Chapter Thirty-Seven
SAWYER
Pete ended up buying a new tarp for his vegetable garden instead of actually getting a roof. At the hardware store, he’d purchased an assortment of new pots and plants to put in the ground. I spend a good chunk of the day helping him get some lemon trees in the ground and trying to talk him out of putting apple trees in as well.
“It’s too hot to plant apples here,” I told him. I leaned against my shovel and pushed sweat off my brow. “They’ll be dead in a week.”
“I can keep the sun off ‘em,” Pete insisted.
And we went back and forth for a while before I conceded, because if Pete wanted to try to plant apples, I didn’t want to stop him. We planted some more, and when it was about time for me to go, I returned the shovel and hoe to the shed.
“You headed to Quinn’s after this?” Pete asked.
I closed the door to the shed. “No. Why would I be?”
“I thought you had some making up to do with her.”
“Nope.” I took off my cap and winced at how sweaty I felt. I needed a quick shower. “I think I’ll head home and get a shower.”
“You’re going to have to talk to her eventually.”
“I tried.” I shook my head. “And it didn’t go so well. She seems to have already moved on. I probably ought to do the same.”
“Oh, I think that’s horseshit,” Pete protested. “I think you need to be happy. Being without Quinn, that just won’t make you happy.”
“I can find my own happiness.”
“You won’t, though.” Pete pushed his cap back. “Just give it some thought, yeah?”
“I thought you were all for me not getting in a relationship. You said you didn’t care for the thought,” I reminded him.
“Yes,” he said. “But you have since informed me that I won’t be abandoned when you get married. Besides, I like Quinn. She’s friendly.”
I sighed and shook my head. “You’re going to hound me about this until I talk to her, aren’t you?”
“Something like that.”
I nodded. “Alright. I’ll think about it. I’ll think about it, Pete, but don’t get your hopes up.”
“No sweat.”
I went off on my way to drive home. As soon as I got in the house, I bolted for the shower and cleaned up a little. The increasing heat meant that the outdoor labor got just a little grosser, not that I minded. Nothing could measure up to the unfathomable desert heat I’d lived in for over five years.
I got out of the shower and put on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, making my way to the kitchen to fix something to eat. As I started to go through the refrigerator, I heard a knock at the door. Worried it might be Stacy, I was cautious in opening it, like that might prevent it from being her at all.
It wasn’t Stacy, though. It was Quinn, and she didn’t look angry.
“Oh, good. You’re home.” Quinn rubbed her arm and offered a smile.
All at once, I dearly missed when everything had been calm between us. I missed being able to talk to her being able to hold her. It had been my one piece of familiarity in this strange new world I’d come home to.
“Yeah,” I said. I opened the door a little wider. “Here, come in.”
Quinn walked in and stood until I motioned for her to sit on the couch. She did, and I sat on the chair across from her.
“I wanted to apologize,” she said. “About everything. I got so… I got so scared of how well things were going that I sort of froze up. It was easier for me to accept that you were a bad guy then sort through the emotional complication and, I don’t know, my friend thinks I’m afraid of commitment, which might be a little true, and it’s…” she cleared her throat. “I came here to hear you out because I did a pretty shit job of that last time we talked.”
I didn’t fully understand what she meant when she said that she was afraid of commitment, but it would make some sense. I didn’t care to a large extent. Whatever the case may be, I just wanted everything back to normal, and I could nod my head along with whatever she needed me to in order to achieve that normalcy again.
“There isn’t much for me to say,” I said. “I… I’m sorry about what’s happened with Stacy, but I guess we know that’s not the real issue here. I guess we can’t make any real progress unless I come clean about what happened overseas.”
“Well, I don’t… I don’t want to pressure you.” Quinn frowned. “If you want to tell me, you can tell me, but if you don’t, that’s okay.”
I frowned. “The way I see it, I can’t come clean unless I tell you. It’s not fair for me to keep expecting you to be patient if I don’t give you something to work with.”
