by Snow Novels
His commander had called him in the last three days and left a message, wanting to know how he'd gotten on with his shrink. Dean ignored it. Brooke had called too. Twice. He replayed her messages over and over, using her voice as a security blanket to help get him out of bed and open a window. The day was warm and sunny. Almost too sunny, but he hadn't been out since his meeting with Brooke, so he grabbed some Aviator glasses and hopped on his Harley.
There was nothing like the open road for breaking down the chains that held you. He cruised up and down Lakeview Avenue, wondering why they called it that when he'd never been able to find a lake anywhere nearby. At Spencer and Grayle he turned right, thinking maybe he'd stop at the store and pick up some frozen dinners, and there he saw her—Sara Rivers.
Several things happened at once. Dean stopped so suddenly on his motorcycle the car behind him had to swerve or hit him; his head went light and the air around him turned to a shade of white that he didn't think was normal unless you were about to faint; and Sara kicked the flat tire that was the obvious reason her and her kids were stopped on the side of the road. She looked up and around, pleading for help with her eyes. Dean slunk back, hoping she'd somehow missed him.
Sara. The memory slipped in too fast for him to try and stop it. It was still too new, still too powerful.
Mike's hands clawed at Dean's face. His head was covered in blood that dribbled down his cheek and onto Dean's hands as he held Mike, cradling in his arms like a dying child. Dean was crying.
"Don't," Mike said. "Not your fault. All me this time."
Dean nodded but said nothing.
"Promise me you'll look after her. Sara and the kids. They're the one thing in this world that I did right."
Then Mike's eyes had turned solid and cold until Dean had closed them and laid his best friend on the dirt, covering him with sand before walking to the nearest base and saving himself. The only one in the unit to survive.
Dean blinked and realized he was still standing on the side of the road with his cruiser. He watched Sara pull the tire iron out of the trunk. One of their kids, he thought it was Matt, got out of the car and started chasing his little sister, who was trying to hide behind a bush. Sara pulled him out of the road just as a car came around the curve. For a moment, her eyes fell on Dean, but then they flickered past him so fast Dean thought she must've missed him after all and counted himself lucky.
He got back on his Harley and kicked it into gear, riding off in the opposite direction from Sara and her children. His gut screamed for him to turn around, to get back there and help Mike's family like he'd promised he would. But Dean reminded himself that his gut had failed him the day Mike died. That day, his gut had been silent. He told his gut to go fuck itself and headed for the first bar he could find.
It was early, but not so early the place wasn't crowded with drunks and tough guys. Dean picked one at random—a bad ass guy big as a house with a shaved head and gang tattoos—walked up to him, and when the guy turned around Dean punched him in the jaw. The guy jumped back up with his fists flying. His friends jumped in, and together they trounced Dean.
Chapter 6
Brooke pushed the button on her stereo and Frank Sinatra started crooning about love and girls and the heartache of it all. She snapped the stereo back off. No need to put herself through the torturous cries of the lovelorn. She barely knew Dean. It wasn't love until you'd been through thick and thin together, as her father used to say.
She opened another box labeled "KITCHEN" and was surprised to find pictures of her brothers and father inside. That must've been one of her "leftover" boxes. The ones she'd crammed full of everything still lingering around her old apartment about ten minutes before the movers showed up. She took a big sip of her homemade martini and pulled the hammer from the drawer, hanging them all together over her newly painted walls.
Moving was both fun and exhausting. She hated packing and unpacking, but it was always fun to pull your things out again, put them in a whole new arrangement in a whole new room, and have it immediately feel like home. She'd learned long ago—somewhere after her fifth move but before her twenty-fifth—that home was where the love was, not necessarily where you laid your head. With the memories and mementos of her family nearby, she was always home.
She looked at the picture of her big brother Eric. He'd been so young when he was killed in Afghanistan. Only twenty. It seemed like yesterday to her, but that was ten years ago now. She'd still been in high school.
She saw him in his navy uniform, looking so handsome, and an image of Dean flashed through her mind. She'd called and left some messages, but Dean wasn't interested in getting help. Her younger brothers and father hadn't been very interested in it either, until after their mother took too many sleeping pills and barely made it to the hospital still breathing. Initially, she' said it was an accident. Then one day, after she was released, she'd confessed that she couldn't bear to go on without her son. She simply didn't know how to cope.
Then they'd all gotten help. The military psychiatrist her father arranged for them to see had transformed her family after Eric's death. She knew she could do the same for Dean if only he'd open up just a little.
She sunk into the new recliner she'd gotten and pulled Dean's file from her briefcase. It was a sad story. They always were. Five men dead, including Dean's best friend. Strange circumstances no one seemed particularly clear on, including Dean's commanders. Ambush was likely. They'd found enough of the enemy dead amongst Dean's unit to establish that much, but still... How had Dean managed to get out when everyone else had perished? Green Berets weren't easy to kill.
The pictures in his file showed Dean at eighteen, a new cadet, young and full of life. The Dean she'd met at the pool hall was a different man. Not yet thirty, but already run down by circumstances beyond his control. Her phone rang and Brooke jumped, almost knocking over her drink.
