He wiped a hand across his mouth, displeased I guess because I made him bleed. “Shit, you are such a pussy, Gray. Left your balls on her counter, did ya? All this crying last night about how you were so worried about her cheating on you. Do you want to know what we did while you were passed out in your drool here?”
He laughed maniacally and I charged him, breaking away from the human bonds of my friends. He tried to fight back but he was slow and uncoordinated. Not even one of his fists came near my face. I had him on his back, repeatedly hitting him until I was dragged away. He lay still, knocked unconscious, but my blood lust hadn’t abated. I spat on him and then turned away, looking for Tucker. He stood off to the side with a disgusted look on his face and his arms folded. "She need anything?"
"For you to leave her alone." He turned and walked toward the front of the house. I followed him. I wanted that key back. It should be mine, and I was going to give everything I had to convince Sam that I belonged in her life. I’d quit the Corps, move here, live in her little condo, and service her on my knees every day if that was what it took.
"Other than that because that isn't going to happen." I had ten—no nine—days left before I had to go back to San Diego and every minute of them was going to be spent convincing her that she should give me another chance.
"She doesn't want to see you ever again. She never wants to hear from you. She's going to wipe you out of her memory."
The verbal blows landed harder than the physical ones but like a stupid man, I stood back up and asked for more. "Did you talk to her about what happened?"
He snorted. “Only that she was done with military guys forever.” He threw something up in the air—her key—the shiny metallic glinting in the sun. I wanted to grab it from him. I clenched my teeth together to prevent the yowl of pain that was rising up inside me. I hated to hear that I hurt her so. Tucker went on digging the knife even deeper, twisting it so every part of my heart felt like it was being scored by a dull knife. "I only remember seeing her that bad once before, and that was after my brother died. She was like a ghost for months. Didn't eat. Couldn't sleep. We had to force her to take sleeping pills and slip protein gunk in shakes so that she wouldn't die from just not caring for herself. We almost lost her after he died, and when she started coming around a few months ago, started smiling again and interacting with her family again, I thought it—” He broke off but I knew what he was thinking.
"You thought it was time for her to start loving again."
He fisted his hand but at my challenging look he placed it carefully on his thigh and nodded grimly. I would’ve loved to repay him with a fight right now. I was brimming with unspent rage. He turned his back on me and walked to his truck. Whatever he'd come to say was done. "But you aren't going to see her anymore. They’re going to England tonight for ten days to see her dad. In fact, she's being driven to the airport right now. And Bitsy's confiscated her phone. They don’t want her in contact with you." He said the word “you” like I was a terrorist.
Ten days. My heart sunk and the terror I was feeling must have shown on my face because Tucker laughed, a mean and ugly chuckle that had nothing to do with mirth and everything to do with his celebration of my pain. "Yup. You aren't going to be able to contact her for a good ten days, and by that time, it'll be over for you. You aren't Will. She'll be over you by the time the plane lands in London."
With the knockout blow delivered, Tucker turned and jogged to his truck. The implication was clear. He'd be here when she got back, and I wouldn't. But I wasn't leaving anything to chance. I sprinted to Bo's car and jumped in. Bo stood in front of the car, allowing Tucker to leave first.
"Goddammit, get out of my way," I screamed at Bo. He wrenched open the driver's door and shook his head. "Move over, I'm not letting you drive in that condition."
I didn't care who was driving as long as we got to Sam's condo in the next five minutes. It took twenty, and I cursed Bo the entire way. His patience was at an end because he bit out, "If you open your mouth one more time, I'm turning the car around and driving us both into the nearest lake." I shut up promptly after that.
At the condo complex, I jimmied the outdoor lock, not wasting time getting someone to buzz me in. Bo was following hot on my heels. I ran up the three flights of stairs and down to Sam's condo. "Sam, let me in." I pounded on the door. I hit it repeatedly, yelling her name. I kept pounding even after my hand started bleeding so I switched to my other hand. Finally a door opened but it wasn't Sam's door. It was her neighbor's door. I leaned against the metal door, and waited to for the words I didn't want to hear. "She's not here, asshole. She left about fifteen minutes ago with her family and a big suitcase."
I swallowed back the bile at those words, but I wasn't ready to give up yet.
"Back to the Woodlands. To her house."
We raced back to the Woodlands. I wisely kept my mouth shut and so did Bo. I cradled my bloody right hand in my lap, trying not to get blood all over the interior of Bo's sports car. We drove up to Sam's house but it was empty. The lights were off and the house looked still. I still got out and looked in every window and door I could, pounding on the door with my left hand and yelling for Sam. But she was gone. They'd taken her away from me. I sunk down on her back porch. I hadn't even had the opportunity to make it right, and by the time she’d be back, I'd have to be back at Pendleton.
"I'll stay here, then,” I decided.
Bo knocked me on the back of the head. "So you'll be dishonorably discharged or thrown in the brig? That's going to win her back?" He hit me again. "Use your fucking head."
"All my ideas are shit." Bo opened his mouth and I threatened him, "Don't fucking say I told you so or it'll be on right now."
He closed his mouth then and then said, "I'm only standing down because I think the squirrel over there is stronger than you at the moment."
