Gifts of Honor: Starting from ScratchHero's Homecoming

by Gail, Stacy

  There was an incredulous pause, and then Beth’s voice came from the direction of the table.

  “The wall is the least of my concerns.”

  Chris groped in the darkness, trying to measure his steps to the counter and stopping short when his fingers brushed the edge. He swept his hand along the smooth surface, hoping to find the coffee machine.

  “Careful, that’s hot,” she cautioned, and then she was beside him, the soft swell of her breast brushing his arm as she stretched past him to slide a mug across the counter. He couldn’t see her clothes, but he could tell she wasn’t wearing a bra. He swallowed hard as a bolt of red-hot desire shot through him like an arrow, and he clutched the edge of the counter like a lifeline as she moved around him.

  He heard coffee splash into a mug, felt the steam rising from the hot liquid. Then she brought his fingers to the mug’s handle, and he took a long, savoring sip.

  “I assumed you still drink it black. Afghanistan seems like an unlikely place to pick up a milk and sugar habit.”

  He nodded, replacing the mug on the counter. Beth’s coffee was bold and delicious. It tasted like normalcy. It tasted like home.

  “I’m sorry about this morning,” he said quietly. “You’re right, trying to walk to the road was a stupid idea. And I’m sorry for yelling. Sometimes I get so frustrated that I lose my temper. I’m working on that.”

  He sensed her hesitation as she considered her reply. “And what you said about surviving—that it was a waste. You didn’t mean that, did you?”

  He grimaced. She had a way of cutting right to the heart of things. As challenging as that was, he admired it about her.

  “I won’t lie to you. Sometimes, when things are difficult, it’s hard to feel grateful. Sometimes I do think it would’ve been better if I hadn’t made it. Lots of other guys didn’t—what makes me so special?”

  Beth inhaled sharply. Chris couldn’t stop himself—he reached out to touch her, compelled by an irrepressible need to feel her skin against his. She caught his hand and held it between her own.

  Only dimly aware of what he was doing, he drew in his hand until she took a step forward, and then he scooped her into his chest. His arms came around her small frame and her cheek nestled just below his collarbone. Her body was so slender, so delicate beneath his hands that as he tightened his grip he felt big and solid in comparison. He felt like he could keep her safe. For the first time in months, he felt like a man.

  “I know you decided that I’m not the person you wanted to come home to,” she said softly, her face pressed into his shirt. “And although I’m still fuming about the way you handled it, I can deal with that. But I’m not sure what I would have done it if you hadn’t come home at all.”

  A rush of guilt shattered the moment like a stone hurled at a pane of glass, and he thrust Beth away from him, holding her at arm’s length.

  “Why?” he asked, all too aware that his frustration was audible in his tone. “Why do you care about someone who left you flat? Why not just move on and forget about it?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Beth replied, sounding more astonished than annoyed. “Whether you like it or not, you were a big part of my life—you still are, in many ways. That doesn’t just go away like this.” She snapped her fingers. “And no matter how we ended things, I think you’re an amazing guy who will be an incredible husband and a great father, and I would never begrudge another woman that happiness.”

  His jaw was slack as he absorbed her words. “You still think I could be those things? Honestly? Even though—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she retorted more sharply than he expected, and jerked out of his grasp. “You’re the one who changed your mind, not me. Being blind isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. Don’t console yourself that I was any less hurt when I found out you were wounded.”

  Chris gripped the edge of the counter as he struggled to understand the significance of what Beth was saying. There was no pity in her statement—just the opposite. She didn’t seem to think that his disability had any impact on the standard of behavior to which she held him.

  What would it take for her to understand how taxing it would be to live with him? How boring and tedious it would become to constantly have to help him with the most basic tasks? That he wasn’t his old self and might never be again—that he was a warrior who couldn’t fight, a soldier who couldn’t defend, an impotent, helpless shell of himself.

  He was about to say as much when the mortar exploded outside. Instinctively he bundled Beth to his chest, covered her head with his hand and hit the deck.

  Chapter Five

  Beth had only barely registered the noise of the snowplow backfiring when Chris dragged her to the ground, her skull bouncing off the linoleum as he clambered on top of her, pinning her to the floor. The force of the impact knocked the wind out of her lungs, and he was so heavy that she could barely manage a thin, rasping breath.

  After what felt like ten minutes but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, she felt the tension drain from Chris’s body and he pushed himself up on his elbows. He frantically ran one hand over her face and through her hair and then rubbed his fingers together, presumably checking for blood.

  “My God, Beth, I’m so sorry,” he stammered. “Are you okay? I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  She was dazed, sore and a little bit scared, but the desperation in his voice told her it was probably best to put on a brave face.

  “I’m fine,” she said with forced calm. His face was inches above hers, his brow furrowed, his blank eyes narrow with worry. She could feel his heart racing where his chest was still pressed to hers, and he was on such high alert he was practically vibrating. She didn’t know if touching him was the right thing to do, but it’s what her intuition dictated, so she laid her hand on his cheek.

