Chapter 5

Pacey

 

 

Well, shit. That hadn’t gone like I’d planned at all.

Firstly, Blondie was gone, and not only didn’t I get her name, but she’d also blown me off to get back to that scumbag motherfucker inside.

Secondly, I’d actually enjoyed talking to her. Her innocence and open questions were fucking adorable.

Usually, as soon as women found out what I used to do for a living, they got all ‘you must’ve been so lonely out there all by yourself.’ Then proceeded to make said perceived loneliness up to me. I took them up on their offers, because I had to remember how to breathe every once in a while, and I’d built up a little bit of a reputation for it. As a result, I got plenty of pussy whenever I wanted it.

But never before had a girl been interested in asking me about what I used to do. The superficial shit, sure.

Was hell week really hell, Pacey?

Want me to make you feel good now that you’re home, Pacey?

Does all that stuff they say happens on base really happen, Pacey?

Never before had those words not sounded like bullshit, purring seduction.

Until Blondie. Hell, once the question was out there, she didn’t even look like she really even wanted it to be. And it was nothing like all that superficial shit women usually wanted to talk to me about.

It was real. The one question that really made me think and question hundreds of missions to give a real answer, even if I hadn’t been completely truthful about the most dangerous situation I’d ever found myself in.

I assumed that saying ‘the one that got my badass girlfriend killed’ wasn’t going to help the mood any.

If I was being honest with myself, the uneasy feeling that had flooded through me when she turned me down was disappointment. Not even disappointment at not getting that particular brand of revenge on her druggie boyfriend, but a burning disappointment because I really did like talking to her.

I could breathe properly, even, and my skin fit just as well as it did in those few brief moments before I blew my load into some random bag.

What was she doing with an asshole like her druggie friend anyway? She seemed too sweet, too pure for that kind of shit. She deserved so much fucking better than that. How was it possible that she didn’t see it?

I stayed outside for a few more minutes, a part of me—the below the belt between my legs part—hoping she would come to her senses and take that ride with me anyway. But she didn’t.

Going back inside to score another lay was an option, but another hookup didn’t seem palatable. Not right now. Besides, Mrs. Brooks, Claire, had given me a mean blowjob just a couple of hours ago. Blondie had put the edge back on, but that didn’t mean I had to do anything about it.

You’re not a fucking animal, for crying out loud.

I had to get out of there. Going back inside was a bad idea. It was time to go home. So I hightailed it to my bike with a light shake of my head instead of heading back into the bar. Swinging one leg over my leather seat, I decided to take the long way home. It wasn’t like there was anyone waiting for me there anyway.

The motor on my Ducati purred to life as soon as I turned the key, and I was whizzing down the street in no time, putting the drugged-up idiot and his blonde bombshell behind me. The bike was the one thing I’d splurged on when I’d moved here and it wasn’t a purchase that I’d ever had buyer’s remorse over. The wind whipping at my hair and the vibration underneath me soon transported me to another time.

Back to five years ago, when the wind had been caused by the open hatch of a helicopter and the vibration, by the turning of its blades. It was my last mission with May. The mission that an integral part of our team, and of my life, hadn’t made it home from.

The wind had been blasting at and battering our craft as we tried to find a landing zone in the jungle. Our comms were quiet, but there was a sense of excitement in the air. We had located the targets we’d been after for months, and when the chopper started descending, May had looked at me with that wild, adventurous look in her eye, and my heart had been claimed forever.

That was it for me. Little did I know, that small moment of bliss and realization would give way to a life that was meaningless. I was a shadow of my former self, and I knew it, but I didn’t know how to get back to the man I was. I didn’t really even want to. Grief had changed me, made me into someone that May wouldn’t recognize, and I was beyond grateful that I’d never have to explain it to her.

I drove around aimlessly until my legs were as numb as my useless heart, and my ass was aching. When I finally got home, the silence was deafening and the emptiness overwhelming. Though May was never there with me, it still felt like she should’ve been.

