by Rachel Lee
A gunshot cracked through the air.
Lucas dove for cover under the bleachers. Anxiety exploded in his chest as if he’d taken a hit. Visions of vehicles thrown in the air in balls of fire and flashes of body parts flying and soldiers dying, released the dam and every last drop of adrenaline he possessed rushed out. He squinted his eyes tightly and tried not to go there, but he got thrown back into the middle of hell anyway. He had to get hold of himself. He had to assess the situation and see how to be useful for his men. Another gunshot. He had to take stock of how many injured soldiers needed his help and triage them. He had to quit shaking.
A crowd gasped, and screams and shouts filled his ears. The flashback faded and little by little he repossessed the moment.
“Coach Grady, come quick!” Brandon’s eyes were wide, his face ashen gray again.
Lucas’s vision spun in dizzy waves as he looked up.
What the hell was he doing eating dirt under the bleachers? It was only a track meet. They fired blanks to start the races. Heat burned up his face. How could he explain what had happened? How could he face anyone?
“Ricardo broke his arm! The bone is sticking out and everything,” Brandon continued, oblivious to the fact that Lucas was on the ground under the bleachers.
Having something to focus on other than bad memories, Lucas got to his knees, then stood and dusted off his jeans. He trotted toward the crowd, realizing everyone was focused on one athlete, not him.
He locked eyes with Jocelyn, who looked startled. Of course she’d look concerned: the track meet had only just started and a runner was down. She probably didn’t have a clue that he’d just time traveled eight thousand miles to Afghanistan.
Lucas worked his way into the crowd toward Ricardo. Whoa! The kid had a ragged-edged bone protruding through a tear in his skin, otherwise known as a compound fracture of the right arm. It was an ugly sight and probably hurt like hell.
“Has anyone called an ambulance?” Lucas asked, dusting off his hands, quelling his internal trembles and accepting the first aid kit from another coach.
“They’re on their way.”
As Lucas opened the kit and used the hand sanitizer, he glanced around and realized this kid had only made it over the first hurdle before face-planting on the rough red Tartan track. Tough luck. Tough next six weeks, too, after surgery, which would include pins and plates to put the bones back in place. Just like his dad had gone through a month ago.
Knowing the EMT was on the way, Lucas cleaned the wound, gently wrapped it in gauze and splinted the arm with the small padded boards provided in the first aid kit to protect the break and save Ricardo from additional pain.
* * *
That evening, Lucas couldn’t shake the blood-and-guts images popping into his head. He’d avoided being around his parents, knowing they’d catch on that something was bothering him and ask a bunch of questions. He’d jerked and flinched each and every time the starting gun fired at the track meet, even when he’d warned himself. A montage of bloody bones and flesh injuries looped through his mind, buddies covered in blood, dirt and soot, the kid’s radius protruding through his skin. Gunfire.
He could take one of the pills the army doc had prescribed, but it would make him feel like a zombie, then put him to sleep, and tomorrow he’d have to face the same facts.
Rubbing his chest, he put on his running shoes and jogged toward the front door.
“Where’re you going?” his mother called out from the kitchen.
“For a run.”
He quickly stretched his thighs and hamstrings using the huge pine tree in his front yard, then set off at a slow jog, waiting for his muscles to warm up so he could sprint away the tightening coils of anxiety in his chest. If necessary, he’d run until it seared every muscle in his body. He’d run until he was so damn tired, he’d have to use all his energy and every bit of his concentration to limp home.
Eyes straight ahead, shoes thumping on the cement, emptying his mind, he focused only on what was ahead, putting one foot in front of the other.
“Wait up!”
He glanced over his shoulder, seeing Jocelyn sprinting to catch him. He wanted to be alone but couldn’t very well run away from her. Grinding his teeth he slowed down and let her catch up.
“Mind if I tag along?”
Yes. He did mind, but what could he do? “Are you kidding—you’ll probably outrun me.”
