He stopped. Thank God in heaven, Osterman stopped, right in front of the door to the barracks. Shane let gravity power him down the gentle slope and damn near burned the skin off his palms when he tried to stop suddenly. “Hey. What happened?”
So much for eloquence.
Osterman fiddled with his iPod, one earbud still dangling around his neck. “I’m so fucking tired of her crap. Have you taken your medicine? Have you eaten? Have you wiped your ass? I’m sick of being treated like I’m a fucking baby. By her. By Carponti. By you.”
“I haven’t treated you any different. You’re still my best gunner.”
“Ha-ha. Nice. I’m not a gunner, and I’m not an armorer. And you keep looking at me like I’m going to blow my fucking head off. So don’t try and play the hero, Sarn’t G, ’cause I’ve known you since I was a private, remember? You always sucked at bullshitting us.”
Shane bit back a surge of anger. “Who the hell do you think you are? You think you’re the only one who’s gotten hurt? Shit, I know amputees who run marathons. Hell, they’re better with the new legs than with the ones they were born with.”
“I’m twenty-three fucking years old! I don’t want to be a fucking cyborg. You don’t see the looks I get every time I hobble around the hospital. The goddamned pity. You think I want to wave the freak flag of a fucking mechanical leg? I want my life back!”
“This isn’t the way to do it. You’re running everyone out of your life who gives a shit about you.”
“You’re going to sit there and lecture me, too? I’m the one missing a fucking leg. You’ll be up and walking soon.”
“And I’m going to be in fucking rehab for at least a year. Are you really sitting here playing a who-has-it-worse game with me? That’s unworthy of you. You’re better than that, Osterman.”
“Correction. I was better than that. Now? Now I just want all of you to leave me the fuck alone.”
Osterman disappeared behind the ancient, rust-colored door of the barracks. Shane closed his eyes and let out a vicious stream of profanity. Goddamn it, he needed to get up to that kid’s room and snap him out of it. That wasn’t the kid who’d patrolled Sadr City with him. That wasn’t the kid who’d taken down an entire house laden with explosives with a fifty cal. He needed to find Carponti and send him up after Osterman.
Shane stared at the door, and at the stairs behind it, and swore as helplessness gnawed at his soul.
Chapter 21
“How’s Vic?” Jen set a bottle of wine on the coffee table in Laura’s living room, sidestepping a Tonka truck.
Laura started to pick up, but Jen stopped her. Once upon a time, her living room had looked like a Pottery Barn display. Now? Now it looked like a playroom with a couple of push toys stuffed in the corner near the fireplace. “Sit. Clean later. It’s just us.”
Nicole smiled sadly and reached for the bottle. “He’s fine, now that I’ve taken all his pills away. He got pissed when I asked him about his prescriptions for the first time. After the accident, though, he practically dropped them into my lap.”
“He did?” Jen said.
“Yeah. Said he was sorry he screwed up. He thought he had everything under control and he didn’t. He didn’t want to accidentally kill himself, so would I please keep him from overdosing again.”
Laura frowned and looked up at the ceiling. “Sorry, thought I heard the kids. Is this the same Carponti I know?”
Nicole offered a faint, lopsided shrug. “At least he’s okay and he’s letting me help. I felt so powerless before.… What’s this?” she asked, as she reached beneath the coffee table and pulled out a large photo album. “Laura and Trent, circa August 2001.”
A younger version of Laura stood smiling on the front of it, her hand pressed to the heart of a much younger looking Trent, who was also smiling.
“I borrowed that wedding dress,” Laura said, leaning over. Instead of looking away, she scooted even closer so that she could look over Nicole’s shoulder. A hint of a smile played on her lips. “Trent looked so good in his Dress Blues.”
“Most men do,” Jen said.
“Oh no.” Nicole ran the tip of her finger around the rim of her glass. “You obviously have not been to a military ball. Some of the paunches those guys try to squeeze into uniforms they wore when they were privates or lieutenants are downright scary. Should be criminal.”
