by Scott, Emma
Finally.
My hands were tugging at the button on his jeans, then the zipper. His own hand was between my thighs. Finding me and feeling how wet I was for him…
“Fuck, Autumn, wait… God, wait…”
Weston braced himself over me a moment, a grimace twisting his beautiful features. Then he was on his feet, turning a small, frustrated circle, his breath coming hard.
His sudden absence was colder than the coldest shower. A visceral slap to the face. I sucked in a breath and sat up, as if I’d been submerged in a warm, dark cave, and now was thrust into the naked light of reality.
“Oh God,” I whispered. Through tendrils of messy hair, I glanced down at my torn dress and my naked breasts. “What did we do? What did I do?”
You cheated. That’s what you did.
“Not you,” Weston said darkly. He tore a hand through his hair. “Me. I did this. Fuck. I’m sorry. I’m drunk…”
The tequila was still swimming in my blood, but not so much that I could blame it for what I’d done. And I knew damn well he wasn’t drunk. His eyes were clear and sharp as we regarded each other.
“I don’t know what happened,” I said, pulling my torn dress closed. “I became what I hate. I did what I swore I’d never do.” I lifted my gaze to Weston. “Why…?”
“Why?” he asked. I could see the barrier going back up. Every thorny vine coiled tight around him. Impenetrable. Yet I’d breached it. And instead of being stung…
I was kissed better than I’ve ever been kissed in my life.
“Because I’m selfish, that’s why,” Weston said. “Taking what isn’t mine. It’s all my fault.”
“No,” I said, taking another deep breath. “I own this, too. I have to take responsibility. It’s my fault too. I guess I felt…”
“Lonely,” he said. “You were lonely. Connor passed out drunk on the eve of goodbye, and everything you wanted to say to him—all your worry and love—you had no place to put it. So you gave it to me.”
“On the eve of goodbye,” I murmured.
Poetic choice of words.
The suspicions I’d voiced to Connor swam through my tequila haze, and were refracted stronger in them. Alcohol was my truth serum. I’d told Weston as much.
Weston…?
The image of him writing at a desk came to me swiftly again. Only this time, he set the pen down, stood up and strode toward me, held my face in his hands and kissed me…
I buried my face in my hands. “Oh, God…what is happening? And Connor…”
Connor was in the next room, not fifteen feet away and oblivious. Just as I had been about Mark.
I looked up at Weston. “I cheated on him. That’s the bottom line. The only truth…”
“Yeah, well, I cheated on him too,” Weston spat. “I’m his best friend. I betrayed him. Because I’m so fucking selfish and I can’t stop…”
“Can’t stop, what?”
His blue-green eyes raised to meet mine and I saw the answer floating in their ocean depths.
Wanting you.
“I’m drunk and scared to ship out,” he said after a moment. “That’s why it happened. We don’t have to tell him. It would only hurt him. He doesn’t…” Weston shook his head, his anger and disgust with himself was palpable. “He doesn’t need or deserve this right now. It’s my fault.”
“I kissed you too—”
“It was my fault and it was wrong and I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“Weston…”
“It won’t happen again,” he said and his voice cracked on the last syllable, unleashing something deeper than regret for betraying a friend. Something final that scared me to my core.
A thousand questions and emotions swelled in me, tangling with the confused, heated desire for him. But the barrier was up. Barbed wire now. And behind it, he was unyielding. An ice statue. Beautiful, but immovable. Immutable.
I mustered my shaken dignity. “You’re right,” I said. “It won’t happen again. But it’s not up to you to say how I deal with it. I need to tell Connor—”
“Tell him what? That we made a drunken mistake? We can’t let him go to war with the one bright spot in his life dimmed.”
I blinked in confusion. “What are you talking about, one bright spot?”
“You,” Weston said. “You make him happy. You make him proud when all he gets is shit from his parents.”
I sagged against the couch, remembering how proud Connor had been at Thanksgiving that I was by his side.
