“What’s up?” Olivia asked. “You got quiet.”
Marlena gathered her courage. There was going to be no gentle way to say this, but all she knew was that it needed to be said. “I slept with Liam.”
The words felt strange on her tongue. Strange and foreign. Their night together hadn’t lost its fever-dream feel, but coming clean to Olivia made it undeniably real.
Olivia blinked at her, her face blank as though what she’d heard couldn’t possibly be true. “You what?”
“I slept with Liam on Friday night.”
Olivia swayed, her brows coming together. Then she shifted her gaze to the empty nachos container on her lap. “Oh.”
Marlena set a hand on her arm. “Talk to me.”
Olivia set the container on the coffee table, then shifted her weight to hitch her knee up on the sofa. “I didn’t know you two were interested in each other. You two never talk, and you definitely never talk to me about him, but at Locks on Thursday, you two seemed into each other. I didn’t put it all together.” She closed her eyes, wincing. “You slept with my brother?”
“I know. I’m sorry.” It was Marlena’s turn to wince because she wasn’t sorry. She’d lied to her best friend to ease the blow, because that seemed to be the right thing to say, but that was a disingenuous way to act. “Actually, I’m not sorry I did it. But I am sorry that it bothers you.”
“I just can’t believe it. Did it happen after the team yoga class?”
“He came to my house later that night, after you and I talked.”
Olivia swirled her spoon in the bottom of the guacamole container, making a loopy pattern in the thin coating of green at the bottom as her expression turned from shocked to somber. “He was the knock on the door I heard over the phone?”
“Yes. Are you okay?”
Olivia stood. “No, not really. I mean, I’d never tell you what to do, but . . .” She stacked Marlena’s empty food container in hers, then walked to the kitchen. Marlena gave her space and quiet to process the news. At the sound of forks clattering in the sink, Marlena glanced at the kitchen to find Olivia looking at her.
“Marli, listen to me. You can’t see him again.”
Marlena didn’t realize how desperately she’d hoped for Olivia’s blessing—or, at least, acceptance—until that moment. Her stomach did a flip-flop as she turned to face her friend. Despite Liam’s lack of contact or the fact that he hadn’t so much as hinted that they might see each other again, her intuition was telling her they were a long way from finished.
“I’m sorry you don’t like the idea of me seeing your brother, but I can’t promise that.”
Olivia dried her hands, then tossed the towel into a heap on the counter. “No, my problem isn’t that he’s my twin brother and you’re like a sister to me. I mean, that’s weird, but that’s not what I’m talking about.” She dropped to the sofa again and set her hands over Marlena’s. “What I meant was that I care about you too much to sit by and watch him hurt you.”
Marlena started to protest, but Olivia silenced her with a wave.
“No, listen. It’s hard to say this about my brother, but you need to hear it. I’ve seen how he is with girlfriends. He’s not good to them. He’s mean.”
Marlena sat a little straighter, defensiveness stiffening her spine. “He’s not mean to me.”
“Give it time. Even if he was able to lay on the charm for a night, he can’t keep that up. It’s an act. You have to see that, right?”
Liam hadn’t laid on the charm. She wasn’t sure he was even capable of faking charm. “No, I don’t see that, because he wasn’t putting on an act with me.” Maybe the sex, maybe, but not the dancing. “He’s not some monster.”
A shadow of pain crossing her face, Olivia picked at an invisible spot on her pants. “I know he’s a war hero. Like, I get it that he saved lives over there and I’m a bitch for not just focusing on how proud I am of him—because I am—but it broke him, Marli. Maybe he’s not a monster, but he’s not fit to date, either. He’ll ruin you, and I love you too much to let that happen.”
“You’re not a bitch, he’s not broken, and I’m not going to be ruined. Hello, this is the twenty-first century. I’m a grown woman. I can handle myself.”
“I know you can. You’re one of the brightest, shiniest spirits I know, but he’s going to suck you down into his darkness.”
It was hard work to keep from rolling her eyes at Olivia’s melodrama. She snuck her hands out from under Olivia’s and took hold of Olivia’s shoulders. “He’s not going to suck me down into darkness. You’re overreacting. We just had sex. Nothing more.”
Not exactly true, but what happened after they’d slept together was too personal to share. Funny, that. She’d always thought that sex was the closest two people could get, but slipping out in the middle of the night to drink and dance in a crowd of strangers felt even more intimate than the sex, which had been great in its own messy, crazy way.
Olivia dropped her cheek to Marlena’s hand. “I still don’t like it.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” She pulled Olivia in for a hug. “I don’t want to lose you over this, but I’m not going to stop seeing him because you want me to.”
Olivia let out an exasperated sigh and tightened her hug. “You won’t lose me. I’ll always be here for you. You’re my person. When things go bad with Liam, I won’t even tell you I told you so.”
With an unspoken goal of lightening the mood, together they cleaned the kitchen, chatting about safe topics like Olivia’s odds in the school science challenge and the trouble Marlena was having collecting monthly membership fees from a few perennially unreliable clients.
