I watch McKayla look across the street as she carries in a load of groceries, and I can read her look as our eyes briefly meet as I finish off a cup of coffee outside.

I don’t know how I’m going to get through to her. I’ve tried everything I can to push her away, and it didn’t work. I’ve thought about what Earl said, and even though I know he’s right, I’m not sure I can be what McKayla needs.

She needs a safer kind of bad boy. The sort of guy who’ll be happy to go rolling on a Harley with her or go skydiving or any other crazy damned thing she has pop into her head, but who isn’t a ticking time bomb. She needs someone who can still be a rock, a foundation she can build her life upon.

There’s a part of me that would like to be, but I know I’m not. Not now, and maybe not ever. But she isn’t getting it. Instead, she’s looking at me with that same mix of half exasperation, half confidence that tells me she still has her sights set on me and is only frustrated I haven’t accepted that yet.

I at least owe her an apology, that I know for sure. But how do I apologize basically for my entire personality—my asshole tendencies, the way the darkness just spews forth sometimes beyond my control, and that I’m not even sure I can be some dinner date nice guy who treats her like the Princess I always call her.

I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since it all went down. I’ve told TJ about the stalker, leaving out the sex beforehand, and that Earl and I are keeping a watch on McKayla, but he doesn’t understand. To TJ, ‘keeping an eye out’ means glancing over and not going out of your way, because bad shit just doesn’t happen to good people in his world.

I know differently. I know that the only reason good people are able to sleep safely at night is because there are bad people like me who are willing to do bad shit to the other bad guys. So that means, in my case, I’ve taken the night shift so my last few nights have been spent in the pitch black, peering through the blinds, a set of binoculars at my side as my mind whirls and replays every moment with McKayla and the quick seconds with the stalker. Hopefully, the sneaky fucker I’m hunting shows his face soon. I want this to be over with.

With nights spent frozen in waiting, I’ve had to bail on TJ a bit during the day, grabbing naps while Earl has found daily reasons to come walking by the street, chatting up folks as he always does. To someone who didn’t know better, you’d think he was just being his Nosy Nancy old self while maybe getting a little extra exercise, but I know he’s patrolling and I appreciate his diligence.

TJ’s at least been cool about letting me head up for a few hours of shuteye in the late afternoon after we get most of the work done. At least, he’s been cool about it until today.

“You watch her again last night?”

I pause at the door to the stairs and look at him with a raised eyebrow. “Of course. We haven’t caught the fucker yet.”

TJ shakes his head, looking around the shop at the three jobs we’ve got stacked up right now. Fast Eddie cracked a steering rod at the track, the Pedersens have their minivan in for an oil flush and tune-up, and Earl himself brought in his old truck for a balance job on the rear axle. “Listen . . . have you talked to her? Maybe she knows something new or talked to the cops.”

I’m silent. I don’t know how to tell him that after getting her up to her apartment and the two of us calmed down, I’d just held her for the few hours ‘till the sun rose. We’d started talking about who it could’ve been, what it might mean, and about how it was likely related to the incident with her car.

I was ready to kick some ass and take some names. I had my immediate gut suspicions, including our all too friendly city councilman . . . but McKayla kept minimizing it. Maybe it was punk kids messing with her car, maybe the guy was taking pictures of the moon, just some big misunderstanding. Hopefully, that’s all it is, but my gut says that ain’t it.

I wanted to give her something else to focus on, a distraction from the seriousness I suspected was coming, so I had shifted the conversation to talking about her.

We chuckled through her stories about working in LA on a scandalous TV show, how Brad has a sort of second-level connection to some pretty famous people in town, and how she and Brad had decided to become their own bosses in a new place.

It gave me a new understanding for just how big of a life upheaval they made together and made me appreciate that she has such a good friend in him.

He’s more than just his prancing prissy act, though, and I respect that. He’s a risk-taker, living life on his own terms, anyone else be damned, and I fucking love that about McKayla too.

I wish I were that gutsy. But I’m not.

“Tell me about what scarred you,” McKayla says, leaning against me and nestling her head against my chest. “Because it must have been a lot to get past that basic bedrock of decency that I sense in you.”

I consider telling her to fuck off, that she hasn’t got the right to ask about what’s fucked me up, but instead, I take a deep breath and start to answer her. “There was a lot . . . but the final straw was my second tour, this time to Afghanistan.”

I close my eyes, and in my head, I can smell the odor of the camp. “Our base camp was in some backwater village. I could barely mumble the damn name. The Taliban had been getting up to their typical bullshit in the area, so the brigade commander thought it’d be a good place to send my company. We had to go in the old-fashioned way, humping our damn rucks and most of our supplies carried in by the three armored Humvees that were also supposedly our ‘heavy weapons platforms’.

That village, it was so poor that most of the people heated their houses by burning the dung of their goats. They cooked their breakfasts over fires of burning goat shit. I’ve never smelled anything so bad in all my life, and by the third day, I barely noticed it. It was sunk in everywhere.

Things were quiet for a while. The Taliban were keeping their heads down, but we knew what they were doing. They’ve been doing the same trick for fifteen years, and before us, the older guys were playing the same fucking game with the Soviets. New unit comes into town full of piss and vinegar, lay low. Let us get worn down by the grind, by the homesickness and the bad rations and the once-a-week showers. Let us get worn down by seeing the starving kids who bugged us constantly for something from our MREs. We couldn’t give them a thing, though, because we knew if we gave one morsel to a kid, we’d have twenty more on our asses like ants to honey, and soon enough, some adult would get their ass in a twist saying we’d given them unclean food.

