize it, but I respected the hell out of that honesty.
And yet, underneath the warmth she left me with, the edges of something darker crept in.
I should’ve been relaxed. Instead, my body was humming, still on high alert.
My shoulders wouldn’t unclench. My jaw ached from being locked.
I closed my eyes, tried to breathe it out.
But my mind didn’t want to stay in that ice cream shop. It wanted to drag me back.
The hum of the ice cream machine became the whir of a helicopter. The laughter at the next table morphed into shouted orders. The smell from the coffee shop next door twisted into dust and sweat and cordite.
My eyes snapped open, chest tight.
“Not tonight,” I muttered to myself, scrubbing my hands over my face.
I got up, paced the living room, and checked the locks on the door for the third time. Rationally, I knew I was safe. Civilians didn’t think like that, didn’t keep their backs to the wall, didn’t catalog every sound in the night. But my body hadn’t gotten the memo.
Sleep didn’t come easily on nights like this. When it did, it wasn’t peaceful.
Hours later, I jolted awake, breath caught somewhere between a gasp and a choke.
My heart slammed hard enough to make my ribs ache, each beat too fast, too loud.
The room tilted for a second before I realized I was sitting up, palms braced against the couch cushions, shirt clinging to my skin with sweat.
My body didn’t get the message that I was safe.
Every muscle was still wired tight, waiting for the next hit.
My throat burned, the taste of metal lingering there. My ears rang, sharp and hollow, like the echo of something that wasn’t really there anymore. I could smell it too—dust, smoke, the dry sting of gunpowder that my mind had dragged back from nowhere.
It took a moment for the room to come into focus: the couch, the soft glow of lamplight, the hum of the TV. Home. Not the desert. Not the noise. Just home.
I dropped my face into my hands and dragged in a breath that trembled on the way out. My body still didn’t believe it. My pulse was a drumbeat against my palms, the edges of my vision still buzzing.
This was the part of me she couldn’t see.
The part I didn’t talk about. The part that scared me more than any firefight ever had: the thought of letting someone in, of letting her in, and her seeing that I wasn’t just guarded.
I was haunted. But sometimes, in the moments when the shadows pressed in and my chest felt tight, I tried to hold onto a memory.
A small, comforting moment from when I was a kid, before life felt so heavy, like the sound of the engine starting on my first dirt bike, the smell of fall as the leaves changed back home, a simple memory of safety.
I focused on my breath, holding myself in the present, and imagined myself standing in that warm kitchen, far from the chaos that now chased me.
It didn’t always work, but sometimes it was enough to pull me back from the edge.
That’s the part they never teach you in boot camp: how the danger ends, but your body keeps fighting ghosts.
The red numbers on the clock glowed 2:14 a.m.
I sat on the couch, hunched forward, elbows on my knees, staring at my phone intently.
Her contact name glowed back at me: Camille.
I thumbed the screen, opened our thread. The last message was from her earlier that evening: Thanks for the ice cream. It was nice to just laugh.
I reread it for the tenth time. “Just laugh.” That’s what she’d said. And, it was nice. The kind of nice I hadn’t felt in years.
But here I was, sweating through another shirt, body wired like I was back in the desert, mind replaying sounds and sights I couldn’t explain to anyone who hadn’t been there.
My thumb hovered over the keyboard, but the words wouldn’t settle. What was I supposed to say? “Hey, I really like you, but sometimes I wake up convinced I’m still overseas. Still in the fight. Still broken.”
No. That wasn’t fair to her. Not now. Not when things were still so new.
I locked the phone and tossed it onto the cushion beside me. My breathing came rough, uneven. I forced myself through breathing. Again. Again. Until my heart stopped trying to punch its way out of my chest.
Still, sleep didn’t come.
I leaned back, eyes on the ceiling. I’d promised myself after the divorce that I wouldn’t drag anyone else into this.
Better to keep things surface-level, keep myself detached.
And yet here she was, laughing at my stupid jokes, looking at me like I wasn’t a disaster, telling me about her kids and her classes and, trusting me with pieces of her world.
Every instinct told me to text her. To tell her she made me feel alive again. To admit she scared me in all the right ways.
Instead, I stayed quiet because hope was dangerous, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready to let her see all the shadows I carried.