Not twenty minutes later, after a long hug at the door, Marlena walked to the parking lot, where she couldn’t help doing another scan of the vehicles in search of Liam’s truck. She found it, not in the parking lot, but in the distance at the end of a one-lane fire road that curved around the edge of the brook. It was parked next to what looked like a maintenance building. The light was on inside and the roll-up garage door open.
She walked closer until she could see through the open door that it wasn’t so much a maintenance building as a workshop, with red metal tool cases lining a wall and a workbench. In the center of the space sat sawhorses supporting a long wood plank that had a handsaw and various other tools sitting on top.
Liam walked into view, dressed in a gray T-shirt and faded jeans, and wearing a backward ball cap and safety goggles. Marlena froze, her breath catching in her throat at the sight of him, even though it shouldn’t have been a surprise that he was inside, given that his truck was parked there. Would she ever not startle upon seeing him?
He held a pencil between his lips and some kind of small power tool in his hands, a saw if she had to guess. He was concentrating intently on one end of the wood plank. He touched the tool to the wood and sawdust billowed.
She watched, transfixed, wishing she knew where the two of them stood, wishing she had a clearer idea if he’d be okay with her popping in to say hello or if that would be seen as invasive or smothering. He had such a stringent, unwritten list of rules he lived by, and it bothered her, truth be told, that she felt like she had to tiptoe around them. She wasn’t the type of woman to worry about or overthink a man’s opinion of her, except that Liam wasn’t just any man.
Simmering with annoyance at him for having a short fuse and a long list of conditions and annoyance at herself for feeling insecure, she stood under the stars, in the night silence, and watched him work.
They’d slept together, damn it. That should have earned her the right to approach him. But sometime between getting in his truck at the bar and reaching her front door, the glass wall had risen up between them again, and she had no idea which one of the two of them had erected it. The longer she stood there, the more she wondered if their connection would always distill down to moments like this—her standing alone in the distant darkness, watching the man who had always existed out of
her reach, willing him to notice her, too.
Chapter Eight
Mondays for Liam sucked. He had a standing morning appointment with Dr. Patel and, while it was good to get his first therapy appointment for the week over with right off the bat, that didn’t make it any easier to go through, week after week.
Prolonged exposure therapy was the best and worst thing that had happened to Liam since he’d cracked. It was the best because it was the only thing that had worked to take away the power of his memory triggers. Not antidepressants, not group therapy, not journaling or hypnosis. Nothing except P.E.T. with a conscious breathing component, which was where his yoga practice factored in.
Yet, P.E.T. was the worst thing that had happened to him in the three years since he’d cracked, because it meant reliving the worst moments of his life over and over and over again. That was the prolonged part. And not just reliving them, but embracing the pain and the vivid details, giving himself fully over to the memories. That was the exposure part. Each cycle was comprised of six weeks of diving down into the muck in his mind and staying there, purposefully, consciously, eyes wide open to the pain.
This Monday morning marked the start of week three of his third cycle of P.E.T. with Dr. Patel. He’d taken a long break after the first two P.E.T. six-week cycles because a man can only take so much. But he’d dragged his feet long enough on this, and it was time for him to deal with his triggers of hospitals and shouting and blood.
Two weeks done and it wasn’t getting any easier to relive the very worst day of his life. The therapy session with Dr. Patel always followed the same procedure. First, the two of them talked about Liam’s previous week, then they went over the rules for Liam’s recitation. After that came the hard part, in which he told Dr. Patel the same story about the kid and that day, over and over, as many times as their appointment allowed. And he didn’t just tell the story, he had to say it as though it was happening in the present tense while visualizing it and concentrating on the details involving his five senses and how he felt moment to moment.
The part that blew Liam’s mind was that the story was never exactly the same with each retelling. The memory actually morphed in his mind the more he immersed himself in it and the more often he revisited it—becoming less about the suffocating and paralyzing guilt he felt and more focused on facts and an acknowledgement about what was out of his control—which was a freaky mind trick . . . and the whole point of P.E.T. At least, that was what had happened to his memories with his two previous P.E.T. cycles. It had yet to be the case about the kid.
On this Monday morning, after he got through the telling once, he turned his heavy, pained eyes to the clock, blinking away the moisture pooling in them to read the time. He shouldn’t have done it, because the time on the clock killed the last shreds of his morale. He’d only been in therapy for twenty-five minutes. That left twenty-five more to go.
Dr. Patel stopped the digital recording of the story that Liam would listen to throughout the week. “The narrative changed from last week.”
Liam had to move a rock off his chest to speak, the pain was so bad today. His first try came out as a wheeze. He cleared his throat and tried again. “How?”
“The wording changed. On Friday, you said you sent the kid into the clinic, but today you said the kid ran into the clinic.”
Liam knew from experience what that meant, that the memory was morphing in his mind. He’d let go of some responsibility. He didn’t make the kid go into the abandoned hospital clinic. He could see that day in his mind like a movie, and of course he hadn’t. Funny that last week, he thought he had. In a few days, he’d probably appreciate that change. But now, his heart and his spirit were too heavy to congratulate himself on remembering a child’s death differently. Either way, the kid was dead, and it’d happened slowly and painfully while Liam was powerless to stop it.