"Hey honey," her father said when she finally got the phone to her ear.
"Dad!" Some people thought her father was scary, but Brooke had only ever felt safe around him.
"Just wanted to see how your first week was shaping up."
She sighed. She couldn't tell her dad about Dean. Well, not exactly. "I've got a client. A pretty tough one..."
"Tougher than you?"
She giggled. "I'd have to say yes. Won't say one word to me about what he's going through."
She heard her father take a breath. "Seen a lot of action, has he?"
"More than most, I think. Special Ops."
Her father gave that soft sigh of his she loved that said he understood completely. He was the only one who could.
"Music," he said.
"What? Music?"
"Yes. Put some music on in your office and just talk to him. Not like a doctor, like a friend or a date. Does that sound strange?"
She thought about it. Music and mood so frequently went together. "I suppose not." She didn't want to comment on the "date" part of her father's advice.
"How are things with you and Mom?"
"Oh, you know. Eric's anniversary is coming up soon. But she'll be okay. She always pulls through."
"Only because she has you."
She could swear she heard him smile. His voice was tough but his words were soft, "Thick and thin, you know?"
She looked back at the picture of Dean that lay flat in her hand, and thought, for the first time, that maybe she knew exactly what her father meant.
Chapter 7
Dean sat in the waiting room at Brooke's office, wondering what he was doing here. A mirror hung opposite him on the wall, and he thought the black eye and cuts were pretty indicative of the reasons he was back.
Brooke opened the door. He registered the shock on her face when she saw his bruises, but she concealed it so quickly that if he hadn't been looking he would've missed it. Her low cut blouse revealed cleavage he'd barely gotten a chance to savor that night, and he wished, not for the first time, that he had a time machine. H
e wondered how she could stand being so sexy, or was she one of those women who wasn't even aware that the shape of her body, with its curves and its swagger, was appealing to men.
"Hello, Mr. Asher. Nice to see you again. Won't you step inside please?" She was trying too hard to sound professional, and Dean found it irritating and cute at the same time. If she had to try that hard, he must've really gotten to her.
Inside the office she closed the door. Dean thought about going right in for the kiss, but he didn't want to piss her off. He wanted her bad, but there was more to it than that. The time he spent around her was the only time he didn't spend thinking about Mike.
"So you're back," she said, reclining in her chair. He put his feet up on the coffee table, thinking the nonchalance of the gesture gave him a James Dean-esque quality, but Brooke scowled and he quickly withdrew his feet.
"So," she said, clearly thinking her words through carefully. "Did you become the new heavyweight champion of the world in the last few days?"
It took him a minute to catch on, then he grinned. "You mean my face." She nodded. "Yeah, well... if I can't fight in Afghanistan, I've gotta fight somewhere."
"There's a big difference between a bar brawl and a war," she said. He shrugged his shoulders. She looked so cute when she was frustrated, he decided to make things more difficult for her.
"You know I can help you get back to Afghanistan, if that's what you really want. You just need to talk to me."
He leaned forward. "I'll talk to you about anything you want, so long as you're naked and laying in my arms." He saw her cheeks flush and knew his charm was working. "Under me, over me, doesn't matter, as long as—"
Elvis Presley jumped out of a stereo he hadn't noticed on her desk till just now. He was irritated for a second, then cracked into a smile when she held her arms out and signaled for him to come dance.
"Why doctor," he teased, getting up, delighted at this change in her. "This is highly unprofessional."
"Sometimes drastic measures need to be taken. There's a condition though." He hesitated, but didn't stop advancing towards her. "For each song we dance, you've got to answer one question."
He lingered over that notion for a second, but her body began to wriggle and her hair began to whip around. "Sure," he said. "Why not. One song, one question."
It reminded him of that night at Tuttle's, before they'd gone outside and had the quickie that he now wished had lasted longer than passing periods between school bells.
"What happened to your face?" she asked. He spun her around her office. Her skin was satin and almost glowed in the sun that still poured through her windows.
"I picked a fight with someone."
"Why?"
"Uh uh, that's two questions." She rolled her eyes but said no more. The next song started. It was a slow sixties tune and she put her arms around his neck. He could smell her perfume, and then realized it was just the natural scent of her skin. "I was upset," he said. "I wanted... I wanted to..." He felt himself opening up and tried to stop it, but it was nice to be with someone he trusted."I don't deserve to be alive right now."
They were hard words to say, but it was the truth.
"You feel guilty about your unit's deaths? About Mike's death?"
He nodded.
"What happened over there? Were you ambushed? How did you make it out?"
Suddenly his eyes turned gray and he pulled back from Brooke, his face turning red.
"Dean, it's okay. I'm sorry." But it was too late. She'd pushed too far. What right did she have? He'd known this was gonna happen. Dean felt the rage swell in him and the music, still playing, hurt his ears now.
"Shut it off!" he screamed, then wiped his hand over Brooke's desk and smashed the stereo on the floor before running from the room.
Chapter 8
Brooke stepped into Captain Wallace's office and took the seat offered her. She'd been in offices like this many times in her life. They all looked the same. Drab carpeting with a billion pictures of the Captain with various army buddies on the walls, maybe even the president.
