After I Was His

by Amelia Wilde

  There, resting against his palm, is a jagged piece of metal. It’s twisted and torn, maybe four inches long. The sight of it turns the heat of the summer breeze into a desert wind and the hum of distant traffic into the treads of our Humvee against that gravel.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “It’s the answer.” There’s wonder in Powell’s voice. He sounds like Afghanistan was a grand adventure, some kind of epic fucking fairy tale, where we were honorable knights and all of us came home in one piece, with nothing but a few scratches in the armor.

  “The answer to what?” Blood thrums in my ears, competing with the sound of the traffic, and a bead of sweat drips down my back underneath my shirt. I’ve got to get off the sidewalk.

  “To why.” He lets his hand hover in the air for a few more moments, then closes his fist around the strip of metal. The instant it’s out of sight, my lungs release and I take a deep breath, my vision clearing.

  “I don’t believe it.” I take one step to the side. I’m going to shove past the bastard, call Dayton from the corner, and tell him to meet me at the bar. I need a fucking drink. Or several.

  Powell’s hand is a solid stop sign in the center of my chest. “You haven’t let me convince you.”

  “I don’t need convincing. I’m not going to believe it.”

  He moves back in front of me, and I hate with a violent fury how level his gaze his, how self-confident he is. “Why’d your girl leave you, Sullivan?”

  I clench my teeth.

  We face off on the sidewalk.

  “You’re a piece of shit.”

  Powell claps me on the shoulder. “You pick the place. I’ll buy the first round.”

  Macmillan’s is the easiest place to go. Where the hell else am I going to pick? I’m fuming and trying to hide it.

  “Yeah.” Powell leans back in the booth like he’s been here a thousand times. “You do need a beer.”

  “No shit.” I rub both hands over my face and snatch up the list of beers on tap. They all blur together. Powell doesn’t give me the chance to agonize over it. He orders two Sam Adams from the waitress who buzzes by, her ponytail bouncing in the afternoon sunlight coming through the front window, then thinks better of himself. He catches her on the way to the bar and stabs a thumb back over his shoulder at me. She blushes. She blushes red. I throw the drink menu back onto the table and press my palms into the cool surface.

  He comes back to the booth and slides in, looking every bit as relaxed as when we first came in. Nothing bothers this guy. I hate him. And then—I don’t. We spent a lot of hours together on two separate deployments, and there’s something steadying about his attitude. I wouldn’t call him easygoing, exactly, but not a lot rattles him. It’s also infuriating. I’m fucking rattled, and it’s been rolling to a boil since last week.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  I glare at him.

  “Not until the beers come,” he says. “Got it.”

  “Not ever.”

  He spreads both hands open in front of him. “Low risk, buddy. Why’d she leave? I’m assuming she left, by how sad puppy you looked out in front of that office.”

  “You really didn’t have to come here. I’m not looking for any answers.”

  Powell smiles and it looks easy. “That’s the thing about answers. Sometimes they find you.”

  “Stop being a cryptic asshole.”

  “Fine. I’ll go first.” He looks out the front window of the bar—arranging his thoughts? I don’t know—and turns back to me. “I’m sorry for heading off the grid there for a while, man. That was a shitty thing to do.”

  “I’m all grown up, Powell. You don’t have to chase me to New York City every time you get a guilty conscience.”

  “I left to find out more about that incident.”

  “I—”

  He lifts one hand and I bite back the rest of the words on the tip of my tongue. “It didn’t seem right, you know? We spent weeks waiting around for final orders. Even Day was in on the planning. He’d have never driven us right into a known IED.”

  “Lots of IEDs are unknown. That’s the fucking point of them.”

  “But this one shouldn’t have been.” Powell’s eyes focus on a spot in the distance, then come back to meet mine. “It shouldn’t have been. You remember that outpost.”

