by Cameron Dane
Sarah acknowledged Alex but looked to Hunter. “Are you going to be okay with this?” she asked him.
It took Hunter a good minute before he said, “Yeah. Give us a few minutes, and I’ll be inside.”
Alex waited for the door to close behind Sarah and Jace, and then turned his full attention on Hunter. “Hi,” he began, feeling oddly shy.
Hunter’s face burned. “You heard all that, did you?” The man slipped to pushing his fingernails into his palm again. Alex could tell by the way Hunter clenched his fist he was hurting himself, but Alex didn’t try to stop it. If Hunter needed the distraction until he could get to that therapist, Alex would give it to him without further humiliation.
“I did,” Alex replied. He so ached to wrap his arms around Hunter and promise him everything would be all right, but forced himself to keep the three feet of distance between them. “I’m so proud of you.”
“I don’t know what I am right now,” Hunter admitted. “Definitely not proud.” He fidgeted furiously, as if he no longer knew how to conduct himself around Alex. “I don’t know if I will know for a long time.”
“I get that.” Alex fell silent, and he belatedly realized he’d picked up scuffing his boot into the grass, just like Hunter did. “Before you go inside,” Alex suddenly blurted, “I wanted to apologize for pushing at you the way I did yesterday morning.”
Hunter jerked upright, his face paling. “You didn’t --”
Alex put up his hand. “No, I did. I contributed to what happened yesterday. In my work, when I’m trying to figure out an opponent, I have this thing I do where I push at a person until I can find the source of his or her weakness. It’s something like psychological warfare. I poke at the person until I can break him or her down and get what I want. It wasn’t conscious, but I used the same technique on you. I pushed at you and pushed at you and pushed at you, as if you were the enemy I needed to conquer, and that wasn’t fair. You’re not a business or an acquisition. You are a person I care about very much. If I have any excuse, it was because it crushed me when I couldn’t do anything to save Mack, and I was determined not to lose you too.”
Hunter’s chest heaved, and his eyes watered. “The main thing I can’t live with in myself, the thing that is going to make me call this guy, is the idea that I could hurt you again. Or do worse if I were to snap a second time.” His raw voice scratched right against Alex’s heart.
Alex’s chest banded exquisitely tightly. “Then it was worth it.”
His hand trembling and smeared with blood, Hunter touched his fingers to Alex’s bruised face. “I’m so sorry I did this to you.”
Alex moved his head and brushed his lips against the back of Hunter’s hand. “Just take care of yourself. It goes against every natural grain of the problem solver inside me, but I came to accept something about myself today while listening to you, Sarah, and Jace.” Biting back a curse as the words got stuck in his craw, Alex finally forced himself to say, “I don’t have the skills to help you. I can’t fix you just because I love you and want to. That’s so fucking hard for me to admit.” He knew he blushed beet red but kept his head up anyway. “You have no idea.”
“Actually I’ve been with you enough to say I do know how much that would grate on you.” Hunter chuckled, a real, honest, small laugh, and it wrapped the sweetest joy around Alex’s captured heart.
“Here’s what I can say,” Alex went on. “I will be here.” He locked his gaze on Hunter’s and prayed the man could feel the truth in his words. “I’m not going anywhere. I will get out of your way because I know you need this time to heal without the pressure of a relationship on your back. But all you have to do is say the word, and I will be at your side. It does not matter the day. It does not matter the hour. I am there if you need me.”
“Thank you.” Hunter’s voice caught. “It’s more than I deserve.”
“No, it isn’t. I wish I could give you more.” Unable to stop himself, Alex brushed a tear from the corner of Hunter’s eye. “Last night your sister said the only thing she wanted as a thank-you from me was for me to stick with you and give you a second chance. She’s going to have to come up with something else, because there was never any chance I was walking away from you anyway.” Now Alex’s voice cracked. “I’m here for the long haul, Hunt.” Alex had already begun making a list of his homework, starting with learning everything he could about PTSD, survivor’s guilt, self-harming, and how to best help a loved one returning from war. “Whenever you’re ready for me, I’ll be there.” He leaned in and brushed his lips against Hunter’s cheek, taking a moment to savor the contact before whispering, “Now go get some sleep.”
