I watch Deacon walk out of the barroom and head for the basement. Parker glances over at me from where she's standing behind the bar, attempting to make another bastardized version of a martini.

"Is he always like that?"

I'm watching the shadows where Deacon disappeared. I'm still distracted, not fully in the moment. "Yeah, cycles of the moon. He gets his period when it’s full."

She chokes and laughs, covering her mouth with her hand. "That's terrible."

I smile, hiding my worry, though. His was not an angry departure but one that was more reserved. More troubled.

I’m chopping up fruit. We're running low on lemons. It's Friday night and we're bound to be busy. There's a local whiskey festival coming to town in two weeks and we've been running specials, trying to get more people through the front door.

Because once they're through the door, they almost always stay for a drink. I wonder if I wanted to finally cut the cord between Deacon and me, whether I'd be able to leave him fully behind.

"You knew Deacon before you both worked here, right?" Parker asks, reminding me that she's there and that I'm not alone.

I breathe out sharply: didn't really see that question coming. I should have. But I've never been very clear-headed when it comes Deacon. Nothing is clear about him. It never has been.

I toss back a shot of Jack, needing the burn of normalcy to slide down my throat before I start talking. And believe me, I'll change the subject as quickly as I can. "Yeah. We were in Iraq together."

Parker perks up, sitting up even straighter than you'd think her perfect posture allows for. It’s hard not to hate the woman for her posture. She makes it look so damn effortless. But I like her.

She's had an interesting life. Don't let anyone tell you that rich kids don't have real problems. The poverty in her life had nothing to do with material lack and everything to do with love. But that's all changed now that Eli's drawn her into our circle here at The Pint.

Like I said, there's something about this place.

"Really? How on earth did you end up in the same bar in North Carolina?"

"Small Army," I say with a smile. "You'd be surprised how small the world really is."

She smiles and twists her hair up on the top of her head, then jams a pen into the messy bun. "I'm learning." She nods toward the basement door. "Was he like that before? When you knew him in the Army?"

I shrug. "Repressed childhood trauma," I mutter as I write down the next bottle I need to bring up from the basement. "That or his penis hasn't been let out to play recently. He's a pretty carnal guy."

She chews on the edge of another pen. "‘Carnal’? I've never heard anyone described as carnal before." She tips her chin at me. "That sounds…erotic.”

“Tell me about it.” I glance toward the stairs once more. I’m running on a serious buzz and an overtired high that feels like a million bucks.

I feel loose. Like I can function well once the doors are opened and the crowds start coming in. I'll flirt and smile and tease. I'll hint at the promise contained in my smile.

None of it is real. It's all a masquerade, a polished, perfected lie that keeps the world turning while I avoid uncomfortable things.

Like the uncomfortable things I'm avoiding as I avoid Deacon.

"You know, it's not nice to keep secrets," Parker says, watching me watch the stairs where Deacon disappeared.

"No secrets. Just complications."

I look over at her when she doesn’t respond. "You're not going to ask?"

She smiles softly, tucking her hair behind her ear. "I learned a while ago that when you all are ready to talk about things, you'll talk."

I swipe the lemons I’ve been cutting into a small bowl and slide them into the fridge beneath the bar. "You have been paying attention."

It's nice to not have to be on guard constantly. I'm working on my first real female friendships—Parker. Nalini. There weren't a lot of women in my units when I was active. I was always one of the guys.

It took coming home, though, to realize that no matter how hard I try, I will never be one of the guys. I never was. It was all a convenient lie I told myself to feel like I was fitting in. The more I work on building my circle of female friends, the more I realize how much I’ve been missing out on.

"I'm working on my people skills," she says, raising her glass in a mock salute.

"It's working." I toss back another shot and grab the empty bottles, heading toward the basement, trying not to feel like I'm walking into an ambush.

I like The Pint's basement. It's always cool, and most of the time it's a place where I can have a drink in private when things start to get twisted.

And tonight, they're getting all kinds of twisted.

I hadn't been planning on not hating Caleb. It's funny how random acts can screw up how you view the world. Maybe tomorrow night I won't feel like the world is rocking beneath my feet.

Except it's so much more complicated than that. I sit on one of the crates and lean my head back against the wall.

I know why this shit with Caleb is bothering me. And it has nothing to do with him and everything to do with me.

My regrets.

I pull out my phone, checking to see if my pen pal responded. She never responded to my last remark.

Funny how I’m convinced she’s a she and not a he.

No comment? Are you afraid?

I'm feeling peevish. I want the mystery woman on the other end to fight back. To show some fucking spine.

To take the dare.

I crack open a beer and take a long pull, rubbing it against my temple, resisting the memories that circle every time I start to think seriously about breaching the wall that Kelsey has erected around her. Around her past.

Around our past.

Funny, I never really spend much time thinking about my part of our shared history. It’s so much easier focusing on hers. But tonight, watching Caleb, unpleasant things started circling around the edge of my mind.

Reminding me of the cost of being a fucking asshole. You might not get tomorrow to apologize.

