I rubbed my other hand over my face, wiping away sweat. “I don’t even know what happened.”
“Don’t try to figure it out right now. Just let yourself relax.”
I closed my eyes.
Reese squeezed my hand. “You don’t have to go through with this, Kim.”
“Yes, I do.” I struggled to find my breath. “They can’t get me in again before my leave is—”
“It’s okay. You can always take more leave if you need to.” She released my hand and touched my face again. The pad of her thumb made soft, comforting arcs along my cheekbone, and I focused on that as she whispered, “Once it’s done, there’s no going back. If you’re not sure, then don’t. There’s still time to think it over.”
I chewed my lip.
A quiet knock at the door turned both our heads. It opened slightly, and the nurse poked her head through. “Are you doing better, honey?”
I nodded. “Yeah. You can come in.”
She shut the door behind her.
I took a breath. “I’m . . . I’m not sure I can go through with this.”
The nurse set my chart on the counter. “A lot of young ladies do reconsider at the last minute. It’s a big decision.”
I swallowed the lump rising in my throat. “Except I need to do this.”
She looked at me with kind eyes. “You’re only eight weeks along. You still have time before the law becomes an issue.” She took my hand and squeezed it gently. “It’s an important decision, so if you want to use that time . . .”
I glanced at Reese, and she nodded.
The nurse touched my shoulder. “I’ll give you a few minutes.”
She left again. As soon as we were alone, Reese put her arm around my shoulders, and I almost broke down.
“I don’t know what to do,” I whispered.
“You heard the nurse.” She smoothed my hair. “If you need more time, take it. This is your decision. No one else’s. Definitely not his. Don’t make it until you’re absolutely sure you’re ready.”
“What about our leave?”
“We’ll work it out. I’ll email MA1. He’ll make it happen. I promise.”
I wasn’t so sure Gutiérrez would grant us an extension, but I just hugged her back and murmured, “Thank you.”
Stepping out of that cool, sterile air and into the thick humidity was beyond liberating. Everything had been out of my control since the night Stanton had raped me, but finally, I was the one making a decision.
Reese slid into the driver’s seat, and as I buckled my seat belt, asked, “Where do you want to go?”
“Let’s just go back to the room for now. I think I need to decompress.”
“Sounds like a plan.” She turned the key but didn’t put the car in gear yet. “You’re doing the right thing, by the way.”
I met her eyes. “Do you think getting the abortion is the wrong thing?”
She chewed the inside of her cheek. “Not necessarily. And that’s not my decision to make anyway. I meant giving yourself a little more time to make sure this is what you want.”
I exhaled. “Hopefully a few days will be enough time to figure it out.”
“Hopefully.”
Neither of us talked on the way back to the motel. God knew what she was thinking about as she stared out at the road. Me, I just watched the scenery going by as I tried to sort out the jumble of thoughts banging around in my mind. I wanted to cry because this whole situation wouldn’t go away. I wanted to laugh because it was all so damned absurd, and maybe if I laughed, I wouldn’t cry. But the opposing needs seemed to cancel each other out, and I was just . . . numb. Exhausted. I was sure Reese was right and I’d done the right thing, and at the same time, I was equally convinced I’d just royally fucked up and this would come back and bite me in the ass.
Reese pulled into the motel parking lot, and we headed inside.
This room had felt like a prison cell for the last few days. I didn’t have much money and hadn’t been in the mood for doing touristy stuff by myself, so I’d spent almost the entire week cooped up in here, staring at the walls and wondering when the hell this would all be over.
But coming back to it now, I felt safe. Like walking through the door meant I’d really escaped, that no one would grab me and drag me back to the clinic to finish what I’d started.
No one was coming after me. They’d all been kind and supportive, though they’d advised me of the fees for canceling within twenty-four hours, and then I’d torn off the medical bracelet and headed for the door. No one had tried to stop me. Stanton’s reach hadn’t extended to the palm-shaded women’s clinic on Oahu, and I’d signed myself out with no incident.
As Reese turned the dead bolt, I sank onto the foot of the bed, sitting on the same spot where I’d nearly broken down the other day. Right before I’d begged Reese for the support that had turned into a plane trip and her reassuring company.
She stepped away from the door and put a hand on my shoulder. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m okay.” I released a breath. “And thanks. I guess I wasn’t ready to go through with it.”
“Then it’s all right to wait.” She went to her seabag and pulled out her laptop. “Let me email Gutiérrez before I forget.”
“Are you sure he’ll give us an extension on our leave?”
“He will if he knows what’s good for him,” she muttered. I couldn’t decide if the implication was that he’d have to answer to Stanton or to her, but either way, as long as the extension was granted, I’d be happy.
She tapped out an email, sent it, and closed her laptop. “There. Done.”
“And you’re sure he’ll—”
“He will. Trust me.”
I sat back, resting my hands behind me. “Just another reason I’m glad you’re here.”
She smiled as she slid her laptop back into her bag. “I’m here to help.”
“But I’m burning your leave.”
She shrugged. “I’ve got forty days on the books.”
“Still. You had to take leave, be at the terminal at 0200.” I shook my head. “Why?”