Then Alex did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. He walked away from the man he loved.
* * * *
Sweat poured down Hunter’s body under his clothes. Down his face too. And he couldn’t stop shaking, no matter he had Sarah holding his hand on one side, and Jace doing the same on the other. A doctor sat twenty feet away on the other side of a closed door, waiting to hear Hunter spill his guts. Expecting Hunter to emotionally cut himself open worse than the way he’d physically done to himself for nearly two years. Instinct punched at Hunter inside, demanding he yank away from Sarah and Jace and run to the cover of somewhere private. He had a knife in his pocket once more -- he couldn’t yet accept he would ever reach a day where he wouldn’t need it. Christ, his fingers itched against Sarah’s and Jace’s to take hold of it right now.
“Here.” Sarah held out a wad of tissues. “You made it this first step.” Squeezing his damaged hand, she nodded at him. “You’re going to be okay.”
After letting go of Jace, Hunter wiped the perspiration from his face as Jace said, “You’re doing great, man.” He rubbed Hunter’s forearm. “We’re going to be here when you get out.”
Right then a woman appeared in the arch on the other side of the small office. “Mr. Tennison.” She wore a gentle, professional smile. “Dr. Royan will see you now.”
Sarah gave Hunter back his hand. He crossed the waiting area and followed the young woman to a closed door. Knocking softly, she didn’t wait for an answer before pushing open the door. Feeling near to vomiting, Hunter followed her prompt to “Go ahead inside.”
A man with dark hair graying at the temples leaned against a desk, his hand extended in greeting. “Hunter” -- they shook hands -- “I’m Dr. Royan. It’s good to meet you.”
The urge to tear though this office and rip it to shreds did battle inside Hunter’s head with the need to cut into his skin until he coated the carpeting in his blood. Fuck.
“Sir.” Hunter rubbed over his pocket, needing to feel his knife, even through his clothing. “I have to be upfront. There’s a lot of violence in me, and it’s twisting me up pretty bad right now.”
“Take a look at me, Hunter.” The man stood up straight, revealing a height and breadth of shoulders that outmatched Hunter by at least four inches. “I’ve seen the wars you’ve seen. I experienced the challenges of transitioning back into civilian life too, although perhaps in a way different from you. If aggression becomes a part of your course to getting well, then I can handle whatever you need to bring.” The doctor’s eyes showed a man even stronger than his frame and indicated someone who’d served a leadership role in his military career. “Understand?”
Breathing just a touch easier, Hunter dipped his head. “Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Dr. Royan didn’t pretend not to see Hunter’s hand on his pocket. He still led Hunter to a pair of chairs anyway. “Why don’t you take a seat, and we’ll get started.”
Terrified, maybe worse than the first time he’d stepped into battle with the enemy, Hunter sat down anyway.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
AUGUST
Shaking his head, struggling to breathe, Hunter fought an internal battle against Dr. Royan’s push to make Hunter again speak aloud the atrocities he imagined himself capable of doing -- of becoming -- when he closed his eyes and d
reamed. “I can’t,” he whispered, his voice barely a rasp of sound.
“You can,” Dr. Royan replied, his voice as steady as Hunter’s was weak. “Tell me what you saw and what you were doing in last night’s dream.”
“No.” Mentally Hunter waged a war to keep only nice, calming pictures in his mind -- such as his work at Forrest-Hawk or the patience and love of his sister -- but the blackness of blood draining from body after body seeped into that image. He cringed and jerked as he felt his fist crack into Trey’s and Will’s lifeless bodies again and again, driven in his nightmares to punish them more for dying and leaving Hunter to suffer alone. In Hunter’s head, Alex appeared, begging Hunter to stop hurting Trey and Will, but Hunter only roared and turned on Alex and began to savagely beat him till his body fell into the pool of blood, as lifeless as the other two. Which isn’t all a dream. Hunter shuddered and shot out of his seat, desperate to claw his way out of this fucked-up, damaged head and body forever. I really did beat him, and I’ll do it again if I can’t make this stop.
