“Reese, Reese!” Caleb shouts from behind me. I glance over my shoulder. No sign of the other guys in our squad.
No wonder our commanding officer sounded so distant. Because he was.
Fuck. When the wall behind us collapsed, they must’ve gotten stuck on the other side of it.
“Over here,” Drake says as he races to a nearby doorway.
“Wait, wait!” I call.
Drake’s in a frenzy, and we’ve learned throughout the week that he’s getting sloppy. He’s too bold. The kind of guy who has a death wish. Who joined the service because he’s thirsty to be in the heat of battle, but without using logic or reason to keep himself alive. He’s the perfect scout, but a shitty strategist.
He kicks down the door and barges inside, searching around for insurgents—the ones who are likely responsible for the machine gun fire that got our squad running into what was clearly a trap.
Broken boards are scattered across the floor. Some larger pieces of furniture are capsized. It’s evident the place has been cleaned out by the Sunnis—surely to transform these buildings and alleys into the perfect trap for the Americans they’ve fought against since Saddam Hussein’s fall.
We make a triangle as we inspect the room, aiming our rifles. We’ll shoot to kill, as we’ve been instructed. We search for hiding insurgents that might be lurking—might have led us down this path intentionally to kill us.
There’s an open doorway to my right and a closed door to my left. “This way,” Drake says as he makes a dash toward the door on the left, I assume planning on heading back in the direction of our squad.
I turn to keep an eye on the door we entered through. “Just wait a second,” I call, but I hear him kick down the door.
Another deafening sound fills the air, and the place fills with concrete dust and wood chips.
I lose my footing and dive forward.
I can’t hear.
Silence. Eerie silence. Like when we first got to Fallujah days ago for Operation Phantom Fury. The sort of quiet that had all my superior officers concerned about what we were getting into.
Everything’s still.
It feels like forever before I turn and see Caleb lying unconscious in the far corner of the room, on the wall adjacent to the one the blast came from. As my senses return to me, a strong burning smell like rubber fills my nostrils. I search for Drake, who struggles to get up beside the opening where the door he was about to enter used to be. My gun’s a few feet away from me.
Disoriented, I grip onto the concrete wall beside me, but as I attempt to climb it, I notice I can’t. My legs aren’t working right, and as I inspect my feet, I notice my shoe’s gone and the bottom of my pants is drenched with blood.
“Fuck!” I rise on my good foot. The pain isn’t crippling yet. My body’s in shock. And I just hope the adrenaline that’s keeping me going will last long enough to get me the fuck out of here.
A scuffling sound comes from the adjoining room.
An insurgent? One of ours?
I turn back to my gun. With my foot like this, it’ll take me a minute to get to it.
I look back to the doorway and see the end of a rifle slide through it. A man steps in, his face covered in a red scarf.
It’s on. Life or death. Kill or be killed.
I don’t have a choice if I’m going to make it out of this alive.
I slide my combat knife out of my belt and lunge at him. He turns, bringing his gun around, but I’m on him before he has a chance. I slash wildly before me. I’m an animal trying to survive—nothing more. Just prey in the wilderness, tearing a predator apart.
But even in this moment, as my blade pierces through his clothes and flesh, I have a hard time figuring out who the real predator is.
If I don’t kill him, I’m dead. Caleb’s dead. Drake’s dead. We’re all fucking dead.
I keep fucking stabbing, trying to keep my eyes open because if I so much as blink, it’s over.
But I can’t help it. Some of the dust in the air stings my eyes and forces me to close them.
I open my eyes back up quickly.
Total darkness.
I’ve lost my eyesight. Must’ve been the dust. Whatever happened, I just need to finish this guy and take him out before he kills me and my guys. Just to give our squad time to rescue us.
“Reese! Reese!”
It’s a familiar voice. A voice that jars me from the nightmare. But my fist is already going, and as it makes contact with a cheek, I know what I’ve done.
I freeze in place as a loud thud fills the room.
My arms shake as I try to calm the powerful rush of energy that soars through me—energy that I realize belongs to another time. Not to right now.
The light flashes on. Jay stands beside the door, one hand on the light switch, the other on his face. He turns to me, his expression filled with confusion and hurt.
What have I done? He told me about his abusive asshole father. About how he grew up taking punches. And now I’ve just done that to him.
I’m a monster.
“I—I—”
“No, it’s fine,” he says. He picks up his clothes, but keeps his eyes on me like he needs to stay on his guard. “I just need to go.” He puts his jeans on and heads out the bedroom door. I hop on my left foot. I’m desperate.
I follow after him, still hopping as I head into the living room. “Jay,” I say.
He doesn’t respond.
This is really bad. This is why he shouldn’t have come here tonight.
“Jay, please,” I say, setting my hand on his shoulder.
He whirls around, his face tense, his eyes wide with rage. “Just don’t, okay? Don’t fucking touch me.”
I see the pink spot on his cheek where I hit him. I want to help him, but I know in his mind he must be equating me with his dad. And that fucking tears me apart.
He turns back to the door.
“Jay, I had no idea. I was just…”
Please don’t leave.
