Forged by Sacrifice Kindle rev 100519

by Evans, LJ

  I was surprised when I came up with blood. Mac saw it and pulled me down the hall toward the office. He punched in the key code to get in and led me to the small private bath.

  “I think I can get it,” I told him as he futzed under the counter, coming up with a first aid kit.

  “You can’t even see it. Turn around.” He was all calm. I kept forgetting he was a military man. That he’d seen and been in worse situations than a cut from an old wooden bench. He joked around so much that it was often hard to remember. Even when he was serious, he didn’t have an aura to him that I’d encountered in other soldiers. He was calmer, lower key about it.

  I turned, pulling my floaty dress to the front and holding it tight so he could see better. Mac cleared his throat and sat on the toilet lid before dragging me a little closer until I was almost between his spread legs. The music from the bar faded away as my body heated at his touch and the intimate position. Heart beating fast, face flushing, I thanked the Lord I wasn’t facing him.

  “I think there’s a splinter in there in addition to the cut.”

  I risked looking over my shoulder at him just as he looked up. Our eyes locked, and his fingers on my non-injured leg caressed my skin.

  “It’s going to hurt like hel―heck if I take it out, but I don’t think we can let it stay in there,” he said quietly.

  I gulped. “No. It isn’t good to let things fester.”

  His fingers were still caressing my leg. My cheeks were flushed. I could feel them without looking in the mirror over the sink. It wasn’t from the heat of the bar or the humidity from outside. It was from this man. The man who thought I was a bad idea—not because of me—but because of my family and his future plans. I needed to remember that. I turned back toward the wall, trying to get ahold of the emotions flowing through me.

  He pulled his hands away, and my heart beat in that constant swell of relief and disappointment he was good at bringing out in me. He dug through the first aid case and came up with a pair of tweezers and an alcohol swab, opening it with his teeth and making me swallow hard at the image.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  No. “Yes,” I whispered.

  It stung, and I twisted my dress in my hands to keep from whimpering and embarrassing myself. It was just a stupid scrape. I’d had worse in the salon from burns and scissor cuts.

  “Okay, I’m going to try to get it out,” he warned just as he stuck the tweezers in, and I did let out a little whimper. “Sorry,” he said. I clenched my hands tighter, biting my lip, and gritting my teeth.

  “There. Done. Out. Gone. Let me put some Neosporin and a Band-Aid on it.”

  His hands were gentle as he rubbed the ointment on. And then he blew on it, cool air that made my whole body burst into one big flame.

  “Oh…hell…sorry.”

  I jumped, and Mac’s hand went up my dress, and we both muttered something as we turned to look out the open door to where Truck stood, hands in his pockets, grinning.

  I let my dress go, and it swooshed over Mac’s face. He laughed and pushed himself out from under it.

  “I have a cut. A splinter.” The words came out of me in a tumble as I started to move out of the bathroom, but Mac placed a hand at my waist, halting me.

  “Stop. I haven’t put the Band-Aid on yet.”

  I looked down at him, and he was trying not to laugh. I looked back at Truck, and he was also holding in his laughter.

  I waved a finger at both of them. “Get your minds out of the gutter, boys.”

  “I’ll just go use the public restroom,” Truck said. His laughter echoed through the room as he left.

  I put my forehead in my hand. “This is awful.”

  Mac put the Band-Aid on my leg and then stood just as I turned, crowding me so my back was pushed into the towel rack that Ava always had real linens on since it was their private bathroom.

  “Why?” Mac asked, eyes searching mine, smile disappearing.

  “Why what?”

  “Why is it awful?”

  “That Truck thought that we were…you know…”

  His hand went to my neck, caressing the back of it. “That sort of hurts,” he said, voice low and guttural like it had been two days before on the boat before he’d asked to kiss me. His eyes made a journey to my lips, down to the lace of my dress that was heaving over my breasts like I was a sixteen-year-old girl waiting for her first kiss, and then back to my lips before stopping once more at my eyes.