"So," Captain Wallace said. "I presume this is about Dean Asher. How's it going? Do you think he'll be able to return to duty soon?"
She hesitated. As a therapist, she couldn't just share information, but then, she had relatively no information to share.
"Sir, I'm afraid that Dean... Mr. Asher... is proving rather difficult. I was hoping you could tell me a bit more about him. About what happened in Afghanistan."
Captain Wallace rubbed his eyes and sighed. "You've read his file?"
"Yes, but it's a bit vague on the exact circumstances surrounding his unit's death."
"That's because our information is vague. They were ambushed. We know that. Too many enemies lying dead not to have been an ambush. What we don't know is how Dean made it out of there."
"You're not suggesting something..." she searched her memory bank for the right word. "Something not becoming an officer?"
He shook his head. "I don't really know what I'm suggesting. There's rumors, but in my experience the truth is usually the exact opposite of the rumors."
"What rumors?" she asked. She pictured Dean in Afghanistan, his friends dead around him. The enemy attacking. It made her blood run cold.
"Nonsense, mostly. About Dean striking some sort of deal to get out with his life."
"What? A deal with the enemy?"
Captain Wallace shook his head. "It's not true." He hesitated."But since he got back, Dean's been, well, acting out."
Brooke remembered Dean's bruised face, his temper tantrum as he'd smashed her stereo just when she was starting to make progress. She also remembered his strong hands pressing against her back and the stubble of his skin as he pressed his cheek to hers.
"Thank you Captain," she said, rising and extending her hand.
"Give my regards to your father next time you see him, will you?"
"Of course."
Brooke sometimes forgot that in the course of his career, her father had met just about every high ranking official in the army. It crossed her mind briefly that he might have actually met Dean. Her father was semi-retired now, but still made the rounds. Special Ops had always been a particular favorite of his.
Brooke got on her Harley and headed back to her office, wondering why she should care so much about this guy. She'd never met a military man before that could catch her eye, why now? Why Dean? His outburst the other day had scared her. Not so much because she thought he might hurt her, but because it had muddied her thoughts on him. Now, on her Harley, she was able to think clearly again.
It was true that Dean was acting out, but that didn't mean he was so far gone he'd made secret enemy deals. She had to find out how he'd gotten away. How he'd survived when his unit hadn't.It was almost impossible to think around him though, especially the way he kept suggesting things... inviting her to do things with him that she longed to do but couldn't because of their relationship. The dancing had almost worked. What might she find out about him if she was willing to give just a little more?
She pushed the thought from her mind. She was a psychiatrist, not a prostitute. Still... no matter how dirty or wrong it may have been, she couldn't get the idea of her and Dean together out of her head.
Chapter 9
The knock on Dean's door forced his eyes out of the alcohol induced fog he'd been sitting in. He walked slowly towards it, watching his steps. He was pretty drunk. He still couldn't believe the way he'd flipped out in Brooke's office the other day. He had to get a better grip on things or else he'd never get back to work. He opened the door and wished he'd remembered to use the peep hole first. Sara stood there, a box in her arms, a scowl on her face.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey."
They stood staring at each other for what felt like an eternity. Finally, she flung the box at him. He caught it and stumbled backwards. "There," she said, her face dark. "It's some of Mike's stuff. I've been holding it for you. Tho
ught you might want it." She laughed, but it was choked with tears. "Not that you care much about him or us, I guess. But still, I think he'd want you to have it."
She turned abruptly on her heels and started back down his hall towards the elevator. "What does that mean?" he yelled, going after her. She was pushing the button to call the elevator up.
"You know exactly what I mean," she snarled at him. "How could you just walk away like that? I know you saw me the other day. What? You forget how to fix a flat?"
Dean's face went white. "I..." but he had nothing worth saying. There was no explanation for the way he'd treated her. He just couldn't face her, but he couldn't tell her why. He let her step into the elevator, her face wet, and stood there a long moment after the doors closed. Guilt overwhelmed him and he thought about taking it out on something, or someone. The bruises on his face were already healing, a fresh set might be just the thing to make him forget Mike, even just for a few minutes.
He hadn't realized how long he was standing in his hall until the elevator dinged open again and Brooke stepped out. The second he saw her, he forgot about Mike. She had some strange power over him. When he was around her he was almost... happy.
"Brooke," he said, stepping towards her, then pausing, afraid she wouldn't want him to touch her after his embarrassing outburst the other day. "Dr.Shannon, I mean. I'm sorry about the other day. I'll pay for your stereo." He looked at her with pleading eyes and saw the harsh lines of her face dissolve.
"That's not why I'm here," she said. "I'm here to find out what is driving you on your destructive streak. I'm not leaving here till I find out what happened with Mike and the rest of your unit."
At her words, his face flushed and he turned back to his apartment, leaving her in front of the elevator. Except of course she was the most stubborn woman he'd ever met. It would have turned him on if it hadn't infuriated him. She somehow got into his apartment before he could close the door and proceeded to interrogate him as he tried to ignore her.