But before I know it, he’s out the door, leaving me standing in the living room, stark-naked, hating myself, still reeling from the shock of my nightmare. I lean against the wall for the support. The only thing that’ll be supporting me for the rest of the night.
20
Jay
I toss my shirt on and head to my car.
I had to get out of there since all I wanted to do was deck Reese. He didn’t hurt me on purpose. I keep reminding myself that, but that doesn’t change the fact that when he socked me, I was transported back to a night when I fought against Dad to get to Todd—to help my brother.
I shake so much it takes me a few tries to get the key into the car door. It reminds me of how Reese gets when he has one of those flashbacks to Iraq.
I can’t believe he hit me. The thought replays over and over again in my head as I get in the car and curl up in the driver’s seat, locking the door. I don’t think Reese will do anything to me. I just feel like I need to be somewhere safe. Somewhere alone.
I sit in his driveway, confused as shit, my body racing through so many emotions—excitement, rage, confusion. I shouldn’t blame Reese since I know what it was—another episode—but I can’t help what I’m feeling toward him. Hurt. Anger. Those wounds are worse than any shiner I might have tomorrow.
I’m relieved that Reese isn’t coming outside to make amends.
I consider driving off, but I can’t leave him. Not tonight. Not when he asked me over to be here for him. But I keep slipping back to that night, feeling Dad’s fists against me, and seeing what I would soon discover was my dead brother’s body.
I’m trapped in that night all over again.
I try to stop the thoughts, but they race through my mind, unbidden, making me hate Reese even more for making me suffer through this. I cringe and my chest constricts.
Get yourself under control.
I ball my hands into fists, the pain in them and in my cheek the only relief I get from the thoug
hts that race through me.
Fuck you, Dad. Fuck you for making me so fucked up. Fuck you for sucking all the good out of this world…for tearing it from my life.
After several minutes, the thoughts settle. I can breathe with ease again as the tension in my chest relaxes.
I’m sweating. Panting. I didn’t notice before. Was too consumed by the thoughts to pay much attention to what was going on around me.
When I regain my bearings, I step out of the car and head back to the house.
I wish I hadn’t needed to leave like that. Reese needed me to be there for him. Needed me to console him. He obviously had some horrifying nightmare that resulted in him losing his fucking shit, and I bailed on him.
I open the door and head back inside, searching around for him.
Silence. Eerie silence.
The air conditioning chills the moisture from the sweat I built up outside.
I call out for Reese, but he doesn’t respond. I search for him, but he’s not in the bedroom or anywhere inside the house.
As I head into the kitchen, I notice through the sliding glass door on the back wall that a light is on, illuminating the back porch.
Strange to think that as much time as I’ve spent over here, I’ve never actually been in his backyard. I’ve seen him working in the garden through the window behind the sink, but never had any reason to go out there.
I walk to the door and peer through it. A few yards away, Reese sits in the fenced-in garden, illuminated by a security light attached to a nearby shed.
I walk to the garden, and as I come to the fence, I open it and step along a narrow board that acts as a divider between different rows of plants. Reese sits in just a pair of boxers, his hands-free crutch strapped to his residual limb as he leans back against a wooden beam that the chicken-wire fencing is stapled to. As I approach, he doesn’t glance up. Just stares at a couple of bush beans at his side.
“I’m sorry for running out like that,” I say.
He tilts his head back to see me. He looks horrified by what I’ve said. As if I just told him to fuck off.
“You’re sorry?” he asks. “I fucking hit you in the face and you’re sorry?”
“You didn’t mean to hit me. I know that.” I sit beside him, on a wooden board that acts as a frame around the garden.
“How can you say that? I saw the look in your eyes. I knew what you were thinking. You were looking at me like I’d just done what your father did to you. I saw the way it affected you. How it tore you up inside.”
“Obviously it wasn’t easy, but it’s not like you decked me during a fucking fight. That would be one thing. That would be unforgiveable, but an accident that happened because of something you can’t control? I’m not going to fault you for that.”
He raises his hand to his face, like he’s trying to conceal it from me. “Maybe you should. Maybe I’m not safe to be around.”
“That’s bullshit. It was one fucking night. How many nights have I stayed over and been fine? You’ve just had a lot on your mind, especially today.”
He moves his hand and looks into my eyes like he’s trying to detect any hate or resentment over what he did, and he might find some. While I understand what happened, a part of me just sees red as I think about that bastard who hurt me far beyond any of the physical injuries he gave me. It’s a whisper in the back of my mind, trying to scare me. Trying to spark fear within me about this wonderful thing I’ve discovered. I won’t let it win, though. Not today.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says. “I would never hurt you intentionally. Never lay a hand on you. But I can’t promise that I’m not dangerous. Because these things happen, and I can’t make them stop. I can’t make myself better. I know that. I have to find a way to live with all this every day. I wanted to believe that I was strong enough for this, but—”
I know where he’s going with this, and I refuse to let him. “Please don’t give up on this already,” I say. “I don’t have a lot of things in my life that make me happy, but this does. Spending time with you is one of the few things I have to look forward to these days, and I know the risks. I know what you’re going through.”
