Bracing herself on her elbow, she looked down at him, being careful not to hover. “Erik, wake up. It’s only a dream,” she said, her voice firm, hoping to penetrate through the thick fog of his nightmare. She tried calling his name a few more times, but to no avail. Desperate to get through to him, she propped herself up on one hand and placed the other on his chest.
Then all hell broke loose in the span of a heartbeat.
Gasping like an emerging drowning victim, Erik jackknifed in the bed, his eyes flying open. He stared straight through her, his mouth set in a snarl as he growled, seeing something other than what lived in the present. A bolt of lightning-quick panic streaked through Olivia as he swept her under him, pinning her to the mattress with his massive body and her wrists shackled on either side of her head.
“Erik!”
Olivia hadn’t even finished shouting his name when she saw the moment he woke up. He stared at her, his eyes full of confusion, but finally grounded in the present. “Livvie?” His voice was gravelly and laced with fear and uncertainty. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” she said, willing him to feel her strength, her confidence that everything was going to be okay. “You were having a nightmare, that’s all. It’s okay.” His brow furrowed and he looked around—at the place he’d been lying next to her, the tangled sheet, their current positions with him still holding her wrists to the bed.
She felt him start to tremble as realization dawned on his face. “Oh my God, Livvie. In my dream, I was… And then… Oh fuck.” Erik bolted from the bed and scrubbed his hands down his face. Then he crossed to where his clothes lay in a heap on the floor and started shoving his legs through his boxer briefs, his motions jerky and agitated.
Olivia turned on the bedside lamp, gathered the sheet around her, and scrambled over to him. “Where are you going?”
Yanking his cargo shorts onto his hips, he answered without looking at her. “I have to go. I’ll send Preacher back to get you in the morning.”
“I don’t need a ride from Preacher. I need you to stay with me.”
He finished securing his belt and finally met her gaze. “That’s the last fucking thing you need.”
His skin was pale and covered in a sheen of sweat. It killed her to see him so shaken, so unsure of himself. “You’re wrong.” She placed a comforting hand on his chest, but the thundering beat of his heart under her palm told her it wasn’t helping. “Everyone has nightmares, Erik, and I knew there was a good chance you’d have one tonight after the flashback. This is perfectly normal.”
“Fuck normal. Goddamn it, Livvie, I hurt you.”
“No, you didn’t,” she shot back, clutching the sheet tighter around her as though it would help her hold him to her as well. “You rolled me beneath you—a move, I’d like to point out, you’ve done to me more times than I can count—and you woke up as soon as you had me on my back.” Olivia stepped into him and cupped the side of his face. “I promise I won’t knowingly put myself in danger, Erik. If at any time I feel like things have escalated, we’ll just sleep separately until things calm down.”
He shook his head and took a step back to escape her touch, a fact that she tried not to let affect her, even as she felt her heart crack open.
“So, what?” he asked, arms spread. “We just wait and hope I don’t actually choke you out the next time? Fuck that.” After shoving his feet into his shoes, he snatched up his T-shirt from the floor and pulled it on. “I’m obviously a hell of a lot less stable than I’ve been trying to convince myself of the last couple months. We can’t be together until I’m sure I have my shit in order, bottom line.”
Erik crossed the room, his long strides eating up the distance to the bedroom door. “Erik, stop,” she said, following him, her throat constricting with the fear of losing him. “We can get through this; you just have to trust me.”
Pulling open the door, he turned around and stared down at her, liquid fire swirling in his eyes as he visibly lost the battle of keeping himself in check. His voice got louder by the second, and she was helpless to stop the hot prick of tears as they started to well up.
“Christ, Livvie, what don’t you get about this? I’m like a fucking land mine that’s been stepped on. It’s not a matter of if I’ll go off but when, and I’ll be damned if I’m letting you anywhere near the blast zone!”
She shook her head, the movement jostling her tears free to roll unchecked down her face. “Please don’t do this,” she whispered. “I love you.”
