Christmas with My Cowboy

by Diana Palmer

  “But I’m sure they translate for you?”

  She loved the calm she saw in Travis’s expression. He seemed much more at peace this morning, unlike yesterday. “They do. I get so I talk their language, not the civilian one.”

  “You’re one of us,” he murmured, sipping his coffee. “I was hoping your dizziness would be gone, Kass.” He pointed to the blue spruce in the corner. “I thought we might trim the tree sometime this afternoon if you wanted. I’m sure you’re probably bored just sitting around here with nothing to do.”

  “I’m not bored,” she said. “I love this cabin. You’re right, it’s like a clamshell, it’s so safe feeling.”

  “When I came home, my parents told me that this place had sat empty and for sale for three years. I was able to buy it pretty cheaply. I had money saved from being in the service but was worried if I could afford much of anything at all. I got lucky.”

  “Do Red and Melba like your place?”

  “Yes, my dad helped me set up the studio when I came home.” He gestured toward the living room. “My mom, bless her, did all the buying of furniture, the decorating and making it into a home for me.”

  “She did a nice job. Do you get to see them often?”

  “About once a month I drive up to see them, and I have Sunday afternoon dinner with them and we catch up with one another.”

  “I know when you were a teen, your dad was teaching you how to fix cars in his garage business. Do you still do that?”

  “Naw. I’m mechanical minded, but I love carpentry and making things with my hands, not fixing car engines. I don’t mind it, but it’s not my passion. My grandfather was a master carpenter, and I think that gene got passed on to me instead of the mechanic’s one my dad has.”

  “I’m sure your folks are glad you’re home.”

  Somber, he nodded. “My mother worried about me nonstop. That was the bad part. They knew I was always in combat areas of Afghanistan. No place was safe. My dad was in the Marine Corps for four years, so he knew more than he’d ever tell Mom. It would only have intensified her worry for me while I was over there.”

  “Melba and Red would always come to the café on Saturday and have lunch. I got a chance to talk with them and catch up on what you were doing.” Because they had, at one time, expected her to become their daughter-in-law, but she didn’t go there.

  Travis shook his head. “Kass, I haven’t treated you like you deserved. I stopped emailing you after two years into my military life.”

  “I know.” She shrugged. “Melba told me you got transferred into black ops, that often you couldn’t get to a computer or Skype. I got it. I understood it.”

  He gave her a sad look. “I’m no longer the boy you grew up with, Kass. Combat has changed me forever.”

  “And is that why you stopped communicating with me?” Years earlier, Kass had felt hurt at being left out of the loop. Melba’s explanation had helped her understand why, but not completely. Once more, she felt abandoned, but her love for Travis was so strong it overwhelmed those feelings and kept them in the background of her life.

  “I was a bastard to you, Kass. I got into combat and I lost so many of my friends. I was scared and yet, I always wanted to be there for my unit. My world changed and I didn’t know how to tell you that. You being a civilian, never seeing what I saw or what I survived, just made me that much more aware of the mountain that had grown up and stood between us.”

  “You didn’t think I’d understand if you shared your experiences with me?”

  “No . . . I didn’t.” Giving her an apologetic look, he said, “Kass, I didn’t go into the military thinking all this would happen to me. You and I had a pact with one another when I left for the Marine Corps. We’d get married when I got settled into my new career.”

  “But that never happened.”

  “No,” he muttered, “it didn’t. I loved you, and I had dreams for us. You and I talked about them often. But getting thrown into black ops upended the world as I knew it. It was so damned different, demanding, and it was always life-and-death surrounding me. I wanted to escape it, but I couldn’t.”

  “It had to be so hard on you, Travis. I can’t imagine some of the things you saw and experienced.”

  “And that’s what drove me away from you, Kass. I’ve had a lot of time to think about what happened and why. And now? Being home a year? Getting away from all that terror and threat environment? I see how much I’ve changed. I have so much to atone for with you that I don’t even know where to start.” He reached out, closing his hand over hers, squeezing it gently. “I’ve hurt the one person I loved the most, in ways that I can’t even begin to imagine.”