  I’ll never fucking forget that little village, tucked up next to the mountains like a kid tucked under his mother’s arm. They’d been completely fucked over by an insurgent group there, and the people were in an impossible situation. Get too buddy-buddy with the Americans, and the insurgents would make them pay for it. Trade help for their lives, and they’d pay for it. We were going to flush out the last of the insurgents. They were supposed to be the last.

  “Get to the point.” I taste the grit in my mouth and wish the beers would hurry up and get here.

  “They were focused on minimizing casualties. That’s what made the whole thing ring false to me.”

  “What does it matter, Powell?” My head throbs. “What the fuck does it matter if it rang false? It happened.” It happened, and I can still hear Dayton screaming, right now.

  The waitress thunks down a beer in front of me and I grab it like a life preserver. One swig doesn’t clear the grit from my teeth, but the second one does.

  Powell watches me, waiting, maddeningly patient. “Doesn’t it feel like a ring around your neck?”

  As if in answer, the knot at the base of my skull throbs. “What about it? It was four seconds in the course of four deployments—”

  “There’s nobody else here, Sullivan. Cut the bullshit.”

  I don’t want to admit it to him, but I’m a husk of a man. My skin offers no protection from the elements. My heart aches. “Fine. It does.”

  “You were driving. Your best friend planned the mission. It could have gone worse. God knows that. I’ve lain awake enough nights because of how close it came.” He looks into his beer. “The heat of it.”

  I can feel it scorching my skin, even now. “I know all of this, Powell. The point. The point.”

  “I had to know what was at the heart of it.” He breathes in through his nose and I swear to God, everyone in Macmillan’s is looking at us. “There’s some stuff that’s random, and some that’s avoidable. I wanted to know which one it was.”

  “Are you always this fucking irritating?” I take another drink of my beer. “Seriously, Powell, I’d rather eat alone if you’re going to string me along like this.”

  “It wasn’t avoidable, but it also wasn’t random.”

  I stare him down. The man digs into his backpack again, pulling out the shrapnel. My throat closes.

  “It was a different group of insurgents. You’ve heard about them on TV, yeah?”

  I don’t watch the news much anymore, but this is a semantic difference, so I nod. Of course I’ve seen about the new groups rising in the Middle East. We couldn’t even stamp out the one we went there for. It’s like a hydra. Unlimited heads.

  “This was a new one of theirs. Slimmer tech, and they planted it after the scouts came and went.”

  I close my eyes and search the memory. “Couldn’t have. There were no marks. Not that I—”

  “There were no marks because it was smaller than the other shit. It was thinner. They didn’t dig up the ground to bury it—they cut a layer off the top of the earth and put it right back down where it was. You didn’t miss it, man. And neither did Day, or the guys on the team that assessed the area. You were driving blind.”

  I can’t speak, so I drink my beer instead.

  Powell drops the shrapnel back into his bag and closes it with a practiced finality. “That’s what I came here to tell you. I wanted to show it to you before we parted ways.”

  I clear my throat. It’s fucking difficult. “How’d you—” Powell raises his eyebrows, a little gleeful. “You’re not supposed to have that. That’s—”

  “I spent some time asking questions. I spent so
me time looking. Effort. Results. All that.”

  “Can I see it again?”

  He doesn’t hesitate. He opens his bag, pulls it out, and drops it into my palm.

  It’s surprisingly light, for a piece of the thing that almost killed me.

  All this time, I thought I was the one who pulled it out of the earth, who set the thing in motion that took Dayton’s leg and my sanity, and Powell’s ability to stay grounded in a fucking city like an adult. It was the same, in my mind, as putting it there in the first place.

  “You had nothing to do with that,” Powell says, and leans back to let the waitress deliver our burgers.

  I hand it back to him in silence.

  “You can hold the wheel as tight as you want.” He adds ketchup and stacks on the pickles from the bed of lettuce and tomatoes on the side of his plate. “Sometimes, you still get blown up.”

  29

  Whitney

  “Aren’t you, like, three days out from opening night? I thought you’d be booked solid.”

