Misadventures of a Curvy Girl (Misadventures #18)(26)

The thing is, wind can sound like anything it wants—a screaming man, the whirr of helicopter blades, trucks rolling over the dirt. Any sound, every sound. One minute I’m in my own bed, and the next I’m back there. Kabul. Marjah and Musa Qala in the Helmand Province. The godforsaken Korengal. All I wanted was to come home. And then I came home and it was like it didn’t matter.

But last night, I came the closest I have in years to falling asleep during a storm, to falling asleep in the same bed as someone else. Maybe it was the very thorough fuck session, but maybe it was also Ireland herself. Watching me with parted lips and openly curious eyes while a contented and happy Caleb snored behind her.

It’s been so long since anyone has looked at me like that, like they genuinely wanted to know what was howling inside me, like they wouldn’t be scared of it if I let it out. Like they wouldn’t be upset if they cracked me open and actually found nothing inside, howling or not.

If they found there is no Ben inside me any longer, that I’ve somehow become a shell, a puppet pretending to be Ben Weber, going through the motions as if he never decided ROTC would be a handy way to pay for college. As if he just decided to stay near Holm and work at a bar and fuck women and his best friend at the same time.

Caleb’s the only person I’ll ever trust with the mess I’ve become, precisely because he doesn’t demand to see those messy truths if I’m not willing to show them. But Ireland… Her gaze last night both demanded and conceded, and it evoked something fiercely needy in me, something that wanted to tie her to Caleb’s bed and have her look at me that way forever. It was so unnerving that I had to leave after she fell asleep, although I would have left anyway. I’m too vulnerable in the nighttime.

I prefer to be vulnerable in private.

What is it about Ireland that makes me think I could change that? Even today, I find myself drawn to her clear blue gaze and her voice, which has the slightly husky sound of a woman who’s just woken up. I want to fuck her right here in the branch-strewn yard right after a fucking tornado, that’s how sexy her voice is.

In fact, I’m listening to her talk when my phone rings, jarring and loud compared to the low, sultry music of Ireland’s words. With a muttered curse, I step away and answer it. It’s Debbie, one of my two employees at the tavern.

“Ben,” she says, and there’s a peculiar and specific tremble in her voice that I’ve heard a hundred times before but never from her.

Never here at home.

Shock.

She’s in shock.

I close my eyes, for a minute both smelling and tasting gunpowder. Feeling grit and dirt under my eyelids and on my lips.

“What is it?” I manage.

“The tavern,” she shakes out. “Ben, the whole town, it’s just—”

I understand immediately, even though I don’t want to. I thought we’d been spared the worst of the storm; I thought we’d been lucky.

Turns out the worst of it didn’t hit the farm because it was too busy tearing apart the town. The place I grew up, the place I earn my living. The place I call home.

“Are you safe?” I ask first because it’s the most important thing. “Is everyone safe?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I only just got here from my place. There’s a police car, but I—I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Shock will do that. Make the simplest sentences break off into fragments, make even the easy thoughts impossible to hold on to. I know exactly how Debbie feels right now because I’ve felt it so many times before. Although never here, never where I thought I was safe, with the wide green fields and leafy trees and sleepy creeks.

I squeeze my hand into a fist so tight I feel the nails dig into my palm.

“I’ll be right there,” I tell her.





Caleb didn’t need to hear anything from me when I hung up the phone. Somehow he had shirts for us. Somehow he herded me toward his truck, and Ireland and Greta ended up between us on the big bench seat. Somehow we made it the two miles to Holm without saying a single word to each other.

And then we roll to the edge of our small town, and I’m beyond words anyway. I’m too busy remembering the sound of boots scrabbling over dusty ground, the heavy spray of gunfire in the heat. The scene we come upon is a scene I thought I’d never have to see again, a scene I saw far the fuck too often: the mounded rubble of a town gashed right off the map.

Holm is gone.

Well, maybe not gone entirely, but close to it—close enough that it’s unrecognizable as the place I’ve called home for thirty-four years, and close enough that I almost wish it were entirely gone, because now it’s become something tragic and alien and chaotic beyond belief.

The big trees shading Main Street are snapped and whittled to sharp, stark masts of stripped lumber, and the green lampposts that used to light the street—the ones the American Legion and Auxiliary Club decorate for Christmas each year—are knocked over like Lincoln Logs. Trash and debris litter every available surface—shreds of fluffy, pink insulation from the mowed-over homes a block away, glass and lumber snapped into toothpicks, paper and jagged slabs of sheetrock, and drifts of shingles and bricks piled as high as banks of snow.

“Fuck,” Caleb says, stunned. “Fuck.”

I don’t say anything but climb out of the truck and walk toward the bar. I hear Ireland and Greta follow me, but I don’t turn back to look at them. I don’t trust myself; I don’t trust that Ireland won’t give me one of those clear, demanding looks, and I’ll crack into a thousand pieces right here in the middle of all this ruin. I can’t crack, not yet. Not before I make sure everyone is safe and I know what all needs to be done.