Bring Down the Stars (Beautiful Hearts Duet #1)(90)

A few tense minutes later, the 5th Regiment joined up from the east, and the conflict was over.

I lowered my weapon, shouldered it, and jostled Connor.

“Let him go, man. He’s gone.”

Connor shook his head and clutched Bradbury tighter, his jaw clenched, his lips pressed down and drawn tight.

“He’s got a wife,” Connor said. “Did you know that? And a baby girl, three months old.”

“No, I didn’t know,” I said and took a sip of water from my canteen. The men may have been like my brothers, but it was Connor to whom they talked to and confided in.

A medic from the 5th pried Connor’s fingers out of Bradbury’s armor and pulled the body away. They covered it with a blanket until it was safe for a chopper to fly the body out.

Connor looked at me, fear bright and glassy in his eyes.

Could be one of us next time, he said.

Not you, I answered. You’re going home.

We turned the burned-out village into our camp. I took first patrol on the south side, then tried to grab an hour or two of sleep. I lay down next to Connor, who was wedged against the wall for cover.

I lay flat, or as flat as I could with my rucksack still strapped to my back. The sky in Syria was unlike anything I’d ever seen in Boston, where the city lights dimmed the star shine. Even Amherst had nothing on the canopy that stretched overhead, impossibly wide, black but strewn with diamonds. I wondered if Autumn ever saw a sky like this in Nebraska.

I hoped she had. I hoped someday she’d see something like this. I wished I could give it to her.

I would bring down the stars for her…

A small smile spread over my lips. I fished under my armor for the small, dirt-smudged notepad and pen I kept there, and wrote down the words before they fled. Not the Object of Devotion poem I’d been writing for months. This was something new. Something that wasn’t born of pathetic longing. No objectifying devotion.

Only love.

I slept, and the dream came again.

I lined up at the track. A cool breeze blew over my skin instead of stifling desert heat. I wore my Amherst shorts and running tank. In the lane to my right, Autumn wore the purple from the night of our going away party. It had little white buttons that scattered like popcorn when I tore the dress open. Crazed to touch as much of her as I could before reason and reality rushed back in.

Poised on the track beside me, Autumn was buttoned properly, but her hair was still tousled from my hands. Her lips were red and swollen from my kisses. Her eyes dark and dilated with desire.

On my left, Connor flashed his mega-watt smile, as if nothing were amiss in his world. Beyond him, Ma, Paul, my sisters, and the Drakes took up position. In the far outside lane, Bradbury lay facedown on the ground.

Not sleeping.

Not unconscious.

Dead.

The call came for set. We crouched.

The gun went off and I crashed to the track as if a massive hand had flattened me. I felt no pain. I couldn’t move, except to reach my arm out to those I loved as they ran away from me.

And then darkness.

I woke up with a gasp, then a strange calmness came over me, along with a deep ache of pain and regret. Pain from missing my people. Regret that the disturbing dream was the last time I would ever see them again.

I’m not coming home from this place.

I reached under my bunk and pulled out the notepad. The rest of the poem I’d begun earlier that night came to me all at once. I wrote without stopping or hesitation, my pen flying across the page, using my thigh as a table. The words no longer hiding behind my diamond mind. No thoughts, only purest emotion. Everything I felt for Autumn from heart to hand. Tears blotched a word or two, but didn’t make them unreadable. I let them seep in.

I came to the bottom of the page. The empty space that waited for a signature. My pen hovered, touched down, and I pulled it away.

Connor said I owned Autumn’s heart. She loved me, my soul.

And I’m not coming home.

This is all I can give to her.

Take it. It’s your love too.

I loved her. My cracked, tarnished heart that was scared to love, loved Autumn Caldwell. My soul sang the words I could never say to her out loud.

The nib of the pen touched down and I wrote my name. My name. Weston. Because that’s what she called me, always. Only. I was her Weston, until the day I died. This day, maybe.

I had just finished the ‘n’ of my name when the first bomb hit.

The concussion rocked the earth and sent debris raining down. Someone in the rear screamed in pain. Was it Erickson? I crammed the paper into my pocket, underneath my body armor and grabbed my weapon. My headset was filled with chatter.

“Incoming hostiles, half-klick south.”

“Copy that. We got refugees ahead of them, northbound.”

“Not regime, hajis.”

“Fuck.”

“Go, go, go!”

Connor scrambled to his feet and we shielded our eyes from the explosive bursts to the south. Jagger, our communications officer, shouted into his comm for immediate air strike assistance.

“The north attack earlier was a diversion,” I muttered, taking cover with Connor behind a hunk of rubble. “We never looked back.”

“They said refugees,” Connor said, his face grim, no trace of his trademark smile. I hoped by the time he got out of here, he’d find it again.