So much for spending my evenings sorting through the mess of training records. After a solid week of busting out right at five and hauling ass to Casey’s to fool around—or going to my therapist and then hauling ass to Casey’s to fool around—I needed to put in more of that unofficial overtime I’d promised Diego.
Today, I stuck around. Casey had physical therapy right after work, and . . . well, I really needed to get this shit done.
I was two hours in when the elevator dinged, but it barely registered. The construction workers had been busy three doors down, and they’d been up and down the elevator all evening.
The click of the walking cast, however, turned my head.
My heart was thumping when Casey appeared in the doorway, and it thumped even harder when he smiled. “Hey.”
“Hey. What’s up?” I chuckled. “Forget your ID card again?”
“No.” He gestured at the banker’s boxes next to my cube. “I came in to give you a hand.”
I blinked. “Really?”
“Yeah.” His cheeky grin made his eyes sparkle. “I mean, I’ve been keeping you busy at night and all last weekend. Figured the least I could do was help. And I figured the sooner you wrap this shit up, the sooner your weekends are free.”
“Ah, so your motives are completely altruistic.”
“Of course.” He flopped down in his desk chair. “So. What can I do?”
“Um. Well.” I looked over everything spread out in front of me. “Just . . . I mean, it’s tedious as fuck, but if you want to help me match people’s quals against muster sheets . . .”
Casey nodded. “Sure. You have a box I can start on?”
“Dozens of them.” I paused. “You probably shouldn’t be carrying them yet, though, right?” I started to get up. “I’ll go get one and—”
“No, it’s fine.” He made a placating gesture. “I can lift again as long as I have the boot on.” Gesturing down the hall toward the conference room, he added, “Which ones are done?”
“Everything to the left is done.”
“Cool. Be right back.” And with that, he disappeared. He returned a minute later, a box on his shoulder, and put it on his desk with a heavy thud. “What are we doing about the ships? The supply ship and one of the others will still be deployed until after the inspection’s over.”
“Diego’s on it.” I made a hash mark on the record I’d just finished. “Neither of them did a lot of landside training, so there isn’t much to go through, fortunately.”
“Good. One less thing to worry about.”
“Right?”
Casey found his groove pretty fast. He knew the system and the records better than I did, so it wasn’t like he was new to this. Hell, anyone else probably would’ve been more hindrance than help, but Casey went through the records faster than I did.
While we worked, we shot the shit over the music playing in the background. I came in on the weekends so I wouldn’t have distractions, but since Casey was picking up some of the work, it wasn’t like I was falling behind.
I kept stealing glances at him, and it blew me away to think about all the things that had to happen for both of us to be here.
If Casey hadn’t had to drop out of BUD/S, or if his injury had happened a week sooner or a week later . . .
If I hadn’t had gone to war enough times to make me unfit to stay in the Marines, or if one of those bombs or bullets had landed a little closer, or if I’d had one or two more drinks on one of those nights when I’d almost drunk myself to death . . .
If things had happened just a little bit differently, we wouldn’t have wound up in this office together. That realization didn’t necessarily make me happy that we’d gone through what we had, but it was a relief that the chips had fallen where they had. That we’d made it to the same place at the same time.
And as much as I knew it bothered him when people said it out loud, I couldn’t help mentally echoing what that guy in his class had said today: Casey was lucky. He had dodged a bullet. Even if he still ended up in combat at some point, he wouldn’t be going in with special forces, and I . . .
What could I say? I was glad.
If my own experiences in a war zone had fucked me up, I couldn’t begin to imagine what life as a SEAL would have done to Casey.
Except . . . I could imagine it. In Iraq, special forces guys passed through our camps a few times. Once they’d brought in a team member who needed to be medevac’d. Another time they’d spent the night before continuing to rendezvous with a classified party in a classified place for a classified mission. Actually, that happened several times. We all knew better than to ask questions when we wouldn’t get answers.