  “That stupid snowplow always startles the life out of me,” she lied, trailing her fingertips down his face, glad he didn’t flinch at the contact. “It’s gone now, I heard it pass down the road. It won’t be back again today—it only ever comes past once for a street this size.”

  Chris’s expression was unreadable, his gaze fixed on nothing, his shoulders still heaving with the rhythm of his breath. Beth stared unabashedly at his handsome face, his tough, all-American good looks in no way diminished by a few scars. The scars were jarring, sure, but they barely made an impression when viewed alongside the high, intelligent forehead, the straight nose and the sexy, serious set of his mouth. The weight of him began to feel satisfying rather than entrapping—Beth became acutely aware of every point where their bodies met, separated by only a couple layers of clothing.

  And then, in what she suspected was blatant contravention of medical guidelines on post-combat recovery, she slipped her hand to the back of Chris’s neck and brought her lips to his.

  His reaction was so instant and intense that at first she was taken aback, but soon she was lost in the sensual pressure of his mouth and the tantalizing rhythm of his kisses, as the buzzed hair at the back of his head tickled her fingertips.

  He slipped his palm behind her head, cushioning her with his left hand while he brushed the knuckles of the right over her cheek, down her neck, across the skin left exposed by her scoop-neck pajama top, and, after a moment’s hesitation, down the side of her breast, finally stopping with his fingers splayed around her hip.

  She moaned beneath his caresses, parting her lips to draw him deeper, responding hungrily as his tongue found hers, drinking in the taste and feel of him that she thought she’d never get to experience again. She was fully aware that this might be her last chance, that at any second they might both come to their senses and revert immediately to the stilted, awkward atmosphere of just minutes earlier.

  She savored the slight flavor of coffee that she found in his mouth, the smooth ridges of his teeth, the gently
insistent motion of his lips. Chris shifted above her, the soles of his sneakers squeaking against the kitchen floor. She felt the hard length of his erection pushing against his jeans, digging into her thigh, and it sent her over the edge.

  Wantonly she ground against him, wrapping her legs around his waist, clutching at his shoulders to pull him in even tighter. He growled against her mouth, and the sound was so feral, so untamed, that the damp throbbing at the apex of her thighs doubled in power and tempo.

  “Please, Chris,” she heard herself whisper against his cheek, “Don’t stop.”

  But at her words, and with an almighty shudder, he did exactly that. He rolled off her onto his back and draped his forearm over his eyes.

  “You can’t let me get away with that again,” he groaned. “It’s not good for either one of us.”

  “It seemed pretty good to me,” she replied with deliberate playfulness, trying to conceal her disappointment as she pushed herself up to sit beside his prone figure.

  He shook his head. “The psychologist said I might find myself seeking casual sexual fulfillment in an attempt to experience something other than the trauma of combat and injury. She said it would only make me feel worse in the long run.”

  Beth’s shoulders stiffened in offense. “It’s hardly casual. We have had sex before, you may recall. In fact I think you could go so far as to say we had a full-blown relationship, in which intimacy was much more than simply physical.”

  Chris was silent and, after a beat, Beth laid her hand in the center of his chest, idly circling her forefinger around one of the buttons on his flannel shirt.

  “I’m not saying your psychologist is wrong,” she said quietly, “But what happened between us just now felt about as real as it gets to me. How did it feel to you? Was it in any way hollow, or like something you were doing to distract yourself from other thoughts? Tell me honestly,” she urged. “I want to know.”

  He withdrew his arm from his face and covered her hand with his own. “It felt like I’d waited my whole life to touch you again.”

  Her breath stalled as she gaped down at him. His expression was thoughtful and sincere.

  She shook her head in disbelief. One minute he insisted there was nothing between them, and then he said something that sent her heartbeat into overdrive. What was he playing at?

  Chris sat up, squeezing her hand once before releasing it. “I’m going to take a shower.”

  She remained in place as he hauled himself to his feet and made his way out to the hallway. Beth watched him walk out with slow, tentative steps, one hand trailing along the wall while the other extended in front of him, his fingers outstretched. In many ways he was unrecognizable as the man who had danced her around the kitchen when his favorite song came on the radio, who accidentally stepped on her feet and tripped her up, who caught her as she fell and slung her over his shoulder, carrying her into the bedroom as if she weighed nothing as she laughed and clutched at his shirt.

  Yet in many other ways, he was exactly the same.

  Beth heard the bathroom door click shut, and she pulled her knees to her chest on the cold linoleum. She could still smell him on her thin cotton shirt, on her skin, in her hair—the earthy scents of freshly tied hay, of rich tilled soil, of blazing summer sunshine.

  Whether or not he was the same man, Beth knew one thing for sure—he could still push her way over the line of her self-control. And she wasn’t about to let him sweep her off her feet only to drop her uncaringly back to earth again.

  She crossed her arms over her heart, determined not to let him break it a second time.