They ran on in companionable silence for the next block, and Lucas hoped it would stay like that. No way was he going to start a conversation that he knew would lead to having to explain why he dove for cover. Unless she hadn’t seen him.
Wishful thinking.
“I can’t get Ricardo’s broken arm out of my head,” she said, not even out of breath.
“Yeah, it was a nasty break.”
“I checked with the hospital and he’s already had surgery. Everything should be fine.”
“Good.”
The long street was lined with ash trees that formed a pale green canopy overhead. A grand gnarled oak sat like a sentry at the corner.
A few minutes later they ran past the neighborhood grammar school they’d attended together, the one where Lucas’s mother still taught. Man, nothing had changed except the color. The flat, fifties-style cubes used to be gray, and now they were beige. And the sign out front had a computerized running message in neon red instead of the old white-lettered announcements hand-placed by the vice principal.
“Let’s go up here.” Jocelyn pointed up a street dotted with pines that ended at the base of the nearby hills. She matched him stride for stride and never seemed out of breath. Impressive.
With each block they covered, the knot in his chest slipped looser and looser. He liked listening to Jocelyn breathe and catching whiffs of her shampoo or whatever it was that reminded him of Rice Krispies Treats. She’d challenged him up the hill and he wasn’t about to concede defeat, especially after humiliating himself earlier today. A guy’s manhood could only take so much embarrassment for one day.
“You want to talk about it?” she asked, edging ahead of him.
“Nope.” He knew exactly what she meant, and he wasn’t about to give her kudos for slyly introducing the subject.
She slowed down, let the topic lie for a few more strides. “I was focused on the race starting, but I was looking for you. You scared me. The look on your face. It was like you were petrified or something.”
“I had a flashback.”
“A flashback?”
“Comes with the territory. The starting gun set off my PTSD.”
She stopped dead. “You have PTSD?”
“A lot of us do.” He sped up, and she quickly caught him.
“So what do you do about it?”
“Get through it. Let it run its course. Hope it will get better over time.”
She tapped his arm. “I had no idea, Lucas. You’ve seemed just like your old self until today.”
His jaw gripped again. He hadn’t been his old self since he left home. Wasn’t that the point when you left home—to change?
They ran on, onto the dirt path cut along the hills. Wheat-colored grass and mustard plants with tiny yellow flowers covered the expanse. When he was a kid, he used to ride his bike as fast as the wind up here, trying to fly over the makeshift ramps he and Anne set up just to see how being airborne felt. Tonight, his legs felt like cement, but he wasn’t about to let Jocelyn outrun him.
At the halfway point, his chest was burning but in a good way. With the evening breeze smoothing the tension in his face, he glanced at Jocelyn. She’d kept her mouth shut. Something about the way she didn’t push him, and her undemanding wide-open eyes, helped loosen his jaw.
“Sometimes I have terrible dreams. I see guys with their limbs blown off or burned and in agony. Today the gunshot set me off, but sometimes I just fly off the handle for no reason. I used to feel so helpless when all I could do was try to stop the bleeding or dope up one of the soldiers, just
to stop their pain until they could be transported. Depending where we were, sometimes it took forever to get them transferred to the MASH units.” He glanced at her as those pretty brown eyes stared straight ahead, as if she knew if she made a peep he would shut up, and she didn’t want him to. Well, she’d asked for it, and he would lay it all out there. Maybe then she’d get the point and leave him alone.
“Sometimes I want to beat my fists against the wall and yell because I can’t take it anymore.” He punched the air like a boxer prepping for a match. Was she scared yet?
She kept running by his side, gently watching him, leaving the conversation completely up to him.
“I’ve been thinking about reenlisting so I can go back where my hair-trigger reflexes make sense. I don’t fit here in sleepy little Whispering Oaks anymore.”
He noted a twist of her eyebrow and her mouth shut tighter, yet she still didn’t utter a sound.