“I’m just terrified that it could have been so much worse. You don’t know how angry I was. How afraid I was of dying in that moment I woke up. It was like I was right back in the war. It was like I was fighting with an insurgent that I had to kill to stay alive that day. When I was in the dark, I didn’t even know I’d woken up. I thought if I didn’t fight, I’d die, I was a goner. And the thought of doing anything that could have put your life in danger scares the shit out of me.”
It scares me, too. Hell, I almost peed on myself when I tried to wake him and he went apeshit like that, but I don’t want to lose him over this.
“You shouldn’t have to keep suffering over something that happened so long ago,” I say.
“But I do. Every day. Every night. And I’ll suffer a lot more if anything happens to you.”
“Nothing’s going to happen. I’ll just be more careful if I try to wake you up next time.”
The way he shifts his gaze, I can tell what he’s thinking. That maybe there shouldn’t be a next time.
It saddens me.
“You wanna talk about the nightmare?” I ask.
He takes a moment before he speaks. I wonder if he’s going to tell me, but then he says, “My squad was ambushed in Fallujah. It was right after we arrived. It was eerily quiet when we first got there. Not a lot of action. But then as we got farther into the city, that’s when the guns came out and made me and my team scatter. Me, Caleb, and another guy ended up going into one building that had an explosive device—the one that took my foot. Crazy thing was, when it happened, I didn’t even realize I’d lost it. Just thought it’d been injured in the blast. An insurgent came in, and I wrestled him to keep us alive. Stabbed him with my combat knife. To death. Then our guys found us and rescued us. Took us to the medics. That’s when they told me that it wasn’t just an injury. My whole foot was gone and some of my leg was shredded and they knew it couldn’t be saved. One of the other guys we were with lost an arm. We were sent back home. Caleb stayed and fought.
“He came back a few months later. I was living in Tennessee, but he convinced me to move down here with him, so I did. He had a fiancée he was coming back to. They were going to start a life together, but he was so rattled. She found him distant…too distant. And she ended up calling it off. Said he needed to get help. I agreed. We weren’t the same. Not just us, but any of the guys we served with. We didn’t know how to just pick up where we left off and act like none of that shit had ever happened, especially those of us who had wounds to show that we were there. Some people I ran into would call me a murderer for even being in that war. I don’t know that they were wrong. I guess that’s what I am now. Anyway, Caleb would just act funny everywhere he went. Agitated. Same as me. He had the nightmares, and he wouldn’t see anyone about it. Neither of us would. Then one day, I got a call from his ex-fiancée. He was back with his family and a bunch of them were going fishing. They didn’t want him to go since he seemed off. He stayed back at the house and put a rifle in his mouth. Pulled the trigger with his toe.”
“Oh my God,” I say.
“That’s when I realized I couldn’t pretend that everything was okay. That if I didn’t do something, I’d end up like him.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I can’t pretend that none of that shit happened. The world wants me to go on as if I’m okay, but I’m not. And everyone can see that I’m not.” He looks down at his shin, running his thumb across the scars. “I’m not even a whole person anymore.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. And every day is just another day I’m scared as hell that I’m about to lose my fucking mind. Which is why I’m scared as shit of hurting you. And it’s why I wish it had bothered you more than it did.”
“What?”
“Because as much a
s I know I shouldn’t put you in danger like this, as much as it tears me up, I’m so fucking selfish, and I don’t want this to end.”
“Then don’t let it end.” I lean in and force a kiss. I know that once I reawaken that passion that’s between us, he’ll realize how stupid he’s been for even considering stopping what we have going on. At least, I hope so.
As we kiss, what remains of my uneasiness from the attack subsides and is replaced with my total appreciation for getting to share this moment with him.
He cups his hand around my head and pulls me even closer, so that my nose is pressed up against his cheek. Then he pulls from our kiss and rubs his face alongside mine, breathing in deeply.
“What the fuck are we doing?” he asks. “I don’t want you to be here because you pity me. I don’t need anyone to be here for me. I’ve been on my own, and I can take care of myself.”
“The only reason I’m here is because of how incredible it feels to be near you. Because I can’t get enough. And because I’m terrified that one crazy moment, you’re going to take yourself away from me. Please don’t do that. Life’s such shit, but this isn’t.”
He pulls me in close and holds me. It’s the most comforting of embraces in the world. Makes me feel like he’s protecting me from the entire world. Like it’s just the two of this in this little garden.
21
Reese
I was so fucking wrong when I thought I had to give up Jay that night.
It’s been a month since the anniversary of Caleb’s death, and I haven’t had an episode like that since. The usual day-to-day things still get to me. I can tell by the look on Jay’s face that he’s always uneasy whenever there’s a loud sound, but something about him being here has made it easier for me to manage. Feels as though at least someone is on standby in case I need help. I’m used to having to deal with it on my own. Be strong. Tough it out through shit. Therapy has obviously helped, but it’s not the same as having someone right here with me. Being around him quiets my mind. Not entirely—I know better than to expect that. The rumblings will always be there, and the episodes won’t go away, but it’s nice having an ally.
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