“Please.” Hunter stalked to the doctor’s desk and started tearing through the drawers. “Where did you put it?” He’d foolishly surrendered his pocketknife to Dr. Royan at the start of this session, and if he didn’t get it back right now, the ugliness slamming in his brain and ripping through his blood would win out and take him over. “I need to make it stop.”
“Let yourself see the nightmare, Hunter.” On his feet now too, Dr. Royan walked to Hunter and towered over him like a giant. “See that it isn’t real, and understand that the fear you feel when you create these scenes in your head do not control your reality.” The doctor’s pale gaze held firm, and every bit of his calm demeanor pushed at the ugly places inside Hunter, shaming him more.
“Parts of it are real!” Other screams raged so loud and high in Hunter’s head, demanding blood, he could barely hear his own voice. “I told you what I did to Alex!” Giving up on finding his knife, Hunter scanned the area, searching, searching, and then moved to the bookshelves in the office in a search of something within the memorabilia that would serve as a weapon. “I wanted to keep hitting him.”
Dr. Royan followed Hunter and got right in his face once more. “Hunter, listen to me. In your need to shut down everything going on inside you, you have compromised your ability to adequately determine the violence you are capable of outside of a war zone. You want to hurt yourself so that you don’t have to feel. Your brain is manufacturing dreams and fantasies in order to make you believe that you’re so awful that you killed Alex, just as the enemy did Trey and Will. In doing so, you give yourself permission to hurt yourself as a punishment. You tell yourself you’re capable of killing Alex as a way to justify turning that violence on yourself, when in truth, this is not a war zone, Alex is not the enemy, and thus you would not kill him.”
No. You don’t understand. Hunter jerked away from Dr. Royan and prowled his way around the office in the other direction. “But the dreams…” Words, confessions choked Hunter on the way out, but he needed this man to believe and accept. “The pleasure in the dreams when I hurt someone… It’s just… You can’t…” The desire for violence shredding its way through Hunter’s insides told him this man could not help him and that he was even outright lying. If Hunter believed Dr. Royan, the next thing Hunter knew, he would wake up from a blackout with Alex dead next to him, and the bloody knife that had done the deed in Hunter’s hand. No! Debilitating cold drenched Hunter from top to bottom and staggered him to a stop. “The release I feel with the pain…mine…his…I need it. In order to keep others safe” -- Hunter spotted salvation in his dark, ugly reflection -- “it has to be directed at me.” Letting out a roar, he ran across the room and rammed his fist straight into an enormous mirror.
Ahhhh shiittt! White-hot fire sliced through Hunter’s knuckles and hand and quickly sent licking flames into his arm, yet it barely appeased the violence of the animal inside him. Shards from the mirror sprayed out in a fan around his boots. He dropped to kneel on the floor and silently screamed as tiny pieces of glass dug into his knees. Yeesss. Give me more. As Hunter wrapped his hand around a large, pointed piece of mirror, Dr. Royan chopped Hunter’s wrist with his hand and sent a numbing pain through his fingers that forced Hunter to release the glass.
“No.” Dr. Royan maintained a death grip on Hunter’s arm, refusing Hunter the glass Hunter so desperately needed. “The cutting isn’t effective. Hurting yourself is temporary oblivion, Hunter. It is not an answer to everything that haunts you.”
“Therapy isn’t either.” Hunter wheezed terribly, trying to bring normalcy back to his breathing even as he cursed the joke of a man he had become. “You can’t help me.” In place of the mirror fragment Hunter craved slicing into his flesh, he ground his knees into the other shards instead, letting the hundreds of little sharp edges dig into his skin through his jeans. Each pinprick of pain cutting through to Hunter’s kneecaps poked tiny, bright holes in the darkness pushing to control him. As Hunter allowed himself to submerge into the physical hurt coursing through him, he finally stopped hyperventilating and was able to blink away the demonic red clouds from his sight and mind.
Pain. The only thing that has ever worked before. A shining light of truth put a spotlight on Hunter’s reality, his future, and crushed what was left of his faith. The only thing that will ever work. Gutted, Hunter uttered, “Nobody can help.” Wrenching his arm out of the doctor’s hold, surging with strength in his overwhelming desire to get away and lick his wounds in private, Hunter pushed upright and strode to the door. “I’m sorry I’ve wasted so much of your time.”
