After I Was His

by Amelia Wilde

  I press my lips tight, trying to summon the instructions for the pineapple. They’re in Aisle 3. I open my mouth, but what comes out is, “I’m sorry.”

  That’s all.

  I put the basket down on the floor at my feet and leave empty-handed. I walk fast, all the way back to the apartment, trying to outrun it.

  Wes is cooking again.

  Fuck that guy.

  I slam the door behind me and the first sob escapes; a guttural, ugly cry.

  He comes to the door of the kitchen as I’m running past to the bedroom.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Don’t fucking worry about it,” I spit at him.

  “Whitney—”

  In my bedroom, I throw myself across the bed like I’m fifteen years old and cry into the pillow, so hard that it makes my head hurt, so hard that when it’s over, I don’t even turn my head. I just fall asleep.

  A soft knock on the door wakes me.

  What time is it? The bedroom is dusky, the light fading outside the window.

  “Whit?” The way Wes says my name reminds me of Summer. How could it not? They grew up together. They have a lot of similar habits, even if they don’t realize it. The ache in my chest expands again and I breathe it out while I sit up in bed. “Are you awake?”

  “Yeah.” I sound hoarse as balls, and I’m tangled up in my pencil skirt. I’m still trying to figure out how exactly to get it to release my legs when the door opens. Wes stands halfway inside, framed by the soft light from the hallway. “What time is it?”

  “It’s almost eight.” He sticks his hands in his pockets. “I’ve got some extra chicken, if you’re hungry.”

  I want to deny it, but my stomach growls. “I’m having a shitty day.” Damn it. My voice wavered on day and now I’m about to lose it again. Buck up, buttercup. “So if you’re here to fuck with me—”

  “I’m not here to fuck with you. I have dinner, if you’re interested. Thought you might want to—”

  “Want to what?” I feel defensive, crouched back like a cat, even though I’m just sitting here on top of the covers, in a pencil skirt that’s seen better days. “Find somewhere else to eat?”

  Wes laughs, the sound adjacent to kindness. “No. I thought you might want to step into the shower and put on some comfortable clothes. It can’t be comfortable sleeping in those office clothes. Plus, your hair—” He motions around his head.

  I raise a hand to my hair. It’s tangled, somehow, half fallen out of the bun I was wearing it in. “Oh. Right.”

  “I’ll get you a towel.” He disappears back into the hallway and reappears a moment later, a clean towel hanging from his hand. I smile at that. He had to go into the bathroom for it, where I will be going in a matter of moments. Still, it’s almost sweet. “Food’s on the table whenever you’re ready.”

  I toss myself awkwardly out of bed and take the towel. “Why are you doing this?” I’m still half-drunk from sleep and I can’t stop myself from asking the question.

  Wes cocks his head to the side. “You came home in tears. Something’s up. I don’t know what it is, but you could use some food, at least.”

  I am wretched, mean, and small, and embarrassment coats my cheeks with pink. “Why do you care?”

  “Because you’re my roommate,” says Wes, but his eyes say something different. “I’m not that much of a dick.”

  When Wes said chicken, I assumed he meant exactly what he said.

  It’s not that.

  I sit down at a place at the kitchen table and look it over. It’s chicken drenched in what looks like—

  “Is this a red wine sauce?”

  Wes puts a plate of dinner rolls in the center of the table and sits down. “Yeah.”

  “I thought you meant plain chicken.”

  He raises one eyebrow. “Who eats plain chicken?”

  “Men, I thought.”

  Wes takes some food for himself, filling his plate, and I stare at it. There is a vegetable. There are rolls. This is an entire meal.

  “Come on,” he says. “It’ll get cold.”

  It’s good food. Really good food, buttery and sauce-y, and nothing like what I expected. We eat in silence, sitting across from one another, but it doesn’t feel strained. It feels almost normal.