“We can’t take that away from him,” Weston said. “Not while he’s got his finger on the trigger and making life or death decisions. One hesitation, one second of self-doubt and it’s over.”
He moved toward me and my pulse jumped. His hand rose and my skin tingled in anticipation of his touch, even as guilt coursed through my veins.
“What happened tonight was my fault,” he said. “Everything. It’s all on me. Not Connor. Don’t punish him for my mistakes.”
“Mistakes?” I said. “I don’t—”
He silenced me with his hand on my cheek, and even then, my body responded to his touch and ached for more.
“You can take the guest room,” Wes said, his voice softer now, frayed at the edges. His eyes filled with pain. “I’ll sleep on the couch here.”
I stared at him a moment more, wishing I hadn’t drunk a drop of alcohol.
My truth serum…
I couldn’t think clearly and the only thing to do was to go. I rose on shaking legs and walked to the door like a sleepwalker, and Weston opened it for me.
“Goodnight, Weston,” I said.
“Goodnight, Autumn.”
I stepped into the hallway and he shut the door behind me. I fumbled my way through the dark, quiet house to the guest room and its big empty bed. The tears were already flowing. No matter how rocky, up-and-down and confusing things were with Connor, I was his girlfriend. And I cheated on him. I betrayed Connor on the eve of his deployment.
The eve of goodbye.
The shame whipped me to the bone. I was no better than Mark. And yet…
“It wasn’t wrong,” I whispered against the pillow.
Or rather, it may have been wrong, but it felt perfectly natural. Inevitable. As if I’d been waiting for Weston for months.
Finally.
Kissing him was cheating on Connor, but it didn’t feel like cheating. It felt like a completion.
What is happening between us? The three of us?
But it was too late to ask.
We said our goodbyes in the gray light of dawn. I felt sluggish and slow; last night’s drinking hanging over me like a fog, and what I’d done with Weston feeling like a dream that was both wrong and perfect. Part of me wanted to run away from the porch in shame, and the other wanted to go back to sleep for more.
Weston’s mother cried loudly. Connor’s mother stifled her tears behind her wrist. Paul shook Weston’s hand and was visibly shocked when Weston pulled him in for a hug. They slapped each other’s shoulders, then held still a beat. Weston pulled back and said something to Paul. Paul shook his head at first, his expression grim, but Weston was insistent. Finally, Paul nodded and then they shook hands, as if sealing a deal.
“I promise,” Paul said.
Connor hugged me and I was petrified, positive he’d sense Weston’s lingering presence all over me. When he craned down to kiss me, shame burned my skin.
“Be safe,” I whispered.
“I will,” he said against my hair.
Ruby took her turn hugging Connor and then Weston. She gave him a pat on the cheek.
“Behave yourself.” She smirked. “No, I take that back. Give’em hell.”
He smiled faintly. “Will do.”
Then it was only Weston and me. Everyone watching two friends say goodbye.
I moved slowly into his embrace and ringed my arms around his neck.
“Take care of him,” I said, my voice cracking. “And you. Take car
e of you.”
And come back to me.
“I will,” he said. When he drew back, his eyes were drowning in a blue-green ocean of pain and regret.
When the Army van arrived, my heart didn’t break—it tore in half. A vicious rip with sloppy, jagged edges. No defined boundaries, no territory lines indicating which part belonged to which man.
Weston’s kisses still burned my swollen lips and I wanted him. I wanted Connor’s letters and Weston’s conversations. I wanted Connor’s poetry and I wanted Weston’s electricity that set my blood on fire.
“Come back to me,” I whispered, as the Army van drove away with the men I loved.
Weston
“Anyone else feel like some shit’s about to go down?” Bradbury deadpanned in his nasally, low voice. “No? Just me? Carry on.”
We were hunkered down against what was left of the stone structure. This village had been bombed long before we found it, its inhabitants long gone, fleeing as refugees to Turkey. We weren’t here for the village, but the road leading out of it to Al-Rai. An escape route from the regimes’ forces in Aleppo and northwestern Syria. They wanted to cut off this refugee line. We had one job: keep it open.