I admired the shit out of them for what they did, and they had bigger brass balls than I ever would, but I didn’t envy them. Not the wounds they brought back. Not the stories they told. Not the thousand-yard stares most of them had. Whenever I’d thought I’d been through the worst the war had to offer, I’d cross paths with some SEALs or Green Berets, and I’d thank God right then and there that I hadn’t been to whatever circle of hell they’d been to.
A Green Beret had been killed during a mission while I was over there. Whatever had happened, it was relatively close to my base, so they came to us. Two of his buddies had been fucked up pretty bad too, and they’d been scheduled to go home on the same flight as his body. I’d overheard one of the others saying the only difference between them and him was that he didn’t have a pulse. The other two . . . they just weren’t even there anymore. Empty-eyed. Damn near catatonic.
Then some shit had gone down. I didn’t know the details—my clearance hadn’t gone that high—only that there was suddenly a lot of activity after lights out, and the next morning, one of the two didn’t get on the flight. The team had left in a hurry in the middle of the night, and he’d gone with them. I never heard what happened to them. If they carried out their mission. If they won. If any of them were killed. I never even knew that one guy’s name or if he ever recovered.
Shuddering, I lifted my gaze and stared at Casey’s back. Yeah, being a SEAL was what he wanted, and if he were still eligible to try BUD/S again, I’d support him completely. What kind of boyfriend—or whatever I was—would I be if I didn’t?
And at the same time, what kind of boyfriend or whatever would I be if I wasn’t quietly thankful he’d never put on that trident?
I kept all that to myself, though. I’d be supportive and try not to accidentally salt his wounds. No point in—
Something clattered at the end of the hall. Then there was a bang, followed by some cursing.
I jumped, my breath catching, but relaxed pretty quick. The activity didn’t sound like anything that we needed to investigate.
Casey and I looked at the door, then at each other.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I laughed self-consciously. “I was just in my own little world.”
He studied me, and I could hear the question he wasn’t asking.
“It’s not my PTSD,” I said. “Relax.”
“Oh.” His eyes flicked toward the doorway. “I can see why they don’t do this during the day. Half the building would be a wreck.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
He glanced at me. “It doesn’t bother you, though.”
“Not really. I mean, I jump as much as the next person, but it doesn’t trigger anything.”
“It doesn’t?”
I shook my head. “Not anymore.”
Casey was quiet for a moment. “Can I ask you about it?” His voice was soft. “About your PTSD?”
“Yeah, sure. What do you want to know?”
“Well.” He paused to lean down, probably putting some folders in the box by his feet. As he sat up again, another folder in his hand, he asked, “What does trigger it?”
I stared at the record in front of me without actually seeing it. “Silence.”
“Silence? Really?”
I nodded. “One of the worst things when I was over there was when everything was quiet.”
He raised his eyebrows, but didn’t speak.
I thumbed the edge of the folder in my hand. “During a firefight, you knew you were under fire. You knew there were bombs coming in, bullets flying at you. If the building next to your vehicle blew up, it was startling, but not because you weren’t expecting an explosion. You just didn’t know what or when would blow.” I pushed out a ragged breath and tried not to squirm. “And I mean, you’re so focused on not getting your head blown off and on covering your buddy’s back, you don’t have time to really think, you know? It was when everything was quiet that I had time to think and worry. Mortars sometimes came in out of nowhere. While we were at chow. While we were sleeping. While we were doing fucking paperwork.”
“Whoa,” Casey breathed.
“Yeah.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “So I guess that’s the part that got under my skin. I can deal with loud noises now. It took a while, but I got there. The quiet, though?” I shuddered.
“That explains why you’ve always got music playing when you’re in here alone.”
“Mm-hmm. Exactly.”
He twisted his chair toward me. “Do you want something like that when you’re at my place? A radio on or something?”
I thought about it for a minute. “That . . . that wouldn’t bother you? Having some background noise?”