Laura laughed and turned the page. “Most men look sexy in their blues, how about that?”
Jen stopped hearing anything. Trent stood next to Shane on the page in front of them. Younger, his face not quite so worn by the elements or time. His shoulders were just as broad and his blues tapered into narrow hips that were clothed in lighter blue pants. She leaned closer and looked at the awards on his chest and wished she knew what they represented. There were a lot of them. At least, it looked like a lot to her.
“Maybe you’ll share your good news with us when you’re done undressing Shane with your eyes?” Nicole asked.
“What good news?” Jen blinked and looked up from the photo. There might have been good news had things not gone so badly between them. But they had. So many times over the last few days, she’d almost stepped over the barrier between them. And each time, she’d turned away. He had to be the one to cross it.
“Don’t lie. You and Shane, you know …”
Embarrassed heat crawled over Jen’s skin. She tried to find somewhere else to look besides at her friends, but her gaze just landed back on the photo of Shane.
“Spill,” Laura said. “I’ve spent so much time with my vibrator, I’ve forgotten what a penis looks like. I’m living vicariously through your sex life.”
Jen flushed and Nicole pounced. “Laura, look, she’s blushing.”
“So it was good then?”
Jen closed her eyes and nodded and wished this wasn’t such a disaster. The conversation or the sex, for that matter. “Yeah.”
“Um, I can’t have some sexy hot fantasy involving Eric Bana if you don’t give me more details than just a yeah,” Laura said. “Where is he tonight, anyway?”
“He’s home. He’s been quiet lately.” Jen lifted a page and peeked on the other side. Shane was dancing with a striking woman with black hair and pale skin. She looked like a goddess.
“That’s his ex-wife,” Laura said, tapping the page with her middle finger.
“She’s beautiful,” Jen murmured. She tried not to compare the woman in the picture with the scarred woman she saw every time she looked in the mirror. But she did. Where Tatiana was willow thin and gorgeous, Jen was petite and, well, she supposed she wasn’t hideous. At least not until her bra with the silicon mold came off.
“She’s a bitch,” Nicole said. “I don’t care how lonely you are, you don’t cheat.” Laura flipped the photo album closed. “This whole trip down memory lane is pointless. I don’t need to look at my wedding pictures. I was there, remember?”
“Just because something went wrong doesn’t mean you can’t still love him,” Nicole said.
“Loving Trent isn’t my problem. He’s the father of my kids. I’m always going to love him. I can’t be in love with a picture. I’m tired of waiting for him to come home.” Laura set her wineglass down with a hard tink and stood. “I love you both, but you have no idea what it’s like raising two kids by yourself. I’m not a single parent by choice, I’m a single parent by my husband’s choice. He’s literally been home for long enough to get me pregnant and that’s it.” She bit her lips and stared into space. “I can’t trust him. Not about being faithful. Not about his reasons for deploying. How can I possibly stay married to him?”
Laura didn’t speak for a long moment. When she reached for her glass, her hand shook.
“It doesn’t sound like that will make you happy,” Nicole said.
“It won’t. But I’ll stop caring eventually.” She poured another glass.
“Maybe he’s busy,” Nicole said. “I know Trent. I really don’t think he would cheat. You should give him the chance t
o explain.”
Laura scoffed and dragged out two large scrapbooks, one pink, one blue. “Want to see what more time gets me? Look. Here’s Emma’s birth. Just me and my little girl alone in the hospital. And here’s Ethan’s. Noticing a trend so far?”
“No Trent,” Jen murmured.
“And we have a winner. But wait, there’s more. If you turn the pages of these albums, you’ll see first birthdays, second birthdays, Halloween, and every single Thanksgiving since 2003. You know what you won’t see? Any pictures of Trent. Because he wasn’t there.” Laura dashed her fingers beneath her eyes and attempted a watery smile. “I’ve tried. I’ve done five different tours alone now and I would have waited a decade or more for him if things were different. But, cheating rumors aside, he’s been volunteering to go. I’m done waiting for a man who doesn’t want to come home to me.”
