Back to You

by Jessica Scott

  “Trent?” She jostled his shoulder gently. “Wake up. It’s just a dream.”

  He didn’t stop or stiffen. He showed no signs of hearing her. The nightmare pressed on and he grunted like he’d been shoved against a wall. She pushed harder against his shoulder, a clawing, writhing terror ripping at her heart.

  She never saw him move.

  She landed with a thud on the floor before she knew what had happened and she had a brief moment to be grateful for the thick carpet. He’d pulled her down to the floor and covered her body with his. “Stay down.”

  His hands swept down her body in a decidedly nonsexual way. His voice was different. Raw. Ragged. Like he’d been shouting over the thunder of machine guns.

  Laura shoved at his shoulder, all two hundred pounds of him crushing the air from her lungs. She fought the panic that he wasn’t really there with her in their bedroom. He was somewhere far away, some place she could not reach him. “Trent, wake up!”

  He twitched and buried his face in her neck. “Story! Come on, buddy, don’t do this.”

  Laura froze. Story was deployed. He wasn’t dead.

  “Goddamn it, Top, get up!”

  His elbows were on either side of her head and the heat from his body pressed into hers. He scanned the darkness, searching for an enemy that only he could see. She felt trapped, pinned beneath a man who could not see her. She shoved desperately at his shoulder, the heel of her palm pushing against the scar over his heart. Fear danced down her spine, twisting in her belly. “Trent!”

  He grunted and looked down at her. He wasn’t seeing her. He wasn’t there. His eyes were empty, unseeing. But it was the pain, the pain and the horror in his eyes made her soul cry out. She had no idea what this man had gone through. All this time she’d just wanted him home and he was facing things she’d never see and could never hope to understand.

  How had she hoped he would share this with her?

  He looked lost. And more than that. Afraid. Of things she could not see and would never understand. She panicked, tears streaking down her cheeks as she shoved and shoved and shoved. “Wake up. Trent, wake up!”

  He jerked once, his breath sucking into his body with a massive gasp. He blinked, looking around, finally seeing her in the dim bedroom light.

  “Jesus, Laura.” He scrambled off her, pulling her upright. “Oh fuck, did I hurt you?”

  She shook her head and rubbed the back of her neck and sat up. Her body protested the too fast movement after impacting the floor but otherwise, everything seemed okay. “No.” She turned her face and looked into his dark eyes. “Are you okay?”

  “I think I should probably ask you the same question.” His eyes scanned her body, new panic warring with the old nightmares. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

  “I’m fine.” She reached for him, threading her fingers with his. She rested their hands on her thigh. “You said Story’s name,” she said quietly, watching him.

  He sat next to her, his back propped against the frame of the bed. She was amazed he didn’t pull away. “It was just a bad dream. I have them all the time.”

  Disappointment clutched at her heart. No matter how many times she tried to walk through the darkness with him, it was one thing he never shared with her. He’d never let her stand with him against the abyss of the war—what he’d seen, what he’d lived through.

  She had no idea the things he’d done, the friends he’d lost. She didn’t know and God knew she wasn’t strong enough to go through what he’d gone through. But she wanted to be there with him. Wanted to be there to help him when the darkness got too heavy.

  Their thighs touched where they sat on the floor. Laura fidgeted with the drawstring on the waist of her pajama pants, trying to keep the tears from spilling down her cheeks. She was so tired of crying for him. Each moment that passed took with it the fragile hope that tonight would be different. That he would let her stand with him even when she couldn’t know the pain he’d lived through. The silence spread between them, a gulf that was more than physical. A gulf that shattered everything they’d done to try and rebuild the fragile trust between them.

  Every so often, she’d catch bits of the conversations between him and the men who’d been there with him. A joke about a dud grenade. A comment about the heat or the night vision goggles freezing in the extreme cold. But he always clammed up and stopped talking when he realized she was listening.

  Whatever hell he’d gone through, he’d kept it—and himself—from her. Whenever the war reared its ugly head, brutal silence always filled the room.

  She sniffed and swiped at her cheeks, hoping he wouldn’t notice. The disappointment lodged in her throat. She wondered if he would sleep on the couch tonight, further cementing the chasm that had reappeared between them. How long would it be before he was gone again, leaving her for the war he could never leave behind?

  She bit her lips, refusing to cry again. She’d known better than to do this, to trust him with her heart one more time. She’d known better and she’d been a goddamned fool.

  He was going to leave her again. He was going to walk out that front door with his duffle bag and his assault pack and head back to the war.

  Leaving her alone, just like always.

  He broke her. And she was a goddamned fool for letting him.

  The silence stretched between them. Laura couldn’t move beneath the weight of the devastation.

  Then he shifted, the sound of cotton sliding against cotton in the dark. His arm slipped around her shoulders and urged her close, until her cheek was rested in the pocket of his shoulder. She tensed, not wanting the hollow gesture but he refused to relent, forcing her to either walk away or relax against him. He pressed his cheek against her hair and they sat in silence, Laura’s need to tend his unseen wounds unmet and unanswered.