Erik’s features softened, his whiskey eyes glistening with the moisture of their shared pain. He reached up to frame her face, the rough pads of his thumbs gently swiping away her tears. “I know,” he rasped.
He lowered his head, took her lips in the sweetest, most heartbreaking good-bye kiss, then walked out of the house…and out of her life.
Chapter Seventeen
“Hi, I’m Lieutenant Erik Grady.”
The receptionist behind the front desk didn’t bother to look up from her computer screen or pause the incessant typing on her keyboard. “Uh-huhhhh,” she dragged out in a way that said, And?
“I have an appointment at fourteen hundred with a Sergeant Cody Adams.”
“Okay, sir, last name, last four.”
Apparently she hadn’t paid attention when he announced himself the first time, and “last four” referred to the end digits of his SSN. Not even thirty seconds into the visit, and he already felt sprayed with the stench of indifference. “Grady,” he bit out. “Eight-six-one-seven.”
“Okay, Mr. Grady, have a seat in the lobby, and Sergeant Adams will be out to see you soon.”
It’s Lieutenant Grady, not Mister. He hadn’t studied his ass off for more than a thousand hours, poring over textbooks and training guides to be called Mister. Then again, there was a small chance he was taking things harder than usual because he seriously didn’t want to be here, but whatever.
Irritated with the entire situation, Erik mentally dismissed the distant receptionist. Instinct drew him to a chair on the far side of the room where he had a full view of the facility from his position. Lowering himself into the seat, he rubbed the sweat from his palms on his jeans and tried to steady his nerves with a deep breath.
He felt like complete shit. Staying away from Olivia was worse than he ever imagined. He couldn’t sleep, forgot to eat half the time, and the other half he couldn’t taste anything other than the smoky burn of the one glass of whiskey he allowed himself every night. If he didn’t put a limit on it, he’d fast become a drunk, wallowing in his self-made misery.
It’d happened so fast, but she’d become his entire world, and now, without her, his world was…off. He missed her smile, her laugh, the way she teased him, the way she spoke so formally whenever she got worked up, the perfect way her body fit to his, and the way she sighed every time she stepped into his arms…he just plain fucking missed her.
He was a miserable bastard without her. And since his head was more fucked up than ever¸ he spent the majority of his time putting himself through punishing workouts while blasting death metal to kill any and all thoughts. Sometimes it worked well enough to make him think he was doing okay. But it only took a few moments of silence for the darkness to whisper through his mind, replanting the doubts and fears faster than he could crush them.
After bringing Olivia’s Fourth of July party to a sudden and humiliating end, Erik had done his best to brush off the incident to everyone unlucky enough to witness it. Not that any of them believed his bullshit. He was either a really shitty actor or what they saw that night had been so profound that no one with two brain cells to rub together could ever believe that it wasn’t a big fucking problem. Whatever the reason, the looks of pity he got—even from his own men—turned his stomach inside out and brewed violence in his veins.
If there was one thing he hated more than anything, it was weakness in himself. He’d been raised to be strong—physically, mentally, and emotionally—and then the army and
special forces took those strengths and maxed them out. The worst feeling in the world was knowing the men he respected the most and the woman he cared for more than he’d ever thought possible had seen him mentally incapacitated. If having a hallucination wasn’t weakness, he didn’t know what was.
The session with Dr. Marion following his “episode” had been the most difficult so far. Erik spent the entire hour keyed up and did a fair amount of ranting, demanding to know why the hell he’d gotten worse—by graduating to a full-blown flashback—instead of better.
Marion spouted off various facts and statistics about the process and possible side effects when someone goes through behavioral cognitive therapy. Something about temporary regressions where the original symptoms can spike and even create new ones as the client—Christ, he hated that word—comes to terms with the root of his or her issues.
Translation: things’ll get a lot fucking worse before they get better. Just what he wanted to hear.
But the real kicker of the hour came when the major asked him about how Erik handled things with Olivia afterward.
