Captured(25)

“You deserve a real room. A real bed.”

He wobbles his head back and forth. “No. I don’t. I had a bed at the hospital. I hated it.” He blinks rapidly, lays a hand over his eyes. “Spent three f*cking years sleeping in the dirt. There was the one place they had me in, an old school, I think it was. Put me in a closet. Bare concrete. Got damned cold at night. Gave me sores on my hip and shoulder. After that, I was thankful for the dirt floor. Kept me in a cave, too. That sucked. Cold and dark. Every sound I made echoed. My breathing echoed. Drove me f*cking nuts. I’d stop breathing until I passed out, just to make the echoes go away. Swore I could hear my heartbeat sometimes. Total silence is f*cking unnerving.” He lifts his hand, stares at his palm, squeezes his fingers into a fist, and releases it and stares at it some more. “The hospital was its own kind of hell. I was basically a prisoner there, too. Here, I can breathe. I can see the sky. I can get up and move around when I want. I can walk out the door and keep walking. Nobody will stop me, give me orders, or yell at me. I might’ve been among my own countrymen in the hospital, but I didn’t feel free. Felt trapped just as much as when the Taliban had me.”

He levels a look at me.

“And, trust me, Reagan, you do not want me in your house. I don’t want to be there, and you wouldn’t want me there.” He goes quiet for a moment. “Maybe that came out wrong. It’s not that I don’t want to be in your house, or around you. It’s not that, it’s just….”

“I get it. As much as anyone can, I get what you’re saying. It’s okay.”

He widens his eyes, blinks, and shakes his head. “Can’t believe how f*cked up that little bit of beer made me. Guess it was a bad idea.”

He stretches, shifts, and the jeans ride low on his waist, bare a hint of the “V” of muscle, curls of body hair. I can’t look away. I should, but I can’t. Guilt assails me. I shouldn’t be looking at Derek like that. At anyone, but especially him, especially when he’s so fragile, emotionally and psychologically. Not fragile — that’s not the right word. Unstable, maybe. Raw, healing. Wounds to the body heal faster than those within.

I rip my gaze away, stare at the floor between my feet. “Do you need anything? Can I get you anything?”

“I’ll be fine. Just need some sleep.”

The moon is a high bright sliver, shedding silver light on the grass. There’s a lamp suspended from the power line stretching between the house and the barn, casting a broad circle of orange light on the gravel drive. I stop beneath it, stare back at the open barn door, at the faint glow of the lantern. My work boots crunch in the gravel, and the only sound is crickets, a few frogs somewhere far away. An owl hoots. The streetlight buzzes.

I don’t want to go in. I don’t want to talk to Ida. I don’t want to crawl into my empty bed.

I do, though. Ida can tell I’m not in the mood for conversation, so she bids me a brief farewell and waits for Hank on the front porch. I strip off my sweat-stiff clothes, pull on a long T-shirt over my bare skin. As soon as my eyes close, I’m seized by a visual memory of Derek stretching, the hint of places on his body I have no business thinking about.

Yet, I do. I wonder. And when I finally fall asleep, I dream.





CHAPTER 8





DEREK





The world spins. Eyes closed, eyes open, it makes no difference. I plant one foot on the floor, and the spinning lessens a little. Eyes open is better, though. Not because it helps the spinning, but because every time I close my eyes, I see her. The black T-shirt lifted up to wipe the sweat off her face? revealing a tight red sports bra, the tan, muscular stomach. Hipbones above low-rise jeans.

She’s a tiny thing. Barely five-five, maybe a buck-twenty soaking wet. Packs a hell of a lot of curve on her tiny frame, though, and I shouldn’t be thinking about her like this. Shouldn’t. Can’t. It’s so wrong, on so many levels.

She’s Tom’s widow.

But no matter how forcefully I remind myself, I still can’t get that vision of her out of my head. Red Reebok sports bra, plump and stretched. Taut stomach flexing as she moves.

When she touched my shoulder, I nearly lost it.

No one has touched me since I’ve been back Stateside. I can’t handle it. The last time a physical therapist tried to grab my leg to test my flexibility, he ended up with a broken nose. They learned after that to leave me the f*ck alone. Tell me what they want me to do, but keep their damned hands off me. Hands bring pain. Touch means ache and agony. Touch flashes me back to being chained to a metal chair, a fist wrapped around my ring finger, bending it slowly and inexorably backward until it snaps. Touch flashes me back to hands shoving my face against the wall, a dull razor being dragged across my dry scalp, stuttering and slicing.

When Reagan touched me, I don’t think she had any clue how close I came to lashing out with my elbow. Her touch was lightning. Sudden, and striking me with instant heat. Her fingertips only, on the round part of my shoulder, a gentle, hesitant touch. And then she pressed her body up against mine, held me up somehow, and carried me to the stall. It shouldn’t have been possible, but that woman is strong. And all I could smell was citrus shampoo in her hair, the sweat on her body.

Fuck.

Eventually sleep comes, but I have a dream. A different one this time. Not the cave or the splinters or the beatings or Tom dying, but a dream about Reagan. The image of her lifting her shirt. Only in the dream, she peels it off and steps toward me, her hair loose.