  She felt the roughness of his hand on hers, hungrily absorbing it, listening to his explanation. “But you’re trying to set things right now, Travis? You said you wanted to be friends with me?”

  Nodding, he said, “Yes. If you’ll have me as a friend. I turned my back on you years ago, Kass. And it wasn’t your fault. It was all on me.”

  “You left the valley, Travis. You entered an alien world that was so different from how you grew up here with me.”

  He released her hand, curving it around his mug once more. Voice low and thick, he held her gaze. “You’re right. I never looked at it that way. It was alien compared to my life here.”

  “I want to be your friend, Travis. We have too much of our lives entwined. I’m happy to be there for you.”

  “You’ve always been so forgiving, Kass. I never understood why, but you are. You’re giving me a second chance with you.”

  “I was thrown away at birth, Travis. I know what it’s like to not be wanted. Even though you disconnected from me after you went into black ops, I never gave up hope on you. Melba and Red always kept me in the loop about you. Even with them, you were out of touch for months at a time. I know they lived for an email or a Skype from you. I got that you were into a very different world than ours. Sometimes, Red would pull me aside and tell me a lot more than he’d tell Melba. He helped me comprehend that combat world you lived within, and I was so grateful to him for doing that for me.”

  “You never gave up on me, did you?”

  “No . . . never. Not then, not now.”

  He sat up, moving and twisting his shoulders, as if to get rid of so many heavy, invisible burdens he still carried. “I don’t deserve your forgiveness, Kass, but I’ll take it.”

  Reaching over, she briefly touched the back of his hand. “There’s nothing to forgive. That’s the past, Travis. All we have is what is right in front of us. I learned a long time ago to live in the moment. That’s all we’ll ever have. The past is something we learn from.” She smiled a little. “I also like looking at the past when something happy or good happened, too. Heartwarming memories feed me on bad days.”

  He sat there mulling over her words. Finally, with effort, he said, “You have a heart larger than the state of Wyoming, Kass. I don’t think I could do what you’re doing. Forgiving me. Wanting to start over.”

  “I’ll take whatever you offer me, Travis. Friendship is a good place to start.” She saw his eyes tear up for a moment, and then he swallowed hard, and they were gone. She felt him battling a wave of unexpected emotion that had to be flowing through him. It served to tell Kass just how fragile Travis really was. He was dealing with deep war wounds, and that was the culprit that had made him excise her out of his life. At least, that was what she intuited. “You’re a good person, Travis. You’ve been caught in a vise called war and you’ve seen too much, and it’s hurt you in ways most of us will never understand or experience. I know that because of the vet ladies who work at my café. They’ve told me horror stories and later, alone, I’ve cried for them. It breaks my heart what war does to people. It doesn’t matter your gender. It’s a terrible wound you live with forever.”

  “Yes,” he said heavily, giving her a glance, “it does change you. I’m glad you’ve had the ladies there to help you understand at a deeper level w
hat we’re all going through.”

  “You need to trust me, Travis. I can feel you’re afraid you’re going to somehow hurt me. Is that true?” Kass wasn’t going to sugarcoat anything between them. She saw surprise flare in his eyes, and then he became sad looking once more.

  “Yeah, that’s part of it, Kass. It’s not me not trusting you, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m afraid to entrust myself to you.” He held up one of his hands. “I’ve killed a lot of men. I won’t ever forget the face of any of them for the rest of my life, Kass. When I close my eyes at night, I see them parading past me, and the firefight I was in when it happened. When I can go to sleep, there’s a good chance once or twice a week, I’ll get a nightmare about one of those events, and I come up swinging sometimes.”

  “So you’re sleep deprived, Travis. That was one thing my ladies have always wrestled with, too. It’s hard to function eight hours a day when you’re dragging. It’s hard emotionally on you, too.”

  “Yeah, I get short-tempered. I never used to be like that, but I am now. I’m afraid I’ll take my anger or irritation out on you. And you don’t deserve that.”