  He tensed a moment before he spoke, his whisper barely penetrating the silence. “I don’t mean to shut you out.” A ragged admission.

  He shifted and she felt his lips press to her forehead. She slid her hand onto his lap, resting her palm against his thigh. The silence hung between them thick and heavy and filled with hurt. And in the hushed darkness, she waited, unable to speak past the block in her throat.

  When he spoke, his words shattered more than the silence.

  “Story and I were leading a clearing mission. A buddy of mine was inside the village, searching these houses that were little more than mud huts.” His chest rose as he took a deep breath.

  Laura didn’t dare move, afraid she would break the fragile moment into a hundred thousand pieces. She had no idea what this was costing him, could not imagine what he’d gone through.

  “There were a few buildings with tunnels beneath them. Story took a couple guys into them after two fighters who’d attacked our patrol with an RPG.”

  She closed her eyes, imagining a building made of mud and dirt, a tunnel pulling all the light from the room. “The tunnel was narrow and cramped. I tried to get Story to listen to me but he was determined to get the fuckers.”

  He shifted, rubbing his eyes. His voice sounded far away, like the memory came from a place deep inside him. The ragged pain cut at her, tearing her heart to shreds. “I should have maintained our position when the fighting started.” His breath shuddered through him. “I could hear Story screaming on the radio.” A pause. “I gave the order to collapse in, to try to get to our boys.”

  His breath trembled when he blew it out. She shifted, resting her hand on the scar over his heart. He reached up, cupping her face. “I know it was just a fucking nightmare but Story died because of me.”

  A sob broke free before she could stop it. What had he lived through that he dreamed about his friends dying? “It was just a bad dream.”

  He didn’t notice. His body was tense, restraining violence and motion. He was hurting. Goddamn it, he was hurting. She wanted to help but nothing she’d ever done had prepared her to deal with this ragged grief and blame and all the fucked-up memories f
rom the war.

  “But it wasn’t. That was a real mission. Except it wasn’t Story who died. My guys collapsed in instead of maintaining security. Two of our boys would probably still be alive if they’d been airlifted out in time. But we had to secure a hot landing zone for the MEDEVAC flight three clicks away.”

  She twisted until she sat facing him on the soft carpet of their bedroom floor. She cupped his face, waited for him to lift his gaze to hers. This was just one twisted memory, just one bad thing that had happened during the war that had driven him away from his home. To try to atone for sins, real and imagined, that he’d committed during war.

  Her heart broke for him. But damn it, she was not going to sit there and cry while her husband’s heart bled out. “Story isn’t dead,” she whispered. “And you didn’t kill your men.”

  He tried to look away. “Trent.” He met her gaze again. “You made a mistake. You can’t fix it. Running away, leaving us doesn’t fix this.” His cheeks were wet beneath her fingers. “It doesn’t fix you.”

  “Story told me that once.” He looked at her. “When I got the papers from you downrange. He sat with me that whole first night. Smoking a cigar while I tried to figure out how to unfuck our marriage.” He paused, remembering that far off night. “Said that if I didn’t get my sorry ass home to you, I was going to end up like him, bitter and alone.”

  He reached for her then, threading his hands in her hair and pulling her close, until her face was buried in his neck. She wrapped her arms tight around him and simply sat, breathing in the warm, real scent of her husband. For the first time since he’d left all those years ago, she’d been given a glimpse at the life he’d lived without her. The life he’d tried to protect her from.

  There were no words she could speak that weren’t empty platitudes, spoken by a wife who had not lived through the war and the chaos and the hell. Anything she said would only make it worse, expanding the differences between them.

  She couldn’t tell him she understood because it was infinitely different to comfort the grieving spouse of a fallen soldier than it was to hold one of your boys as he died.

  Her heart ached and her soul bled for the man next to her. And she wished more than anything she had some way to take the hurt away.

  He shifted then, a rustle of fabric against skin. She reached for him, finding his hand in the near darkness, and threaded her fingers with his.

  It was the only thing she could think to do.

  “Please don’t leave me.” He rested his cheek against the top of her head again, hugging her body against his. “I can’t do this alone.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “You’re very quiet today,” Emily said. He could feel her gaze on him, studying him. He felt like she was waiting for him to go screaming from the room or to put on a tin foil hat and start rocking in the corner.

  He released a hard breath. “I had a pretty bad nightmare last night.” He swallowed. “It was a mix of one of my buddies dying and a real mission.” He looked up at her. “How fucked up is it that I’m dreaming about my friends—who are not dead, by the way—dying at war?”

  He shifted and pushed his glasses up onto the top of his head.

  It was a long time before Emily spoke. “I think it’s reasonable for you to expect more nightmares in the coming months,” she said gently.

  He looked over sharply. “I can’t do that. I think I threw my wife out of bed because of incoming rounds last night.”

  “Was she hurt?”

  He closed his eyes, hearing again Laura’s quiet sniffle in the darkness. “Maybe not physically, but yeah, I hurt her.”

  “I’m sorry. Was she okay?”

  “I think so.” He remembered falling asleep with her in his arms. It was not a gentle sleep, not a restful one. But he’d woken with her body twined with his, her hand resting over the scars on his heart.

