A Soldier's Redemption

by Rachel Lee

  “This is the first time,” he said slowly.

  He felt a ripple pass through her and when he peered at her face in the nearly total dark, he thought he saw a smile. “What’s so funny?”

  “Turn on a light,” she suggested. “I want to see your face, too.”

  Exposure. Confidences were easier in the dark, as he’d learned sitting in an awful lot of hides in alien lands. But he obliged her, turning on the small lamp beside the bed. It was dim, just enough light to read by.

  She was smiling at him with puffy lips and puffy eyes, and he had to admit she looked happier than he’d yet seen her. “Nothing’s funny,” she said in answer to his question. “I just don’t think this is the first time you’ve made love to a woman.”

  “Oh. That isn’t what I meant.” And now he half wished he hadn’t mentioned it at all.

  “Then what?” Her smile slipped away, her gaze grew gentle.

  He hesitated. “First time I ever cuddled after.”

  Her eyes widened, and for an instant she looked as if she didn’t understand. But when she did, something happened on her face that seemed to reach out and touch his heart.

  “Oh, Wade,” she said softly, and all of a sudden her arms wound around him, hanging on tightly, so tightly, and giving him that feeling again. “Oh, Wade, I think that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “No…no, don’t be sad. Be happy. I am.”

  She burrowed her face into his shoulder, and he felt her kiss him there. “You,” she whispered, “are more special than you know.”

  “So are you.”

  She didn’t answer, just tightened her hold on him even more.

  He would have liked to stay there forever, and maybe if he’d been an ordinary guy, he could have done so. But he was a former SEAL, and coded into him now was a mission clock, one that wouldn’t stop ticking. He couldn’t forget reality for long, couldn’t forget there might be a killer out there circling in even now. Couldn’t forget that even alarm systems were little protection against a determined assassin. He ought to know: he’d disabled more than one.

  So finally, feeling as if he were ripping off his own skin, he gave in to the demands of reality. “Let’s take a shower,” he said. A gentle way to ease them back. To stay as they were left them with few defenses. He might not be at a total disadvantage naked, but he couldn’t say the same for Cory. And if they got distracted again—a very tempting possibility—they could miss something important.

  So they showered together, playing games with a bar of soap and a nylon puff that neither had been designed for, but that made them both grin, and elicited some pleasurable sighs.

  He helped towel her dry, then slipped from the bathroom while she worked a bit at her hair. His internal clock and other triggers were beginning to drive him nuts. He’d allowed himself to be off duty for too long.

  A quick check of the alarm showed him nothing amiss, but he crept through the house anyway, once again putting his knife on his belt, donning boots because protecting the feet was so essential. He skipped the shirt, though, as the house was warm enough. Cory would just have to live with the sight of the knife.

  When he was sure the house was still secure, he followed the glow of light to the kitchen and found Cory making coffee. He glanced at the clock. “A little late for coffee. Or maybe awfully early, depending.”

  She shook her head, and when she faced him, he could tell that reality had settled in once again for her, too. All the softness was gone, except, perhaps, for her eyes when they brushed over him.

  Until they came to rest on the knife.

  “I see,” was all she said, and turned her back again, waiting for the coffee. “I didn’t think we’d get much sleep. One way or the other.”

  “No,” he admitted. “Cory, I’m sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing, damn it. It’s not your fault all this is happening. It’s not your fault I’m such a mess. So we took a vacation. At least I did. For a little while I felt normal, I’m not going to apologize for it, and okay, now we face the real world again.”

  “You are normal.”

  “Oh, let’s not get back on that again. Look at what I did today. I freaked out, basically. I totally shut down. Then I took it out on you.”

  Turning, she grabbed two mugs and put them on the table. Then she got out the milk. A burst of steam announced the coffeemaker was pretty much done.

  He watched, feeling an unaccustomed pain in his chest. A few minutes later, when they sat at the table, he spoke again. “Quit feeling bad about what you said to me.”

  “Why shouldn’t I feel bad? I was horrid. I’m surprised you could even want to make love to me after that.”

  This was not good. He didn’t want her to feel this way about herself. Not at all. Not ever. How could he make it clear to her that he really had forgotten what she had said?

  Finally he chose his words with care. “I’ve had a lot of time to develop confidence in myself and who I am. The names don’t stick anymore. I’ve been called far worse. I’m not saying I’m perfect. God knows, that’s the last thing I’d say about myself. But I have had time to build and internalize a lot of confidence over the last twenty years. You haven’t. You got stripped of everything, and now you’ve got a bunch of broken pieces to work with. Of course you’re going to strike out sometimes. But you’ll do just fine. You’ll find a new version of yourself. If anything, I hope you do it better than I did.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Maybe you can get rid of some of the trip wires.”

  At that she laughed unsteadily. “I don’t even know where any of mine are.”

  “Sure you do. You know what makes you uneasy, you know what scares you. You even told me what made you feel threatened.”

  “I did?”

  “Hope,” he said simply. “You’re terrified to hope.”