Oh, you know, the usual. I told her we should stop seeing each other, she disagreed and countered that I should take my aggressions out on her during sex, and because I’m a selfish fucking prick, I fucked her within an inch of her life and reveled in every goddamn second of it.
Yeah, not something he’d be sharing with anyone anytime soon, much less her uncle.
Instead, Erik stuck to the basics of the argument they’d had both before and after the sex. About him not being good for her as messed up as he was, and that he thought it’d be best if he stayed away until he could be 100 percent sure he’d never again have another incident that put her at risk for being harmed.
That’s when Dr. Marion prescribed him this visit to the Boston Vet Center. A place where disabled veterans came for things like group therapy, occupational therapy, and meditative yoga.
A place that made Erik’s palms sweat and his muscles grip his bones so tight they might snap. He was nervous as hell to be there, and it made him feel like a complete asshole. Erik may not have served with any of these men, but they were all a part of the same brotherhood, and that meant he’d take a bullet for any one of them without hesitation. So then why did the thought of meeting them scare the ever-loving hell out of him?
Because you’re afraid you’ll look in their eyes and see yourself. Just another broken soldier, used up and no good to anyone anymore.
“Lieutenant Grady?”
Erik stood and shook the man’s outstretched hand. “Sergeant Adams,” he said in greeting.
“I’m good with dropping the formalities if you are. My mother insists I still answer to Cody on occasion,” he said with a bright smile. “Says it’s to keep me humble and remind me that beneath the badass is still her baby boy.”
Erik felt some of the tension in his muscles ease as he returned the smile. “Does it work?”
“Hell yes, but if she knew that, she’d be making me couch pillows with my name in needlepoint, and then I can kiss my badass balls good-bye.” Cody gave a dramatic shudder.
Chuckling, Erik said, “Then I’ll go with Cody and hopefully it keeps your balls where they belong.”
“I appreciate that, my friend. Now,” Cody said as he clapped him on the shoulder, “what do you say we go meet up with the others hanging around today and make some new BFFs?”
Cody had a good sense of humor and a quick wit about him that Erik instantly liked. His easygoing personality helped Erik relax, at least a little. From the looks of him, Cody couldn’t be a day over twenty-five, which pretty much made him a kid in Erik’s book, and the fact that he could easily get a second job as an Abercrombie & Fitch model gave the impression he hadn’t seen any time downrange. He was more “bright eyed and bushy tailed” than “sun’s out, guns out,” but Erik supposed combat experience wasn’t a job requirement for working with those who had.
Erik took a deep breath and released it in a slow, steady stream. “Lead the way.”
For the next couple of hours, Cody introduced Erik to almost a dozen men and women who’d all come back from deployments missing pieces of themselves—physically, metaphorically, or both. A few were amputees with one of them being a double, but most of them suffered with TBIs from IEDs (Traumatic Brain Injuries from Improvised Explosive Devices), and pretty much all of them had PTSD in some form or another.
If you asked, most would tell you they were there because they’d fucked up. They’d had a split second to make a decision but made the wrong one, and the second after that, shit went to hell in a handbasket and their entire world narrowed down to one ugly truth: they’d lost.
Lost the use of their legs or the ability to hold their children or even the capacity to withstand something as basic as a trip to the grocery store without having a damn panic attack. (Because what the fuck did it matter whether they chose Lucky Charms or Frosted Flakes when there were bad guys who needed killing?)
They’d gone from being elite warriors to struggling civilians in the blink of an eye. Their new reality was accepting—or, more accurately, trying to accept—that they’d never again be as good as they once were. Whereas they used to spend hours every day training in things like close-quarters combat and the shoot house, now their time was spent learning how to cope with the post-war mental shit and accomplish new ways of doing the physical shit.
