Undefeated

by Melissa Cutler

  It didn’t help that she attended every Bomb Squad game, sitting right there next to Olivia and the rest of the players’ wives and girlfriends behind the gamekeeper’s table. At least when he was stewing about her, he wasn’t stewing about his bad memories. That ought to count as improvement, right? Maybe he should share that with Dr. Patel.

  Duke slammed a clipboard against a locker, his favorite way to get everyone’s attention. “Listen up. Whatever mental blocks are keeping you from working and thinking like a team, it ends now. You leave it in this locker room because this is the last time we walk out of this building as losers. You hear me on this? I’m making a change, a big one, that I’ll explain tonight at our team meeting and I don’t want to hear any bitching about it. Lock, Stock, & Barrel in thirty minutes. Don’t be late.”

  He punctuated the command with another clang of the clipboard against the locker.

  Liam slung his shower towel over his shoulder. “You sure we can’t have this meeting at the VFW?” It was worth a try, and not only because Marlena and Olivia would probably be at Locks. The less contact he had to make with civilians in general, the better his mood.

  Will groaned. “Are you kidding me? There aren’t any girls at the VFW. Just old dudes shooting the shit about the Korean War.”

  “What do you care if there’s girls around? Unless you finally decided to give up on celibacy,” Gabe said, wearing a goading smile.

  Will yanked his hockey-stick-holding prosthetic off his arm and dropped it in its foam case. “Why do you have to bring that up? That’s none of your goddamn business.”

  Gabe’s smile broadened. “I keep telling you, man, girls don’t care about a guy being short a hand or two. All you need is a tongue.”

  “Nice,” Brandon said, offering his fist to Gabe for a bump. Gabe knocked the knuckle joints of his prosthetic hand with Brandon’s fist.

  Will kicked his locker closed. “That has nothing to do with anything, and you can just get the hell out of my personal life.”

  “Shut up!” Duke roared.

  Liam flinched, banging the back of his head on a locker. Damn triggers.

  “This bickering is what I’m talking about,” Duke said. “We’re all going to Locks and that’s the end of it. Thirty minutes. Latecomers don’t play next game.”

  Liam grabbed a bar of soap, but before heading to the shower, he intercepted Duke. “Coach,” he said, lowering his voice. “I’ll be there, but I might be a few minutes late because I need to do a P.E.T. listen first. That going to be a problem?”

  Duke shook his head and slapped Liam’s back. “Not at all. Good on you for sticking with that. We’ll wait.”

  He hated having to ask Duke for special consideration, not when Liam’s inclusion on the team had mostly come about as a favor between Duke and Liam’s old man. Unlike every other player on the team, Liam hadn’t suffered a lasting physical injury during combat, as was Duke’s standard for admittance onto Bomb Squad. He couldn’t compare his mental problems to Gabe’s missing arms or Brandon’s amputated leg or Theo’s brain injuries that had left him unable to read or write.

  Liam’s unique situation had created a conflicting dynamic for him where he simultaneously felt like a fraud on the team because he was the only one not grappling with physical limitations, and yet also like the most wounded man there because his injuries refused to heal. Hence, his obligation tonight to do his prolonged exposure therapy—or P.E.T.—a five-times-a-day therapy he self-administered as supplements to his twice-weekly therapy appointments.

  After his shower, he made the ten-minute drive to Locks with the radio off, flying through the dark, quiet streets of Destiny Falls with his mind centered on the loud purr of his diesel engine and the wind roaring against the open truck windows.

  Locks was housed in a two-story, boxy brick building left over from the canal’s golden age of the early twentieth century, positioned on the northern bank of the Erie Canal across a grassy commons from Theo and Allison’s boat rental business in the heart of Destiny Falls’ quaint, historical downtown district. Sometime while Liam had been in the army, Harper had purchased the run-down building and renovated, and ever since, it had been one of Bomb Squad’s favorite haunts.

