Driving away from the office with Casey behind me, I was a weird combination of dangerously tired and so spun up I was almost shaking. For the last week and a half, every waking hour of my life had revolved around the records and the inspection. Now that everything was over—and now that I was sure my boss wasn’t going to rip my head off—I should have been relaxed to the point of passing out at the wheel.
But I wasn’t.
If anything, it was worse.
Because now I had nothing left to distract me from the conversation I still needed to have with Casey. The topic had gnawed relentlessly at me ever since my last appointment with Lynda, but there hadn’t been time. What precious little downtime we’d had, we’d rationed for things like sleep, food, and (temporarily) giving a shit about the inspection. A conversation like this would have been way too much.
But now all that was over. No time like the present, right?
Except we were both too exhausted. The inspection had taken a lot out of me, and I had a feeling it had fucked him up too. This was so not the time to be dealing with heavy things like emotions and relationships and futures we might or might not have.
So . . . not tonight.
Soon, but not tonight.
Cold sweat clung to my skin as I dropped into a chair at the kitchen table. My hands were shaking. My heart was pounding. I thought I was going to be sick even as I flipped to the first blank page in the black sketchbook.
I couldn’t get the lines down fast enough. My hand blurred across the page, and I had to stop three times to switch out pencils because I’d snapped off the lead. Fuck. I was too jittery for this, but too rattled not to do it, so I gritted my teeth and breathed slowly and let the page pull the poison from the dream onto the paper, where it wouldn’t hurt anymore. Where it would hurt less.
Except it wasn’t working. My subconscious had stepped things up tonight. It wasn’t just flashbacks anymore. Now it was getting hypothetical. Things that could have happened, and not just to me. As if I didn’t know that feeling all too well from powerlessly standing by while a buddy died. I’d had my hand on a man’s pulse when it had stopped. Did my mind really have to torture me with scenarios that hadn’t actually gone down?
People want to do this? I traced the edge of a bullet, darkening the line until the pencil lead just slid uselessly back and forth. People want to be there?
My stomach lurched.
Casey wants to be there.
Casey was grieving because he couldn’t be there. And he was actually feeling better now that he was headed back to active duty, especially since it meant he might—probably would—still see combat. We’d talked about that before, and it had bothered me, but now it was under my skin. Driving me crazy. Casey in the line of fire. Casey under a sky that mortars sometimes fell out of. He wouldn’t be doing spec ops or anything, but combat wasn’t out of the question. He wanted it. He wanted to be in the thick of things, with bullets flying and bombs dropping and enemies in shadows and—
“Logan?” A sleepy voice cracked against my senses like gunfire.
I jumped out of the chair, slamming the sketchbook shut as I did, and jumped again when the chair crashed into the stove behind me.
“Whoa. Hey.” Casey put up his hands and watched me uneasily. “It’s just me.”
“Shit.” I raked a hand through my damp hair. “I . . . didn’t hear you.”
You’re here. You’re okay.
He was, right? The blanched light from overhead made his skin deathly pale and added creepy shadows under his features, and my skin crawled as the dream flashed through my mind. But it was just a trick of the light. He was okay.
Of course he was. Because everything I’d seen had been a dream. Not even a flashback—just a dream. Something that had never happened.
Something that could happen if . . . when—
I forced the thought out of my head. Dropping my gaze, I let my shoulders sag. I rubbed my eyes before wiping my hand over my face. “I’m sorry. Did I wake you up?”
“No. I woke up and you were gone. And the light was on.” He took a cautious step into the kitchen. “You all right?”
“Yeah. Yeah. I . . .” I looked around for the chair, then hooked my bare foot under one of the legs and dragged it back to the table. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”
“Which is it?” he asked softly. “You are, or you will be?”
I met his gaze again, and now that he was closer, the light wasn’t so harsh on his features. His eyes were wide with concern, his lips pressed into a thin line, and the crevices between his eyebrows deepened as he watched me. He had no idea what I’d seen. What I’d been drawing. Because it hadn’t happened. It wasn’t real.
Without a word, I gathered him into a tight hug and buried my face against his neck. Eyes closed, I pulled in a deep breath of his scent.
“Hey.” He wrapped his arms around me. “You sure you’re okay?”
I’m sure you are. That’s all I care about.
“I’m good.” But I didn’t let him go quite yet, and he didn’t try to free himself.
For the longest time, we just stood there, and my thumping heart gradually slowed.
“I’m sorry,” I said again as I finally let him go.
“It’s okay.” He kept a hand on my side. “Come on. We should get some sleep.”
I nodded, but hesitated. “I’m going to grab a shower first.” I gestured at myself. “Sweating.”
Casey watched me silently. “Maybe that shower can wait a few minutes.” Before I could respond, he cupped my face in both hands and kissed me.
I was so, so not in the mood, but . . . but then . . . but . . .
Sighing, I pulled him closer and let the warmth of his body heat my cool skin.
“Let’s go back to bed,” he said softly. “I know you’re probably not in the mood, and I know I can’t fix anything, but I can at least make you feel good right now.”
It almost moved me to tears that he wanted to try. That although we were both exhausted after the grueling inspection, he not only found the energy to be awake in the middle of the night, but wasn’t annoyed that we were. He just wanted to do what he could to make things even a little bit better.
So I kissed him.