  * * *

  While Chris was in the shower, Beth poured another cup of coffee, carried it to her bedroom and booted up her laptop. Without so much as a cursory glance at her email, she pushed her glasses up on her nose, opened a search engine and typed in post-traumatic stress disorder alongside combat and soldier.

  Beth clicked on one article, and then another, and another, and by the time she heard the water shut off and Chris padding back to the guest room, her eyes were wide and her coffee was stone-cold.

  She read stories of soldiers violently attacking their wives in their sleep, becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol, too anxious to go out in crowded public places, breaking into panic attacks during violent scenes in movies, having irrational and destructive outbursts at friends and family, and withdrawing from society until they struggled to leave the house. She read about household finances falling into chaos, marriages torn apart, children separated from their fathers, even self-harm and suicide.

  Hadn’t Chris already said that sometimes he wished he’d died out there in the desert? Hadn’t he admitted that he was working on trying not to lose his temper? And between cowering behind the hotel bed and setting off on his own in the snow, his behavior was far from normal or consistent.

  Beth swallowed hard. For some reason his blindness didn’t faze her; that was just a question of practicality, of making adaptations, learning techniques and helping him adjust to a new way of doing things.

  But PTSD was different, and it scared her in its intangibility, in the way it seemed to affect an individual’s core personhood. She knew that recovering from such a serious condition would be incredibly difficult, complex and gradual. She hoped he had someone in his life who was tough enough to see him through it.

  The rap on her bedroom door made her jump. With one hand over her wildly beating heart, she called to Chris to come in.

  “This is slightly embarrassing,” Chris began as he appeared in the doorway, wearing nothing but one of her purple towels wrapped around his waist. “I forgot where I put my bag, and I can’t find it.”

  Beth was so busy staring at the long, jagged scar running down the left side of his rib cage that she didn’t notice his sheepish smile and only barely heard what he said. Dotted around it were several smaller scars, each about the size of a dime, extending out to his stomach in the front and his shoulder blade in the back. Like the ones on his face, their shiny, pinkish hue betrayed how recently they’d been acquired.

  His smile vanished. “Sorry, were you in the middle of something?”

  “No,” she said, too brightly. She slammed the laptop shut and slid from the bed. “I think your bag is here in the hall. Stay there, I’ll get it.”

  She brushed past him, too disgusted and ashamed at her own gaping to look at him. How naive could she be? He was close enough to a suicide bomber to lose his eyesight, did she really think those minor scars on his face were the sum total of the damage?

  She tightened her jaw as she fetched his bag, steeling herself against the compulsion to hold and comfort him every time she thought about what he’d been through. He’d made it clear he didn’t want to be with her, and she had to quell what she knew were unreciprocated emotions.

  “Here it is,” she announced, pressing the bag’s strap into his hand.

  “Thanks. Guess I won’t have to borrow any of your clothes after all.”

  She looked up to see his grin, and found herself caught in another one of those jolting moments where the past collided with the present. Because despite Chris’s foggy eyes and the scars flecking his body, there was something so familiar about his broad shoulders, his straight back, the light scattering of dark hair over his lean, muscular torso that it sent her rocking back on her heels with heady recollection.

  “I was thinking,” she said hastily, blinking rapidly in an effort to snap herself back to the present. “If they’ve cleared the residential roads, the main ones must already be done. We could go into town for lunch, if you want? I thought you might want to get out of the house.”

  She didn’t mention that she was desperate to get out too, and that she was hoping that loosening their proximity might give her a little perspective on everything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours.


  He nodded. “Sounds good. I spoke to my family earlier, they’re still snowed in up at the ranch. I hope you don’t mind if I crash for one more day? Or I can call up the fort, see if anyone—”

  “Of course I don’t mind,” she fibbed. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you need.”

  Or until I finally get it through my thick skull that you’re only going to hurt me again if I let you, Beth thought grimly. And that I can’t go through losing you again.

  * * *

  Maybe I can do this, Chris thought as Beth pulled slowly into a parking space, the car bumping gently over the road’s snowpacked edges. Maybe I can make this work.

  He was enormously heartened by Beth’s simple statement of faith in him, her belief that he would still make a good husband and father. Her insistence that his disability didn’t excuse him from being accountable meant she didn’t see him as a pitiable victim, and her vividly feminine response as they lay entangled on the kitchen floor assured him that she still found him attractive—that his physical insecurities were unfounded.

  Maybe this really could work. Even if his vision didn’t come back, blindness wasn’t a death sentence—hadn’t everyone at the hospital constantly reminded him that lots of people led perfectly normal, fulfilling lives after losing their sight?

  He hadn’t gotten any medical discharge orders yet, and the major general had always had high hopes for him—if he threw himself into rehab and proved that he could be independent and productive, maybe he could make the case for remaining on active duty, getting a desk job somewhere at the fort, even deploying again in a noncombat role. He could still make major, still try for a secondment to the Department of Defense or NATO or the UN like he’d always wanted. He couldn’t sight a rifle anymore, but he still had a political science degree from Georgetown, three deployments and almost nine years of service to his country under his belt. Surely the army could find a use for him somewhere.