Only Love

by Garrett Leigh

  JED PULLED into the hospital parking lot with a heavy sigh. Most of his PT appointments were scheduled in the mornings, but every second Tuesday, Carla pulled him in for an evening session. He didn’t usually mind—PT hurt like bitch whatever the hour—but today a round-trip to Seattle had left him beat.

  He trudged wearily into the hospital. Carla took one look at him, flipped a switch on the treadmill, and pointed to the massage bed.

  Relieved, Jed slipped one leg out of his sweatpants and maneuvered himself onto the bed. He bit back a wince as Carla slid practiced hands over his weakened thigh. Her hands were small, but deceptively strong. Though a therapeutic massage was less effort than physical training, it was sometimes every bit as painful.

  Carla manipulated the damaged muscles in his leg. Jed bore it in silence until he noticed she was uncharacteristically quiet. Carla talked his ear off most days, even when he closed his eyes in protest. When the fog of pain had cleared enough, he glanced up and shot her a quizzical look. “Why so quiet?”

  That earned him a smile. He’d learned his first Spanish from Dan, but over the years his dialect had become more Mexican than Ecuadoran. The syntactic variations amused Carla, and fascinated Jed enough to filter through his apathy-clouded brain.

  Carla lifted his leg and pressed her fingers into a sensitive spot below his hip. “Long day,” she said. “I took my senile grandfather grocery shopping. It’s always an experience.”

  “Grocery shopping’s never fun.”

  “Speak for yourself.” Carla waited for Jed’s discomfort to pass. “I’m pretty sure I saw you and Max living it up in Walmart.”

  Jed let the remark pass. Walmart was the devil’s playground as far as he was concerned.

  “Speaking of Max,” Carla said when Jed failed to take her bait. “I’ve called him a few times today, but he hasn’t gotten back to me. Has he got a big project booked in at the boat shed?”

  Jed shrugged. It was sometimes hard to tell what Max was up to. He worked his fingers to the bone, but his tidy workshop belied his chaotic approach, and Jed was never altogether sure which boat had his sketchy attention. “I don’t know what he’s working on.”

  Carla let it go and moved on to a particularly painful phase of her massage. Jed covered his face with his arm and gritted his teeth. The time for talk was over and, perversely, the grinding pain in his leg sometimes sent him to sleep.

  A little while later, Carla nudged him awake. “Are you going to tell me what you’ve been doing to exhaust yourself today?”

  Dazed, Jed lowered his arm. The bright light of the room hurt his eyes. “I’m all right.”

  Carla grinned and held out her hand to help him up. “Sure you are. That’s why you just snoozed through an hour of muscle manipulation.”

  “I wasn’t asleep.” Jed braced one arm behind him, accepted her hand, and sat up. He rarely let anyone help him, but he got a strange kick out of letting his petite therapist yank him upright.

  Carla bustled quietly around him, tidying up and resetting her room while he got dressed and took a moment to steady himself. When she was done, she pulled up a chair and scribbled at the notes in her lap until he was sure the room had stopped spinning. “So,” she said, her attention trained on her work. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Jed smirked. Carla was as inquisitive as he was private. Many of her questions went unanswered. “About?”

  “Don’t be a dick. What have you been doing to wear yourself out?”

  His grin widened. Despite the setting of their relationship, he found her blunt candor comforting and familiar. It reminded him of both his old life and the new life he was forging with Max at the cabin. “I had to go to Seattle today.”

  “Seattle? Why?”

  “Work.”

  “Work? I thought you were discharged?”

  “Not Army shit,” Jed clarified, though in truth, discharged he might have been, his job was far from done. “I got offered a translating contract for an NGO in Sudan.”

  “NGO? That’s a nongovernment organization, right?”

  “Right.”

  Carla set her notes aside and leaned forward. She was curious, he could tell by her tilted head and open hands. “Something close to your heart?”

  “Used to be. Not sure I can take the job, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t have a laptop, Internet access….”

