It had hurt a little, at first—but then, as her tension had waned and her body had grown accustomed to him, the discomfort had receded. At least hers had. When she’d looked up into Paul’s face, his eyes squeezed shut and the muscles straining in his jaw, his breath harsh and ragged and his thrusts fierce, she had acknowledged the depth of his torment, the complete absence of joy in his soul. At his peak he’d emitted a dark, anguished cry, and she’d realized that what little pain she might have felt was trivial compared to the agony he had endured.
They hadn’t made love; she was under no delusions about that. Yet what she’d done—reaching out to someone she cared for, offering him what she could—had been an act of love. Short of giving birth to Shane, it was the most selfless thing she’d ever done. No man had ever needed her so much as Paul had. She’d never before felt the longing to give so much. She didn’t for a minute regret what had happened.
"Are you on birth control?" His voice was low and rough-edged.
She took another sip of coffee. "Don’t worry about it," she said.
Paul swore under his breath. "I will worry about it. Tell me the truth, Bonnie."
"The truth is..." She sighed. Illogical though it was, she knew she was safe. "The timing is off. I’m very regular, and this isn’t a fertile day for me."
He clearly wasn’t reassured. Muttering another oath, he stared across the haze-shrouded yard and pounded his fist against his thigh. "Why don’t you just let me leave?" he implored her. "Why don’t you do me a favor and hate me?"
"Oh, so now you’re asking me for a favor," she teased. "That’s a bit much, don’t you think?" She knew he was in no mood for humor. Neither was she. But she needed to break through the barrier of self-recrimination he’d erected between them. She needed to reach him again.
"Damn it, Bonnie—" He seemed on the verge of hurling his mug across the lawn. He channeled his energy downward instead, jumping to his feet and pacing the length of the porch. When he reached the far end, he pressed his forehead against the clapboard wall of the house and groaned. Then he turned on her. "Okay, maybe you enjoyed yourself upstairs. Maybe that’s the way you like it. Maybe I’ve got you all wrong."
She gaped at him. What on earth was he talking about?
"It takes all kinds, Bonnie. Maybe this was exciting for you."
This time she was the one who had to fight the urge to hurl a coffee mug—not across the lawn but at Paul.
"Maybe you want to thank me for what I did," he goaded her. "How the hell should I know? Maybe this was the highlight of your life."
She slammed down her mug and rose to her feet. How dare he insinuate such a thing? "Shut up," she said, hoping against hope that he would stop. "Don’t say things like that.
He approached her, his eyes shadowed, his lips twisted in a mirthless smile. "Maybe we ought to do it again, sometime. That’s what you’re thinking, right? You like it mean and cruel, and—"
She slapped him, first with her right hand and then with her left. As she swung back to hit him with her right hand again he caught her wrist and jerked her arm away, causing her to lose her balance. She fell against him, burying her face in his shoulder and bursting into tears.
"That’s better," he murmured into her hair. He closed his arms around her in a hesitant hug as she sobbed into his chest. "I’d rather you get crazy-angry. I couldn’t stand seeing you so calm and understanding."
"I’m not understanding," she claimed, sniffling away her tears and straightening up. He immediately let his hands fall from her and she searched his face, seeking confirmation that he wouldn’t continue with his vicious insults. "I don’t understand any of this, Paul. You wanted me to hit you?"
He peered down at her for a moment, his expression suddenly tender, alive with yearning. Then he sighed and returned to the far end of the porch to get his coffee. He remained there, sipping it and staring bleakly at her.
He had wanted her to hit him, she realized. He wanted her to hate him as much as he hated himself. But she didn’t think she was capable of hating him. Slapping Paul had been utterly out of character for her—perhaps as out of character as what he’d done to her upstairs in the spare bedroom.
"I don’t understand," she repeated, referring not to now but to then, not her aggression but his. "I don’t know where you were when we were in bed. You certainly weren’t with me."
His eyes met hers and he nodded, conveying that he knew what she was asking. "No, I wasn’t."
"Were you in Vietnam?"