  Tonight, the parking lot was jam-packed with cars and people. Liam buzzed by the entrance and parked on the street a few blocks east so he could listen to his P.E.T. recording in peace.

  Before P.E.T. had started being used as a treatment for soldiers with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder—PTSD—like Liam, it’d been a therapy method for people with crippling phobias. The theory behind it was that by exposing someone with, say, a deathly fear of spiders to photographs and videos of spiders, then to live spiders contained in glass terrariums and so forth, the person with the phobia could inoculate him- or herself against the fear by building up a tolerance and taking away the phobia’s mystique and power.

  With soldiers dealing with PTSD, the therapy’s purpose was to let mental wounds heal into a scar by forcing the soldier to retell the story of the trauma over and over again, day after day, until it loosened its debilitating grip. The purpose of the therapy walked a fine line for Liam because he didn’t want those trauma memories to lose their sacredness. These were memories of his brothers-in-arms, and of innocent women and children, whose lives were sacrificed for the violence inherent in men. Their lives and their stories were sacred and deserved an exalted place in his mind. The trouble was, those memories had been eating Liam alive until he’d discovered P.E.T. the previous year.

  Already, he’d made peace with several big triggers that had impacted his post-army life, including feeling trapped in small rooms and how every time he’d seen a cross, he’d relived, in a visceral way, the memory of ragged-edged bones sticking out of shoulders where Lieutenant Jimmy Leighton’s arms should have been, a memory association from his second deployment.

  After powering a bottle of water, he lit a cigarette, then tucked earbuds in his ears. He took a deep, steadying inhale from the cigarette, and pressed “play” on his smart phone to listen to the latest chapter of his very own personal horror story, narrated by himself.

  “It’s August twenty-seventh. Dawn,” his gravelly, pained voice said through the earbuds. “For the third day in a row, my unit is conducting a KLE operation in the Wataphur District, Konar Province, Afghanistan . . .”

  Twenty minutes later, he pressed “end.” The ensuing silence wrapped around him, sucking him into bleakness and grief, though the tears in his eyes didn’t fall.

  He watched the dark silhouettes of the trees, feeling drained, but somehow stronger. Not yet strong enough to think about entering a hospital without having a crippling panic attack, and not yet strong enough that he wouldn’t flinch when Duke shouted at the team, but he’d get there eventually. One day, he wanted to think about what happened to the kid and the kid’s mom and that horrific day without reliving every smell, every taste, and every crippling feeling.

  He swiped the bases of his palms over his eyes, then plunged his fingers into his hair and took a deep breath. He wasn’t supposed to dwell when the recording was over. Dwelling gave the memory too much power. He was supposed to listen, then immediately do something mundane or ordinary.

  There was nothing mundane about Duke making some kind of big announcement that night, but it’d be a good distraction, and getting a beer and checking the day’s sports scores would be nice. Maybe he’d get lucky and Marlena and Olivia wouldn’t be there. Maybe no one would talk to him for a while, until he could shake the residual P.E.T. pain.

  Locks was crowded and noisy. The guys were there, standing in bunches, some of them with their wives or girlfriends, others playing darts. Nobody seemed to notice him, which was ideal. Hopefully, Duke would give him a chance to grab a beer before calling the meeting to order.

  Olivia was at a table with Presley and several other people Liam didn’t recognize. He sidestepped out of her line of sight as a safeguard. Of all the people he could possibly
talk to right after a P.E.T. listen, she was right at the bottom of the list.

  Marlena sat at the bar gabbing with Harper, who was mixing a drink.

  He took one look at the back of her—at the ginger hair tumbling down her back in fluffy coils, to the green T-shirt that snugged over her narrow waist, and her jeans-clad hips and ass that flared out over the barstool in juicy perfection—and was hit with a one-two punch of attraction and frustration. The niggling feeling he had about her was stronger than ever. Didn’t matter that she’d turned into a crazy person when he’d tried to seduce her, or that she’d triggered his worst memories with her shouting; he wanted her still.