  Until Wes puts his fork down and sighs, as if he’s been holding something in this entire time. “Look. I never say this kind of thing, but if you want to talk about it—”

  A bite of chicken sticks in my throat. I do not want to talk about it, ever, but there’s something about the way he’s looking at me that makes me want to get it out in the open. I’m too tired to lie anyway. “My dad died when I was eighteen.”

  “Oh, shit,” Wes says softly.

  “Yeah.” I stab a butter-soaked carrot with my fork. “We’d been fighting a lot. He was kind of a dick in a lot of ways.” He was. He was volatile and moody, and when his mood was low, things were hard. But when it was high, it was the best ever. “He didn’t think I should go away to college, and we fought about it. I told him to fuck off.” He’d laughed at me. My dad had laughed, a sound of surprise and delight, and it had pissed me off at the time. “He was working a weird shift at that time, and got hit by a drunk driver on his way home.”

  Wes puts a hand to his forehead. “That’s fucking rough.”

  It can’t be nearly as rough as going to war. I know about the incident with the Humvee, but only the vague details… something Summer said in passing once.

  “It still gets to me every year. I try—” I swallow hard. “I try, you know, to remember that life is short, and that it blows to spend it being angry and sad, but some days it’s hard.”

  “Is there anything that makes you feel better?”

  Who is this version of Wes? This version of Wes who cares what the hell I think, how I feel?

  “I tried to get sweet & salty Chex mix and candy at the store, but I failed. Some old lady pushed me over the edge.”

  “Old ladies will do that. Anything else?” His eyes are on mine, gentle, not a hint of the animosity that sometimes flashes there.

  “Watching you eye-grope my bras made me feel better.” My mouth pulls upward in a smile. That was hilarious.

  Wes rolls his eyes. “You’re never going to let me forget that.”

  “I will if you agree to watch a shitty movie with me.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  We take our plates to the couch and Wes lets me pick some obnoxious romcom that lightens my soul. Halfway through, the plates pushed away onto the coffee table, he slips his arm around me. God, it feels good, a comforting weight. There’s no pressure there.

  “Is this the part where we kiss again?” The couple on the screen is playing in the water on some Mexican beach, the woman in a bikini that looks like it could fall off at any moment.

  Wes leans in and silvery anticipation sweeps through my veins, but he only kisses me on the temple. “I don’t fuck around with girls who are going through a bad day.”

  “Oh, but you’ll put your arm around me? Wow, that’s—”

  He tugs at his arm, but I lock my hand around his wrist and pull it back, leaning into the solid warmth of him.

  We stay that way for the rest of the movie, not saying a word.

  14

  Wes

  I’ve never seen her like that before.

  I wake up the next morning still thinking about it—the sorrow in Whitney’s face. A drunk driver? Fuck. That’s the kind of thing nobody can prepare for. I pulled plenty of dumb stuff as a teenager, fought with my parents plenty of times, but it makes my chest feel strange to think about ending things with them on that kind of note.

  I want to kiss the pain away.

  Whitney can be infuriating. That energy of hers, bright and unceasing, gives me a headache if it hits the wrong way. I saw it for what it was last night—an act. I’m sure there’s a layer to it that’s real. I’m sure, deep down, she’s a sunny-as-hell perso
n. I didn’t count on the darkness at the heart of it.

  The sound of the shower permeates my thoughts and I squint at the bedside table. It’s too early. She must be slipping away before I get up. It was intense, last night, sitting that close, gathering her into my side and not doing anything else.

  That’s all it takes to take my morning wood from half-hearted to raging. I could have laid her back on the couch, I could have stripped off those yoga pants, I could have breathed in the scent of her, my face inches from her panties...

  I wait until the apartment door clicks shut to get out of bed.

  I’m not going into work this morning. I have a bullshit appointment at the VA and lunch with Dayton, but something Whitney said last night is still nagging at me. She tried to pull herself out of it—she stopped at the store, but didn’t make it to the checkout.

  That fucking blows. And I’m going to make it right.

  I shower and dress, then walk down to the bodega in the silky morning air. The owner—I can never remember his name—nods at me. What was she talking about? Chex Mix.