Connor sat beside me, our backs to the wall. Bradbury and Erickson crouched kitty-corner. We were all smudged, bloodstained and sweating in our sand-gray camouflage. War was indeed the great equalizer and the antagonism of boot camp was long forgotten. Erickson, Bradbury and I were closer than brothers. Here, under the relentless sun and never-ending stress, I wasn’t the Amherst Asshole. I was Iceman, because nothing rattled me. How could it? A man who knows his own fate has nothing left to fear.
As for Connor and me… I didn’t have a word for what we were. Something beyond brothers. We were bonded at a molecular level. And in my mind, my one job was to make sure Connor got out of here alive.
I was squad-leader on this mission, with Connor, Jagger, and Erickson under my command. Lieutenant Jeffries was squad-leader of the other half of our platoon, but I’d been promoted in the field to Corporal for “exemplary leadership skills under fire.”
Translation: I stuffed all feelings down deep where I couldn’t touch them, leaving me precise and unflappable. The horrors we’d seen, the men we’d killed…I pressed them all down or cut them out—like tonsils. I’d been the Amherst Asshole. Now I was the Iceman. Cold. Hard. Unfeeling.
Jeffries still outranked me and loved giving orders. I let him. Giving orders wasn’t my thing unless it was to keep my men safe. He gave us the ‘move up’ signal from the other side of the street. The village was at the lip of a flat, wide plain. The terrain ahead was strewn with huge rocks that led into foothills. Intel told us the road ahead was clear, but that was three days ago.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up as the twelve of us crept as quietly as our gear would allow. We moved in a pack toward the last structure in the village, looking to secure it. On Jeffries’s order, Bradbury, Mendez and Milton moved farther ahead, and peered over the broken walls of the roofless structure.
Erickson made a hissing sound between his teeth. I raised a fist. My men froze.
Ahead, hostiles crouched behind the red-brown boulders, and the searing whine of an RPG missile tore the air.
“Get down! Get down! Get down!” I bellowed into our headsets.
Connor disobeyed and ran ahead to where the blast had hit.
“Fuck,” I muttered.
I dove behind what was left of a smaller house, then leveled my weapon over the jagged edge of what was left of the wall. Our platoon had scattered, but I knew we’d been hit.
“Connor, you asshole…”
I could see him through the haze of kicked up sand, dust, and smoke. He had Bradbury and was dragging him by his vest toward me. I laid down suppressive fire over his head, until he was close enough that I could help him drag Bradbury behind the wall.
Connor fell back on his ass, exhausted, with Bradbury’s back against his chest.
“I think he’s dead,” Connor said, his voice shaking and low. “I think Bradbury’s fucking dead, man.”
“I ordered you to stay the fuck down,” I said.
Shots fired and men’s voices shouted. I pushed up from my crouch, took aim over the wall and sprayed the road in front of us. I glanced quickly at Bradbury, then back to my targets, squeezing the trigger of my M4, calm and steady.
“Yeah, he’s dead,” I said.
A dead body isn’t like how it is in the movies. It’s like how Stephen King put it in his story The Body—the one they made Stand by Me out of. Not sleeping. Not unconscious. Dead. The eyes don’t always stare perfectly into space, as if the person fell asleep with their eyes open.
Bradbury’s eyes were slightly crossed, the whites showing. Blood trickled down his cheek from where a bullet had struck him just under the helmet.
“Fuck,” Connor whispered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Chill out,” I said. “And stay down.”
The sound of gunfire, angry shouts and barking orders were muted under the stifling, oppressive heat. A hostile in white and tan streaked across the terrain in front of me, from boulder to boulder. I squeezed the trigger and he went down.
That was a human being.
No matter how many men I killed—six so far—the thought always filtered into my head. That guy would’ve killed me if he had the chance. Hell, he was actively trying to kill my men when I took him down. He may have been the one who killed Bradbury.