  Summer glows in the seat across from me at Vino, wearing her favorite summer halter top. She looks damn good, even though I can tell she did her makeup in a hurry. In her defense, I only called her forty minutes ago and begged pathetically for a girls’ night out. Or a girls’ two hours out. Whatever she could spare.

  The wine is delicious, sweet and sparkling, and I try to throw myself into it without success. “I kicked ass at rehearsal today. Bargained for an early morning tomorrow instead of a late night tonight. How’s January and Day?”

  “Oh, she’s been asleep since eight and he’s tucked on the couch with a beer, so I’d say they’re living their best life. What about you? Did you miss me? That chicken pot pie bake was amazing, by the way.”

  “Yes. I only wish my life was as successful as the chicken pot pie bake.”

  Summer raises her eyebrow. “I’d say you’re being dramatic, but you’re always a little dramatic, and this actually seems...serious.”

  God, this is mortifying. I twist the stem of my wine glass in my fingers. Should I really have asked Summer here? She’s Wes’s sister. This is exactly why I never should have touched him in the first place.

  She might be Wes’s sister, but she’s my best friend, so screw it.

  “The show is going really, really well. Rowan thinks there’s enough buzz about opening night that we might get a few new investors in attendance. Maybe a Broadway run in the spring.”

  “That’s so exciting, Whit.” Summer beams at me, but the smile slips off her face as quickly as it rose. “But you look like you found a bug in your wine glass.”

  “Yes, well—” I can’t bring myself to say he dumped me or even I dumped him because what really did happen? A stupid fight? There was no misunderstanding, that’s for sure. We both said things we meant. I only wish now that I hadn’t said them. Some of them anyway. “My personal life has become a barren, soulless wasteland.”

  Summer blinks at me. Processing. Processing. Then it hits. “Oh, my God. You and Wes?”

  I nod mournfully, which fucking sucks, because we’re at Vino and there should be no mourning in this place, unless you really like mourning in wine bars. Not between me and Summer, is what I mean.

  I stare down into my wine glass, wishing there really was a bug in there so I’d have a reason to watch the bubbles rise from the bottom like an idiot. An erratic idiot, if Wes is correct, which, maybe he is. I don’t know. What I do know is that I don’t want to look at Summer. Perfect, honorable Summer. I can’t bear the disappointment in her eyes.

  “Whit, I’m so sorry.” Her tone makes me raise my eyes from the bottom of my glass. There’s no hint of disapproval. It’s pure sympathy. “Listen, I—” She purses her lips, making her mind up about something. “I don’t blame you. At all.”

  “You don’t? It would be reasonable to blame me, you know. Wes does. He blames it on—” I roll my eyes toward the ceiling to keep the tears from spilling out. “I don’t want to relive the whole thing, but he took issue with some of the more...eccentric aspects of my personality.”

  Summer’s mouth curves in a smile. “Like the way you always like to change plans at the last minute?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Yeah.” She shakes her head, her expression settling into a contemplative set. “Day mentioned something like that to me.”

  “That bastard. He was complaining about me behind my back?”

  “No, no, no. Dayton mentioned it on his own. That Wes has had...you know, some issues since he got out of the Army. Even before, I guess. Since...the thing with the Humvee.”

  “Issues that would make him behave like a controlling asshole?”

  “Not that it’s an excuse—I’m not saying that it’s an excuse—but yeah. That kind of thing.” Summer sighs. “Day’s worried about him. He keeps trying to—” She closes her fists around the air. “If he can keep everything under control, nothing like that might happen again. I guess it...boiled over.”

  “Good for him.” It comes out tinged with acid. “He’s getting exactly what he wants. A life he can control completely. It’s too bad I wasn’t like that.”

  “No, it’s not. You’re exactly the person you’re supposed to be.” Summer sips her wine. “Honestly, I loved you guys together.”