It’d been a humbling experience for Erik to spend the afternoon with the brave veterans at the Center. They’d all been cut down while fighting in the pits of hell and then crawled and clawed their way back through it again as they relearned how to acclimate and live as different people with new disabilities. And there he was, standing in front of them with all his appendages and answering the “So how’re you fucked up?” question with the pathetic story of how fireworks damn near made him piss himself before doing a solo reenactment of his last battle in Iraq. Made him feel like a pussy in comparison, and he wondered what the hell he was so worried about with Olivia.
Then he remembered how absurdly real that flashback was. How he’d had no idea he was crouched in the corner of his girlfriend’s parents’ kitchen with his only immediate threat a floor of shattered glass and wasted alcohol. How he could’ve twisted the situation even more, believing Livvie was an enemy sneaking up on him, and seriously hurt her…or worse.
Yeah, he was plenty fucked up, thanks.
“So what’s it like being a fireman?” Cody asked as they walked down the hall to his office.
“Similar to the military, really,” he said dismissively. “It’s all about high-pressure situations. You’re either in them, training for them, or waiting for them to happen.”
Cody grinned. “So you’re saying it’s not all kittens in trees and calendar shoots.”
Erik laughed. “I’ve been on a few kitten calls in my time, but it’ll be a cold day in hell when I sign on for a calendar shoot.”
“Careful, you could be forced into it by the mayor to boost the FD’s image, like that guy in Chicago. You hear about that?”
“Luke Almeida? Yeah, bro, that story spread quick. The commish used it as an example of what could happen if we ever made BFD look bad. I heard his brother ate it up, but Luke hated every minute of it, the poor schmuck.”
Cody stopped at the vending machines and dug a couple of singles from his wallet. “Yeah, well, the way I hear it, that poor schmuck ended up getting the girl of his dreams, proving that love really does conquer all.”
The kid said it with a hint of humor, but glancing at his expression, Erik could tell he wasn’t being the least bit sarcastic. When they each had a bottle of water in hand, they continued on. “Speaking from personal experience?”
“Absolutely,” Cody said proudly. “Love is the only thing that can conquer the kind of battle-borne demons men like you and I live with. Well, that and regular visits to a shooting range, am I right?”
Erik stopped, stuck on the first thing Cody said. “
You were downrange?”
Again, Erik took in the man’s appearance. His blue Oxford shirt with rolled sleeves was tucked neatly into a pair of dark jeans that were distressed on the thighs by a machine, not from actual years of wear, and he wore a permanent grin. If he’d been deployed overseas, it was more likely he’d been a fobbit—a service member who never went outside the wire of the forward operating base. Not that Erik felt superior to non-infantrymen, but shit was a whole other world outside the security perimeter of the FOB.
“No offense, Cody, but you don’t seem fucked up enough for that.”
“Ah, that’s because you haven’t seen the hardware,” he said, bending over to raise the legs of his pants. “They go all the way up to mid-thigh, or what used to be, anyway.”
Fucking hell. Cody was missing both legs, replaced by metal prosthetics that disappeared into his boots. “What happened?”
“Afghanistan, 2011. We were on our way to Forward Operating Joyce in Kunar when our bird took an RPG and small arms fire. The Chinook zigged and I zagged, right out the fucking door. I fell three stories, but a Toyota full of hajis was nice enough to break my fall. Unfortunately, it also broke my legs and my back. I remember all of that, but not the grenade that fragged my shit as I was being pulled out of there. It took care of my broken leg problem, seeing as there wasn’t much of them left after that.”
Erik rubbed the back of his neck that burned with shame. “Jesus, man, I had no idea. What I said, about you not being fucked up enough, that was an asshole thing to say. I’m sorry.”
Smiling, Cody opened the door behind him and allowed Erik to enter before closing it. “Don’t give it a second thought; I don’t anymore.”
“How?” As soon as the question left his mouth, he wanted to reel it back in. Suddenly everything he said made him feel like more of a dick.
“Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t always this well-adjusted and handsome.” Cody took a seat in one of two guest chairs in front of the office desk. “Actually, that’s not true. I’ve always been this handsome.”
Hot for the Fireman Page 24