She sat down beside me and took my hand in hers. “You said you needed someone.”
I held her gaze and her hand but didn’t say anything. The truth was, I hadn’t just needed someone. Whether or not I’d realized it at the time, looking at her now, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind—I’d needed her. I couldn’t explain why, but out of the other seven billion people on this planet, I was grateful as hell to have this one in particular sitting here with me.
She laced our fingers together. “Maybe after we’ve chilled for a bit, we should go get you something to eat.”
“Good idea. Now that you mention it, I’m starving.” I shuddered at the memory of why I hadn’t eaten since last night. “I could eat just about anything, I think.”
“I don’t doubt that at all.” She stood, picked up the rental car’s keys, and spun them around her finger. “Let’s go.”
Hawaii had some amazing places to eat. Tons of cool varieties of ethnic foods.
So where did we go?
Burger King.
Maybe we were both just really, really hungry. I hadn’t been able to eat this morning, and hadn’t wanted to eat in front of her anyway, but now that she had a reprieve from the procedure, my stomach settled a bit. And we both agreed—greasy fast food sounded really fucking good.
We took the burgers to go and headed down to the beach. There, we spread a towel on the sand beneath a palm tree and sat with the food bags between us. For a long time, we just ate and watched the ocean, enjoying the warm afternoon.
It occurred to me that we were much more comfortable together than we’d been in the beginning. That she trusted me. And maybe that meant I owed her a little bit of honesty.
I broke the silence. “So, um.” I picked at my fries. “When we met, I told you we had more in common than you probably thought.”
Kim nodded. “Yeah.”
“I don’t blame you.”
I took a deep breath. “I should, though. And the mandated reporter thing, it . . . The statute of limitations is up, so it’s a moot point.”
“Noted. It stays between you and me then. You don’t have to tell me, though.” She lifted her eyebrows, asking without asking.
“You told me yours.” I pulled my cigarettes and lighter out of my pocket. “Seems only fair I should tell you mine. If you, uh . . . if hearing it doesn’t bother you.”
“No, it’s okay.” Kim shifted beside me. “That whole not being alone thing.”
“Gotcha. Just, if it bothers you say so, and I’ll drop it.”
“Okay.”
Neither of us spoke as I took out a cigarette and lit it. I took a deep drag, praying that the nicotine got into my bloodstream before I started shaking. Even after all this time, I didn’t like letting my mind go back to that dark place.
“It happened when I was in Afghanistan.” I pulled my knees up to my chest, shrugging away a chill in spite of the hot breeze. “My LPO didn’t like women in his unit to begin with, and everybody knew it. One night, we were transporting some detainees from our base to a transfer. Long story short, he made a bad call.” I sighed and shook my head. “He wanted to get back to the base because it was almost the end of shift. And, I mean, it was hot as fuck. We were exhausted. But being hot and tired doesn’t give you an excuse to cut corners when it comes to dealing with detainees.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Kim wrinkled her nose. “And they put this guy in charge?”
Rolling my eyes, I gestured at the place on my arm where my insignia would’ve been if I’d been in uniform. “He had more chevrons than the rest of us. Whether we liked it or not, he was in charge.”
“Ugh.” She rolled her eyes too. “So . . . what happened?”
I took a breath. “He made a bad call, and I called him out on it. Normally I wouldn’t do something like that, especially not in front of subordinates, but he was going to get us all killed. The assistant LPO backed him up, but everyone else thought I was right. And it turned out I was right. They’d been lazy about the pat down and missed a knife under a detainee’s clothes.” I shuddered. The desert sun glinting off that blade was a memory I’d carry with me until the day I died. “I mean, what if that had been a bomb, you know?”
“No kidding.”
“So, of course, he got his ass chewed over it, and the assistant LPO did, too. They probably would’ve been hemmed up, but they both had buddies in the chain of command who swept the whole thing under the rug and just told them to keep their shit straight after that.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Right?” I picked at the fries, my appetite suddenly gone, then took another drag instead. The chill under my skin was getting worse by the second. I hugged myself tighter and rested my chin on my knee. “So one night after chow, he and the assistant LPO pulled me aside and said they wanted to talk to me about it. I figured they were just going to give me hell about insubordination, but at least they had the good graces to do it in private. So I went with them.”
Kim’s hand went to her mouth, and her eyes widened.
I swallowed. “As soon as we were alone, my LPO grabbed me and told me if I made a sound, I was dead. And then they took turns. For . . . Shit, I don’t even know how long it went on.” I took a deep drag off my cigarette, wishing my nicotine tolerance wasn’t so goddamned high these days. “And they kept telling me the whole time that this was my commendation for being a motherfucking hero.”
“Jesus,” she breathed. “I didn’t realize it was two guys. I thought it was just one. Not that that’s any better, just . . .”
“I think my LPO knew I’d have kicked his ass if he’d come at me alone,” I growled.
“He was probably right.” Her voice was little more than a hollow, horrified whisper.
“Oh, he was.”
Kim pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “So, what happened to them?”
I tapped my cigarette over the sand. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I never told anyone. Because I was scared.” I turned to her. “For a lot of the same reasons you’ve been scared to turn in Stanton.”
