Only Love

by Garrett Leigh

  Nick sneered, his derision clear, but before Max could retaliate, Jed reached again for his arm and pulled him back.

  “Why are you here?” Jed asked again.

  There was a beat of silence as Nick considered his answer, and in that brief moment, Max’s anger evaporated. Nick’s logic was obvious—his father had died and he’d come to his brother for comfort. Naively, it seemed, because it was clear Jed didn’t care. Not for Nick and his grief, and even less for Frank Cooper.

  “You don’t care, do you?” Nick said suddenly, echoing Max’s thoughts. “You really don’t give a shit that our dad died.”

  “Why would I care?”

  Jed’s tone was disinterested. There was no malice or aggression in the words, but Max heard the message loud and clear.

  He thought back to the last time he’d seen Frank Cooper. It was years back, right before Nick moved him into the nursing home. He’d been a vile old man, with a vicious tongue. Nick said it was because he was ill and in pain, but Max knew better. He’d seen that kind of hate before… he’d seen it in Nick before. It was hard to imagine that Jed bore any relation to either of them.

  “Oh, man.” Nick shook his head, bewildered. “How long are you going to hold that night against him? He made a mistake. We both did. We were wrong, okay? What we said to you was wrong, but you never gave us the chance to put it right. You left.”

  Jed let out a humorless bark of laughter. “I’m not gonna argue with you about shit that went down fourteen years ago. You can mourn that old bastard all you like, but leave me out of it.”

  “No!” Nick’s face reddened. “You’re not getting out of this that easily. I’ve been dealing with him on my own for years. The least you can do is come to Portland with me and arrange his fucking funeral.”

  Jed didn’t answer verbally, but the expression on his face left no doubt that he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Max suppressed the urge to intervene. Over the past few years he’d learned that with families, some things could never be fixed. Instead you became trapped in the cycle, knowing exactly what you were doing wrong, but unable to stop it.

  Nick took a wobbly step forward. For a moment, his coherency had fooled Max into forgetting he was drunk, but his weak attempt to shove Jed brought reality crashing back. He lurched into Jed, catching him with a glancing, clumsy blow.

  Jed didn’t react. Nick came at him again and again, until Jed finally sidestepped him and sent him tumbling to the ground with a flick of his wrist.

  Nick rolled over on the ground and got to his knees, his already rumpled clothes covered in mud. “What is this? Some sick kind of revenge? You can’t get back at him, so you put me on my ass instead? How does it feel, huh? Is this what you wanted all along? Me facedown in the dirt instead of you?”

  Jed said nothing.

  Nick laughed, unfazed by his stony silence. “I don’t get it. What did you want me to do? I know I took the easy way out, but you made it impossible for me to do anything else. Letting him beat us both wouldn’t have changed anything. How many times did you say that to me?”

  Flo whined, her eyes on Jed, like she knew he wasn’t himself. Max glanced rapidly between the two Cooper brothers, knowing he was watching something terrible unfold, something that had festered for more than a decade.

  Nick remained on his knees, his belligerence all but gone. “What do you want from me? You came back here all busted up and distant. Why are you even here, if it’s the last place on earth you want to be?”

  Jed looked as though he might let out a heavy, world-weary sigh, but he didn’t. Instead, he shook his head. “I came back here because you asked me to, and I wanted to get to know your children. Maybe you should sober up and do the same.”

  He walked away without another word and slammed the cabin door.

  Nick laughed again and sat back on his heels in the icy mud. “There’s something wrong with him. He’s always been a stubborn prick, but that bullet might as well have hit his damn head.”

  Max swallowed his retort and crossed the yard to Nick’s idling car. He killed the engine and removed the keys. He considered inviting Nick inside to dry off, or calling someone to pick him up, but instead he went inside and shut the door in Nick’s face.

  He found Jed in the living room, growling into his phone. Max shook the keys to the Mercedes and tossed them onto the coffee table.

  Jed nodded his thanks and said into the phone, “Can you come and get him? I can’t drive him home. I’ll fucking kill him.”