  “Has anyone ever talked to you about your emotional rucksack?” Emily asked, interrupting his thoughts.

  “No?”

  “It means that we all have the capacity to deal with bad news. And when the first piece of bad news hits, we can stuff it down and keep going. But eventually, our bags get too heavy and there’s no more room to stuff things down anymore.” She looked at him, her expression filled with compassion. “And sometimes we keep stuffing anyway because we don’t think we have time to deal with things. What happens to a bag you stuffed too full when you open the top?”

  “The laundry pops out of the top.”

  “Trent, you’ve been stuffing things for so long, your body and your mind are probably in shock at the fact that you’re starting to unpack things. The nightmare felt real because it was real, at least part of it.”

  Trent looked at the young doctor. “What if I hurt my wife?” he asked. His voice was thick, filled with things he couldn’t say. What if he hit her? Or threw her out of bed. Or hurt one of the kids? Thank God they didn’t have any guns in the house.

  He flinched from the nightmare thought that could too easily come true.

  “I can’t promise that you won’t have more nightmares. But there are things you can do to avoid them. Avoiding certain foods at bedtime. Turning the TV off.”

  “That stuff really works?”

  “We think it helps. Will it work completely? Probably not. But if you lessen the likelihood, as you continue to unpack and start to heal some of the hurt you’ve done to yourself, maybe you’ll start to see them taper off.” She scribbled a note in her file. “How are things with Laura? Any more troubles with the kids?”

  Trent leaned back, uncrossing his legs. “Things are good, actually. Better than I thought they’d be in a couple short weeks.”

  Emily’s smile lit up her face. “That’s wonderful to hear. How’s the medication working?”

  “It’s okay. I don’t take it that often but knowing it’s there helps, if that makes sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense,” she said. “We’ve known for a long time that the placebo effect is a statistically significant result. Sometimes, just having the medication makes a difference.”

  He sat for a moment, listening to her as she described some new therapy she wanted him to try.

  He’d come here because of the court-martial, because Patrick had told him to get a clean bill of health. “Can I ask you something?” he said abruptly.

  “Sure.”

  “Have you already written the report for the court-martial?”

  “Of course. I wrote that after your first visit.”

  Trent ran his tongue over his teeth. “So why am I still here?”

  Emily’s expression was carefully blank. “Why don’t you tell me that?”

  He was still there because he loved his family. Because this had helped to at least start him on the road to somewhere approaching normal. He smiled, realizing that if Patrick had planned this, it had worked out.

  “Did Patrick put you up to keeping me in therapy?”

  “No. But I did get a note from your old first sergeant, telling me that if I could help you be less crazy, he’d buy me a beer when he got home from Iraq.” Emily shrugged. “I don’t drink and I normally don’t try to keep clients here under false pretenses. But Story told me about your kids and your wife and how much you love her. I figured if I could get a couple visits out of you, maybe I could make a difference.” She crossed her legs. “I hope you’re not upset?”

  Trent’s smile started slowly then spread beyond his mouth to the empty space in his heart that was not so empty anymore. “No. In fact, I think I owe my first sergeant that beer when he gets home.”

  “Yeah, you probably do. You have a lot of people in your life looking out for you. You need to take care of yourself so you can take care of them.” She paused. “Will I see you next Thursday?”

  He looked down at his hands. At the wedding band around his left ring finger. He never thought he’d be the guy that would go and let someone crawl around inside his head.

  He looked up at he
r. “Yeah. You will.”

  * * *

  Trent walked through the chapel, unable to concentrate on anything to do with Shane’s wedding. His thoughts were distracted and raw, a hangover from the ragged memories that had risen up and tormented him. The war was doing it again. Demanding he leave, that he go back to doing what he was good at. Fighting.

  But somehow, the war felt very far away. The whispers were there but their seductive promise of adrenaline and power were… diminished. His mind drifted from memory to memory, focusing on home, on ignoring the siren’s call of the war. On his family that still loved him.

  Emma giggling as he blew a raspberry on her tummy.

  Ethan squealing with laughter as Trent dangled him upside down.

  Laura’s eyes filling with tears as she watched him walk from that crowded gym one more time.

  Emotions twisted around inside him, filling the dead space. He wasn’t afraid of feeling anymore. There was a time when being around the guys, around Shane and Carponti and Story, would have been the only slice of normal in his life. That being around the guys would have fit better than being around his family.

  But the pieces were fitting back together now, better than they had before.

  “You’re thinking way too hard,” Carponti said, leaning on the altar. “We’re supposed to be plotting a way to get Mr. Cranky Pants to the church on time and you look like you just stepped in a pile of dog shit.”

  “Hamster shit, more likely,” Trent mumbled.

  Carponti laughed. “Yeah, well, you were the one who bought them. I’m still shocked Laura let the kids keep them.”

  Shane walked up and joined them. He’d been off looking for the chaplain’s assistant. “Where did everyone go?”

  “Bride’s room.”

  “What are they doing in there, anyway?” Carponti asked, glancing down the hallway.

  “Painting each other’s toenails. How the hell should I know?” Trent asked.