by Rye Hart
I could’ve sworn I heard disappointment in his voice.
CHAPTER 19
LIAM
My eyes opened and I felt the warmth of Whitney’s body against mine. Another restful night of sleep where the nightmares were kept at bay. I knew it was Whitney’s presence doing this. I knew she was the one driving my nightmares away. There was something about her I simply couldn’t place. A soothing component my body simply gravitated toward. I drew in a deep breath through my nose as her hair danced along the pillows of my bed. Then, I drew her body into mine and held on to her tightly.
I knew most of the roads would be cleared tomorrow and I wanted to make today special for Whitney. I knew she was on vacation and I didn’t want this snowstorm to have spoiled anything. I racked my brain as to what in the world we could do but, before I could come up with an answer, I felt her turning around in my arms.
“Good morning, beautiful,” I said.
She groaned, her body turning to face mine. There was a smile on her lips but her eyes weren’t open yet. It took her a while to finally peel them open and, even when she did, I could see how tired she still was.
“You can go back to sleep if you’d like,” I said.
“No, that’s okay,” she said groggily. “What time is it?”
“I’m honestly not sure but my inner clock usually gets me up around seven thirty.”
“Balls,” she said flatly.
I laughed and pulled her to my chest. The way she instinctively nuzzled into me was something I was going to miss. Running my fingers through her hair, I felt her sigh into me. Her arm was lazily draped around my waist while her leg wiggled its way in between mine. It was like her body had to be connected to me for her to feed off my energy.
And I soaked up every single moment of it.
“Anything you want to do today?” I asked.
“Is there anything to do?” she asked.
“Well, I’m sure the snow’s starting to melt somewhat. How’s your ankle feeling?”
“It doesn’t suck nearly as much as it did.”
I reluctantly pushed myself away from her and scooted down toward the foot of the bed. I slipped the blanket away from her legs and took her foot in my hand. I unraveled the wrappings and started to work it in slow circles. For the first time, Whitney didn’t wince when I did so. The swelling had gone down and the joint was much stronger than it was.
“You’re about ninety percent there,” I said. “Can I get you to stand on it?”
“You want me to move?” she asked.
“I promise you can lay right back down.”
She let out a hefty sigh that caused me to laugh. I took her hands in mine and slowly pulled her upright. She was not a morning person. Not by a longshot. Honestly, it was a little cute. I helped her up to her feet and she tried to put pressure on her ankle. I could tell by the shocked look on her face that it felt much better than it had previously.
I watched her take a few steps and noted that her limp had gotten significantly better. It was hard for me to keep my sights trained on her ankle when I had her entire naked body prancing around for me but I was able to do it. She lifted her tired grin to my face and came right back to me. Then she threw her arms around my neck and kissed my skin.
“Thank you for taking care of me,” she said.
I wrapped my arms around her body and simply allowed myself to get lost in her voice.
“Would you like some coffee?” I asked.
“Definitely,” she said.
“What about breakfast?” I asked.
“Definitely.”
“What would you like to do after coffee and breakfast?” I asked.
But then I felt her shake her head “no.”
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t want to ask,” she said.
“Why not? Come on. We can do anything. Anything that doesn’t require my truck.”
“I just don’t know how you’ll… do with it,” she asked.
“Try me.”
She looked up at me with hesitant eyes and I knew what she was going to ask before she even asked it. She might be a country girl but she was that city kind of country. Fancy dinners and barbecue you ate sitting in a restaurant. She wasn’t the bonfire and beer bottle kind of country.
Which meant she’d probably never shot a gun.
“I noticed you had some deer meat in your freezer,” she said.
“I do.”
“Did you hunt that down yourself?” she asked.
“Just ask, Whitney. It’s okay.”
I could tell she was nervous but I finally got her to ask.
“Would you teach me how to shoot a gun today?”
“I can do that, city girl.”
She clapped her hands and jumped, which was another test for her ankle. She came down onto it without a second thought and I smiled to myself as she rushed into the bathroom. I could hear herself cleaning up while I pulled on a pair of pajama pants. Then, I made my way to the kitchen.
I didn’t have any smaller guns she could start out with. I only had my shotgun and my hunting rifle. I made us up some eggs and cheese grits before I started making some coffee and, the moment I heard her come into the room, I turned around.
She was in my clothes again and it made me smile.
“Mine are still dirty,” she said. “Wanna do laundry today?”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll put them in the washer in a bit.”
“Just show me where it is. I can do it.”
I sat the eggs off to the side as the grits continued to simmer. The coffee was still brewing and I was debating whether or not to fry up some bacon. I led her down the small hallway of the cabin and opened up the closet at the end, revealing the small washer and dryer set I’d had installed. She immediately began to take note of the stains before she started putting them into the washer.
I took a step back and watched her before I headed back to the kitchen.
