Emory
“You need to spend time crawling alone through shadows to truly appreciate what it is to stand in the sun.”
―Shaun Hick
I CAN’T SLEEP.
After a revolving effort of staring at the ceiling, restacking my pillows, and rolling from one side of the bed to the other, I finally give up and vault off the mattress to head for the kitchen.
I open the bedroom door quietly, hoping the click of the lock doesn’t wake the detective sleeping on my couch. I close the door behind me so that Pounce doesn’t come out, and then tiptoe my way through the living room and into the kitchen.
I crack the refrigerator so that the light doesn’t shine into the living room.
I’m about to reach for a yogurt when I hear, “Not much of a night for sleeping, huh?”
I jerk up, cracking my head on the top of the refrigerator. “Ow!”
The yowl that comes out of me surprises me as much as it does him.
He steps forward and presses two fingers to the place on my scalp. “That’s gonna be a goose egg.”
His touch surprises me, stuns me, actually. I take a step back, reaching my own hand up to press the sore spot. “Yeah.”
He picks up a dishtowel from the kitchen counter and then opens the freezer and pulls out some ice, wrapping the towel around it. He walks over and holds it up in question.
I nod, wincing a little as he tentatively presses the ice to the knot. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I was trying not to wake you.”
“I wasn’t doing much sleeping.” Something in his voice makes me look up. “Bad dreams?”
He shrugs. “I’m used to it. I have something at home that I take most nights.”
“Can you sleep without it?”
“Not very well.”
“That’s miserable.”
He shrugs. “One of the things I brought back from Afghanistan.”
“PTSD?”
He studies me for a moment, as if weighing how to answer. “That’s what they say.”
I consider this before answering with, “I’ve worked with some soldiers who are dealing with it. It’s way more common than anyone would think.”
“Apparently.”
“I’ve wondered why that is.”
“That soldiers come back with it or people are surprised by it?”
“Both, I guess.” I realize that I must sound as if I am taking the realities of war lightly. “That didn’t come out right.”
He stares at me for a few long seconds, glancing off when he finally says, “Maybe it used to be that soldiers didn’t survive the horrible stuff as much as they do now. Or maybe they came home and put it away better than we modern soldiers seem to be able to.”
“Your training—”
“Prepares you for the battle. Just not the aftermath.”
I lean against the kitchen counter, weighing my next question. “Do you ever regret being a soldier?”
He shrugs, holding my gaze. “If we pull a thread from the person we’ve always been, how do we know what we’ll be when we finish unraveling?”
“We don’t.”
“So I guess I’d have to answer that with, ‘It’s who I am.’ I don’t know how to be anyone else.”
“Was it what you thought it would be?”
“Yes and no.”
“Like most things in life.”
“Yeah. You’re young to have figured that out.”
We’re looking directly at each other, and even in the dimly lit room, I feel like I really see him and that he really sees me. It’s the most unsettling thing I’ve felt in a long time, but I don’t want to look away. I want to see him, want him to see me. “I don’t think it’s age as much as it is experience.”
“Life’s a steamroller. It gets around to all of us eventually. Some sooner than others.”
“You’re strong. Or you never would have made it as a SEAL.”
“I always thought of myself that way.”
“You don’t anymore?”
“I never thought I had a breaking point. Now I know I do. Even steel has a breaking point.”
I see him hesitate, wait for him to go on.
“A tensile test finds out what happens when steel is stretched,” he says. “You can place a steel bar in a device that pulls one end away from the other fixed end. The tensile strength is the maximum amount of stress the bar can handle before it breaks. If I had to describe what it was like to be in Afghanistan, that would be it.”
He glances away, and there is another stretch of silence, before he adds, “We like to think some things are just indestructible. Certain people. Certain places. Maybe that’s how we convince ourselves things are safe enough for us to do. Who would ever have thought two skyscrapers in the middle of New York City could be brought down with airplanes?”
“It was unthinkable.”
“And yet they were. All that steel and concrete couldn’t withstand the impact of a commercial airliner turned into a kamikaze.”
The remembered image is a sobering one. “There really aren’t any words, are there?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t think we’re made to handle the kamikazes in life.”
I think about Mia, the true horror of what has happened in the past few days, and tears fill my eyes. I bite my lip and glance away, reluctant to let him see.
He takes the ridiculous ice pack from my hand and sets it on the counter. We stare at each other in the dim light, and I feel somehow as if I’m really being seen for the first time in a very long time. Maybe because my own mother and father could look at me and know exactly what I was feeling. The thought brings tears to my eyes, and I am instantly mortified that this man whom I barely know continues to see glimpses of my bare soul.
I turn away, but his hand is on my shoulder, turning me back.
We don’t say anything, watching each other, absorbing the silence and all the unspoken things shooting through the air around us. I have never before felt this kind of awareness of another person’s effect on me. The obvious reasons are obvious enough. He is a beautiful man in every way I have ever thought counted. I’ve never felt the physical pull of attraction to be so undeniable. But it is. Undeniable. I think of the reason our paths have crossed—my missing sister—and my emotions are in a sudden jumble again.
He wants to kiss me. I know this as surely as I have ever known anything. I feel the pull of it in the air between us, an electric current with its own charge.
He wants to.
But he doesn’t.
His restraint impresses me even as I am disappointed.