They ran back down their street, four feet beating the cement in syncopated rhythm. The sound soothed him. He glanced at her and saw the look she’d tried so nobly to hide, the look he didn’t want to be responsible for. “All I do is worry people here.”
They ran the rest of the way home in silence. He had to admit he felt like he’d hurled a brick load off his chest by opening up to someone who wasn’t a shrink. He knew his parents wouldn’t understand, and he didn’t expect Anne to, either, but Jocelyn was different. He was broken, and he had finally admitted it to her out loud.
They came to a stop in front of his house, both sucking in air and sweating. It felt good. Cleansing. He needed the outlet and, not surprisingly, he liked her company. She’d helped him purge his thoughts. Maybe saying “I have PTSD” aloud would help make the condition go away.
If only it were that easy.
He leaned against the pine tree, a rueful smile twisting his lips. “You sure you want me to help with that fund-raiser? A balloon may pop and I might freak out on you or something.” He tried to use humor, but it fell flat.
From nowhere her cool hands caressed his cheeks. Jocelyn went up on her toes to buss his lips, catching him by surprise.
“Yes,” she said, gazing into his face. “I still want you to help me with the fund-raiser.” There was a playful glint in her coffee bean-colored eyes. “I also hope you’ll reconsider about reenlisting. Besides, your parents need your help.” With her hands still framing his face, her lashes fluttered downward then back up.
Their gazes met and held in an I-refuse-to-be-the-first-to-look-away contest. He could hear her breathe, and there was that sweet flower bloom and vanilla shampoo scent again.
Chapter Five
Standing in Lucas’s front yard beneath the tall pine, Jocelyn wasn’t about to let him know how much she needed him. The night air sent a chill over her sweat-moistened shoulders. She hoped he didn’t think their quick-as-a-firefly kiss was the reason for the goose bumps. Though it definitely was. She’d given the kiss because he needed to know she cared about him, and honestly, she’d wanted to kiss him since she was six years old. She could hardly call it a kiss—more like a preview.
A kiss with potential.
His coming home had brought back all the good memories she’d let slip from her mind when the relationship with her ex-fiancé had changed. That guys and girls could have fun together. That it was possible to care about someone for years and years, even when they were gone and never tried to get in touch. That there was such a thing as true friendship.
Rick had scarred her toward men. He’d changed in front of her eyes. Given what Lucas had just told her, wouldn’t his circumstances make him a changed man, too?
She really should remove her hands from Lucas’s beard-stubbled cheeks and quit staring into his darkening hazel eyes, but...
Lucas made a quick move for her mouth, covering her lips with his before she knew what he had on his mind. A kiss could really mess up their rediscovered friendship, but man-oh-man, it felt great. His mouth was warm and moist, soft and inviting. And dreamy.
Just as quickly as he’d moved in, he ended the kiss, right when she’d quit resisting and decided she wanted more.
He took a step back, distancing himself. She saw caution in his eyes, as if he were sorry for making a huge mistake. Was smashing lips in the middle of the sidewalk the right thing to do? She thought so, but he’d called the shots on this one.
Lucas had just opened up about his struggles—he’d valued her enough to show his emotional warts. She’d seen the panic in his eyes today as he dove for cover at the track meet. It had taken him four miles and lots of sweat to break down and tell her about his PTSD diagnosis.
He’d opened up to her, then followed it up with a kiss. The least she could do was share something with him. Something from her heart because sex was out of the question so soon after her breakup. Plus, she and Lucas were friends, first and foremost, lifetime friends. She wouldn’t dare disrupt the ecology of their friendship with something as tempting as sex...with the sexiest guy she knew...who happened to be her next-door neighbor.
Feeling flushed, she glanced into his hooded eyes. Damn, he really was appealing, even now with caution written all over his expression. She wanted to touch his lips with her fingertips to see if they still felt warm, but she cleared her throat instead. Fighting to focus, she decided to open up to him. “You know I was engaged for six months, right?”
He gave a slow nod.