  Truth was, Jed wanted to take the job. Not because he needed the money, or because translating public health documents was particularly stimulating, but because he needed to do something. With dark dreams haunting what little sleep he got, he needed to flex his brain before he lost control of it completely.

  “Max had an Internet connection for a while. I don’t know what happened to it, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you set it up again.”

  “Wouldn’t do me much good without a computer,” Jed countered.

  “So buy one.”

  Carla reached behind her and retrieved the smallest laptop Jed had ever seen. He eyed it warily. He’d handled the most dangerous weapons in the world, but he found domestic technology perplexing. The computer was tiny. He was sure he’d break it.

  Carla flipped it open and pulled up the website for an electronics store. Somehow she needled Jed’s credit card from him and bought him a laptop that seemed not much bigger than hers.

  “Man, you’re a pushover. Thought you Special Forces guys were hard as nails?” Clearly pleased with herself, Carla handed the card back. “If the Internet thing doesn’t work out, you can always print your work here, come to my place, whatever. We can work it out.”

  “You know I’m gay, right?”

  “Fuck off.”

  For the first time in days, Jed laughed. It hadn’t taken long for Carla to topple down the walls he’d spent years building around his sexuality. She was more like Dan than she probably cared to admit. Jed slid off the bed and planted his feet on the floor. Dizziness washed over him. He steadied himself on the edge of the bed, but he felt Carla’s sharp gaze all over him.

  “How’s that pesky anemia coming along?”

  Jed shrugged. It had been a while since he’d bothered to check.

  Carla tsked gently. “I had a feeling you might say that. Sit your ass back down. I want to check your blood sugar.”

  Really? Jed sighed, but obeyed. Anemia and chronic low blood sugar were both symptoms of gastroparesis Jed lived with every day. Who cared about the damned numbers? Carla pricked his finger with a small device and waited for the result to come up.

  “Dr. Howarth came to see me this morning. He told me to tell you if you don’t make an appointment soon, he’s going to make an impromptu house call.” The blood sugar machine beeped. Carla let out a low whistle. “That’s low. When did you last eat?”

  “This morning?”

  “Skipping lunch is not cool,” Carla said sternly. “You need to get your iron levels checked too, and don’t discount Dr. Howarth. He will come looking for you.”

  Jed didn’t doubt it, but he wasn’t in a hurry to hook up with the good doctor. Max’s vegetable garden was keeping him in as much iron as he could handle.

  He left Carla, promising to take better care of himself and remind Max to return her call, and made his way back to the truck. Max remained on his mind as he drove the short journey from Portland to Ashton. He’d been distracted most of the day, but with time on his hands and the freeway for company, he couldn’t help brooding over his vibrant young roommate.

  Max had been avoiding Jed since he’d given him an eyeful of his burned shoulder, and Jed hadn’t made much effort to seek him out. He understood the horror in Max’s face—it was a reflection of his own disgust—but he missed him. It had felt strange to slip away from the cabin at the crack of dawn without his daily dose of Max’s infectious grin.

  Through the haze of PT-induced exhaustion, Jed suddenly found he couldn’t wait to be home.

  Chapter Ten

 
November 2002

  Central Africa

  GLENN THREW the syringe into the plastic container and wiped his brow. Jed caught his eye, and the medic offered him a weary grin. Glenn looked exhausted and ready to drop. Jed cast his gaze over the long line of waiting villagers and their children, and couldn’t help but feel the same.

  He sighed and discarded his own empty syringe. This jungle shit was getting old. His crew had sweated their balls off in the tiny village camp for months, and for what? The atrocities continued around them regardless. Aside from providing too little aid and not enough medical care, their presence had become meaningless. A day didn’t pass without Jed wondering why they were even there.

  The young boy in front of Jed smiled, and for a brief moment, his cynicism evaporated. This whole area was like that. The quiet, resigned suffering of its people was soul destroying, but every child had a smile that lit up the world. In a place where time seemed to stop, those smiles alone were enough to keep Jed in motion.