  There are about a hundred varieties of Chex Mix, but the one she wanted isn’t there. Oh—wait. No, it’s here, wedged all the way in the bottom corner of the shelf. Sweet & Salty.

  Next on my list: candy.

  She didn’t say what kind, and I linger in the aisle for long enough to get frustrated. Skittles? Sure. A Milky Way? Why not? I grab four candy bars at random. At the end of the aisle, a package of Rolos catches my eye. I swear I’ve seen her eating these. I add it to the stack of things in my hands.

  The apartment is still silent when I open the door, and I’m half-disappointed. It’s good that she felt up to going to work, but I wouldn’t have minded another chance to be near her. I want to be here to see her face when she sees these things and laugh out loud. What am I going to do, hang around here all day waiting, in case she comes home early?

  No. There’s a gravitational pull to stay here, to be close in case she needs me, but even the Earth doesn’t crash into the sun for the love of it.

  There’s a cereal dish in the sink that nags at me. I spend fifteen minutes in the kitchen, moving out toward the living room.

  Everything is tidy. I’m out of excuses.

  I go to the meeting.

  “I don’t have a problem.”

  Dr. O’Connors, who can’t be more than nineteen, raises his eyebrows. “The things you’re describing indicate to me that daily life has become a struggle.”

  I let out an irritated breath. “Daily life is fine since I moved to the city.”

  Except the traffic. Always the traffic. All the prick drivers in the city seem to follow me around every day, running into each other, fender-benders that are so easily avoidable. If they’d look, for five seconds—

  Like a condescending asshole, he flips through his notes. “You’ve mentioned difficulty riding the train.”

  “I walk to work now.” Not that it ever gets me away from the fucking traffic. The cars might as well be in this exam room with us, since this guy won’t let the topic drop.

  “Yes. You’ve become adept at avoiding the kinds of situations that you think might trigger you, but my concern is that the symptoms might find another outlet.”

  I open my mouth and shut it again. Now is not the time to mention the way my head pounds when I get home from work most days. It’s also not the time to mention the way I have to wear headphones on the walk, because the sound of traffic sets me off. It’s the yelling. It’s exactly like that sound after the Humvee hit that IED, when everything was chaos. The longer I listen, the more it blurs into my fellow soldiers. I’m not going to fucking say a word, because then he’ll say that I have—

  “My feeling is that you’re dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. I see you were involved with an incident during one of your deployments that would cause anyone to—”

  I groan out loud. “I don’t have PTSD. These are only thoughts. I was deployed four times.”

  He looks at me over his clipboard, levelly, and then continues on as if I haven’t said a thing. “I’m recommending a course of anti-anxiety medications and talk therapy. We can begin with something low-dose and see if—”

  “No.” No way. Not a fucking chance. I’m not taking pills. I don’t have PTSD. I have memories, like every other human being on the planet. “I’m not taking pills. You can stop writing that down right now, because I’m never going to do it.”

  “Fine.” He keeps writing. “I’m referring you to a very well-regarded psychologist in the building. In fact”—O’Connors swivels on his little black stool to the computer in the corner of the room—”she has an opening for next Wednesday. It is now yours. The appointment will last about an hour.”

  “Great.” I stand up. “Is there anything else?” My heart rockets against my rib cage. I’m not going to this fucking appointment. I’m not going to talk about what happened in the Humvee. If they want to know what happened, they can look up my official records. That’s the end of that. I’m not going back there. I’m not.

  O’Connors blinks up at me. “Do you have any other concerns?”

  “Not a single thing,” I tell him, and then I turn my back and leave.

  “That little prick at the VA is too much,” I tell Dayton over burgers. He picked this place. It looked fancier than it is, but the food is good, so I haven’t given him too much shit about his high-class ways.

  “Did you have a thing today?”