It was a decent house, bought off a foreclosure auction that meant I’d had some extra cash to fix the place up. My renovations weren’t going so great, though.

I lacked the drive to get it done. Why wouldn’t I? It was a single-family, two-story home with no family to live in it. There was no rush. I should’ve stuck with the bachelor pad the realtor showed me, but something about the house had spoken to me.

My granddaddy was a developer who always said that if it spoke to you, it was meant to be yours. God only knew why it had spoken to me though. It certainly wasn’t because I intended on filling it with the family it deserved.

There was a mudroom off the entrance hall, begging to be filled with coats and purses, and other knickknacks I’d never bother with. The stairs beckoned from right next to the mudroom like they were saying, ‘You’ve shed your shit in there, now come up and relax.’

To the left of the entrance hall was an open-area kitchen, living, and dining room. A door from the kitchen led to a vast backyard with a large kidney-shaped pool and all the way round to the entertainment area that sat to the right of the entrance hall that I was still planted in, stuck in all the dreams I’d had when I’d imagined buying a place like this.

May and I were kindred souls. Tugger always knew he’d get out eventually, what with his sweet wife waiting for him at home. But May and me?

We had a plan, and it’d never included leaving. The way we saw it, we had at least five more years left as SEALs, and we planned on living every damned one of them. Aside from Tug, May was the only person I’d ever met who was as passionate about the job as I was. And there was a lot of fucking passion to go around.

Once we had to leave our unit behind, we’d planned on finding a quieter corner of the military and riding it out until we retired. Somewhere along the line, we’d get married, though we didn’t talk about it much. Possibly have a couple of kids. Mostly, we planned on hunting the bad guys by day, fighting evil and taking names, while we spent our nights exploring our passion.

Well, the last part was my plan, anyway.

May’s sex drive had never matched mine. Not that I could blame her. It was like teenage hormones had never let me get away from their, or my own, grip. And while she had a sense of adventure that rivaled mine, it’d never quite gotten there.

But whatever.

Just lying beside her in bed used to make me feel good. Content.

I made it to my bedroom and collapsed on the bed fully dressed, only having pulled off my boots to place them at the side of the bed like I still did every damn night. Memories of May haunted me.

She was tucked close to my chest, whooping as we leaped out of an airplane the first time she went skydiving for fun.

The look in her eyes before we’d rolled off our first Zodiac to go scuba diving to look at fish instead of looking for bodies or on a mission. She was so damn excited.

I remembered our first drill simulating the approach to a suspected terrorist vessel in open water, and the fierceness with which she’d approached every enemy we’d encountered. Laughing aloud when I remembered her threatening one of our superiors, saying she was going to cut off his balls and feed them to him, after she found the container full of agents that were masquerading as victims of human trafficking.

She was a firecracker, my May. And she was gone.

All of those things that I remembered, those were the reasons that I could never move on. We used to lie in bed talking about our missions, our favorite weapons, and who would win in a fight if random celebrities were pitched against superheroes.

May was the most perfect girl for me, but life had been cruel to us that way. Only affording us enough time to get to know each other past the brother-in-arms stage before she was ripped away from me—never to return again.

I tried calling May a sister-in-arms once, but she spat all over the idea and launched into a tirade of how antiquated it was to want to refer to someone as a sibling when they were a really good friend. She argued that people got to choose their friends, so no one should be relegated to the status of being family—who you had no control over choosing—when being a close friend was something so much better.

It kinda made sense, in a twisted way. Didn’t make me think of my adopted SEAL brothers as any less of my family, however. I just made sure not to mention it in front of May.

Birds were chirping before I knew it, the early morning glow of sunrise lighting up the dark wood walls and laminated flooring of my bedroom. Yet another night that I’d spent tossing and turning without more than a few winks of sleep.

At least it was finally fucking Friday. Maybe things would look better next week, though I’d been telling myself that lie for five years now.

But maybe, just maybe, Monday would signal the arrival of the week when I’d be able to breathe on my own again.