August
I sat up in bed, drenched in sweat. My hands were over my mouth, and I was still screaming.
Looking around my bedroom, it all came back to me. I was in my home in Los Angeles. I wasn’t in the Marines any longer. I had been discharged after my firearm had accidentally gone off, hitting and killing John Black, aka Sonic.
That one thing had done me in.
When you added all the death and destruction I had not only witnessed but been a party to, you had the recipe for one hell of a bad case of PTSD.
I was trying my best to get a hold of myself though. I wasn’t about to just give up, roll over and die, or live my life as a vegetable.
John Black deserved more from me than that. I used money I had won in a lawsuit to keep the memory of the man, who had been one of the best friends I’d ever had in my life, alive.
For all the positive I did, that negative was still a factor that kept me from having it all. I knew I wasn’t right in the head yet. I knew I had a long way to go. And I had my friends, a couple of men I’d met since moving to Los Angeles to live with my sister when I first got out of the Marines.
Between those guys and my family, I was doing as good as I could be. I’d managed to move out on my own, leaving my sister’s house. She had a lot of kids to worry about anyway; she didn’t need her brother cramping her lifestyle.
I needed to be on my own anyway. I needed to work on being me again. I hadn’t been me since I left Sebastopol. The morning I’d left the town I’d grown up in had been the last day I was just plain old August Harlow. From then on, I had been Crash, the Marine with a mission.
Having time to myself was nice. Time to do whatever I wanted to. And I had the money to do it too. Sure, there wasn’t anyone special to share it all with, but I wasn’t ready for that anyway.
With the help of my therapist, I was looking at a long road to recovery. The nightmares weren’t the worst part of my problem. No, the day terrors were. Losing my shit in public and having no idea I was doing it was by far the worst part of my disorder.
But I was luckier than most of my fellow military veterans who suffered from the same thing I had. I had money to get the best help I could buy.
Funny how the loss of a life had made me so damn much money. I’d become a billionaire from the lawsuit I filed on the company who’d made that gun that took my friend’s life. I took what I’d won and found an investment company to make it into more money, so I could keep John Black’s name alive for as long as humanly possible.
With so much that had happened in the last couple of years, Tawny had slipped almost all the way out of my fucked-up mind. She didn’t belong in there with all the bad stuff I had added since joining the Marines.
I kind of kept her in a separate place where I didn’t go too much. She was with me though. I knew she was. That part of her that I took with me would always be there. It was part of me now. It seemed like it always had been.
I was on my way to the office, driving through the streets of Los Angeles before traffic got too bad. I liked to arrive at the office early. I hated rush hour traffic. It made me crazy, and since I already was kind of crazy, I didn’t like to tempt fate.
Parking my car, I got out and looked around as I’d parked on the top of the parking garage. Smoke came from the fires that were burning in the hills around town.
There was something in the air that morning. Some odd feeling. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it felt like change.
I had put my past away, where it belonged. I had a future to work on. Sure, I was alone, without a woman in my life. But I had been without one for such a long time, it wasn’t a thing I really missed that much.
My therapist had told me to take one day at a time. Don’t dwell on the past or the future. Live now. Live in the moment. Take what is coming and forget about what has already come.
He made it sound easy.
It wasn’t.
Nothing was easy. Waking up screaming wasn’t easy. Opening my eyes in a crowd of people who were shocked at how I’d been acting wasn’t easy. But I was still alive.
A thing John Black wasn’t.
I still had a chance to make his name live on.
He didn’t.
I had to live my life for him. And I had to make the most out of it for him too.
But I wasn’t sure how I was going to do that exactly. Not with the problems I’d developed.
So much was ahead for me. So many hard things, so many great things.
My partners and I had a new nightclub we were building. I focused most of my attention on that, so I had something to look forward to.
That was another thing my therapist had told me. “Keep busy, August. Stay focused on life, living it one day at a time, and you will get through this hard time.”
I prayed he was right. And I prayed that Tawny was living a happy life too. Even if she had found another man to live it with, I wished her the best. But that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt to think about her with any other man than myself.
A new beginning was forming, and I was ready for it.
The End???
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