  “Yeah.” I sigh and take another bite of my burger. “It was bullshit. As usual. But what the hell else am I supposed to do?” Day knows what I’m talking about. The appointments at the VA take forever to set up. Miss one and you’re back in a quagmire of red tape. I have no idea how he skirted all of it, because I know he wasn’t showing up regularly when he got his leg fixed.

  “Dr. Peterson?”

  “O’Connors. God. That guy has a head bigger than the continental U.S.”

  Dayton laughs. “He’s not so bad. Got on my nerves too, until I got over myself.”

  Dayton—he’s the one who came out of this with a real injury. He’s the one who lost his left leg below the knee. I’m not going to go cry to some shrink over the fact that I made it through four deployments with scratches and bruises that have long since faded.

  “I don’t want anything to do with it.” I swirl a fry around in a puddle of ketchup. “Screw it.”

  I can feel Dayton looking at me across the table. He’s been my best friend since we were kids, so I know he’s giving me that stare, trying to figure out what’s going on in my head. I eat another fry and refuse to look at him. By the time I glance up, his attention is back on his burger. “It’s not that bad,” he says lightly.

  “What’s not?”

  “The talk therapy bull,” he says. “It’s really cut down on some of the things that were bothering me.”

  He waves vaguely around his head. I don’t have to ask what he means. I know about the nightmares. Fuck, everyone does. There’s not a single man I know who’s come back from combat without dreams that make the sheets seem like they’re trying to suffocate you. It’s the cost of doing business.

  I take a bite of burger, chew it, swallow. They’re good here, thick and juicy and solid, and after all that bullshit at the appointment, it’s what I need to ground me.

  “That’s good,” I admit. “But you’re the only one who came back with a problem.”

  Day eyes me across the table, hands wrapped around the remaining half of his burger. “Not likely.”

  I look right back at him. “I still have both my legs.”

  “You were in the Humvee, same as I was.” There’s more than one meaning here, but he’s being as stubborn as O’Connors. I don’t have a problem. Everybody I know wants to tell me I have a problem, but I don’t. I went to Summer’s wedding, for God’s sake. I got a job in the city. I’m doing everything they wanted me to do. Who the fuck cares if I walk to work, the music turned up loud?r />
  I roll my eyes, an exaggerated move calculated to make Dayton laugh, and it works. “You’re not going to convince me I’m crazy.”

  He grins back at me. “I don’t have to convince you or anybody else of that. I know you’re crazy. I’ve known you since we did Midnight at Suicide Mountain.”

  I laugh out loud. “That was more a risk than the Humvee.”

  I’d forgotten about Midnight at Suicide Mountain, an ill-advised film Day and I shot on an old-ass camera we found in his dad’s basement. We went to Suicide Hill behind the school in the middle of the night one winter, lit some cheap sparklers left over from the Fourth of July, and went down on saucers, blind into the night. Could have broken our necks.

  “See? Who needs more proof than that? You should let O’Connors know you’ve always been that stupid.”

  “Sure. If I see him again, which I won’t, knowing how the VA works. They’ll call me up sometime next year, wondering where I went.”

  “I like the leg they got for me,” says Day, digging into his fries.

  “They only gave back what they took in the first place,” I say in a mock-serious voice.

  He opens his mouth to say something but outside the window, twenty feet away, a guy runs out into the street in front of a yellow cab. I see a flash of his red coat, turn my head, and there’s that metal-on-metal screech. The impact comes a second later—a delivery truck, beat up as hell, running into the cab. Neither of them is going fast but I hear it, the crunch, as it reverberates through the restaurant window. The Humvee lifts up under my hands, the heat blooming through the underside, and there’s a second of silence before Dayton screams, an ugly, strangled thing. I’m drenched in sweat. It’s a spring day but there’s desert heat whipping in past the glass, gritty and stinking with fear and sweat.

  “—for a beer? Wes? Wes.”

  I turn my head away from the scene in front of my eyes and back toward Dayton. He looks at me with narrowed eyes, one hand on the surface of the table, mid-reach. A surge of anger rises, covering the fear, blocking it out. “Yeah? Jesus. What? I heard you.”