She shuddered when I said his name. “Do you ever regret it? Not reporting it?”
“I wish I could have, and I wish I’d gotten them both strung up.” I shifted my gaze back out to the ocean. “But I don’t know what good it would’ve done if I had reported it. There was a woman on the base who tried to nail a sergeant for sexual assault, but the investigation never got off the ground. And she ended up getting out at twelve years because she couldn’t deal with the environment anymore.”
“I can understand that.”
“Yeah. Me too.” I tapped my cigarette over the sand again. “That’s the whole reason I started smoking. When I first went to Afghanistan, I could almost deal with the stress, but after what happened? Especially when I still had to work for those fuckers every damned day for another five months?” I shook my head. “I needed something to help.”
“And people wonder why Sailors drink.”
“If they wonder, they aren’t paying attention.” I extinguished the cigarette and dropped the butt into my mostly empty soda cup. Going back to that time had left me jittery, so I didn’t even try to talk myself out of lighting up another. After I’d taken a drag off the fresh cigarette, I said, “The worst part is knowing the LPO is still in the Navy. Last I heard, he made board for chief.”
Kim’s jaw dropped. “No way.”
“And the best part? Right before I transferred here, he got to put on gold stripes.” Bitterness seeped into my voice as I added through my teeth, “For twelve years of good fucking conduct.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“That’s what I said.”
“What about the other one? The assistant LPO? Did he get out?”
I blew out some smoke. “He’s dead.”
“He’s . . .” Kim blinked. “Really?”
“Yep. When they . . . When the incident happened, he was there on his fourth tour in six years—two in Afghanistan and two in Iraq—and he already had some serious PTSD by that point.” I took a drag and slowly exhaled the smoke. “Couple of months after he went home, he ate his service weapon.”
“Wow. I don’t know if that’s sad or poetic.”
“A little of both.” I crushed my cigarette and wrapped my arms around my knees again. “It’s weird. Part of me thinks good riddance, but part of me . . .”
Kim put her hand on my arm. “What?”
I took a breath. “The thing is, the LPO was a fucking sociopath. All the women were nervous around him anyway, and everyone thought he was a bit unhinged. That was his first combat tour, though. He’d been deployed as part of ship’s company before that but never in the desert. Whatever was wrong with him, it had nothing to do with the war.” I was nauseated just thinking about that asshole. He’d given me the creeps long before he’d torn my uniform in that stuffy office. “But the assistant . . . I just can’t help but wonder if he was messed up in the head from spending four years of his life over there. Not that it excuses anything, and I would’ve been happy as fuck to see him wind up in the brig for what he did to me, I just . . .” How the hell was I supposed to word that? Especially to a woman who’d been raped, too?
Kim squeezed my arm. “You wonder if the guy who raped you was really him or if it was what going to war turned him into?”
“Yes. Exactly. I mean, would he have done anything like that if he hadn’t been so messed up from combat? It’s like, I would never excuse the guys who go home and kill their families, either, but . . . I kind of get it. Being over there, it . . . does things to you. Changes you.” I looked her in the eyes. “I don’t care what anyone says, no one comes back the s
ame person they were when they left.” I picked up my wrinkled pack of cigarettes. “I came back a smoker. Alejandro started doing dip after he went to Gitmo, so—”
“Alejandro?”
I tensed. “MA1 Gutiérrez, I mean.”
She furrowed her brow. “You guys are on a first name basis?”
“We go back a ways. We met in ‘A’ school, when we were still the same rank. Sometimes it’s hard to remember he’s my LPO now.” Lately, it’s hard to remember he’s my friend. “This is the first time we’ve been stationed together since school, but we’ve stayed in touch for years.” Somehow I doubt that’s going to last.
Kim wadded up her burger wrapper and stuffed it into the empty bag. “So, how many tours have you done in the Sandbox?”
I held up two fingers. “I went to Iraq during my first enlistment and Afghanistan a couple of years later. Iraq wasn’t too bad. I was stationed in one of the bases that didn’t see a lot of action, so I was mostly standing around with a rifle while the Army guys rebuilt schools and shit.”
“And Afghanistan?” Kim hesitated. “I mean, besides what happened with your LPO?”
“Afghanistan was hell. We were in a bad spot. Lots of . . .” I swallowed the queasiness. “It was a really active area, let’s put it that way.”
“Wow. Dealing with that and what those guys did, I can’t even imagine.”
“I’ve done okay, all things considered. I saw a lot of shit I’ll never be able to forget, and I’m a little more familiar than I’d like to be with getting too close to IEDs and enemy fire, but I’ve done all right. Nightmares now and then, but that’s about it. I don’t have constant flashbacks and stuff like some of the others in my unit.” I held up my cigarette. “Mostly I just have these.”
“I can understand that.” She paused. “Thanks. For telling me. I know it’s rough to relive that kind of thing.”
“Actually, it’s . . .” I wrapped my arms around my bent knees. “I’ve never talked about it before. It’s kind of nice to get it out. And . . .” I glanced at her, some heat rushing into my cheeks. “It’s good to tell it to someone who believes me.”
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