  I exhale hard. I’m not crying. Not now. Not at Vino. Not with Summer. “Honestly, I did too. That habit he had of making dinner at the same time every day? I don’t know if that was him or whatever this fucked-up nonsense is—”

  Summer waves a hand in the air. “Oh, he was always organized. The Army brought out more of that in him. And then...maybe too much.”

  The center of my chest is a black hole, all the pain of the world sucked into the center. I sniff. “That’s no way to live.”

  “Sometimes people take it to the opposite extreme.”

  “Summer Sullivan.” I put a hand to my chest and throw my widest, most appalled eyes at her. “Are you taking his side in this catastrophe of lost love?”

  “I’d never take someone’s side over yours.” She takes another delicate, measured sip of her wine and rolls it around her tongue for a moment before she swallows. “All I’m saying is—”

  “Don’t.”

  “All right.”

  She falls silent, watching the comings and goings of Vino as they swirl around our table.

  “I hate when you do that.”

  “Do what?” Summer is the picture of innocence.

  “Listen to me when I’m wrong.”

  She takes a calm, cleansing breath. “You sounded pretty agonized when you called. And not just normal stress, either. Not just show stress. Not audition stress.”

  “I never should have agreed to live with you.”

  “First”—Summer grins—“you asked me to live with you, at the beginning of all this. And second, you know you were a wreck, and that’s why you called me here. And I came. That should count for something.”

  “It does.”

  “You can overcome this, if your heart is broken the wrong way.”

  It’s something Summer’s said to me before—a broken heart the wrong way. There are some broken hearts you have to suffer through, because it’s ultimately the right thing, or something you have to accept.

  I have the horrible, sinking feeling that this is both.

  “I don’t know, Sunny. It all feels wrong. Everything.”

  “Give it a few days,” she says, too wise for the blonde-haired small-town girl she used to be. “Do your show. Then decide. There’s always time to fix things.”

  I nod with her, and we solemnly “cheers” our wine glasses. Then we move on to other things.

  But the truth beats hard in my chest: there’s not always time. I can hear it, even now, ticking away.

  30

  Wes

  Dayton opens the door after a single knock, wearing boxers and a t-shirt. He doesn’t have his leg on. He must have taken the stairs three at a time on one foot
to get here before I knocked a second time.

  “Hey.” He says it as casually as a person can when they’re balanced against a doorframe, running a hand through sleep-disheveled hair.

  “I woke you up.” The guilt balled tightly in the center of my chest is covered in a thick layer of not giving a fuck and giving entirely too many fucks.

  “Yeah, and I’m already down here, so don’t give me that ‘aww shucks’ bullshit and walk away.” He doesn’t ask me what I need. He backs up a step and gestures me inside, then shuts the door gently behind us. “Did you get kicked out of your hotel?”

  “How’d you know about the hotel?” It’s one in the morning, and I’ve been fighting off racing thoughts all night. What the hell did I miss?

  “Your sister, named Summer.” Dayton’s voice is gravelly with sleep and the guilt rises again. Not enough to make me leave, but it’s there, always there, just like that fucking Humvee. “She has a certain level of friendship with—”

  “I never told her I was staying in a hotel.”

  “Hotel, hostel, somewhere else. You’re picky as hell about roommates. Everybody knows that.”

  “Wes? Are you okay?”

  Summer comes down the stairs in bare feet, a soft outfit setting off her hair, which falls loosely around her face.

  “You don’t have to be up for this.”

  “The hell I don’t.” She steps to Day’s side and wraps her arm around his waist like it’s the easiest thing she’s ever done. “You’re practically naked.”

  He looks down at himself. “You’re right. I’m not dressed for the occasion. Be right back.”

  Dayton goes for the stairs and Summer looks at me across the entry hall. “You want a beer?”

  “You really don’t have to—”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. And keep your voice down. January did not want to go to sleep at bedtime.”

  I follow Summer into the kitchen. She grabs three beers from the fridge and motions me out onto the back patio. Their backyard isn’t huge, but it’s got honest-to-God grass, and it’s all theirs. I don’t know how they lucked into this place.