“I’m not your therapist,” Quinn reminded me. “You’re not obligated to share this with me.”
“But I want to,” I said. “I want to.” I wanted to prove to her that I trusted her and the best way to do that was to trust her with the one thing she knew I couldn’t tell anyone about. If nothing else, it would prove I trusted her, and maybe through that trust, she could begin to glimpse how much I cared about her. It was the only card I had left to play, and she needed to see me play it.
“Okay.” Quinn leaned forward a little and bit the inside of her cheek. “Okay, then I’m listening.”
I nodded and sat back, wondering where to start with this story. “I had a few people in my team that I was close with.” I couldn’t give her the team number, and I wasn’t even sure I could give her names—not giving her the team number and giving only first names would probably be fine. “John and James and Mike and I were the closest in the team. We did scouting stuff, some raids, nothing dangerous. When I went overseas, we weren’t in any immediate conflict, mostly just patrolling and making sure nothing happened.”
Quinn nodded.
“We got assigned to go out to this little village a little while away from our camp. We left in the middle of the night, hoping to get there on foot by daybreak. When we got there, we found that a group of extremists had taken over the area. They had a bunch of the villagers hostage; they had a bunch of their own people at gunpoint. Sometimes people here don’t realize that as much as these groups target Americans, it’s their own country they’re really gutting. Most of the place was rubble by the time we got there.
“We went looking for whoever was in charge. It broke into a firefight too quickly to process much of anything. Since we were outnumbered, we were just trying to get out of there. I radioed in for backup, a helicopter, some way out, because we were a few hours away on foot and there were hostiles all the way back. We were fish in a barrel, all of us. We ran through the city, looking for cover, and when we finally found it, I radioed for help again. The line wasn’t dead, but the connection was bad, and eventually, we just dispatched our signal. We all sat down, hunkered in this little hole in the ground that some bomb blew open before us, waiting for some help or some sign. And then John shouted ‘grenade.’
“I jumped. Mike pulled John up. We got back. James… James didn’t move. I didn’t grab him. When the explosion was over, we… we went back, and we found him.” If I closed my eyes, I could see it. If I closed my eyes, that’s all I could see, and there wasn’t any way to escape it. “He’d been… well. He wasn’t quite dead when we got back. I tried to stop the bleeding but there was no stopping the bleeding; you couldn’t even tell where it was coming from, and all at once he just… quit.”
That moment, the moment James became heavy in my arms, was the moment that haunted me the most. “He just stopped. Help arrived, and we had to leave him there in that hellhole.” I shook my head. “I should have grabbed him. They told me he should have jumped out himself, but Mike pulled John up and I should have pulled James up. I shouldn’t have let them leave him.”
Quinn’s eyes were wide, and she stared at me with something bordering on the pity that I dreaded receiving from her.
“I know now that it wasn’t my fault,” I said to her. “He got the same training as we did. He knew the same basics. He knew to back up when there was a grenade, he knew what to do, and he wasn’t fast enough. Even if I’d pulled him up, we would have both been slow, and then we would have both been dead. I know it wasn’t my fault, but I always feel like there’s something I could have done.”
“You would have died,” Quinn said.
“Maybe,” I confirmed. “Maybe.” I stood up and ran a hand over my hair. I hated the stillness in the air around us. This was why I hadn’t wanted to say anything to anyone about it. It alienated me, placed this experience on me that no one else could understand, let alone try to process.
Quinn stood up when I did, and she wrapped her arms around my neck and stared at my face. “I’m glad you didn’t,” she said. “Even with what happened… I can’t help but be glad you’re here. You’re lucky to be here.”
I kissed her cheek, and she kissed mine. My hands went up to hold her upper arms, smoothing my thumbs over the soft skin.
“I love you,” she said, her voice near to a whisper in the darkness. “I couldn’t bear to be without you.”
I sealed the space between us with a kiss.