  He hung up and dropped his phone beside the keys. “Thanks. Where is he?”

  “Where you left him. You okay?”

  “Yep.”

  Max nodded silently. He’d been nervous about seeing Jed after their encounter the night before, but now the stolen kiss was the last thing on his mind. “Um, you know, I could go with you to Portland? If you didn’t want to go with Nick.”

  “I don’t want to go to Portland. Forget about it. Dan’s coming to get him.”

  Max knew he was treading on dangerous ground, but something didn’t add up. If he’d interpreted Nick’s drunken rambling correctly, Frank Cooper had hurt Jed in the worst possible way. He couldn’t ignore it. “What about your dad…?”

  “He’s not my dad!” Jed exploded. “He’s not anyone’s fucking father, least of all mine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said. He’s not my dad. It’s biologically impossible.”

  Max didn’t know what to say, and by the time he’d found his tongue again, Jed was long gone, with the distant rumble of his truck driving away the only sign he’d been there at all.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Phoenix, AZ

  January 2, 2007

  JED HAD watched a Serbian church burn once. An old wooden building, painted white and weathered by the harsh Balkan weather. Every boy in the village died in that church, burned alive as punishment for the religion they’d been born into. Jed’s patrol had been too late to save them, the heat too intense, but they’d heard the screaming, and then the silence.

  The silence had been louder.

  The Serbian winter was bitterly cold, and despite the heat of the flames, every facet of Jed’s being became numb, turned to stone by apathy. He felt nothing except an illogical hatred for the sacred building that became a mass grave. Years later, standing in the small-town Phoenix chapel, he didn’t feel much different, except on the inside he felt as charred and decayed as the bullet-riddled church he’d watched burn.

  Jed felt himself drift as he stood beside Olivia, Paul’s widow. He fought it. She needed him to be strong for her, but his mind wasn’t capable of taking him to a better place. Instead it took him back in time, back to a city he’d fought so hard to spare the same fate….

  Mosul.

  The first time they came to the city, no one had known they were there. They’d crept through the streets unnoticed and hadn’t seen a soul. That was how they liked it—get in, do the job, and get out.

  Not this time.

  This time they were patrolling the night markets with Kurdish rookies, trying to teach them to be fighters, mediators, and diplomats all rolled into one. A tough enough task on its own, but in the packed town square all eyes were on them, watching and waiting for them to put a foot wrong.

  Jed scanned the square. His team was split, and the two separate groups were surrounded. An elderly woman screamed in his face. He didn’t pick up every word—her dialect was as ancient as she was—but he got the sentiment. His team and their band of recruits were unwelcome.

  The local young men who stood in small groups caught Jed’s attention, their eyes dark with suspicion. The coalition had forged good links with them at the beginning of the war, but a misplaced cluster bomb had decimated far more than the local school, and the relationship had unraveled.

  Jed searched out Paul. He was on the other side of the square, covering the eastern sector. With his back turned, it was impossible to tell if he f
elt as wary as Jed did.

  A young woman approached Jed. She wasn’t wearing a headscarf, but that was normal in Mosul. The city was diverse. Muslims, Christians, Yazidi, they all had their place. What was unusual was the woman’s friendly smile. It lit up her warm Arabian skin and inky dark eyes, and flew in the face of every other local in close proximity. Though Jed wasn’t drawn to women, she was beautiful.

  “Masaa el-Kheir.”

  Jed returned the sentiment and smiled back, mesmerized. She didn’t seem real.

  His distraction was brief, a split second, but it was enough.

  Paul’s shout cut through the claustrophobic noise of the market, and the woman dropped to the ground, a bullet embedded in her skull.

  “J! Get back, she’s fucking packing!”

  Jed stared at the dead woman crumpled at his feet. The explosives strapped to her body were now glaringly obvious, and as his team spread out in well-drilled symmetry, his heart told him they’d never clear the square fast enough to get out alive.

  Someone had to defuse the bomb. Now.