Shaking like hell, Hunter somehow managed to get the door open. As soon as he did, he sprinted through the waiting area, past his too-patient sister and her always hopeful eyes, and through the small medical center until he got outside. Heat and humidity slammed through Hunter, but he didn’t care. He welcomed the high temperature that offered him an easy excuse for why his shirt clung to his back and sweat poured down his face and neck.
Just as Hunter reached his truck, Sarah’s voice carried across the parking lot. “Hunter!” She thundered to a stop at his side. “What happened?”
With every muscle in him seizing so fucking tightly, hurting him worse than the miniscule pieces of mirror still in his knees, Hunter made himself face Sarah. “This isn’t going to help me, Sis.”
As he told her the truth, her eyes watered and she mouthed no.
The sight of her denial sucker punched him. “I know you hoped for a miracle, but sitting in that office talking about myself and taking away my knife isn’t going to make me better. I can’t get better.” He flashed on his nightmare from last night, the one Dr. Royan had wanted him to spill the details of today, and he could only see himself brutalizing his already dead brothers-in-arms and then taking Alex’s life. Shaking his head as if to deny that picture, Hunter said, “Maybe I’m not supposed to.”
Sarah’s face crumpled. “But…”
Right then Dr. Royan emerged from the building and moved with big, confident steps to Hunter and Sarah. “Hunter, come back inside.”
“No more.” In deference to Dr. Royan’s military ranking of lieutenant colonel, Hunter had an instinctual knee-jerk reaction to drop his head and comply. This time, though, too many violent thoughts sat too close to the surface, and Hunter could not ignore them. “I can’t sit in that office and tell you about one more single day of my life. The nightmares are worse now than they ever were.” In the month since he’d agreed to see the doctor, Hunter hadn’t gone a single night without repeated, horrific, graphic dreams. “If I keep coming to you” -- he laughed, something full of grit and roughness -- “I’m never going to sleep again.”
Dr. Royan dropped his focus to Hunter’s bleeding knuckles. “Let me at least take a look at your hand.”
Hunter shoved his hand behind his back and then took a moment to squeeze it into a fist to maximize the swelling of discomfort. “I’m used to tending to my own
wounds. I know how to take care of it.”
The older soldier’s mouth narrowed down to an unforgiving line, but he nodded and took a step back. Confidence and life, however, still lit his eyes. “Give me a week, Hunter. One week to regroup and come up with a new strategy for your sessions. Don’t throw this away yet.”
His throat so tight it felt like a pair of hands strangled him, Hunter shook his head. “No. I can learn how to live with this by myself.”
The spark of a man used to being in command lit Dr. Royan’s eyes and stiffened his back. “I have the ability to remand you for a mandatory psych evaluation on the grounds that you are a danger to yourself,” he said, his tone low yet striking. “I don’t want to do that. I believe I can help you through outpatient care, and I believe you will succeed at a faster rate outside of confinement. Don’t put yourself in a position where I have to take that other route.” His stare softened, and his mouth lost some of its hard lines. “You’re still a young man, Hunter. Say yes and give yourself the best chance you can for a full life. I know you want one.”
With just the tips of her fingers, Sarah touched Hunter’s arm for the briefest second. “Please.” Her voice cracked on her plea. “Please don’t give up.”
Unable to bear the tears rimming Sarah’s eyes, Hunter cursed and turned back to the doctor. “Fine. We can keep going.”
Dr. Royan nodded, and Hunter noticed he discreetly pumped his fist in victory. “I will be in touch with you very soon.” As he walked away, he called out, “Take care of your hand!”
Before Hunter put the key in the driver’s side door, Sarah took it from him and told him she would do the driving back to Quinten. Hunter didn’t put up a fight. Much as he hadn’t done with Dr. Royan. Just because Hunter had agreed to see the doctor again -- for his sister’s sake -- didn’t mean he believed it would do him any good. He knew it would not. This was how Hunter was supposed to be for the rest of his life. Violent, ugly, and fucked-up. And alone.