So the Taliban waited, and even if we didn’t mean to, we started to relax. We let things slip, let things go slack . . . and that’s when they hit us.

I’d been tasked with four other guys to take two of the Hummers to Battalion Headquarters on a supply run. Mail, more rations, ammo even though we’d hardly used any, shit like that.

I was in the back of the lead Hummer when they hit. I got lucky, I guess. The rear Hummer was hit by a Taliban RPG full on, taking out the gas tank and turning our mail and most of our ammo into a ball of fire. But whoever was supposed to shoot at us was a little off. He hit near the right front tire. Perkins, the driver, jerked the wheel and got us off the road, where I jumped to save my ass . . .”

I pause, and I open my eyes to feel McKayla stroking my face. “Evan, it’s okay.”

I shake my head, kissing the tips of her fingers. “They went over the side. We were halfway up a mountain and there was no real guardrail. Some nights, I can still hear Perkins scream when he realized what he’d done. I turned my attention to the other Hummer, spraying up the hill toward where I guessed the attackers were. I had two hundred rounds and I used them. But there wasn’t much I could do. The other guys never had a chance. I tried, Princess . . . I tried so hard.”

“What happened?”

“I had a radio,” I rasp, thinking back. “And I was lucky. The Air Force had a couple of birds in the area. They dropped napalm and tore up the mountainside with those big fucking guns of theirs in a couple of passes. They sent in an evac for me, and somehow, I got a cut on my cheek that needed three stitches. So I’ve got a Combat Infantry Badge, one barely deserved Purple Heart, and the rest of them . . . their families got a flag and a letter signed by the President. That’s it. But at nights, I can still see them.”

I expected her to pity me. I’ve seen those looks before, but like she always does, she surprised me.

Instead, McKayla stroked my face again before hugging me even as I stayed stiff in her arms, running her fingers through my hair. “You served well,” she said quietly. “Those ghosts, they’ll be with you, but they aren’t mad at you for surviving. They want you to live, Evan. To live well, to honor them by living well.”

Her words shook me to my core, and now, looking across the garage at my brother, who’d taken my lost feelings and my laundry lists of mental issues with a simple decision that I was working in the garage with him, and that was that . . . I just don’t have the energy to deal with him right now.

“She didn’t go to the cops. Doesn’t want to make a big deal. I’m thinking me and Earl can handle it anyway.” I give him a pointed look and hope he keeps his big mouth shut.

TJ, who went to the cops last year when he found some wannabe gang graffiti on the rolling door, shrugs in that way he has that says he doesn’t understand but doesn’t really care. “Fine, whatever. Besides the camera guy, don’t you want to talk to her about other stuff? Like, you know, you and McKayla? What’s going on there?”

My eyes dip down to my boots, and I really wish TJ would just get to the part where he says he wants me to get one of the jobs done tonight while I’m watching the salon. “Earl says I need to take her to dinner. But I’m not exactly the guy who picks a girl up with flowers to go to some fancy restaurant in a four-door sedan.”

TJ grins wolfishly, laughing softly. “Well damn, you don’t say? I’d have never known that, asshole. Bet she doesn’t either. She probably thinks you’re some sweetheart who’s gonna wine and dine her, romance her like a chick flick. That’s totally the vibe you give off. You’re all The Notebook, you know.”

I grin in slightly shocked surprise—TJ getting one over on me is rare—and laugh at the image of me in some twisted rom-com movie as the anti-hero type, and give him a push on the shoulder. “Fuck you, man.”

We end up wrestling back and forth like when we were boys, goofing and pushing and laughing. I finally wrap his head with my arm in a loose chokehold, rubbing my knuckles through his hair. After it’s standing up with static, I release him, our laughing breaths echoing loudly in the garage.

He smooths his hair back and hops up on a big drum of solvent that we use for cleaning tools. “Man, you may not be some wine and dine type, but everybody eats. Get your scaredy-cat ass over there and invite the woman to dinner. I don’t care if it’s a fucking pizza. Take her on a date. Hell, you can double with me and Alice if you want—wait, on second thought, scratch that. You’d probably scare the shit out of her. Maybe I can introduce you to her in stages. One minute here, ten minutes there . . . it’ll probably take a few months to build up to an entire dinner with your grumpy ass.”

I laugh out loud, and I see TJ’s moment of hesitation as he wonders if he took it too far before he relaxes and laughs fully along with me. It hurts when I realize I did that to him. He has to think about every word he says to me and is always waiting for the other shoe to drop at the most unexpected time. McKayla was right. I gotta fix that. That’s not the guy I want to be.

TJ’s been the one hanging with me through some dark days and even darker nights, and he deserves to have a brother who’s there for him too. Hell, just two minutes ago, I was ready to get defensive and accuse him of being an asshole. Instead, maybe I need to open up to him too.

“Hey . . .” TJ looks up at me, a question in his eyes, and I don’t even know what I was gonna say, so I don’t think about it. I just grab him in a hug, patting harshly on his back a few times.

“Thanks, Bro.”

He squeezes me back, and when he answers, his voice is a little raspy. “Hey, Bro, it’s good. You okay?”

I step back, nodding. “Guess I need to go see a girl about dinner. Wish me luck, because I damn sure fucking need it.”

He nods as I turn, wishing me good luck behind my back as I start heading for the street. My eyes are laser focused on the salon door, but I swear I see a reflection in my periphery of TJ wiping a single stray tear from his eye.