  Jed dropped to the ground and ripped the thick layers of clothing from the dead woman’s body. It was a classic sign of a suicide bomber, and the device he uncovered was huge. How had he missed it? He stared at the rudimentary bomb with his breath stuck in his throat. The bomb was massive. If it detonated, no one in the square was making it home. They’d all be blitzed in a crater the size of a football field.

  Bomb disposal wasn’t Jed’s skill. He knew only the basics—learned at training camp and long forgotten. He scanned the packed marketplace, searching for Raffi, his weapons specialist, but Raffi was too far away, stuck on the other side of the square. He caught Jed’s eye and shook his head. No time. He was on his own.

  Jed stared at the bomb, looking for the timer to sever the physical connection between the detonator and the charge. His hands shook, refusing to work the way he needed them to. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t slow his mind down enough to process his actions. It was over, it was all over. The bomb was going to detonate, and they were all going to die.

  Paul dropped down beside him, his boots smearing the dark blood pooled on the ground. “Focus, J. Look at the bomb. No one else can do this. It’s gotta be you.”

  Jed tried to shove Paul away. “Get outta here.”

  Paul remained obstinate and unmoving, like the stupid, stubborn bastard he was. “No chance. If it takes you, it takes me. Now do your fucking job.”

  A dull pain throbbed in Jed’s chest. Life wasn’t supposed to end this way for Paul. He’d had plans, big plans. He was a soldier through and through, the best Jed had ever known, but his priorities had changed in recent years. When their endless tour in Iraq was finally over, he’d had enough. He was getting out and going home to build a ranch with his wife and son.

  Jed remembered the day they got word Sam was born. They were on a boat, of all places, somewhere deep in the Persian Gulf. Paul had been so happy his grin split his face in half.

  “Better not get my ass killed now, huh?”

  It was six weeks before Paul got home to see them, and even then he only saw his son a handful of times before he came home in a box. Months after his death, the guilt Jed felt as he stood beside his widow at a belated, awkward memorial service was overwhelming. She was pregnant with a daughter Paul would never know he had, and the feel of her hand in his was almost too much to bear.

  The memorial service drew to a close. Jed lifted Sam from the wooden pew and followed Olivia outside. The Phoenix sunshine bathed his face, but he found no pleasure in its warmth. Deep inside, he felt as cold as the frosty ground he’d left behind in Ashton. As cold as the apathy in his heart for Frank Cooper, the man who’d been dead for only a week, but had been dead to Jed for years.

  Sam tightened his arms around his neck. “I was a good boy, Unky J. Can we go see Daddy now?”

  Jed glanced at Olivia. She nodded tiredly, and so, ignoring the throngs of family and military personnel, Jed led Paul’s wife and son away from the memorial service and to the tiny cemetery behind the church where Paul was buried.

  Sam squirmed in his arms as they neared the plot. Jed let him down to charge around the grassy expanse. It was probably wrong to let him run riot in a graveyard, but there was no one around for him to bother, and Jed knew Paul would’ve let him.

  Olivia knelt down and brushed some dust away from the engraved headstone. “Sam likes it here,” she said. “It’s the only reason I can bear to come.”

  “It’s a nice place. Peaceful.”

  Olivia shot Jed a wry glance. “Don’t pretend you want to be here. I only agreed to this service for Paul’s mother. She wanted to mark his birthday. I think she was hoping more of you would come. She doesn’t understand Army life. She never did.”

  Jed held out his hand to help her up, keeping one eye on Sam as he hurtled around. His hyper energy reminded him of Tess, and the newfound claim his hometown now had over him. “I’m sorry I didn’t come to the funeral.”

  Olivia kept her hand in his and leaned against him, her sigh heavily weary. “When they came to tell me about Paul, they wouldn’t tell me what had happened to you. When you didn’t come, I thought you were dead too.”

  Jed had no memory of the time between that fateful day in Kirkuk and waking up in bits in Boston, but later, when his mind had cleared enough to comprehend what had happened, Olivia’s face as they gave her the news was all he could see. “I’m sorry, Liv.”

  “Don’t be,” Olivia said. “Don’t ever be sorry for being alive. You know he wouldn’t want that.”