  I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t meant it like it had sounded. Like I would be embarrassed to be caught being intimate with him. He was gorgeous and gentle, but as much as it stung, he was right that we couldn’t be together, and it would be awful if the others thought we were together when we weren’t.

  My hand went to his arm, squeezing. “That isn’t what I meant,” I said quietly.

  His head inclined ever so slightly, and I wasn’t sure if it was in acknowledgement, or if he was heading toward my lips with his own.

  The door to the office banged open again, and Ava came running in, pushing between us as she hurled herself at the toilet, throwing up. Mac’s and my eyes went to her and then back to each other before he backed out of the tiny space.

  “I’ll go get Eli.”

  “No,” Ava said before heaving again into the toilet.

  I reached under the sink to the washcloths she kept there. The public was never allowed in this bathroom, and Ava treated it like it was one at the house, full of nice-smelling soaps and pretty towels. I wet the cloth and bent to place it on the back of her neck.

  Once she’d emptied everything that she could have possibly had in her tiny body after days of hardly eating, she sat back on her haunches and leaned her face into my leg.

  “Thanks,” she said, taking the washcloth and rubbing it on her forehead, the makeup she’d worn rubbing off on it.

  “What the hell, Ava?” Mac asked. “Should we take you to the doctor?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, it’ll pass. In about three months.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she pulled back in shock and frowned at both of us, hand to her mouth.

  She was pregnant. Ava was pregnant. One of my very best friends was going to have a baby. With the man she loved. My heart jumped again, this time in joy, and I smiled. When I looked over at Mac, his face was going from shock to smiles as well.

  “Oh my God. You can’t say anything. I haven’t told Eli,” she said.

  I sank down next to her and hugged her. “Congratulations.”

  “This is fu―frickin’ awesome!” Mac said, and he came up and hugged us both in this awkward position with us all near the floor.

  “Get off,” Ava said, pushing us both away. “You’re crushing me.”

  “And the baby!” I said, still smiling.

  Ava put a hand to her forehead. “You two will never be able to keep this secret.”

  Mac shook his head. “I’m a great secret keeper.”

  “But not from Eli,” Ava said.

  She stood up, and I hugged her again, a full hug, and said, “I’m so happy for both of you. And I can keep a secret.”

  “We’re so stupid,” she said, but she was smiling. She was happy. “We didn’t think it would happen the first time out the shoot.”

  “Wait! You were trying?” I asked.

  She nodded with a blush that Ava rarely wore. “Well, the doctor said it could take three to six months for the pills to clear out of my system and for us to actually be able to conceive. I should have known better. Eli always has to be first at everything.”

  Mac and I burst into laughter.

  Mac

  CHANGE

  “For all the brave and the souls who went before us.

  Stand tall, then proudly lift your voices,

  Let 'em know who we are and our choices.”

  Performed by Christina Aguilera

  Written by Aguilera
/ Hagood / Reutter

  When we left the office and the bathroom, I couldn’t help the grin I had on my face. For Eli. He was going to be a dad. He’d already acted like a dad since I’d known him, but now he was going to be a real one. With a real kid. He’d be awesome at it.

  Ava frowned at my smile. “You’re a shit,” she said before heading to the stage where Brady was just finishing up a song and calling for her.

  Ava still looked pale, but she climbed onto the stage and joined him while they sang the song that was about Eli and Ava when they’d first met and then left each other to follow their bigger dreams. I turned to watch Eli at the bar as Ava sang. He’d stopped to watch her like he had every time since I’d known them. He couldn’t help himself. It was like the world drifted away when he was watching Ava sing. I had never really gotten it until I’d kissed Georgie. The whole world had receded when our lips had touched. Just like it had receded when we’d been squeezed into the bathroom together, a few moments before, with my hand on her leg.

  When the song was over, Ava spoke into the mic.

  “Fourth of July might not be the start of a new year. It might not be your typical resolution type of day, but it’s certainly a day that began this amazing country of ours. And recently, I had some good news. News that will change things for me.”