I'm supposed to ask Kelsey if she'll participate for my thesis. And asking her might be the most difficult thing I've had to do in a long damn time.

The more I think about it, the more the words lodge in my throat. In the vicinity of the space that used to hold my heart.

I take another long pull off my beer. I'm going to need something a hell of a lot stronger than beer to broach the subject with her. Maybe I should take a few muscle relaxers and get really loose before I attempt to talk with her about it.

Jesus, is that what it's come to?

"Oh, how far the mighty Sarn't Hunter has fallen, eh?"

I look up to find Kelsey leaning against one of the crates of California wine. "When did you become a ninja?"

She frowns. "Huh?"

"How the hell did you sneak down here? Those stairs aren't exactly quiet."

"Maybe that's a sign you're either half in the bag or distracted by whatever you're looking at on your phone."

I lean back, killing the rest of the beer. The glass clinks against the concrete as I set it down next to my foot and grab its twin, pulling it out of an open crate that Eli leaves down here for us for when we need a break from upstairs. "Neither."

"Cryptic much?"

It wasn't always this way. I didn't always have to look at her and know I could never touch her again.

“Does Caleb seem off to you?” I ask her suddenly.

She frowns for a moment. “Yeah. He’s normally super obnoxious. Tonight, he was only mildly so.”

“You think he’s okay?”

She rubs the bridge of her nose. “I’m too fucking tired to try to psychoanalyze my least favorite person in our little tribe.”

I grin and extend the beer toward her.

“Thanks.” She takes a step closer and snags it, taking a long pull. “You worried about him?”

“I don’t know. It just feels…off without him being the resident pain in the ass. Like I don’t know how to function without having to break up his fights.”

She hands me back the beer. “I overheard him talking to Eli. Something about an anniversary coming up. The way it sounded, it’s not a good one and it’s maybe hitting him a little harder than normal?”

"Jesus, I feel like an asshole now." I take a long pull off the beer, then lean my head back, closing my eyes.

"Complicates things, doesn't it, when the people in our lives don’t fit into neat little boxes of good and evil?"

“Definitely.” She kills the rest of the beer and cracks open another one, taking a pull from it and handing it to me. "Are you okay?"

"Mostly." I should present to be a rational adult and have a reasonable conversation. Anything is better than the status quo, right? “I guess…sometimes things get to me that shouldn’t.”

"Yeah. I get that." I look up at her words, the frustration in her voice echoing the tension clawing at my heart, locking the words I need in my chest. “It’s hard, though. To say when something hurts.”

I say nothing for a long moment. Letting her words sink in. Letting their possibility wrap around me.

Then I move. Silent and slow, I back her up against the wall. "You don’t have to be strong all the time," I tell her softly. Her mouth is there, just there. She is soft against me, soft in all the ways I remember.

Soft in a thousand ways that will torture me for the rest of a lifetime.

"Neither do you." She’s goading me tonight. Crossing boundaries I know she’s set in place. I can’t figure out what’s changed. If it’s the fatigue I see in her eyes or the mixture of that with too much to drink. I don’t know.

And part of me doesn’t care. Part of me only cares that she’s here. That her body is pressed to mine. That I’ve penetrated the space around her and she has not pushed me away.

God, this woman is fierce and amazing. She doesn't back down, doesn't break against the threat anyone else would read in my body.

"I will never forget what happened between us in Iraq. Or when we came home." I reach for her then, cupping her face. Sliding my thumb along her full bottom lip. Wanting so badly to taste her. To end this unnecessary distance between us. “But we don’t have to keep suffering alone. Apart. It doesn’t need to be like this.”

And goddamn her, she presses her lips to my thumb. A gentle kiss. A thousand sensual memories slash through me, ripping away any shred of my composure.

It takes everything I have not to lift her, to urge her legs around my hips and grind against her. I'm hard as a fucking stone. I know she can feel me, solid and hard against her.

She's my addiction. The one woman I dream about when I'm with someone else.

And she knows it. She has to know it.

Her barriers hurt us both.

"We spent four weeks together when we got home and I don't remember any of them. Except the nightmares." She cups my face, brushing her lips against mine. "I can't do that again. I can't get lost in the alcohol and the sex. Because it doesn't help me forget. It only makes it worse."

I lower my forehead to hers, her quiet admission gutting me, ripping through me. That’s why she’s kept us apart. That’s why she’s walked away and pretended there was nothing between us.

Her words hurt; they slice at me, reminding me of how fucking self-centered I was when I first got home, wanting to do nothing more than drink and fuck, then drink some more.

I had no idea how much she was hurting. Because I didn’t bother to look.

"I didn’t know." It’s a pitiful confession. So insufficient. I step back then, releasing her from the wall.

Letting her go when it's the last thing I want. She disappears up the stairs, quiet as a ghost.

I lower my forehead to the wooden shelf holding parts of Eli's extensive and very expensive whiskey collection. We're a long fucking way from that bloodstained container where Kelsey used to live.

But we might as well never have left.

A piece of my soul stayed back there, mixed in with the sand and the bullets and the blood.

Forever entwined with hers.