  Of course, if he was being honest, the way she filled out her clothes wasn’t what his nagging feeling was about, not entirely. Something about her had drawn him in a long time ago and had only grown more insistent over the decades. His desire for her had become intense enough that when he’d seen her massage certificate at the silent auction, he hadn’t second-guessed the impulse to bid.

  Why he’d been moved to do that rather than make an ordinary massage appointment, he couldn’t say. He’d wanted guaranteed time with her, and he wanted her to know he was serious about it, which was why he’d dropped a grand that night. Somehow, bidding low had felt insulting. Probably, she was right about the whole plan being insulting to her, no matter how much or little he paid. He should have just bitten the bullet and asked her out, bought her a nice dinner and gone through all that ritualistic, meaningless dating nonsense. He could have tolerated it for a night.

  Then again, the night probably would’ve turned out the same, with him coming on too aggressively and her flipping her lid. That was the most frustrating part. Their incompatibilities had made them doomed from the get-go.

  Before he knew what he was doing, he was moving toward her at the bar, though he had no idea what he’d say when he reached her.

  When she noticed him approaching, she tensed. Her hand clutched her half-full pint glass as though it were an anchor. Her eyes turned wary. Better that than mad, he reasoned, but he wished he knew how to adjust his expression to lessen her nervousness. Among all the interpersonal skills he’d lost during his years as a soldier, modulating his expression at will was one he wished he could recover.

  “Liam, hey,” Harper said. “Can I get you a drink?”

  Marlena offered him an anxious flash of a smile. “Hi.”

  He nodded. For some reason he didn’t understand, he couldn’t make himself say empty pleasantries. It wasn’t like he’d always been that way, only since he’d cracked up, and he didn’t mind that it made people uncomfortable because fuck them. He didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to.

  He tossed a ten-dollar bill on the bar. “A pint of the IPA, please.”

  He gave Harper time to get out of earshot, then propped his hand on the bar and his work boot on the foot bar of Marlena’s stool. He was struck with the oddest urge to touch her hair, as though, subconsciously, he wanted to demonstrate that he was capable of other moves, gentler moves, than using her hair as a grip during sex, because he was pretty sure her trigger had something to do with her hair.

  The more he’d thought about it, the more that was the only explanation that made sense. The hair pulling or his hands on her wrists. It had to be one of those two. Which meant some asshole, at some time or another, had done something bad to her. And how could he be mad about that?

  So he did indulge the urge, smoothing his hand over the tips of a few curly locks that sat on her shoulder. She didn’t startle, which he took as a good sign that her the trigger with her hair only involved the use of force.

  Her hair was soft against his fingers and smelled fantastic, neither of which he’d picked up on at her massage studio—another sign that he’d been way too hopped-up on his own greedy needs that night. Hell, she’d had to kick him in the leg for him to notice she was having a panic attack. Some medic he was.

  She worried her bottom lip. “You played a good game.”

  He huffed. “No, I didn’t, but I’m over it.” Just like he was done being mad at her. Time and distance had fixed that. Now, he was more concerned with getting to the heart of what went wrong—the first step to that being her acknowledgement that what happened wasn’t all his fault.

  “Why does it have to be a problem with me?” he said. “Why can’t it just be that we’re not compatible?”

  She shifted in her seat to square up to him, studying him. Up close, with the soft light in the tavern, he was reminded all over again about how pretty she was, with pale skin and red hair, green eyes. Plus, she had the weirdest thing where she was serene and fiery at the same time. They’d known each other since they were eleven, so he’d had plenty of time to study that particular phenomenon.

  Their focus turned to the bar as Harper slid a beer his way. Maybe she sensed the charged vibe between Liam and Marlena because, without a word, she hurried away again.

  “You’re right. I overreacted, and I owe you an apology.”

  That was too easy. Liam sipped the beer, playing it cool. As much as he’d wanted her to admit her role in their disastrous night, he wasn’t all that interested in her apology because that meant it was his turn next to apologize, and, like empty pleasantries, he couldn’t quite make himself take that leap of civility. “Apologies are overrated. But I want to hear you say that first part again. I like the way that sounded coming from a know-it-all like you.”