He smiled. “I’ve been on ships and I’ve been to BUD/S, baby. I can sleep through anything.”
I laughed quietly. “I miss that ability. But as far as a radio or whatever, it’s up to you. It’s your house, you know?”
“Yeah, but if you’re there, I want you to be able to sleep.”
I hesitated, not sure if I wanted to take him up on it or if my pride was going to dig its heels in.
Casey wheeled his chair a little closer and held my gaze. “How bad is it really?”
“It’s . . .” Well, the sooner he knew about things, the sooner we could both find out if any of my dark underbelly was a deal breaker. “Not as bad as it used to be. I mean, it is and it isn’t.”
He cocked his head.
I swept my tongue across my lips and focused on working at the edge of the file folder in front of me. “I didn’t cope well for a long time. So even though it’s been a while since I saw combat, I just started really dealing with it. Or, well, dealing with it in a way that didn’t involve a bottle.”
Casey swallowed. “How long has it been?”
“It’s been almost seven years since I got out of the Marines. If I had to guess, I remember about two-thirds of that.”
Casey’s eyebrows were up, but he stayed quiet.
I took a deep breath. “I couldn’t handle going to war again, but there’s nothing I can do about the war zones I’ve already been to. The nightmares, the flashbacks, the guilt over things I—” I exhaled. “The only options were lose my mind or get out of it as much as possible.”
His eyes narrowed a little. “Booze?”
Lips pressed together, I nodded. “I don’t even like drinking, to be honest with you. Never did. I just did it because it was the only thing that turned everything else off. And even now, it’s hard not to. My therapist taught me some coping mechanisms, and I’m learning to live with the PTSD instead of drowning it, but I ain’t even gonna lie—it’s hard not to go get shitfaced sometimes.”
“I believe it,” he whispered.
“The shitty part? Sometimes I think the only thing that keeps me from doing it is that I hate who I am when I’ve been drinking. That’s the me that fucked things up with Clint, you know?”
Casey nodded. “The Navy Ball.”
I winced. Then I studied him. “You know what happened between me and him. How the hell are you still interested in me?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” No hesitation whatsoever. “You’ve obviously got your shit together now.”
I laughed dryly. “It’s only been a few months. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“It’s a start, right?”
“True.”
“Even if you still have to fight it,” he said softly, “you’ve been winning, right?”
“So far.”
A small smile flickered across his lips. Then he got up and moved from his cubicle to mine. He sat on the edge of my desk and touched my arm. “Look, you’re not the first traumatized vet I’ve run across. You’re sure as shit not the first one who’s tried to self-medicate. And I mean, my brother isn’t a vet, but he’s an addict.”
I leaned in closer. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. First it was booze. Then he got into meth.” Casey’s eyes lost focus for a moment. Then he met mine and sighed. “I’ve seen how hard he’s had to fight to stay sober. I know it’s not something that makes him less of a person. So if you still think I’m going to lose interest in you because you’ve got some demons?” He shook his head. “Think again.”
I couldn’t help smiling, and slid a hand up onto his thigh. “You’re amazing.”
“Nah.” He ran his fingers up my chest. “I’m just me.”
“Yeah, well. I like you. So . . .” I shrugged. My cheeks burned as I realized how utterly cheesy that had sounded, and I cleared my throat. “So should we wrap some of this up so we can get out of here?”
“Absolutely.” He tapped one of the boxes with his foot. “First one to finish a box gets his dick sucked?”
“Hmm.” I grinned. “Can’t decide if I should try to win or lose that one.”
Casey rolled his eyes. “You dirty cocksucker.”
“I don’t recall hearing you complain.”
“Nope.” He leaned down and let his lips graze mine. “You’re definitely not going to hear any complaints.”
“Hopefully you’ll be hearing something else pretty soon.” I nodded toward the boxes. “Let’s get this shit done so I can make you scream.”
Casey barely masked a shiver. “I love that plan. Let’s roll.”