  Eli was frowning and making his way from behind the bar toward the stage.

  Ava was watching him. “I wasn’t going to say anything today. I was going to wait, but then someone found out my secret, and he can’t keep his mouth shut,”—she threw a glance my way—“so I better get it over with.”

  Eli stood on the floor in front of her while she looked down at him.

  “Doodles, do you remember when we met, and I started calling you Dad?”

  Eli’s hands went to her bare legs, pulling her closer to the edge of the stage.

  “Well, congratulations. You’re going to be a real one.”

  It took a minute for him to get what she was saying. Then, his face broke into that huge smile that Eli rarely wore unless he was around Ava. He pulled her from the stage and was kissing her before anyone could have said two words.

  Behind the bar, Lacey pulled out a mic they kept back there for just these sorts of occasions. “This round is on me! I’m gonna be a grandma again!”

  Cheers for the free drinks. Cheers for Ava and Eli’s parenthood. Cheers for Lacey saying she was a grandma when she really wasn’t either of their parent. I couldn’t help it. I turned to Georgie who’d been standing next to me the whole time and hugged her, picking her up off her toes and hugging tight.

  It was such good news.

  Georgie didn’t even resist; she just hugged me back.

  But then I realized whom I was hugging and set her back down. She brushed at her star-spangled dress and moved away toward Ava and Eli and the crowd who was clapping them on their backs and hugging them.

  Ben and the band sang a cover of “Life Changes” by Thomas Rhett, which was such a perfect reflection of this moment, while Brady quietly disappeared down the hall to the back door and the dark SUVs, heading on to Phoenix.

  The air felt jubilant, because it was.

  ♫ ♫ ♫

  It was late, but everyone was still wired by the time we got back to the house after closing down the bar. We made our way down to the firepit with a bottle of champagne and the fixings for s’mores.

  Truck raised his glass and said, “Here’s to having a little Eli running around in less than a year. May he have all of his mother’s spunk and none of his father’s grumpiness.”

  “Asswipe,” Eli griped, but he was grinning. He hadn’t really stopped since Ava had broken the news at the bar.

  “You aren’t going to be able to continue to cuss like that anymore,” I said, smiling. “You’re going to be just like me, modifying your language.”

  “Why are you modifying your language?” Truck asked.

  “Dude. Politics. Can’t run my mouth on TV.”

  “I can’t believe you actually think you’re going to get elected,” Truck said, picking up where he’d left off earlier in his harassment of my goals.

  “I’d vote for him,” Ava defended me.

  “It’s slightly frightening,” Eli responded.

  “It’s frightening that I’d vote for your friend?” Ava asked.

  Eli shook his head. “No. Yes. Just the thought of Macauley here running our country.”

  I stuck my hand to my chest. “That hurts.”

  “Convince us then,” Georgie said, joining the conversation for the first time. “Tell us one thing you’re going to do.”

  “Save the planet. World peace. Solve the hunger crisis.”

  Everyone laughed, but I didn’t.

  “You sound like you should be onstage at the Miss America competition,” Georgie said.

  It hurt just a bit, but it was true that my statements were simple. Maybe even bordering on the ridiculous. Preposterous. Immature. And that was all on me, because I’d always joked about it with my friends. I’d teased about my plans and about sowing my oats before becoming the family man who was needed to run for office. I hadn’t meant it to sound so calculating. Yet, it was. There was more to it than just that. More to me. I didn’t want to run for office for the power or the glory. I wanted to run for office to make a damn difference. I might not have had the full plan yet, but I knew we could get there as a nation.

  Georgie seemed to sense my emotions, because she said, “Weren’t you already out there saving the world in the Navy?”

  “It isn’t the same.”

  “Now wait a minute―” Truck said just as Eli added, “It is.”

  “Come on. You both know I don’t mean to say that serving in the military isn’t a great way to make a difference. I’m just saying we need more than that. We need someone in government who can pull everyone’s heads out of their as―buttocks, so we can work together instead of separately.”