  The kid left, clutching his mother’s robe and a baby as she carried his two siblings. Jed called the next child forward and tried not to speculate how far they had to walk home.

  A few hours later, Jed helped Glenn pack up his makeshift clinic, and they headed back to base camp. Tired and grimy, Glenn disappeared to clean up, but Jed lingered in the dying evening sun to catch a smoke. He was running low on cigarettes—he’d limited himself to one a day to conserve supplies—but the quiet moment he set aside for himself at dusk each day was a moment he often needed after a long day in the village.

  When he was done, he strolled across a patch of earth that constituted a road to search out the rest of his team. He found Luke first, asleep under a tree, a sight that made him grin. The lazy motherfucker was always asleep. Amused, Jed kicked him, once… twice, until he opened one eye. “Where are the others?”

  Luke inclined his head to the right, the motion slight and idle. “Pretending they know how to play soccer.”

  Jed followed the sound of raucous laughter as Luke’s eyes slid closed. Across the camp, Paul, Raffi, and Kip were playing soccer with the village kids and roughhousing with each other. Jed laughed aloud as Raffi put Paul on his ass. Raffi was the smallest guy on the team, and Paul the biggest, but Raffi had taught them all they knew about hand-to-hand combat. Only Jed had ever put him down.

  A vehicle approached the camp. Jed glanced behind him and spotted the bright red logo of the aid charity they were assisting. Shit. He ducked into the radio tent, ignoring Luke’s deep chuckle. The French nurses were nice enough, but one of them had taken to following Jed around with such tenacity Jed suspected Paul’s hand.

  Still, as he began the arduous task of auditing his crew’s dwindling supplies, he mused that life could be worse. It could always be worse….

  FAST FORWARD three years and Jed felt like his perception of hell had been spun on its axis and redefined in a way he never thought possible. The sticky heat of Africa had given way to the sandstorms of the Arabian desert, and with it had come the oppressive chaos of a city that, long after the conflict was officially over, was still waging a brutal war.

  Mosul. The third largest city in Iraq, and a city that Jed had fought to take and retake three separate times. In the early days, way before TV cameras came, Jed’s crew had parachuted blind into the desert just north of the city. The repressed Kurdish community welcomed them then, but times had changed since. The invasion was over, but the conflict remained. With no infrastructure to the city—no government, public services, or civil police—rival religious factions had turned on each other in a melting pot of violent tension.

  One sweltering summer evening, Jed led his crew through the busy streets of one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. There were eight of them in total, nine if you counted the dog, and eight young recruits from the newly formed Iraqi Army.

  Jed picked his way along the dusty road, ignoring the radio on his shoulder. Its tinny chatter was his constant and irritating companion, and he had little patience for it tonight. His fingers itched to hurl it against one of the dilapidated buildings that surrounded him. That would give the suspicious, hollow eyes of the locals something to gawk at.

  But the eyes he couldn’t see were the worst. Twitching curtains and faceless shadows. The prickling sensation of being watched danced on every inch of his skin. He tightened his grip on his weapon, and his knuckles turned white.

  They came to the end of the dusty street, a crossroads of sorts. Three children stood on the corner, watching them. The oldest child smiled, and Jed smiled back. It was the first friendly face he’d seen in days. He called a greeting, beckoned the children over, and talked to them while the others gave out candy. They were nice kids, polite and friendly, and it didn’t take much to get them talking—a handful of sweets and some friendly words. He didn’t ask them anything important; he’d be back for that another day.

  The patrol moved on and continued its sweep of the city. They retraced their steps at dawn. The streets were deserted this time around, save the bodies of the three children lying in the dirt just yards away from where Jed had left them. Their throats had been cut, punishment for talking to the enemy and a message for all, crumpled in the dust of the city streets.

  The silence of death was loud and enveloping, broken only by Paul’s hand on his shoulder, Glenn cursing, and the frantic bark of his team’s specialist combat dog….

  JED ROLLED from his bed and onto the hardwood floor with a thump. The impact sent a shock of pain through his body. He shuddered as the discomfort passed, from the chill in his bones as much as the remnants of his unpleasant awakening. The cabin was dark and cold, like it had been since he’d come home a few hours before.

