Grudge (Virtue & Vice Book 5)

by Cait Forester

  Martin didn’t call him and Taggart didn’t feel right about reaching out to him. The only things he had to say were things that would hurt. They’d see each other soon enough.

  He found himself at the VA hospital on time for his appointment, but didn’t remember most of the drive there. He’d spent it lost in thought. He had a sudden, panicked worry that he’d taken Grunt out and forgotten to take him back in before he got in his car. But no, he remembered letting the dog back inside. Now he kind of wished he’d brought him along. Martin would have liked to have seen him, probably.

  It hurt to see Martin again. There were circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept at all, and he didn’t smile when he saw Taggart. It was like being stabbed in the chest by something improvised and dull.

  “We’re in PT3,” Martin said. “It’s where all the evaluation stuff is. They sent someone from recruitment to oversee.”

  “Martin,” Taggart said quietly.

  “Don’t,” Martin whispered. “Not here, okay? You might be shipping out, but I still have to work here so I can take care of Janey.”

  “Of course,” Taggart said. Martin walked away before Taggart could apologize.

  The evaluation was straightforward. Martin walked him through familiar exercises, making notes on a grading sheet of some sort as they went. Taggart jogged on a treadmill, balanced on his good leg, and went through a variety of postures to show that he had plenty of motor control. At each stage, Martin spoke in a clipped, professional way. He was encouraging, but Taggart knew the difference between how it sounded when he meant it, and how it sounded now.

  All in all, it was easy enough. Taggart worried and hoped that he’d impressed the recruiter.

  “Well,” Martin said when it was done and he’d handed the sheet to the stoic recruiter, “I’ve got another appointment to get to. Mister Coulson knows his way to the nurses station by now. You have the room for another fifteen minutes.”

  He didn’t look at Taggart before he left them.

  The recruiter looked over the sheet and compared it to another — probably a benchmark guide. Half of being in recruitment was just the ability to read ten words in a row and know what they meant. “I have to say, Private,” the man said, “these numbers look pretty damn good. You’ve been in PT with that prosthesis for, what, a little over three months?”

  “Just under,” Taggart said. “This’ll be eleven weeks.”

  “God damn, Marine,” the recruiter muttered. “That’s some Wolverine level recovery.”

  “I worked hard,” Taggart said. “That’s all.”

  “I can see that.” The recruiter smiled, and slipped the evaluation form into a yellow folder, and slipped the folder into a black leather briefcase. “I’d say your chances of redeployment are pretty much guaranteed. I’m not too worried about the final physical. At this rate you’ll probably be outrunning Marines with a full complement of legs, right? Just don’t do too well, or POTUS’ll start having us hack things off. Crazy son of a bitch.”

  “Right,” Taggart said. He tried to muster a laugh but it came off dry. “Well, I guess I’ll see you in a couple of months.”

  “Maybe,” the recruiter said. He smiled. “There’s the psych eval but, you know, those aren’t that big a deal. Just say all the stuff you need to say, promise not to blow up your friends or go Full Metal Jacket and you’re golden.”

  “Psych eval?” Taggart frowned. “ I mean that might be a problem. My doc’s got notes on me going back months — she handed me a diagnosis. It’s in my record now.”

  The recruiter snorted. “PTSD?”

  “Yeah,” Taggart said. “What do I do about that?”

  “That kind of thing, I mean, it gets a little fudged,” the recruiter admitted. “Psych evals are hard to fail, Private. You’ll do fine. I gotta make a few more stops here. Keep up the good work, Marine.”

  The man saluted.

  Taggart’s heels came together, and his hand came up, as a reflex. Latent, and seemingly long unused, but still there.

  He was left alone in the room, and stayed there until someone came in and was confused about why he was there.

  “Join the club,” Taggart sighed. “It’s fine. I’m leaving.”

  Promising, the recruiter had said. A promise of what? He’d made promises already. Promises to Grunt, and to Martin. He didn’t want to leave them behind. But before he’d made promises to either of them, he’d sworn oaths to his country — to everyone. If he was fit for duty, he had to go back, didn’t he?