The washer was going and we were on the couch eating breakfast. One of the things I really enjoyed about Whitney was that the silence with her was comfortable. There was no need to talk to justify the time I was spending with her. The sun was beating down onto the snow and I could already see it dripping from the gutters of the cabin.
At this rate, half the snow that dumped onto us would be gone by tomorrow.
I gathered up our dirty dishes as Whitney traipsed back down the hallway. I could hear her fiddling with the dryer while I rinsed all the dishes and she started it up just as I made my way to my room.
“Let me put on some decent clothes and we’ll head out,” I said.
“All I gotta do is slip on shoes,” she said. “If that’s okay.”
“Unless you wanna go shooting guns naked, that outfit’s just fine,” I said, grinning.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
I held her gaze for a spell before I broke it, sliding into my room and getting changed.
By the time I emerged, Whitney was standing by the door. I could tell she was excited and anxious at the same time. I held my shotgun in my hand while I stuffed my pockets with ammunition and, the moment her eyes connected with mine, they lit up with anticipation.
“Ready to learn how to shoot a gun?” I asked.
“You’re starting me off on that thing?” she asked.
“I don’t have anything smaller,” I said. “But don’t worry. The kickback isn’t actually that bad if you hold the gun right. I’ll teach you.”
I slipped on a coat before I handed her a sweatshirt. Then we left the cabin and started for the backyard. I walked us a bit into the woods before we came to a clearing where I’d set up my own targets to practice on
“Okay, first, you have to hold the gun properly,” I said.
I handed it to her and watched how she naturally held it before I stepped behind her and started correcting her posture.
“You want the butt of the gun to lay right in the crook of your arm. Let
the excess meat on your chest settle against the side of the gun.”
She giggled and shook her head and I grinned at her reaction.
“Hold your trigger hand like so. Then support the gauge of the gun with your other hand like this.”
I maneuvered her hands and fingers to where they needed to be so she could get a feel for what a gun felt like in her hands. I stepped back and let her point it at a couple of things so she could get used to the weight of the gun in her hands. Then, it was time for me to direct her on how to aim.
“Aiming down the sight of a gun gets a little trickier because everyone sees things a bit differently. Some people have to close one eye or the other, depending on how good their vision is, while others can keep both eyes open and sight a target just fine. But I want you to look down the barrel of the gun right here and tell me what you see.”
I helped her to align her head but, already, I could feel her arms shaking.
“This gun’s a lot heavier than it looks,” she said.
“You wanna take a rest?”
Even though she was beginning to tremble, she shook her head.
“Okay, what do you see down the end of that barrel?” I asked.
“I see the barrel but then there’s a mirror image. A picture of the gun that’s a bit fuzzier than the actual one.”
“Then close one eye and figure out which gun image is the one that’s less hazy.”
I watched her test it out until she figured out what I was talking about.
“That’s so weird,” she said. “Why does that happen?”
“It has to do with a lot of factors. Your vision. How far apart your eyes are. When you’re looking at an image, your eyes are coming at it from two different angles. Your brain fuses the two images together, calculates the average, then provides you with the picture you see now. But if anything gets distorted, then those two images split apart. The one that’s fuzzier is the image being interpreted by your less-dominant eye. That’s why you want to go with the one that’s not as fuzzy. Because that eye is going to be more reliable when it comes to aiming at a distance.”
She kept opening and closing one eye at a time as a grin spread across her cheeks.
“Too cool,” she said.
She finally allowed her arms some rest and I took the gun from her. She shook her arms out while I loaded two shots into the gun and, when she was ready, I handed it back to her.
“The safety’s on, for now, so just get yourself back into the setup you were in before,” I said.
I watched her get into position and I corrected a couple of things before I toggled the safety.
“Okay. Close your non-dominant eye and aim the barrel of the gun just below the target.”
“Just below?” she asked.
“Yep. Just trust me. Whenever you’re ready.”
I watched her take a deep breath before she pulled the trigger and the loud shot that rang out caused me to jump. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath before I heard Whitney cock the shotgun. Then, the second shot rang out before she dropped the gun from her shoulder.
I could feel the tremble starting at my fingertips while she cheered herself on.
“How was that?” she asked.
I opened my eyes and looked at the target. The shot was pretty scattered but that was to be expected. She hit the target right where I thought she would, which meant her aiming was pretty good for someone who’d never shot a gun before.
I looked over at her smiling face, her eyes anxious for what I had to tell her.
“Your aim’s actually pretty good and you cocked that gun like a pro,” I said.
“I’ve seen that done in movies,” she said. “I knew nothing else about this thing.”
“Let me reload it and we can go again,” I said.
I reloaded the gun and she popped off two more shots. One was a bit high and the other was still a bit low, but I just kept trying to encourage her. Even though I could feel the panic rising, I wanted to try and stay out here long enough for her to at least hit the middle of the target once.