  He glanced around for a shirt, noting he’d pulled his usual trick of passing out half dressed after his shower. He found his T-shirt bunched up in his hands.

  Idiot.

  Jed hauled himself up and pulled it over his head. He felt a little odd, the way he always did when he woke from a journey back in time: detached somehow, like his mind wasn’t quite his own. The dream was an old but regular one. Sometimes he thought the slaughtered children’s laughter would haunt him forever, but it had seemed faded this time, only to be replaced by other facets of his memory. This time, Paul’s hand on his shoulder had felt too real, and Glenn’s whispered oath too loud. For a moment it felt like they were right there with him. He could smell them. Touch them. Even Saja’s warning bark still echoed in his head.

  Jed put a hand on his chest, willing his racing heart to slow down. He was losing it. He had to be. In the haze of his dream-clouded mind, the familiar warning sounded all wrong. The bark was loud and persistent, but it wasn’t alerting him to the presence of explosives or a suicide bomber. It couldn’t be. His trip down memory lane had been all too real, but he was awake enough now to know he was as far from Iraq as he’d ever been.

  Fuck. It wasn’t Saja barking at all: it was Flo, and she was calling for help.

  The blast of perception was abrupt and shocking, and it propelled Jed forward before his brain caught up. He threw open his bedroom door, moving faster than his damaged body wanted to. His leg screamed in protest, but he ignored it, following Flo’s call through the cabin and out into the yard. He scanned his surroundings, his bare feet crunching the frosted dirt. A flash of white caught his eye. Flo was mostly black, but her muzzle was white, and he finally spotted her in the open doorway of the boat shed.

  Jed darted across the yard. It was the first time he’d tested his body in such a way, but as his gaze fell on Max, convulsing on the ground, he felt no pain. He dropped to the floor, desperate to soothe him, but the rational, trained part of his brain knew he couldn’t touch him until the seizure passed.

  Make him safe.

  He grabbed a rug from the battered old couch and jammed it under Max’s thrashing head, using his foot of his good leg to shove the couch out of Max’s way.

  Flo nudged him with her nose, whining, as h
e scanned the floor for any other objects that could injure Max.

  Jed patted her tense, coiled shoulders. “I know, girl, I know. I’ve got him.”

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, his medic training told him that he needed to time the seizure. Longer than five minutes meant Max was in serious trouble, but Jed didn’t wear a watch these days, and he’d left his cell phone turned off on his nightstand.

  Flo whined again, and Jed’s breath caught in his throat. He felt comforted that she’d known to call for him instead of pressing the panic button, but the thought of her possible indecision… of Max lying on the cold floor of his workshop, tore Jed apart. He’d come home to a dark cabin and Max’s closed bedroom door. Without his lively roommate to distract him, Jed had passed out without so much as glancing around the cabin. He called himself every name under the sun for not checking Max’s whereabouts first.

  The violent tremors wracking Max’s body began to fade. Jed put two fingers to the pulse point in his neck then checked his airway. Going through the motions came to him without much conscious thought. It had been a while since he’d put his medic training to the test, but it was something he’d always been good at.

  He shook Max’s shoulder. “Max? Can you hear me?”

  Max shifted, his eyes rolling, but Jed was persistent, and eventually, long after the bitter cold of the outbuilding had crept into his bones, he saw awareness flicker back into Max’s dark gaze.

  He held out his hand. Max took it and sat up with a soft groan. He flexed his locked joints and brought his hand to his head. “What…?”

  Jed sat back on his heels, relieved. “Seizure. Anything hurt?”

  Max looked around as he considered his answer. His eyes were dazed and confused, like he couldn’t remember how he’d come to be in the boat shed. He opened and shut his mouth a few times, but words seemed to fail him.

  Jed hooked the couch with his foot and dragged it back to its original position. He slipped an arm under Max’s shoulders, braced himself, and brought them both to their feet.