Chapter 9

Rhys

 

I was physically and emotionally drained, but sleep? Not a chance. My mind was whirring too fast, and after a solid three hours, I finally stopped fighting it. Lying on my back, hands laced behind my head, I stared at the ceiling of the hotel room I was sharing with Derek.

Entirely too close to me, he was asleep. I envied him that much, but I knew it wasn’t because his mind was at ease. He’d been in the Army for eight years, and he’d done three combat tours. That was more than enough for a soldier to develop that superhuman ability to sleep any time, anywhere because there was no telling when the opportunity would arise again. There’d been a time when I could do it too, but my own military career had ended prematurely, well before that ability could stick.

At least one of us could sleep. If I didn’t drop off in the next hour or so, I might have to let Derek drive tomorrow. For now, I was too busy reliving tonight and a few other glaring red dots on my life’s timeline.

On that day last September, the moment I’d realized what had happened—the moment I’d truly grasped the magnitude of what I’d done—had felt similar in a way to how I’d felt when I’d woken up from my accident almost twenty years ago. Physically, I’d felt different of course, but mentally, there’d been the same horrifying awareness that my entire world had changed and that there was no going back. I’d been overwhelmed with panic, trying to mentally do damage control and find some angle that would make everything normal again, and at the same time, felt a cold, heavy blanket of calm resignation around my shoulders. My world had changed. There was no going back. Might as well get used to it.

Back in Airborne School, I’d known as soon as I’d hit the ground that my career was over. Not just as a paratrooper, but most likely in the Army. There’d been too much pain for this to be anything less than a catastrophic injury. Too many bones bending where there were no joints. In the blink of an eye, everything from mid-shin down on my left leg was changed forever. I wouldn’t say I’d made peace with it, but within a matter of seconds of that fateful impact—before my instructors and the medics had even realized anything was wrong—I’d known nothing would ever be the same.

A few drug-fogged days later, when the base docs had told me amputation was the best course of action, I’d had the same sense of my whole world being irreversibly changed. A weird feeling of wanting to freak out from sheer panic and at the same time thinking I should probably start getting used to the idea.

And years later, as I’d dropped onto the bed beside a man I never should have touched, I’d had that exact same feeling. There was no taking anything back. I could no more pretend that I hadn’t fucked him than I could pretend my ankle and lower leg hadn’t shattered.

Except I’d recovered from my injuries. I’d learned to walk again. I’d learned to run. Prosthetics were still a pain in the ass, and life would be easier without missing half my lower leg, but I’d adapted to my new reality and moved on.

Tonight, in this too-small hotel room, I stared at Derek’s silhouette in the milky glow of the streetlights. The similarities between my accident and what I’d done to our marriage ended with that sense of irreversible change. The accident had been just that—an accident. I’d come in hot, misjudged the terrain, and landed too hard on loose ground.

Cheating on Derek… Well, there was definitely blame there. And Derek wasn’t something that could be replaced with plastic and carbon fiber. I could eventually move on to someone new, but I didn’t want someone new. I wanted him. I’d been in love with him since our second date, and that hadn’t changed. Every time he looked at me with all that hurt and anger in his eyes, I wanted to break down sobbing because I hated myself for what I’d done to him and to us. I had never been more profoundly aware of how much I loved him than I’d been the morning after I’d torpedoed everything.

Apparently it’s true what they say—you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

Gazing at him now, I swallowed to force back the threat of tears. Yeah, it was definitely true, and Derek was definitely gone.

With a heavy sigh, I closed my eyes and ran a hand through my hair. Sometimes I wondered if I should have told Derek at all, but that thought was always fleeting. The only thing worse than having him hate me was having him go on loving me without knowing I’d betrayed him. He’d deserved the truth so he could decide whether to stay with me or go, and I’d known even before I’d opened my mouth what his choice would be.

But I couldn’t lie to him. Not directly, and not by omission. If he left me, which I’d known he would, then I deserved it for cheating on him. I didn’t deserve to have him unknowingly continuing to love me as if nothing had changed. Because it had. As surely as if bones had shattered, there was no walking this off. No going back and pretending things hadn’t happened.