It was still a human being.
The thought always followed a kill. Six times now. I supposed if the thought stopped showing up, I might be in more trouble than I was already.
A few tense minutes later, the 5th Regiment joined up from the east, and the conflict was over.
I lowered my weapon, shouldered it, and jostled Connor.
“Let him go, man. He’s gone.”
Connor shook his head and clutched Bradbury tighter, his jaw clenched, his lips pressed down and drawn tight.
“He’s got a wife,” Connor said. “Did you know that? And a baby girl, three months old.”
“No, I didn’t know,” I said and took a sip of water from my canteen. The men may have been like my brothers, but it was Connor to whom they talked to and confided in.
A medic from the 5th pried Connor’s fingers out of Bradbury’s armor and pulled the body away. They covered it with a blanket until it was safe for a chopper to fly the body out.
Connor looked at me, fear bright and glassy in his eyes.
Could be one of us next time, he said.
Not you, I answered. You’re going home.
We turned the burned-out village into our camp. I took first patrol on the south side, then tried to grab an hour or two of sleep. I lay down next to Connor, who was wedged against the wall for cover.
I lay flat, or as flat as I could with my rucksack still strapped to my back. The sky in Syria was unlike anything I’d ever seen in Boston, where the city lights dimmed the star shine. Even Amherst had nothing on the canopy that stretched overhead, impossibly wide, black but strewn with diamonds. I wondered if Autumn ever saw a sky like this in Nebraska.
I hoped she had. I hoped someday she’d see something like this. I wished I could give it to her.
I would bring down the stars for her…
A small smile spread over my lips. I fished under my armor for the small, dirt-smudged notepad and pen I kept there, and wrote down the words before they fled. Not the Object of Devotion poem I’d been writing for months. This was something new. Something that wasn’t born of pathetic longing. No objectifying devotion.
Only love.
I slept, and the dream came again.
I lined up at the track. A cool breeze blew over my skin instead of stifling desert heat. I wore my Amherst shorts and running tank. In the lane to my right, Autumn wore the purple from the night of our going away party. It had little white buttons that scattered like popcorn when I tore the dress open. Crazed to touch as much
of her as I could before reason and reality rushed back in.
Poised on the track beside me, Autumn was buttoned properly, but her hair was still tousled from my hands. Her lips were red and swollen from my kisses. Her eyes dark and dilated with desire.
On my left, Connor flashed his mega-watt smile, as if nothing were amiss in his world. Beyond him, Ma, Paul, my sisters, and the Drakes took up position. In the far outside lane, Bradbury lay facedown on the ground.
Not sleeping.
Not unconscious.
Dead.
The call came for set. We crouched.
The gun went off and I crashed to the track as if a massive hand had flattened me. I felt no pain. I couldn’t move, except to reach my arm out to those I loved as they ran away from me.
And then darkness.
I woke up with a gasp, then a strange calmness came over me, along with a deep ache of pain and regret. Pain from missing my people. Regret that the disturbing dream was the last time I would ever see them again.
I’m not coming home from this place.
I reached under my bunk and pulled out the notepad. The rest of the poem I’d begun earlier that night came to me all at once. I wrote without stopping or hesitation, my pen flying across the page, using my thigh as a table. The words no longer hiding behind my diamond mind. No thoughts, only purest emotion. Everything I felt for Autumn from heart to hand. Tears blotched a word or two, but didn’t make them unreadable. I let them seep in.
I came to the bottom of the page. The empty space that waited for a signature. My pen hovered, touched down, and I pulled it away.
Connor said I owned Autumn’s heart. She loved me, my soul.
And I’m not coming home.
This is all I can give to her.
Take it. It’s your love too.
I loved her. My cracked, tarnished heart that was scared to love, loved Autumn Caldwell. My soul sang the words I could never say to her out loud.
The nib of the pen touched down and I wrote my name. My name. Weston. Because that’s what she called me, always. Only. I was her Weston, until the day I died. This day, maybe.