  The physical had happened early, before Taggart met with Doctor Kate, which turned out to be a good thing.

  He’d never looked forward to therapy more than he did at that moment.

  “You probably know what’s going on already,” Taggart said to Kate when he sat down for their session. “Right?”

  Kate pursed her lips and slid a form up from her legal pad so he could see it. “Redeployment evaluations,” she said. “That’s a pretty big hurdle, I imagine.”

  “Hurdle?” Taggart asked.

  “Sure,” Kate said. “It takes a lot of willpower to go back to combat, doesn’t it?”

  Taggart shook his head. “No, actually. In a lot of ways it’d be the easy thing to do. I mean I’m not in top physical just yet — it sort of seems like it would be a lot of hard work now — but when I am?” He shrugged. “It’s like going home.”

  “I see,” Kate said. She made a note on the form. “So, how are things at your current home. Have you made arrangements for Grunt?”

  “He’d probably go to Angie’s place,” Taggart said. “I mean, I could always take him back when I finish my enlistment. It’s just another four years.”

  “I’m glad you thought about it,” Kate said. “It’s an important relationship. I’m sure by now the two of you mean a lot to one another.”

  Taggart folded his arms, and shifted on the couch. “Me and Grunt,” he said.

  “If you like.” Kate gave him that placid, patient look.

  “You’re not talking about Grunt,” Taggart sighed.

  “I’m not only talking about Grunt,” she corrected. “But it really is important that you consider Grunt’s future in all of this. I’m sure your sister would be a good option for him, but I trust you’ll talk with her about that?”

  “Of course I will,” Taggart said.

  “Good.” Kate made some other little mark. She gave a heavy sigh, and watched him intently again.

  Taggart let her do that, and looked around the room while she did. If she had questions she was supposed to ask, she could ask them. If not, he wasn’t sure why he was here.

  Wait. That wasn’t true.

  “I’m —”He rubbed his face. “It’s hard to think about leaving. I want to go back. Why is that? I have nightmares about going back. I wake up sometimes and curl into a ball and cry myself back to sleep for fuck’s sake. What’s wrong with me? If I go back, will that stop?”

  “I can’t answer that,” Kate said sadly. “But I thought you’d said the nightmares had gotten a little better? Did I mis-hear that before?”

  Taggart sighed. “Yeah,” he said, “they did. For a while. Then they came back.”

  Kate frowned, nodding a little, and made another mark on the form. “Taggart that’s highly unusual. Bordering on miraculous, actually. You’ve had a consistent symptom, even with Grunt around, for months. Other than this one factor, nothing else changes — and yet, the symptom goes away for a few weeks, and then suddenly returns. I’ll be honest with you, I’ve never seen that in my career. And I’m older than I look.”

  “I got the leg,” Taggart pointed out, rapping the fiberglass cuff with his knuckles. “Now that I’m getting around, maybe?”

  “Except,” Kate said, “the symptom came back. Now, my guess would be, that there’s some other change that you haven’t told me about. And if I were to go a little further, I’d say that whatever that change is, it’s changed back. Does that sound about right?”


  Taggart shrugged.

  “What I’m seeing is regression, Taggart,” Kate said. “I’ll be completely honest with you. Under those circumstances, I cannot ethically give you a pass on your evaluation to return to active duty.”

  He couldn’t decide whether he was angry about that or relieved.

  “You’re ambivalent,” Kate noted. Maybe she could read minds.

  “If I lose this chance,” Taggart said, “I might not get another one. They might take back this high tech leg.”

  Kate sat back in her chair, and regarded him for a long moment in silence.

  “Your job is to fix me, right?” Taggart asked. “To make me ready to go back. So? Fix me. What do I have to do?”

  “Tell me what it is that made your nightmares stop,” she said softly. “You can trust me, Taggart. My job isn’t to get you ready to return to combat. It’s to help you return to your life. So. What changed?”

  He closed his eyes. It had been easy with Janey. There was no reason it shouldn’t be here.

  “You can’t say anything,” Taggart said. “Promise me.”