His body heat sent waves of relief through me. Every harsh breath he released across my skin calmed me a little more. It was irrational to be so relieved that he’d survived a dream, but I knew better than to question my subconscious when it ran off on me like this. If holding Casey and feeling his heart pound made me feel better, then so be it.
“Come back to bed,” he panted against my lips. “You can take that shower after I make you forget things for a little while.”
God, how did I get so lucky? We both knew it wasn’t that simple—that sex wouldn’t fix a damn thing in my head—but right now I could think of nothing I wanted more than to tangle up with him and make his pulse race. How he knew that, I had no idea, but he did. I didn’t protest. Sliding a hand up into his short hair, I kissed him harder.
Holding him now was like coming back to life. My heart was pounding, so it was beating again. I was out of breath, so I was breathing again. My body was tingling and aching and itching for more contact with his, so I was feeling something other than miserable again.
I held him tighter and pressed our groins together. If I’d been with any other man, I probably wouldn’t have even been able to get it up tonight, but I was so driven by the need to feel Casey and to make him feel me, to feel how alive we both were, that I was rock-hard.
He hummed into my kiss like he always did, and murmured, “Tell me what you want, baby.”
“You.” I raked my fingers through his hair. “That’s all.”
“You’ve got me. You know you do.” He leaned down to kiss my neck. “Anything you want me to do. Just say it.”
I didn’t say anything, but he got the message when I started herding him back toward the bedroom.
Naked, tangled, out of breath, we made out between the sheets. Our hands were all over each other. Everywhere we could press together, we did.
I pushed him onto his back and straddled him. “Your leg okay like this?”
“Uh-huh.” He grabbed the back of my neck and lifted his head to kiss me. His hips rocked, and I couldn’t help doing the same, and we both grunted as I thrust against him. The friction drove me wild. Casey was hot and breathless and alive, and he made me feel hot and breathless and alive, and I didn’t think anything could possibly turn me on more.
“You feel any better yet?” he ground out.
“Oh yeah.” I rubbed harder against him. “This is perfect.” You wouldn’t touch me if you knew how crazy my head is right now, but you don’t know, and you’re perfect, and . . . “God, Casey . . .” Forget not being able to get hard—now I was on the edge of getting off, and if he kept moving like that, if he moaned again, if—
“Oh shit,” he breathed. “Shit. Don’t stop. Baby, don’t . . .” Casey’s nails dug into my back. His head lifted off the pillow, almost like he was curling in on himself, and he didn’t breathe for a few beats before he forced out a single, hot huff and jolted under me. That was all I could take, and suddenly I was coming too, shooting cum all over both of us. The sight drew a groan out of me. I’d never had a thing for semen all over skin before, but for some reason, it drove me wild with Casey. Maybe because I still couldn’t believe some of it was my semen all over this gorgeous man. Or that he’d somehow dragged me back into the present and out of my nightmare enough to get turned on, let alone to come on him and make him come.
How do you do this to me, Casey?
I didn’t ask, though. For some reason, I was afraid of the answer.
Casey’s hair was still damp from the shower we’d shared. His head was on my shoulder, hair cool against my skin and between my fingers, and he was sound asleep.
I was still staring up at the ceiling, wide-awake. I wasn’t even sure if I couldn’t sleep, or if I just didn’t want to. Maybe a little of both. Nightmares came in packs, and I didn’t want to face another one that I couldn’t exorcise through a sketch.
The arm I’d wrapped around Casey’s shoulders was tingling, and I could barely feel my fingers, but I didn’t move. I wasn’t ready to let him go or even loosen my hold on him.
I did feel better, but I also didn’t. The dream hadn’t let go. Having Casey, naked and vulnerable, didn’t settle my nerves. At least in the dream he’d been covered in body armor. Not that it had helped against—
I tamped down that thought so I didn’t make myself sick.
Drawing after a nightmare usually helped, but tonight, it’d had the opposite effect. I wanted to tell myself it was because Casey had startled me before I could finish, but that wasn’t the whole story. The whole process had been counterproductive tonight. Pouring salt into wounds instead of numbing them. If he hadn’t interrupted me, I probably would’ve worked myself into a flashback or something.
What the hell? It had never been like this.
Because the dreams had never been about him.
They’d always been about me. My buddies. The past.
I closed my eyes and exhaled. That was it, wasn’t it? My nightmares had always been about the past. Tonight had been the future.
In my mind’s eye, I watched an IED take out a vehicle in a convoy with Casey in it, and I had to fight hard not to shiver and wake him up.
Even if he were sent back to a ship, he wasn’t safe by any means. If that ship got involved in some sort of combat, he’d be in the thick of things, shooting at the enemy. Maybe launching torpedoes, but quite possibly out on the deck, manning a large weapon or holding a smaller one. Enemies weren’t stupid—they took out the weapons and the men operating them first.
I closed my eyes and swallowed the lump in my throat. My arm was still asleep, but I curled it tighter around him anyway as I pressed a kiss to the top of his head.
It all went back to everything I’d told my therapist the morning before the records debacle had gone to shit—as long as Casey was on light duty, he was safe. Once he went back to full active duty, all bets were off.
And I didn’t know how to deal with that.
She wanted me to talk to him and work out how we both felt, what we both needed, and if we could make this thing happen. And maybe if we’d been able to do that the day she and I had talked, we’d have a solution by now, but we’d both been swimming in stress and chaos, and there hadn’t been an opportunity—never mind the energy—to talk about anything this deep.
Fuck. What if I really can’t handle being with him?