  “You want me to tell you that you’re right? Fine. You’re right.”

  He smiled around his pint glass. “Yes, I am.”

  “I’m not a know-it-all.”

  He raised his brows, challenging her statement, and stared her down until the skin of her cheeks and neck turned pink, making the ruddy brown of her freckles pop.

  “Okay, a little bit. But so are you,” she said.

  “I’m a huge friggin’ know-it-all. See? It’s not so hard to admit your flaws.”

  She raised her glass in a toast, smiling. “To being incompatible know-it-alls.”

  He clinked glasses with her, satisfied with the exchange and pleased he’d taken the chance of approaching her. That niggling feeling was still there in spades, maybe even more so, because he was recalling how much he liked being around Marlena, but at least they could move on from that horrible experience at her yoga studio. And he hadn’t even needed to apologize.

  “Are you smiling? Did you get him to smile, Marlena?” Olivia’s voice shattered the moment.

  Liam’s face fell. It was the damnedest thing, but since he got out of the army, he couldn’t let his guard down around Olivia. He wasn’t sure exactly why, except that she brought out the worst in him and she was one of the few civilians he had no choice but to interact with on a regular basis. Most of the time, he found it easier to not say anything to her, because she nitpicked everything he did. She couldn’t even let him smile without making a big deal about it.

  “Olivia.”

  “Don’t say my name like that, like we’re distant acquaintances. I can’t stand that. We were in utero together.”

  He sipped his beer and scanned the room for his friends. Theo was deep in conversation with Will. Gabe and Brandon were at the bar, flirting with two girls who looked like they might be tourists. No help there.

  Marlena tipped her pint in his direction. “Liam and I were commiserating about our mutual insufferableness.”

  “Your what?”

  Marlena shook her head. “Nothing. Never mind. What’s up?”

  She pointed at Liam. “I did a walk-through with that couple this afternoon. They didn’t take the place. They said the lighting was bad.”

  The lighting wasn’t bad. The lighting was the lighting. Nobody wanted that particular apartment within the sprawling complex their parents owned, and that he and Olivia managed, because its last tenant had died there under not the best circumstances, and now the apartment was creepy.

  Liam had replaced the linoleum in the bathroom, as well
as the bathtub unit, and repainted the walls, so it wasn’t like there was blood splatter scaring away possible renters, but there was no denying the creepy factor, even months later. He didn’t know what the hell to do about the issue, but getting the place rented had become an obsession for Olivia, for reasons Liam didn’t bother trying to understand.

  “If they’re the kind of people who bitch about things like lighting, then we don’t want them as tenants anyway.”

  Olivia crossed her arms over her chest, looking exasperated. “No one wants the apartment because it’s haunted. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

  Liam had decided after their last argument over the apartment that he was done trying to convince her that there was no such thing as ghosts, but luckily he wasn’t the only know-it-all in the room.

  “It’s not haunted,” Marlena said. “I’ve told you, spirits have better things to do than hang out in empty rooms.”

  “Know-it-all,” Liam muttered behind the rim of his pint.

  Marlena flashed wide green eyes at him.

  Olivia hadn’t notice the exchange. “That’s what Liam said, too. And I’ve told you both that we’ll have to agree to disagree on that point. Because that apartment is all kinds of weird. I don’t even like to go in there to show it to prospective renters.”

  “It’s just walls and floors and empty space. No ghosts. I guarantee it,” Marlena said.

  “Oh!” Olivia set her drink on the bar, then gave an excited wave of her arms, complete with jazz hands. “I’ve got a great idea. You should move in to the haunted apartment. Liam and I will give you a great deal.”

  Ah, no. “Don’t go shoving your obsession with that apartment down your friend’s throat,” he said.

  Marlena waved off his concern. “I don’t mind. Thanks for the offer, but I love my apartment.”