"I don't know how Sam got up and lived again after losing her husband because right now the pain is fucking unbearable,” I choked out.
Bo drew me against his side, a hand on the top of my head and I allowed myself to lean into him, like we were out in the desert and too tired to stand up after a thirty-mile hike through the hills of Afghanistan. "You gotta go home, get your head together, and plan an assault. There is no citadel, human or natural, that can withstand a siege from a Marine."
"I hope you're right."
They took me to the airport the next day. Silence was our fourth companion, so heavy and weighty it could have been another passenger.
When we arrived at the gate, Noah and Bo both got out of Noah’s truck. Bo had felt so sorry for me, he gave me shotgun even though I hadn’t called it.
“You look like hell,” Noah commented.
“Thanks, man.” I shouldered my seabag and rucksack. “It was real fun.”
Any moment the police would come and boot them out of the drop off lane but neither of them seemed to care. Noah grabbed me and pulled me in for a long hug. "You know we love you, man."
I nodded, the emotions of the last few days riding so close to the surface that I couldn't speak. He shoved me away then and grabbed me around my neck so I'd look straight at him. "You love her enough, you never stop fighting for her. Never stop showing her how much she matters. You give it your all, and even if she doesn't accept it, you lived up to your own standards and you can walk away with no regrets. But I'm telling you, Gray, that if you love her, she's going love you back. I know it."
I think it was the most words I’d ever heard Noah string together.
"Do you now?" I snorted.
"I do." He let go and said, "Semper Fi, Marine."
Always faithful.
Noah was right in one sense. I wondered a lot after Carrie had cheated on me if I'd given it my all. Maybe I hadn't. Probably I hadn't. I loved having sex with her, but I loved playtime with my boys just as much. And that had sat uncomfortably on my shoulders. Deployment had been a relief from the constant emotional upheaval.
In th
e airport, people shied away from me, the bruises on my face making me look like a dangerous man. The airline ticket agent didn’t give me the upgrade that servicemen and women usually received and I was stuck in the back by the bathrooms in a tiny seat with no space. The woman beside me shrank to her side as if I was a monster. I was a monster, though. Only a monster would’ve done what I’d done to Sam.
When I arrived home, I threw away my enlistment papers and drove out to see my parents.
"I'm not reenlisting," I told my dad. His mouth quirked to the side in what looked like disappointment, but he didn’t ask about my bruised face.
"What will you do?"
I wasn't going to say that I planned to return to the city to try to win over a girl, so I just mumbled, "Don't know."
"That doesn't sound like much of a plan." My dad had been a drill instructor when he retired, and you didn't get to that position without perfecting a stern look of reproof and disappointment. He laid a good one on me, but I was too numb to care.
I threw up my hands. "What do you want out of me? You said there were better things for me than just the Marines. You and Pops got in a fight about it at Christmas, and made Mom cry, so now I’m telling you I’m getting out. I’m going to get a degree, maybe go into law.” Maybe I’d be the lawyer Sam didn’t want to be. At this point I had no other plan but to win her back.
"I told you that because you were looking like you were at a crossroads. I wanted to make sure you thought long and hard about whatever decision you made."
I gaped at him. "I thought you wanted me to get out."
"Hell, no." He stood up and began to pace, his hands folded behind his back like he was barking orders to an unseasoned recruit, which is what I was acting like. "I wanted you to know that the Marines weren't your only option. That because we have a little more money now and I have a certain position, that you've got other choices. The Marines were good enough for your grandpa and me but we didn't have much. I know that there was a lot of pressure on you to enter the Corps because your older brothers decided against it. I wanted you to have an out."
I sank back in my chair. "I don't know what to say."
"Think about your service again," Dad recommended. "I don't want you making a hasty decision because you thought that’s what I wanted, but you'll have to do it on your own time and you’d better hurry before the boat fills up."
Boat space—or space in the Corps—was limited, particularly with the troop drawdown and the government tightening its belt on the defense budget. Ponder too long about your future options, and they’d be decided for you.
At my sigh, Dad came over and squeezed my shoulder. "But no matter when you make your decision, there will always be room for a good Marine like you. I'm proud of you, son."
Oh man, if you only knew. I swallowed and stood up, saluting my dad. He knocked my arm down, and drew me in for a hug. "Looks like all that thinking took a lot out of you. Let your mom coddle you for a bit. It'll make her feel good."
I spent the day with my parents and then drove over to my brothers' garage and they took me in without question. Unlike my dad, my brothers knew immediately what was wrong with me and it wasn't that I'd been wrestling with a decision about my future. "Girl troubles, huh?" said Luke, my oldest brother, but that was it. I tooled around in the garage doing odd jobs, running errands and learning a bit about custom painting, silently stoking my pain into hardened determination. Then it was back to Camp Pendleton.
My bruises were mostly healed by the time I got back to base but my CO still called me in. “Am I gonna hear about some Marine breaking shit in bars and generally making the Corps look bad?”
“No, sir.”
“I’d better not,” he harrumphed. “Where’s your reenlistment papers then?”
“I’m not reenlisting, sir.”