  “Done,” Kate said. “I promise.”

  He sighed, and rubbed his left thigh. The pain had come back, aching down to an ankle which wasn’t there anymore. Regression, huh?

  “I got involved with Martin,” he said, barely a whisper. “My PT.”

  “Involved?” Kate asked.

  “I fell in love with him,” Taggart said. “And I thought that I could be normal again. I met his aunt, who’s like his mom. He’s been living with me for the last three weeks. When I sleep with him next to me, I — the nightmares don’t come. It’s like they can’t get past him or something. I know that sounds stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid, Taggart,” Kate said gently. She set her pad aside, and leaned forward to rest her elbows on her knees, her hands clasped. “It’s called security. You feel safe. You have bad dreams when you don’t feel safe.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Taggart said. “Not anymore. I screwed it up. So. Getting back to something that makes sense is my next option.”

  Kate frowned, skeptical. “This is the young man you terrorized in high school,” she said. “Isn’t that right?”

  Taggart flinched, but it was true. “Yeah,” he muttered. “That’s him.”

  “And yet after all that you still managed to fall in love?” Kate asked.

  Taggart nodded. “I guess.”

  “And after you were with him for all this time, you can’t think of a single thing you might do that could repair that relationship?”

  He sighed. “No. As soon as he realized how much I wanted to go back? Not everyone can be a soldier’s . . . significant other. And for him, it’s a special case. His brother died in Mosul, the same place where I . . .”

  “What?” Kate asked. “Complete your thought, Taggart. It’s important.”

  Taggart remembered. He had seen Keith. “I saw his brother,” he said. He closed his eyes, reached for the memory. “It was outside Mosul, before it was taken. Just insurgents at the time, and a few radicals. Mostly we did perimeter security. I was only two years in.”

  “What happened?” Kate asked. “What are you remembering.”

  “I gotta go,” Taggart said.

  Kate straightened, sighing. “Taggart, we should keep exploring this. I can’t just sign a paper and send you back, I have ethical —”

  “It’s okay,” Taggart said. He stood. The pain in his leg was gone; for now, at least. “I don’t need it, Doc. Say whatever you want. I’ll be back next week, I just need to go for now. I got something I need to do. Calls to make.”

  “Taggart,” Kate said as he reached the door.

  He turned back to her, impatient. “Yeah, Doc?”

  “Does Martin know that you’re in love with him?”

  Taggart thought about it, and shook his head. “Not yet.”

  42

  It was Arnold’s last session. On any other day, it probably wouldn’t have been that big a deal. Cause for celebration, maybe. But this day, Martin looked over Arnold’s chart and, no matter how hard he tried to keep it together, he just couldn’t.

  “Wow,” Arnold said as Martin wiped tears away. “I’m touched, I think. I didn’t realize we had that kind of chemistry, you and me. I’m kind of an old fart. But I’m certainly flattered.”

  Martin laughed weakly, and shook his head. “I like you plenty, Arnold. Not like that, I admit. Professional boundaries and all. I’m just . . . sort of sorry to see you go.”

  “Bah.” Arnold waved it away. “If you’re really that attached, we can see each other outside of this place. I’m a retired widower — I can afford to skip bingo once in a while. What’s really going on, though?”

  “My — ah, a friend,” Martin said. “He’s maybe going back into the service. He’s already been injured once.”

  Arnold grunted. “I take it this ‘friend’ is very close. Like a boyfriend close, or like you grew up together close?”

  Martin smiled, and wiped the last of his tears away. “Sort of both.”

  “The best combination,” Arnold said. He gave a heavy sigh, and rubbed his jaw. “You know, when I first got out of the service — the very day that I handed in my rifle — I was relieved. It was finally over. I’d be able to sleep in a warm, comfortable bed again, for a full eight hours, or more if I wanted. I’d be able to maybe get out there and do all the things I never thought I’d do. I had more confidence. Sure, I was a little, you know.” He swirled a finger at his temple and crossed his eyes. “But I figured I’d manage that. You know what happened?”