  Long minutes passed in silence as Cory faced what he was saying. It was as if his simple statement had stripped away everything else and forced her to look at what might be the deepest wound of all. And it hurt. She finally covered her lower face with her hand and closed her eyes. “I used to take hope for granted.”

  “I know. You will again.”

  He sounded so sure, but considering how long she’d been living without it, and how much its reemergence scared her, she wasn’t sure about that. What did she have to hope for, after all? That one morning she’d wake up and discover that her life was free of threat, that she could then take up the strands of the woman she had once been?

  She’d never be that woman again. Ever. And in the murkiness of now, she couldn’t even imagine who she might become if the threat was removed.

  “First,” he said, “it’s little things. Immediate things. Little hopes. Just seeds.”

  “Do you hope?”

  “Hell yeah. I hope for lots of things, some big, some small.”

  “Such as?”

  “I hope I can settle into civilian life at least enough that I’m not a ticking time bomb just waiting to be startled. I hope someday I get past this edginess and stop seeing every shadow as a place of concealment. I hope that I can sleep without waking in a cold sweat from nightmares.”

  “You do that, too?”

  “All the time. Not as much as even a few months ago, but yeah.”

  “Me, too. For a long time I was afraid to sleep.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “For a long time I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sound of a knock.”

  “But it’s better now?”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “You see?” He spread his hands. “Baby steps, Cory. You’ve already started to take them. It’s been my experience, though, that you’ll take a few backward steps along the way.”

  “I think I took a big one today.”

  “No.”

  “No? What do you call what I did? That…that thousand-yard stare you called it. That numbness. That recklessness. Then yelling at you.”

  “The
yelling was you coming back. I’ve seen guys go a lot deeper and stay there a lot longer. You actually had a pretty fast turnaround.”

  “And that’s good?”

  “You bet. There’s a lot of life left in you, Cory. You’re starting to kick the traces of fear and despair. It’ll be rough for a while, but I believe you’ll do it.”

  “I hope so.” Then a little laugh slipped out of her. “I hope so. Listen to me.”

  “Sounds good.” He stirred in the chair, and he seemed to lean forward, toward her. “You may have gone through more healing in the last year than you really realize. I don’t know. I’m no shrink. I can only tell you what I’ve seen, and what I’ve learned from my own experience.”

  “I’m tired of being such a mess all the time.”

  “Tell me about it. But look at you. You’re still here. You’re still trying to deal. You could have quit a long time ago.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No way I can judge. But ask yourself, have you been living in terror every single minute of the last year you’ve been here?”

  She started to say yes, then realized that wasn’t entirely true. Her heart skipped a beat with the understanding, for it surprised her. Maybe what she thought of herself wasn’t exactly true. “At first, yes. But then only when something happened to worry me. I can’t say I spent the whole year in shaking terror.”

  “No, I’d bet most of the time you let it slide to the back of your mind. When nothing threatened you directly, when you were working.”

  She nodded slowly. “That’s true.”

  “So the idea that you spent a year doing nothing but living in terror is your perception. Basically it was the story you told yourself, but maybe not exactly what you were doing.”

  “No, it’s true,” she said, straightening a little. “I’d forget about it. Maybe not for too long at one time, but I did. I had to.”

  “Of course you did. So give yourself a little credit here, Cory. In some pretty awful circumstances, having lost everything that meant anything to you, you managed to function. To hold a job, pay the bills, read books, maybe go to a movie. You kept going. You were probably doing a whole lot better than you thought.”

  “No. No, I wasn’t.” She still remembered all too vividly her many failures. And there were scores of them. Things undone, things unsaid. If she sat down and made a list, she’d hate herself.

  “So sure? You didn’t quit. A lot of people would have. Granted, healing probably would have been easier, maybe even happened faster, if you hadn’t been cut off from everything. But that only makes what you’ve achieved all the more admirable.”

  “I haven’t achieved anything!”

  “Getting through the past year on your own is a huge achievement. Why don’t you count your strengths instead of your weaknesses for a change?”

  That comment drew her up short. Her strengths? She’d been looking at herself for a year as a quivering blob of fear, incapable of answering her own door without peeking out first to see who was there.

  “You went to work, didn’t you? You went to the bank, and the grocery store. You even made a few friends.”

  “Not really. I couldn’t let anyone get too close.”

  “But was that a failing or a reasonable caution given what you went through?”

  She almost wanted to protest that he didn’t know her well enough to guess what she had been like for the past year. And yet, she found herself drawn up short by awareness, a shift of perspective on her own actions and behavior. Yes, she had lived with fear, but not enough fear that it had prevented her from functioning. Not enough that it had kept her locked in this house.

  Going to work hadn’t caused her a nervous breakdown, although she’d never dropped her guard about what she said. Yes, answering her door had been difficult, but considering what had come through her door that night fifteen months ago, maybe it was surprising she could answer a door at all. She’d had dinner a few times with Nate and Marge Tate, with Gage and Emma Dalton. She went to the library regularly, and never considered avoiding it, at least not since the first few weeks.