  Jed was silent. Just being in Phoenix was hard. He’d always known this day would come, that Olivia would reach out and ask for his help, but he’d been sorely unprepared for the heavy shadow of Paul’s ghost. He’d never seen Paul’s hometown, but Paul had talked about it so much it felt like he was hiding around every corner.

  Olivia tugged on his hand. “Walk with me?” Jed nodded and called Sam back to him. Olivia sighed. “How come he does every little thing you tell him, huh? He runs rings around me.”

  “You’re his momma,” Jed said absently. “That’s what boys do.”

  Sam reached his side and put his arms up. Jed lifted him, settled him on his good hip, and extended his hand to Olivia again.

  She led him out of the cemetery and along the quiet, dusty path back to the chapel. “So tell me about you. How have you been? I had to get your number from your brother. Why aren’t you living with him anymore?”

  It was news to Jed that Nick even had his number, but he pushed the feeling aside. The shitstorm he’d left behind in Ashton had been the last thing on his mind since he’d taken Olivia’s call. “I moved out a few months ago.”

  “A few months ago? But you’ve only been home a few months, Jed. What happened?”

  Jed adjusted Sam on his hip and shrugged. “It didn’t work out.”

  Olivia wasn’t buying it, not for a minute, but she let it go. Being married to a soldier like Paul had taught her that sometimes the conversations she wanted to have wouldn’t happen. She let go off Jed’s hand and slipped her arm through his. “Where are you living now? Did you get a place in Ashton?”

  Jed considered his answer. It was on the tip of his tongue to say he lived with a friend, but did that define Max? In the place he was right now, he didn’t have a fucking clue. “I’ve got a room at a cabin up by the lake. It’s nice. I like the peace and quiet.”

  Olivia shook her head, a wry smile on her face. “I know it’s been a while, Jed, but you’re not as mysterious as you used to be. What’s his name?”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever you’re thinking about.”

  Jed rolled his eyes. From the moment he’d met Olivia, she’d made no secret of her desire to see him happy and settled with a partner. “Max,” he said reluctantly. “But he’s just, uh, my roommate.”

  The words felt wrong even as he said them. His mind was convoluted and weary, and he was tired t
o the bone, but there was no denying that Max wasn’t just anything.

  Olivia snorted, but the slight smirk on her face faded as they reached the end of the path. The people who’d attended the service were gathered around the corner in her brother’s house, and she seemed to know without asking that Jed wasn’t coming in.

  Leaving Olivia and Sam was almost as difficult as coming to Phoenix in the first place, but even as Olivia pushed a battered envelope into Jed’s hands, he knew he had to go.

  There had been men he recognized in the church, but no one he knew well enough to call a friend. Anyone he’d worked with in recent years was either dead, fucked up, or still in the field. The only military people here were empty faces. They didn’t mean anything to him, and he didn’t belong here anymore than he did in Ashton.

  Jed set Sam down. It was only the second time they’d ever met, the first being on a Turkish airbase when Sam was just six weeks old, but his wide eyes were so much like Paul’s, bright and laughing, Jed couldn’t leave without saying good-bye properly. He knelt awkwardly on the ground and pulled Sam close. Sam’s young, chubby hands were hot and sticky. “You remember what we talked about, buddy?”

  Sam screwed up his face and thought hard. “I be good for Mama and not make a mess?”

  Despite himself, Jed smiled. It was a pretty good summary of the conversation they’d had at the park early that morning. “Nah, you can make a mess, but you have to help clean it up. You gonna take care of your mama for me?”

  “Even when she’s sad?”

  “Yeah, especially when she’s sad. You’re her little man now. She needs you.”

  Sam kissed Jed’s cheek and disappeared into the nearby house. Jed watched him scamper safely into the arms of his waiting uncle and got stiffly to his feet. Olivia leaned into him again and wrapped her arms around his waist, pressing her swollen belly into his own delinquent stomach.

  “Paul never lied to me, Jed,” she said softly. “Even when it was something he knew could hurt me. I’ll never regret a moment I spent with him, but I’ll always know a piece of his heart belonged to you.”