How do I move on from doing this to us?

Beside me, Derek jerked. Then again. He sucked in a breath, and it came out as a faint whimper—a sound I’d long ago learned to recognize as the beginning of a nightmare.

Years of habit had me moving before I could think twice.

“Derek.” I put a hand on his arm, as much to let him know I was there as to keep him from taking a startled swing at me. “Hey.” I shook him gently. “You’re okay. Derek?”

He tensed. Then stilled. Slowly, he exhaled, and the tension melted away. Sometimes he’d wake up fully after I’d shaken him out of a nightmare. Other times, he’d drift back to sleep as if nothing had happened. That was what he did this time—sighed into the pillow, and fell back into that familiar steady rhythm that meant he was asleep.

My heart was racing as I eased back onto my own side. That was pretty normal after he’d come out of a nightmare, mostly because I knew how quickly and violently he could surge out of a dream before he woke up and realized where he was. I was hardly afraid of him—though I was mindful of flailing hands and elbows—but it was always unsettling to watch the man I loved going through that.

And how many times had he had those nightmares since we’d broken up? They were always worse when he was stressed, and God knew he’d been stressed all to hell for the last few months.

Guilt made me cringe inwardly. As if I didn’t already feel like shit for making him so miserable. Now his combat nightmares were probably stepping up too. Because of me.

Gazing at his silhouette, I fought the urge to touch him again.

I wish I could show you how sorry I am.

I wish you knew how much I still love you.

But even if I could, it didn’t matter.

Because although he was lying here beside me in this quiet hotel room, Derek was gone, and he wasn’t coming back.

 

***

 

Another silent morning. Hooray. Without exchanging more than the absolute minimum of monosyllabic words, we showered, dressed, packed, checked out, and loaded our things into the truck. More than once, I’d considered speaking up just to ask if he was doing all right. He’d had several nightmares throughout the night, and judging by the circles under his bloodshot eyes and the lack of color in his face, they’d taken their toll. They usually did.

But I didn’t say anything. I had a feeling he was miserable enough without being expected to talk to me, and maybe this just needed some time. Did we need to cool down? Catch our breath? Fuck if I knew. All I knew was I was worried about him, worried about myself, and worried about how we were going to get through the next several days.

Now if I could just figure out what to do about that.

Just like yesterday, it was Derek who finally broke the standoff, this time before I’d even started the engine.

“Wait. Before we go.”

I let go of the key and turned to him. “Hmm?”

Derek wasn’t looking at me. Instead, he stared down at the coffee cup in his lap. “We still have to get through the wedding.”

“Yeah. I know.”

He chewed his lip. “So how do we do this?”

“I…” I pressed back against the driver’s seat and stared out the windshield. I had no idea what to say. I still wasn’t quite sure what happened last night. What exactly had flipped the switch in him and turned some much-needed sex into…that. Not that it mattered. “You tell me. Where do we go from here?”

Derek stared out the windshield for a long, quiet moment. Finally, he took a deep breath and faced me. “Let’s just…take a break today. I’m still getting my head around everything from last night, and I just…”

“It isn’t like we can get away from each other.”

“No, but I’ve got headphones. Can we just call it a ceasefire, do our own thing until we get to the next hotel, and maybe regroup in the morning? Figure things out from there?”

That sounded like several hours of quiet, awkward hell, but I really didn’t have any better ideas. If he was half as raw as I was this morning—and I suspected he was, especially after so many nightmares—then we were asking for an even worse flavor of hell if we kept the communication channels open right now.

“Okay.” I cleared my throat. “Okay. Yeah. I guess… I guess that works.”

There was nothing left to say, so neither of us said anything else. Derek slipped on a pair of noise-canceling headphones. I found an upbeat playlist on my phone that wouldn’t put me to sleep and set it to play on the truck’s speakers. Loud enough I could hear it, not so loud it would bug Derek through his headphones.

And I was right.

It was several hours of quiet, awkward hell.