  “What?” Martin asked.

  Arnold smiled sadly. “Two days back in the civilian world and I was bursting out of my skin to get back. If you haven’t been there, it’s hard to know what it means.” He shook his head slowly, his eyes growing distant just like Taggart’s sometimes did. “You stop having questions in the service. Not at first. But, over time they just start to fade away. It’s partly by design. As a soldier, you’re a tool. Like a hammer. It’s good to be a hammer. You’ve got one job — hit nails. And you just wait for someone to pick you up and swing you at a nail. They put you back in the toolbox, and you wait some more. You don’t have to figure out what you’re going to eat, or what movie to go see. You don’t have to dress up, put on a mask, socialize with people who wear their own masks and costumes. You don’t have to guess what people are thinking or what they want.”

  Arnold shrugged. “That’s bad enough. That simple life. But then, there’s the other stuff. Combat is terrible, and awful. As in, full of awe. Survival makes things sharp, clear. You have one goal. It’s addictive. That kind of singular focus? You just don’t get it in this world. You stop remembering who you were before that fight, and that rigid, clean, oiled machine. But you can’t stay that person when you come back. You don’t fit anymore. You’re the stray puzzle piece that got dropped in the wrong box.”

  Martin listened, rapt, and tried to put himself in Taggart’s head. “But you seem, I don’t know, normal? Now, at least. Did you ever go back?”

  “No,” Arnold said. He smiled. “I met Ian. I wouldn’t say that he fixed me, exactly. It was a group effort. But he did heal me. Over time. I mean years. But it started on day one. I felt something inside that I thought had been slowly cut out of me suddenly . . . sprouting again. Like kudzu. I’d pulled out the leaves and vines, but the roots were still there, waiting for the thaw. And when they started to finally grow — they spread, and spread, until I finally remembered who I was.”

  “If you’d have gone back, that wouldn’t have happened,” Martin said. “Right?”

  Arnold frowned. “I don’t like to deal in would haves and could haves, or might haves. I like to focus on the present, and give a little thought to the future. The past teaches us lessons we can’t really avoid learning unless we’re particularly foolish, I think. Once those are learned, I figure I’ll just take the good stuff and run.” His thin lips curled up int
o a broad smile, and he winked.

  “What should I do?” Martin asked. “I want to hang on to him, keep him here. Make him realize what he's doing. But if he wants to go then maybe he just doesn’t feel the same way I do. Right?”

  “I don’t know, Kiddo,” Arnold said. He clapped Martin the shoulder. “Maybe just give him the chance to say for himself. You can’t really go wrong with that option.”

  “Yeah,” Martin sighed. “Maybe not. Thanks, Arnold. It’s really been good getting to know you. I’d like it if we could be friends, now that you’re all done.”

  “Couldn’t have done it without you, Martin,” Arnold said. “You have a gift. Real, rare skill. If you’ll take one mandate from an old man who wasted a lot of time in his life, I’d like it if it were this: don’t waste your time, and use what you were given. Huh. Make that two mandates.”

  “I won’t,” Martin promised, “and I will. Come on. I’ll get you checked out.”

  When his day was over, Martin tried to decide if he should go to Taggart’s place. He wanted to — but if he did he’d end up stuck there talking his feelings out and doing whatever else. He needed to get back up to Janey’s house for the weekend to take care of her and try to make some time to arrange home visits from some of the in-home care services he’d found. Now that he had access to Janey’s accounts, there was no reason to put it off any more. Taggart had a couple of months at least before he could be deployed, and Martin would see him on Monday regardless.

  So he left the hospital and went straight to Willow’s End. His mind raced the whole way, though. What could he say to Taggart that would convince him he should stay here? That they just needed time? Maybe if he introduced Taggart and Arnold, it would give Taggart some perspective.

  Or maybe there was nothing he could say. He played that scenario over and over again as well. All the different ways that Taggart might say that he’d rather go back than stay with Martin. Some of them were brutal — the old Taggart, shoving Martin away and calling him a fag. Probably that would be the best. A nice clean break with plenty of closure.