"Yes."
"In the middle of a battle?"
He opened his mouth and then shut it. "I don’t want to talk about it."
She pressed ahead, refusing him the luxury of evasion. "Do you often have nightmares like that?"
His expression was pleading, but she refused to withdraw the question. He might want her to hit him, but all she wanted was to know him, to know what had driven him to do what he did, to help him—and herself—come to terms with it.
He answered reluctantly. "I don’t have the flashbacks as often as I used to. But sometimes, if I’m sleeping in an unfamiliar place..." He shifted his gaze to the upstairs window, then grimaced and glanced away. "You shouldn’t have come into the room."
"But you sounded so upset," she explained. "I heard you moaning in your sleep all the way down the hall in my room. All I wanted to do was wake you up—"
He issued a caustic laugh. "And look where it got you."
Undaunted, she took a sip of coffee and sank back onto the porch, leaning against the railing and studying him in the ethereal twilight. "You kept saying you were dying, Paul. But you didn’t die. Over there, I mean. You survived."
"Everyone died a little over there," he corrected her, his tone bitter. "A lot of the men died physically, and the rest of us died spiritually. Even when we were alive we weren’t really living."
She scrutinized him thoughtfully. His body appeared strong to her, his posture proud and sturdy, his gaze firm. He did not seem like a spiritually dead man. "I thought you were a hero," she reminded him.
He snorted.
"Tell me what happened," she demanded. For all her anti-war sentiments, she realized that she was pitifully ignorant about what the soldiers had actually experienced in Southeast Asia. But now, more than ever, she had to know what had gone on there, what men like Paul had endured. If he talked about it, if he explained it to her, perhaps he could explain it to himself, as well. Perhaps by verbalizing the horror of it he could mend his tattered conscience. "Tell me what your dream was about."
He eyed her accusingly. "Why? You want me to confirm for you that you were right about ‘Nam, that it was a lousy war and you and your Cambridge Manifesto chums were on the money? You don’t need me to tell you that."
"No, I don’t," she retorted, irritated by his derisive attitude. "What I need you to tell me is what the hell was going on in your head when you were lying in bed with me upstairs. And if you think I haven’t got the right to an answer—"
"I don’t like talking about it," he snapped.
"Well, isn’t that too damned bad!"
Her outburst apparently took him by surprise, and he shot her a look of amazement. Recovering, he carried his mug back to the steps and resumed his seat beside her. He struggled with his thoughts, then relented. "I’ll tell you what you want to know," he conceded, gazing at his feet to avoid looking at her, "but you’ve got to promise you’ll never call me a hero."
She hadn’t realized he’d been reacting to that specific word. "Why shouldn’t I?"
"Because..." He addressed his coffee. "If my C.O. hadn’t gotten himself killed, I probably would have faced serious charges. Maybe a court-martial."
"A court-martial?" That didn’t sound terribly heroic."On what charges?"
"Insubordination. Failure to obey a direct order." He drained his mug, placed it on the porch beside him and focused his gaze on a dimly visible pine in the distance. The air vibrated with the deep-throated croaks of frogs cel
ebrating the end of the storm.
Bonnie waited, but Paul remained silent. She looked from his grim face to his hands, his forearms resting across his spread knees, the sleek strength of his thighs visible where the denim of his jeans was drawn taut.
She suffered a swift, utterly irrational pang of guilt. She had acquiesced in what Paul had done upstairs for the simple reason that she’d wanted to make him feel better. She’d wanted to bring peace to his inflamed soul. But she’d failed. If anything, he seemed tenser now than he’d been before. The tendons in his neck stood out, and the muscles in his shoulders were knotted. He couldn’t seem to prevent his fingers from curling and uncurling.
It had been futile. She could no more bring peace to Paul now than she could bring peace to an embattled nation twenty years ago. Far from chasing away Paul’s demons, she had added to them.
"I’m sorry," she murmured.
"Don’t be. The court-martial never happened."