  Maybe she was confusing heightened caution with terror, at least later. There was no question she had been terrified right after Jim was killed. No question she had been terrified when she had finally been dropped here on her own. But of course she had been. For the first time in months she didn’t have a Marshal at her elbow, had to venture out on her own, pick up the threads of the basic necessities of life.

  And she had done it. Unhappily, with her heart so broken it sometimes seemed too painful to draw a breath, hating it and fearing the unknown that loomed before her as much as the past that might try to follow her. But she had done it.

  “You see?” he said, almost as if he sensed the shift in her. “What happened today has probably happened to you a number of times since your husband was killed. You disconnected because it was too much. The past, the present, all of it converged on you again when you listened to Gage and me talking. So you shut down. That’s an important protective thing. Sometimes it’s the only way we can deal.”

  “You do it, too?”

  “I thought I said so. And God knows I’ve seen enough people do it. You see it in survivors all the time. Survivors of battle, survivors of natural disasters. That’s the thing. It’s like the brain gets so overloaded it just says enough. It can’t deal, so it basically removes you as far as it can. It’s not a failing. It’s not something wrong with a person. It’s survival. It’s only a bad thing when it takes over for too long and too completely.”

  “But you said post-traumatic stress disorder. Isn’t that an illness?”

  “But that’s not what I saw today, Cory. PTSD, yes, but the useful, coping kind. I guess what I’m trying to get at is that after watching you, especially today, I don’t think you’re as bad off as you think.”

  She sighed, letting his words sink in slowly, rearranging her mental and emotional furniture, trying to see herself in a more positive light. The change left her feeling uneasy. Then a new thought occurred to her, one that caused her a pang.

  “Maybe you’re right about survivor guilt.”

  He stirred again. “What do you mean?”

  “It hasn’t been just fear and grief. Maybe I’ve been punishing myself with both of them.” Even as she could accept the emotional logic of that, she didn’t like the idea much. She almost hoped he would deny it.

  “Could be, I suppose. But now you’re getting into shrink territory, and I’ve probably already ventured too far that way. I’m just talking from what I’ve seen and experienced over the years.”

  She turned the idea around in her head, though, weighing it against her emotional response. The Marshals had tried to give her everything she needed to move forward in a safe life. If she looked at the past year honestly, they had succeeded. But she had refused to fully accept the gift. Grieving had been one thing. Even some initial fear at being on her own. But at some point had she started using fear as a way to flagellate herself and limit her options because she was still alive when Jim and her baby were not?

  It was as if doors were finally opening in her mind, giving her a different view than the box she had tried to paint around herself during the past year.

  Plenty of food for thought, and plenty to leave her feeling adrift inside herself. Who was she, actually? And what had she really been doing with herself over the past year? She suspected these new ideas of herself might be closer to the mark than the abbreviated form she had adopted previously. Grief and fear did not begin to explain it all.

  She sighed. “I’ve got a lot of thinking to do. But I’d appreciate it if you would accept my apology for what I said earlier. I’m horrified at myself.”

  “I thought I already had. Apology accepted.”

  “You’re a very kind man.”

  He said nothing for a while, and she wondered if she had offended him somehow. Then he said, an almost rueful note of humor in his voice, “I think I need
to learn how to accept a compliment.”

  “Does it bother you that I said you’re kind?” How awful if it did, because he had certainly been kind to her, kinder than she had any right to expect.

  He answered, still sounding rueful. “My mind is trying to remind me of all the times I wasn’t kind.”

  At that a forlorn little laugh escaped her. “Yeah, the way I’m sitting here remembering all the ways I wasted the last year. All the things I could have done but didn’t.”

  “I’ll cut myself some slack if you will.”

  “Deal.” But was it? Could she really see herself through his eyes, rather than her own? He certainly made a compelling case for a Cory who had acted the way most people would after what she had been through, rather than the Cory she had talked herself into thinking she was.

  Then she asked a question that she knew was freighted with baggage. But it was a question that needed an answer because it might help her plant one of those seeds of hope he had talked about, give her something to hang on to.

  “Wade?”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell me just one little hope you have right now. Just one little thing, not the big things.”

  She watched as his face started to freeze, but before he could turn completely to stone again, she watched him relax his expression muscle by muscle. For a full minute, he didn’t say anything.

  “Wade?”

  “I hope that you’ll hug me again sometime,” he said finally.

  He couldn’t have sent a surer shaft straight into her heart. Aching for him, for his isolation and loneliness, she rose and rounded the table. He pushed back as if to rise, but before he could she slid onto his lap and wrapped her arms around him tightly.

  “I hope,” she whispered tremulously, “that you’ll let me hug you again lots of times. It feels so good to me.”

  He wrapped his arms snugly around her in answer. “Anytime, Cory. Anytime.”

  The skin-crawling sensation came back, possibly because he’d gone AWOL for a few hours. Or it returned because he sensed something internally. Some inner clock was ticking, counting out the minutes and hours it would take for the killer to respond if he had identified Cory.