She glanced at her beat-up cross trainers then back at him. “My ex, Rick, was a football coach at Marshfield High, the first school where I taught. He liked that I was athletic, and I enjoyed going to all of his games. We started dating, then got serious and he asked me to marry him.”
She looked at her shoes again, waiting for the right words to come, not wanting him to think she’d been a pushover. Lucas had gone back to leaning against the pine tree and drinking the water she’d offered from her runner’s waist pack.
“It was pretty innocent at first. He challenged his team to buff up, and they all worked out together at the local gym several times a week. He got great results, but that wasn’t enough for him, and he started taking steroids.” She paused, remembering. “Within half a year he’d changed drastically—he was humongous. I really didn’t care for the look, but he was totally into it, so I kept my thoughts to myself. Didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”
Bad memories of his twisted face pushing into hers, yelling at her like a drill sergeant, trying to scare her—and doing a damn good job of it—made her draw a shaky breath. She cleared her throat. “He started to bully me.”
Lucas straightened and cocked his head.
“He never hit me or anything, but he pushed me down once. And he scared me. I didn’t know him anymore, and I didn’t like what he’d changed into.”
She saw alarm in Lucas’s on-alert eyes.
“It only took the one push. I broke it off the next day. Got out of that apartment and moved back home.”
Damn it, she really didn’t want her eyes to well up in front of Lucas, but they burned and went bleary anyway. He cupped her arm. She leaned into his hand. “I made a bad choice turning my head to his steroid use and what he’d become, and I got zapped with the consequences.”
She caught his gaze, wise with a history of mistakes, and relaxed into the hazel softness. Of all the people she knew these days, he was the one who could understand.
“Seems to me you made the right choice that day.”
She nodded solemnly and scratched the prickles on her neck. “Only when push came to shove. Literally.” She stared at his broad shoulder because it took too much confidence to look him in the eyes, confidence she was sorely lacking. “I’m scared to death about taking on the head coach position because I’ve failed at so many things I’ve tried to do before.”
“Everybody screws up sometime.” He shrugged and an ironic smile twitched at the corners of his lips. “Hell, look at me. I’m the king of screwing up.”
She laughed and kicked a sma
ll rock, grateful he’d understood.
He moved infinitesimally closer. “You did great today,” he said, his voice soft and solid. “You’ve got what it takes to make it happen. You’re trained. Organized. Easy to work with. You’ve just got to believe in yourself.”
She swallowed and blinked away the moisture. “Ditto, dude.”
He lifted his brows, gave a touché smile and squeezed her arm the teeniest bit tighter.
She chanced a glance, found his dizzying eyes and locked on. “So here’s what I’d like to throw out there,” she said, her voice a bit breathy. “I’d like to be there for you if you ever need to talk, but that doesn’t come without strings.” She stared deeper into his eyes, now shadowed by moonlight and dim stars. “Would you be willing to be my sounding block, too? I mean if I start to panic and feel like I’m sinking or something with all of this stuff going on? Could you be that for me?”
“Your wingman?”
“My backup.”
His hand dropped from her arm. He pushed off from the pine tree and stretched his neck, as if tossing a sudden weight.
* * *
It may have been a major mistake, but damn, it had felt good kissing Jocelyn. He’d done it on reflex because she’d kissed him first. He’d only sampled a taste before Mr. Cota came by walking his dog. No way could he start a relationship these days, and with Jocelyn, the kiss would definitely get blown out of proportion. It was best to nip things in the bud.
How hard was it to listen when a person needed to talk? He’d been doing it for the past hour or so, just the two of them under the night sky, confessing their biggest weaknesses. Even though he’d tried to shut down the conversation with a kiss, they really had opened up to each other. Though it went against his solitary nature, her soft brown eyes compelled him to try to be there when she needed him. At least for as long as he stuck around Whispering Oaks.
“I’ll try, Jocelyn.” He’d never been good at rah-rah dancing for his sisters, either. “That’s the best I can offer right now.”