"No—I mean—" She inhaled sharply and shook her head clear. "How did your commanding officer get killed?" she asked, hoping Paul wouldn’t detect the tremor in her voice. Perhaps she’d failed him upstairs, but she wasn’t going to make matters any better by dwelling on her failure now.
"He walked into an ambush," Paul said bluntly. His voice was flat, but Bonnie could sense the churning undercurrent of rage inside him.
"Oh, no." She shook her head and sighed. "How horrible. Oh, Paul—"
"He took two of my buddies with him," Paul went on, still laboring to keep any excess emotion out of his voice.
She instinctively reached for his hand and covered it with her own. He flinched and she let her hand drop. "I’m sorry, Paul," she said. "About your friends, I mean."
He gazed into the distance, scanning the early morning fog as if seeking his past in its translucent layers. "We were doing four-man night patrols. The night it was my turn, the sergeant decided to have us patrol this one area that seemed..." He shook his head. "I don’t know. There had been too much suspicious activity over there. It was just north of this village where a lot of VC sympathizers lived. My sergeant was the fool who wanted to be a hero that night. So he decided to take us up north of the village."
Paul’s voice grew more distant as he sank deeper into his reminiscence. His dark gaze continued to comb the mist.
"It was a damp night, kind of like this. The monsoons were a lot like that storm we just had. Sometimes at night the rain would let up, but the air was so wet you could almost see the moisture floating in it." He closed his eyes for a minute, lapsing into a silent meditation. "I had—I don’t know whether it was a premonition or what, but I just knew we shouldn’t go beyond a rise on the trail. I knew there was trouble waiting on the other side. When Macon said we were going over the hill, I said no."
"Just like that?" Bonnie was stunned. "You actually refused to go?"
"I’m here, aren’t I?" Paul said tersely. "If I hadn’t refused I’d be dead like the others."
She heard the anguish and bitterness in his tone—and comprehended it in some subliminal way. If only his friends had listened to him, if only they’d shared his premonition, if only the war hadn’t happened in the first place... So much waste, she thought. So much heartache. So much pain.
It wouldn’t do to give voice to her own anguish and bitterness. "So," she asked, directing her thoughts back to the actual event he was describing, "this sergeant threatened you with a court-martial, right then and there?"
"He said he’d bring me up on charges as soon as we returned to camp. And I said, do whatever the hell you want, but I’m not going over that hill." He let out a broken sigh. "Rigucci and Swann tried to talk me into going with them. They said I was nuts. Maybe I was nuts, I don’t know. After a while over there, everybody was nuts. You’d grab hold of anything, anything that made sense—because so little did make sense. That night, it made sense to me not to go over the hill, and nobody was going to take that away from me."
For a long moment he seemed unable to continue. When he finally did, his voice was uneven, on the verge of disintegrating. "I stood by a tree, watching them march off along the trail, disappearing over the hill. And then I heard the gunfire..." He shook his head, curling and uncurling his hands against his knees. "God," he whispered with such ferocity Bonnie understood that he was reliving the incident again, as he’d relived it in his dreams earlier that night, as he had undoubtedly relived it innumerable times in the past. "Macon, Rigucci and Swann came home wrapped in plastic, and I came home with a bunch of fucking medals."
"And you never got court-martialed."
He shook his head. "It took me a long time to get back to camp. I didn’t move for hours; I didn’t want to draw enemy fire. But when the sky started to lighten—like this..." He lifted his gaze to the moon-glazed clouds. "It had been quiet for so long, I took my chances and advanced to the rise. I saw Swann." He stopped, his voice breaking, and pressed his hand to his eyes. For a long time he was silent.
Bonnie waited.
He swallowed, then continued. "I couldn’t find the others quickly, so I just got Swann and carried him to camp on my back. I reported..." He drew in a sharp breath. "I lied, Bonnie. I reported that we’d spread out on the trail, and that’s why they had all bought it and I hadn’t. I covered my ass."
"What else could you have done?" she asked.
"I could have told the truth, damn it. I could have admitted I was a coward."