And Jen couldn’t argue with that. No matter how badly she wanted Trent and Laura to fix things, Trent had hurt her friend, and badly. It was going to take a miracle to get through her pain, and Trent wasn’t even trying.
He’d given up his family to go to war and Laura had every reason to be furious and hurt and finished.
* * *
Shane looked up from the magazine he’d been pretending to read for the last three hours. The front door open and Jen walked through. He was hit with a potent kick of relief mixed with desire. He was fixing this. Tonight, one thing in his life was going to go right, damn it. Maybe he couldn’t be with her, but he could damn well get things back to what they’d been like before he’d screwed up. He could get back to being her friend.
“Hi.” Damn, that was brilliant.
“Hi.” She dropped her purse by the door and kicked off her shoes. She moved with an almost fluid grace to the love seat across from where he sat on the couch. Jen rubbed her temples.
She looked beautiful. Beautiful but exhausted. “You look tired.”
She turned and looked at him, a glint of light from the kitchen spilling onto her face. “It comes with the job.”
“I know.”
He swallowed as she rubbed her head with her hand again. “You don’t have to sit and make small talk, if you don’t feel like it,” she said after a moment.
“What if that’s exactly what I want?”
She looked at him again and Shane wished he could read her thoughts. Her body language was too fatigued to reveal much. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”
He met her gaze. Steady. Afraid to blink. Afraid to look away and risk breaking the fragile peace between them. “I screwed up, okay? I never meant to hurt you by suggesting you don’t know what it feels like to lose someone.”
Jen sat up abruptly and leaned forward, her elbows hitting her knees. “I was trying to goad you into looking past your legs all the damn time.”
“What you said about control? You were right. I’m used to being in control. I’m used to having my finger on the trigger and knowing the plan and, hell, even writing the plan. I can’t plan now. I can barely think half the time. All because these fucking pins take up my entire field of vision and I can’t see anything else.”
“That’s just it, Shane. You’re more than your injuries. You’re hurt. So what? You’re not dead.”
“I’m also not going through the same thing Carponti and Osterman are. They’ve lost limbs.”
“I lost a breast and I’m doing just fine. Carponti will get better and he’ll be fine. I’m willing to bet he fights to stay in the army and learns how to shoot again.”
He wanted to tell her that Osterman was not going to be fine. That he was going to wake up one day and realize that he’d driven away everyone who’d ever cared about him. That Randall was going to badger each person on Shane’s team until they broke and admitted to something they didn’t do just to get the damn lieutenant to leave them alone.
“Carponti was one of my best sergeants,” Shane said quietly. “Osterman was hell on a fifty cal. So much potential there, and now it’s gone.”
Jen moved before Shane could even register the movement. The couch bent beneath her weight and the heat from her body began sinking into his skin. “Stop talking about them like they’re dead. They’re not. You’re not. Tomorrow’s another day. You’ll get another chance to make a difference.”
“It’s not that,” Shane said.
“Then what is it? Explain it to me so that I understand. Because I don’t.”
The words got stuck right beneath the hollow in his throat. He cleared it then, and forced them out. “It’s that I can’t fix this. I can’t fix what’s wrong with Carponti. I can’t fix Osterman’s head so that he stops looking like he’s about to off himself.” He dropped his head back and closed his eyes. “I have never been this useless before in my entire life.”
“Shane, you’re not supposed to fix everyone else’s problems.”
“Yes I am!” The force of his words stunned them both. So much for fixing things. He was making this worse, but he couldn’t stop now that the dam had broken. “I am. That’s what I do. I fix my soldier’s problems. I let them lean on me when things in their lives are broken. I take care of them.”
Her fingers were cool on his cheeks as she traced her fingertips over his skin. “Then maybe it’s time you accept that you need a little help fixing your own things,” she murmured.
“I can’t. Because I’m not supposed to be the one who needs fixing.”
He sat with his hand covering his mouth. So still he might have been a statue. It was a long time before he moved his hand from his mouth. His voice sounded cracked and rough. “The first soldier I ever buried committed suicide.”