  “I can’t believe you have that much faith in our country,” Truck said.

  “No politics,” Eli chimed in before Truck or I could get riled up over anything. “You’re never supposed to talk politics or religion with friends.”

  “That’s going to pretty much be impossible to stick to if Dickwad runs for office,” Truck griped.

  I turned the conversation because Eli was right. We didn’t need to go down this road tonight. I raised my glass and brought us back to the joy we were celebrating. I said, “To Ava and Eli and Baby Wyatt. May he be brought into a world that has righted itself from the cliff it’s falling off of.”

  “May she have health and happiness on top of all the love that she’ll have with you two as parents,” Georgie said.

  “To Baby Wyatt, whatever gender, and to Eli and Ava for bringing us all together,” Truck added.

  We clinked glasses, and Ava took a small sip before raising her glass. “To good friends, to Georgie’s new chapter going back to school, and Mac’s new chapter leaving the Navy.”

  “School?” I breathed out before I could help myself.

  “Georgie’s going to law school,” Ava said for her. Georgie had told me her undergrad had been pre-law that first night on the beach, but she’d stopped me from asking more questions, and I hadn’t pushed. I thought I’d learned everything I needed to know once she’d told me about her family.

  “Nice! Congrats,” Truck said, sticking up a hand that Georgie high-fived. “Now Mac will have someone to bail him out when he gets caught with his pants down with his campaign manager’s wife.”

  I snorted. “So not going to happen.”

  “Why can’t his campaign manager be a female? Couldn’t he be caught with his pants down with her? Or maybe her husband? It would make the story just ever so slightly more modern,” Georgie teased Truck.

  He blushed. “True. That was very old-school, sexist of me. Who do we really want him to get caught with his pants down with?”
r />   “No one!” I said with force. “No one. I’m clean as a whistle and am going to stay that way.”

  “I think Mindy from the DoD might not see it that way,” Eli smirked at me.

  Mindy had been, perhaps, my one mistake. I hadn’t intended it to be anything more than the casual get-together that I’d had with all my other partners. But she’d been the one who had stuck for about a month. It wasn’t until we’d met up for our fourth Friday that I realized she already had wedding bells in mind. She was a civilian contractor I’d worked with, and she knew who my dad and my grandfather were. Knew that Dani was working for Guy. Knew that I was planning on working for him, too. She’d put three and three together and got five hundred million, somehow.

  “Mindy has nothing to hold over me. Not one note.”

  “Because you’re a jerk who doesn’t write notes?” Truck teased.

  I winced again. I had been careful over the years with anything I put in writing. Even when I’d been in college, I’d written every essay with the idea that it might, someday, come to light when I was running for office. It was the same with pictures I took with people. I was very cognizant that they wouldn’t disappear and that, if I ever announced I was running, every a-hole who I’d ever been around would come running out of the anthill with their pictures of me.

  Eli had never really given me a hard time about it. But Truck, the guys in my first unit, and the JSOC folks, like Nash and Darren, rode my ass every time I refused a group selfie when we were at a bar or drunk on the beach. Even when we’d had poker competitions on the USS George Washington, I’d carefully leaned back out of the picture when they were taken. Darren had told me I was like Michael J. Fox in the reruns of Family Ties, where he’d had a Ronald Reagan picture on the wall of his bedroom. And he was right. That had been me with presidents on my wall.

  Ava said, “Don’t bang on his dreams, Truck. Here’s to Mac. I’m counting on you to fix our planet, create world peace, and solve the hunger problem, because I want our baby to live in that world.”

  Everyone clinked glasses again, but Ava’s words settled into my heart. I had a niece and nephews from my two oldest sisters. I had cousins with kids. We were a big family. But not once had the thought of me handing over a world to those little ones hit me as hard as it did when Ava said those words. I’d wanted to make our world better. And now I had another, more important, reason to do that. For Baby Wyatt and all the other babies who might come our way.