"A coward! You chose to live. You listened to your heart and chose to live. That wasn’t cowardly, Paul—it was wise. It was human."
"Great. I was wise and human, and my buddies died."
"That’s not your fault," Bonnie argued. For no good reason, Paul seemed to be blaming himself for what had happened to his friends. He ought to console himself with the fact that he’d tried to talk them out of going.
"I should have died with them," Paul muttered, staring at the wooden step between his feet. "They were good soldiers, Bonnie—even Macon was a good soldier. I was a bad soldier, and I lived."
"Well, that certainly proves something," she remarked, realizing too late that she must have come across sounding flippant.
Paul gave her a scorching look. "Yeah," he snapped, turning away once more. "It proves that there’s no justice or fairness in this world. It proves that survival is just a matter of luck."
"Surviving isn’t a sin," she reminded him.
"Maybe not. But survival and sin have something in common. They both make you feel guilty."
"You have nothing to feel guilty for, Paul."
"Thanks," he grunted. "I feel a lot better now."
Anxious to counteract his corrosive bitterness, she dared to touch him again. Before he could pull away she closed her both hands around one of his. His fingers fisted against her palm as he tried to free himself. She didn’t care—she held him tightly, refusing to let go. "You weren’t just lucky," she murmured. "You were smart. You deserved to live, Paul."
"And they deserved to die?"
"I didn’t say that." She ran her thumb over his knuckles in a soothing caress. "The memorial you want to erect on the town green—it’s for them, isn’t it."
His nod was so small she almost didn’t see it.
"But it isn’t going to have their names on it, Paul," she pointed out, puzzled. "It’s going to have the names of some Northford veterans."
"Who cares what names go on it? In my mind I’ll know who the memorial is for. One dead soldier or another...does it really matter?" He took a calming breath, then explained, "I made a promise to my buddies that night, Bonnie. I promised I’d see to it that the world never forgot about them. It doesn’t matter whose names get carved into the rock. The only thing that matters is that people remember."
"Then why don’t you establish memorials in the towns where your friends came from?" she asked.
"Because I’m here," he replied quietly. "Because this is my home, and that’s the promise I made."
She was moved b
y the simplicity of his words. She could understand the appeal of such a promise. Perhaps keeping it had given Paul the strength to survive. Much as she despised his memorial in concept, she appreciated his devotion to his fallen friends.
But his dream just hours ago hadn’t been about the memorial. More than a promise had come from that ghastly night in Vietnam, more than the death of his friends. More, even, than his own fear of being discovered and killed. Bonnie had felt the ferocious hunger in him when he’d joined himself to her, the savage urgency. She had nothing to do with patrols and snipers, monsoons and promises—and yet, for those few brief, harrowing minutes she’d been as potent a part of his nightmare as anything he’d described.
"Was there a woman that night?" she inquired. It made no sense that there would have been—except that, as Paul himself had said, nothing made sense in wartime.
"No," he answered swiftly. He whipped his hand free of her clasp and averted his gaze.
"Paul...please. Tell me."
"What the hell do you think was going on there?" he shot back, his voice thick with anger. "It was a goddamn war, not a party."
"Then why—?"
"Because," he cut her off. Then he let out a long, uneven breath and turned away.
"Paul." Of everything he had told her, this was what she most needed to hear. She would never be able to understand any of it if he didn’t explain this part.
"Because," he repeated, his tone hushed. Evidently he believed she deserved to know. "Bonnie, I...I was lying there for hours, waiting to die. I knew the VC were looking for me. If they found three guys they’d look for more, and if they found me they’d kill me. So I just lay there, waiting.... And God help me, I—" He abruptly stopped.
"You what?"
He buried his face in his palms. He didn’t speak.
She ached to hold him, placate him, assure him that there was nothing he couldn’t share with her. But if she did, he would probably retreat even deeper into silence. So she only watched him, observing his hunched posture, the clenched muscles of his shoulders, the spread of his fingers across his face as he tried to shut out his terrifying memories.
Wounded Heroes Boxed Set Page 14