He rubbed his hand over his face before he continued. “I was too young and too cocky to see it coming. The signs were all there. He started showing up late to work. His performance started falling off. Then one day, he didn’t come in. I lied when I reported I had all my men accounted for. I was almost court-martialed for dereliction of duty when they found Dickerson’s body.” He sucked in a deep breath. “He killed himself on Friday, right after end-of-day formation, and no one knew until Monday.” He pressed his mouth into a flat line. “It took two and a half days for me to find out that one of my guys killed himself.”
The muscles in his neck were tense, straining against his skin. “And he was just the first soldier I buried. Do you want to know the names of the other ten? Martinez. Neils. Jablowski. Mercado. Davis. Williams.”
“Shane. Stop.”
“Stupediwictz. We called him Widget. Zublow. Mitchum. Adel. But only one killed himself.” He closed his eyes, covering his mouth with his hands again. “Today, I felt like I was sitting at the bottom of a fucking mountain because I couldn’t climb the goddamned stairs at the barracks to get to my soldier.”
“Shane.” She knelt at the edge of the couch, her fingers digging into his forearm. His skin was hot against hers. “This isn’t your fault. There’s still time to get through to him.” Please, God, don’t let her be wrong.
Finally he looked at her and the pain in his eyes tore at her soul. “I need these pins out. I need to be able to get places where wheels can’t take me.”
“I can’t do that for you, Shane. Even if I could, getting them out requires a surgical team and you’re not fully healed yet.”
His mouth opened but no sound came out. Nothing, then he snapped it shut.
“Look, instead of worrying about what you can’t do, let’s figure out what you can. Osterman comes in for physical therapy—”
“Every time I try to talk to him, he avoids me, and climbs up stairs so I can’t follow him. Do you know how fucking pathetic that is? One of my guys went to the hospital for screwing up his pills. Osterman is just a matter of time. I know it in my soul. This is my team. These are my boys, and they’re floundering because I can’t get my ass out of that chair.”
Jen stood abruptly. “You know what? Fine. Sit here and wallow. You’re letting a flight of stairs do you in? Really?”
F
inally, emotion sparked in his eyes—dark fury roiled there in a massive ball of energy. “This is my fault!” he shouted. “Both of them were hurt on missions that I was running.”
“So what? They got hurt. They’re alive, damn it. They’re still alive.” Her words started with a shout but ended with a whisper. Shane’s boys were alive but he was dying sitting in that wheelchair. It was as though it was doing more than atrophying his muscles, it was chipping away at his soul.
“Shane.” She reached for him, cupping his rough jaw and turning his face toward hers. “This is not your fault. You are a soldier. You cannot save everyone. Good men die in combat and you can’t save them. Your boys are alive. Be happy for that.”
“Every time I see Osterman, I’m reminded of Dickerson,” he whispered.
“Then we’ll figure out how to get him to stick around longer so you can talk to him. We’ll figure it out. Stop acting like you had the power to change this. You’re just a man. You’re not supposed to be okay all the time, either.”
Silence hung between them for a long moment.
“Jen, I can’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Us.”
“Well, you know, we already did the ‘us’ thing. And unless you want to stay in that van down by the river, brushing me off right now is the last thing you want to do.” She paused, waiting to see his reaction. “Yes, that means I’m blackmailing you. I need to keep the Great Penis around a little longer.”
He choked. “What?” he managed.
“Never mind. Inside joke.”
“Seeing how I assume this is my penis we’re talking about—”
“Will you shut up and kiss me?”
He pulled her to him and kissed her like a dying man. Like he wasn’t going to get another chance at this, whatever this was. Because she’d been wrong. He couldn’t count on being able to try again tomorrow.
He only had today. Tomorrow, he had one less day to make a difference. But he didn’t tell her that. He slid his tongue against hers and tasted her, Jen, and something so much more.
Something stronger than anything he’d ever felt. Something that felt like pure heaven.
Because of You: A Loveswept Contemporary Military Romance Page 21