I just had to keep a lid on it until then.
I’d shot my rifle to hunt and I shot my shotgun into the air once to clear a bear off my property, but there was something different about another person shooting a gun off so close to me. I wasn’t in control of it and that bothered me. I wasn’t the one holding the gun and wielding it and I could feel the sweat prickling the back of my neck. Whitney shot off two more shots. One was still low, but the next one hit as close to the middle of the target as she’d come yet.
And that was just going to have to be good enough.
“Look, Liam,” she said, smiling. “I almost got that one.”
I nodded and smiled before I took the gun from her hands.
“Your arms are trembling pretty badly and that’s a bad thing when holding a gun,” I said.
I watched the smile slowly slip from her face but she didn’t question it.
I gripped the gun hard as we started back for the cabin. We walked in silence as the wind kicked up and dried the sweat off the back of my neck. I could tell Whitney knew something was wrong but I was trying to conceal it as best as I could.
There was a massive part of me that wanted to talk about it with her but there was another part of me that kept telling me I hardly knew this woman.
“Everything okay, Liam?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just worried about the weakness in your arms. If you dropped that gun after shooting it, someone could’ve gotten hurt.”
I reached for the cabin door but I felt her hand come up and rest on my forearm.
“Are you sure?”
Her eyes were prodding me and I almost caved. I almost scooped her up into my arms and spilled everything to her. About the deployment. About the capture. About how much of a coward I really was.
But, instead, I nodded my head and plastered a smile on my face.
“Yep, sure am,” I said.
She sighed, resigning herself to my answer before we both walked back in. I made sure the gun was empty before I put the safety on. Then I walked it back into my room and placed it in my closet. Whitney made her way over to the dryer and started tugging clothes out, folding them and putting them on my bed before she made her way out into the living room.
Only this time, the silence was uncomfortable and I cursed myself for ruining what was supposed to be a perfect day.
CHAPTER 20
WHITNEY
I knew something was wrong and it had to do with the guns. It had to do with those nightmares and his Navy days. I knew it was all connected. I just had no idea how. His Purple Heart. The gunshots bothering him. The nightmare he had that night. Something had happened to him during his time in the military. Something terrible that had forever imprinted itself onto his mind.
I wanted him to know he could talk to me if he wanted. I wanted him to know that I wouldn’t judge him for anything that might’ve happened. Anything he felt he might’ve done or anything that might’ve been done to him.
But the only way I knew to make him comfortable about opening up was by opening up myself.
I stood in the kitchen in nothing but his flannel shirt and some socks as I cooked dinner. Rice and beans was a simple dinner I’d learned to make from my grandmother at a young age. She always knew how to do it right. A little bit of butter, cayenne pepper, and red pepper flakes went into the rice to cook as she soaked and boiled the beans with six strips of bacon. By the time dinner was done, the smells rolling around in the kitchen were making me salivate.
“Liam?” I asked.
“Yeah?”
“Want some toast to go with dinner?” I asked. “There isn’t really anything that has a crunch.”
“Sounds good to me.”
I could tell he was still far away, off in his mind and losing himself in his thoughts. I threw some bread into a little toaster oven he had sitting on the counter. Then, I started setting the table.
And all the while, Liam was simply staring into the fire.
“I don’t know where my parents are,” I said.
I heard the couch creak and, as I looked out the window, I could see his reflection on the couch, staring at me.
I had his attention and I could feel my hands already beginning to shake.
“They left me with my best friend Gwen and her family when I was in high school,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
I drew a deep breath through my nose before I settled myself into the story of my childhood.
“I had a wonderful childhood,” I said. “We weren’t well-off by any means but we got by. My father taught me how to be frugal. How to rub two quarters together and make a dollar. Gwen always teases me about how cheap I can sometimes be.”
I allowed a small giggle to leave my lips before I felt tears brewing behind my eyes.
“But then my father lost his job and it was hard. We tried everything we could to pay our rent but, eventually, we found ourselves on the street.”
I heard Liam get up off the couch and slowly walk his way toward me.
“It was hard,” I said. “I was just starting high school and sleeping in a homeless shelter. Mom was begging on the streets for money while Dad was applying for every job he could possibly find.”
I felt the heat of Liam’s body at my back as I started scooping up rice and beans into the bowls I’d found.
“Eventually, I broke down to Gwen about what was happening and her family took us in. It was the most gracious thing anyone had ever done for me but I knew it could only be temporary. Her parents were well-off but supporting another family is hard.”
“I can’t even imagine,” he said.
“Dad kept applying for all these jobs. Any job he could find, anywhere in the country. He applied in Florida and the Dakotas. He applied to jobs in California and Texas. Anywhere that had an opening for anything he felt he was qualified to do, he applied.”
I felt Liam’s hand come up to my waist but I stepped out from underneath his touch and took the bowls to the small kitchen table.