“I hate this shit.”
“There are twenty-five minutes left of your appointment. That’s enough time to tell the story one more time.”
Liam hung his head and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. “Well, that’s really fucking lucky for me.”
Dr. Patel ignored the outburst. “Whenever you’re ready, go ahead. Start from the beginning.”
Nobody was making Liam do this. He could get up and walk out of this room at any moment and no one would stop him. But he needed this wound to heal. His parents were getting older, their health deteriorating, and he wanted to be able to go to the hospital to be with them, if and when that happened someday. He wanted to stop flinching when people shouted.
He was a tough bastard, too tough to let this get the better of him. Time was going to pass anyway; he was going to replay this story over and over in his head anyway—therapy or no—so this, reciting it again to Dr. Patel, was nothing special. Besides that, he knew this kind of therapy worked. It’d worked before, with other stories that had haunted him. Already, this second round of exposure therapy was starting to work.
He sniffled his runny nose. “It’s August twenty-seventh. Dawn. For the third day in a row, my unit is conducting a KLE operation in the Wataphur District, Konar Province, Afghanistan. We’re in the street, clearing it, when a woman comes running up to us, dragging a child behind her. A boy about the age of eight. The kid’s crying and he has a bloody nose and bloodshot eyes. The mom won’t stop shouting at us. Our translator gets busy figuring out what the mom’s saying, but I only have eyes for the kid. I can tell he’s hurt by the way he holds his arm and the dried blood on the back of his neck and in his ear.
“I get down on his level and smile at him, and I give him a hard candy from my pocket. I always keep some there for the kids we come across during patrol. And sometimes for their moms, too, if they look like they’re getting beat down at home.”
He closed his eyes, embracing a wave of anguish that made his skin sweaty and his stomach lurch. “Then I hear it, a gunshot from my left . . .”
***
Monday evening, after therapy and putting in a seven-hour day at Duke’s jobsite, Liam started work on fixing up apartment 710 for Marlena. He’d done a passable job before, good enough for renters, but not for her. This time through, he planned to repaint, refinish the wood accents, change out the carpet from blue-gray to light beige, add crown molding, and fill the nook in the bedroom with built-in bookshelves.
It was a huge list, especially since she might be moving in the next weekend for all he knew, but he hadn’t slept well since his P.E.T. had started, so he had plenty of hours in the day to tackle the projects. Plus, he was considering it a good omen that he’d found an honest-to-God paint color named “Celery Green” at the paint store.
The first order of business was taping the edges in preparation to paint. He’d nearly completed taping the larger of the two bedrooms when footsteps sounded behind him. He knew it was Olivia because even the sound of her walking got on his nerves.
“Hi, Liam. You and I need a word.”
She was in her teacher clothes, her lanyard still around her neck with her school I.D. photo smiling at him and a ton of buttons with science jokes that went way over his head.
He’d already pretty much figured she wasn’t there to give him a hand, judging by the determined clomp of her footsteps. Even still, he should have ignored her terse tone and said Grab the spare roll of tape. You can say what you need to while you help me with the trim.
For whatever reason, though, he couldn’t say something so casual to her. Maybe it was the fear that she’d actually take him up on the offer to stay and help. The mere idea of her working side-by-side with him got him feeling squirrely and defensive. So instead, he said nothing and kept on taping.
“I talked to Marlena,” she said after a long pause.
Marlena. His ribs gave a squeeze at the sound of her name, like they always did. That was part of the nagging hold she had on him. He couldn’t even hear her name without having a physical reaction.
“Don’t you two talk all
the time?” he said, ignoring Olivia’s accusing tone and what it probably meant that she and Marlena had talked about.
It sucked that he had the hots for his twin’s best friend. It really did. It made everything messy in exactly the way Liam hated. The trouble was, he couldn’t get Marlena out of his head. Even now, days later, he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Hell, he was taking a whole week to spruce up her apartment, including painting it so it would look like a vegetable.
Olivia walked around the side of Liam to glare at his face. “You need to stay away from her.”
Well, shit. His guess had been right. It pissed him off that Marlena had gone blabbing to Olivia about so private an experience. He supposed he should have expected it, given the adage If a woman does something, but she doesn’t tell her friends every nauseating fucking detail, did it really happen?
“Why would I do that? Are you jealous that I actually enjoy spending time with her?” Admittedly, that was a shitty thing to say, but when it came to Olivia, he couldn’t seem to get himself to think before opening his big mouth.
“I hate you sometimes.”
He broke off the length of tape he was edging the bedroom window trim with and tossed the roll on the ground as he stood. “Just sometimes?”
Olivia’s cheeks went red. She pressed her lips together as though regrouping. “She’s my best friend. I care about what happens to her, and I know you’re going to hurt her. You can’t help yourself.”
Irritation tightened his throat and made his movements jerky. “How are you so sure I would hurt her? I want to hear you say it.”
She shook her head, lips clamped shut, shooting daggers at him with her eyes.
“Because I’m broken, you think I’ll break her, too? Is that the opinion you’re too chicken to admit all of a sudden? You think what I’ve got is contagious?”
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