CO Dailey looked alarmed and then narrowed his eyes at me. “You better tell me what happened out there.”
“Nothing important, sir.”
“If it ain’t important, then why the hell aren’t you reenlisting? If it’s a tiny bar fight, then we give you an Article 15 and call it a day. With your record, that ain’t gonna hamper you.”
“No need for a non-judicial punishment, sir. Nothing will reflect poorly on the Corps, sir.”
The CO stared at me for a long time hoping I’d cough up some details but I stood rigidly at attention, giving him nothing but the stony face I’d learned in boot camp.
“Go on then, get out of here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Samantha
ADAM’S CREW CAME IN THE night I returned from England.
“You look good,” Eve commented.
“Do I? Because I feel like shit.”
“Okay, I was lying to make you feel better. You look like you went on a bender in Reno and are still hung over, rather than a ten-day vacation to jolly England.”
“The Reno description is pretty close to how I feel. Besides England isn’t very sunny. Lots of rain.” It had mirrored my mood.
“Sorry I pushed you on soldier boy.”
I didn’t bother correcting her. Gray wasn’t even around to appreciate it. Oh Gray. That stupid asshole. I hated and loved him at the same time.
One by one Gray’s friends came up to the bar to tell me how much he missed me.
“How come he’s not here saying it?” I said curtly.
“Because if he’d stayed around till you got back, he’d be absent without leave, court martialed, and kicked to the curb,” Bo shot back just as curtly.
That shut me up, but I wasn’t interested in hearing reasonable things about Gray Phillips so I made Eve serve them the rest of the night.
They were persistent, though. Bo and Noah showed up the rest of the week I worked, and while they didn’t talk to me, I got the message. Gray missed me and he was showing me through his friends.
And it was working. Even Eve was impressed.
“He’s got good friends. You can tell a lot about a guy by his friends.”
It was true, but I wasn’t ready to forgive him. Eve just wanted me to get over it. We hadn’t made any extra tips because I didn’t want to kiss anyone but Gray, not even Eve.
When Bitsy, Mom, and I came home from England, I went with them. I wasn’t ready to go back to the condo, where now it was filled with my memories of Gray. At first my mom wanted to kill Gray—or at least file a police report—but then I explained that it wasn’t him but some other dude who’d hit me and that I’d hit him first. She dropped it after that.
But she frowned whenever she saw me in her house, and unlike after Will died, she started making comments about how little birds pushed out of the nest should learn to survive on their own. Her most recent comment was about how older sisters were supposed to be good examples for their younger sisters.
“Am I screwing you up, Bitsy?” I asked, dragging myself out of my bedroom about noon one day, wearing hobo overalls and not bothering to brush my hair.
“Nope. I’ve accepted that you are pathetic and weak and I’m the stronger sister,” Bitsy said airily. I winced but she wasn’t wrong so I just shut up and ate my cereal. Tired of my moroseness, she jabbed me with her finger. “Why’d you guys break up?”
God, what to tell Bitsy. “I think he got scared and then I got scared back.”
"Because you didn’t want to move to San Diego? So you're making him choose between the career he loves and you? What is it that you're giving up here? A knitting group?" Bitsy gave me no quarter.
“My family.” It was a weak argument, and I knew it.
"You'll always have us. It's not like Mom and Dad wouldn't pay for you to fly back every month if you wanted to."
"What are you going to do in three years?" Yes, I was changing the subject.
“Chicken,” she said softly. “One thing I liked about Gray was that you smiled a lot when he was around. Anyway, be a sad sack. I don’t care. I’m going to go to medical school and be a transplant surgeon. Save lives." She fl
exed her fingers.
“I thought you were going to law school?”
“No way!”
I reached across the table and patted her arm. “That’s awesome, but does Mom know this?”
“Of course,” Bitsy said, annoyed.
Then I laughed and couldn't stop. Bitsy stood up and stomped around the kitchen. "What's so funny?"
"Oh, Bitsy. I love you. You are the absolute best."
Whatever expectations people had of Bitsy, she didn't care. She made her own path. If my fifteen-year-old sister could do that, couldn't I be brave enough?
I MOVED BACK INTO THE condo. The sheets still smelled like Gray, and I cried the first time I washed them as if I were cleaning him out of my life. I couldn’t forget about him; he wouldn’t let me. At first, I received phone calls and then voice mail messages. I deleted his entry from my recent call list and binned the messages. After a week of silence from my end, he began texting me once a day, at the end of his day.
Initially, his texts made me angry and I deleted the messages without even reading them. In the second week, I began reading them and was surprised at how ordinary and conversational they were. It was like a diary entry of how he spent his days. And he ended each “conversation” all the same—late at night, right before he went to bed—he sent me a three word message.
I love you.
As July wound down, I started to prepare for classes at Central. When I thought about the fantasies I’d cooked up about Gray and me together on campus, my heart ached so much I actually had to rub my chest, but no amount of medicine was going to ease the pain. I attended two more painful lunches with Carolyn and David. Tucker came to both; he had been extra nice since the Gray incident. I was just glad he’d never brought it up.
Unraveled (Woodlands) Page 22