  “I’ve had my ladies get short with me. We talk about it after the café closes. There are no secrets among us, Travis. And I’m well aware you’re short on sleep. You have shadows beneath your eyes. I’m sure you didn’t sleep well last night.”

  “No, I didn’t,” he admitted, scowling down at the mug between his hands.

  “Look, how can I help around here, Travis? We’ve got four days together, maybe more, if this blizzard keeps dumping snow on us.”

  “I just want you to heal up, Kass. You don’t need to do anything around here. You’ve just come out of a level three concussion. You need to rest.”

  She laughed a little and sat back in the chair, giving him a humored look. “Remember, I run a business. Our café is open at six a.m. and we close at nine p.m. I’m there at five a.m. every day and I leave work at ten p.m. I’m on my feet running all day long. I’m not used to sitting around. I honestly need something to do. I’m a Type A person at heart. If you have something that needs to be done, tell me. I can help.”

  “Do you feel up to moving around at the speed of light right now, Ms. Type A?”

  She loved him for gently teasing her. Kass could see concern in his eyes for her, that she might not be fully healed yet. “Yes. Maybe not the speed of light, but I can putter. I’m not a hundred percent and I admit that. But at least let me do things around here for you. I’ll feel better and it’s a way of thanking you for taking me in.”

  “Why don’t we trim the tree later this afternoon?”

  “Do you have ornaments, Travis?”

  He smiled a little. “Yeah, my mom made sure I’d have a lot of the older ones. You know, the paper ones we made as kids in grade school kind of thing? She kept all of them in boxes, a scrapbook of my growing-up years.”

  “The past is important in that one sense,” Kass said softly. “Those good memories I was talking about earlier? Maybe that’s what needs to be done to help you, Travis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Remember our past together? The great times we had as kids and teens growing up?”

  He pushed the emptied mug aside. “Sometimes I do. That’s not a bad idea you have, Kass. I’ve been so consumed with combat, with what happened. I need a distraction, maybe. Some of the good things that happened to me in my life to replace the bad ones.”

  “It’s understandable. But maybe remembering some good times might help to offset the bad ones a little bit? What do you think? We can talk about our past and what we did together. I found out from my ladies that they were fixated like you were, on all the horrible things that happened to them. I started prodding them and asking about the good things, the happy moments, the laughter they’d had in their lives. It worked. It kind of helped each of them reset their own emotional barometer. It didn’t cure them and it didn’t stop the flashbacks or nightmares, but they learned when it happened to force the mind and memory onto something good to come up with instead. In many of them it helped shorten their downward spiral, or it lessened the emotional impact on them.”

  “I’m open to anything. The VA gave me antidepressants and sleep meds. Both of them made me worse. I said to hell with it. I dropped them into the wastebasket and never looked back.”

  “My ladies had the same reaction to them. There’s a physician’s assistant in town, Taylor Douglas. She’s one rung below a medical doctor and she’s a specialist in PTSD. Two of the four of my ladies have gone to her with almost miraculous results. They had high cortisol, which is what causes that horrible anxiety everyone gets. She has something called an adaptogen, which once taken for a short period of time turns off the cortisol that’s flowing 24/7 in your bloodstream. It returns control over that hormone back to the brain where it belongs. Both my ladies reported that within three days, Travis, their anxiety was gone.”

  He stared at her. “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has the anxiety come back? How long ago did they take adaptogen?”

  “Let’s see . . . Laura took it for only thirty days under Tayor’s guidance. And that was a year ago. She’s never had her anxiety return. Lily took it nine months ago, with the same result. Mackenzie and Grace have appointments with Taylor. They’ve seen how well Laura and Lily are, and they want the same thing. That anxiety is, as far as I’m concerned, the number one symptom that nearly anyone with PTSD has to wrestle with. It also stopped their hypervigilance and the feeling they were being stalked by the enemy to be killed. As Taylor explained it to me? She said the hormone cortisol is there to help us survive situations of danger and threat. Usually, it turns off after the incident. But when you’re in war and threat is around you for six to nine months? The cortisol is ‘on’ all the time because you’re in danger all the time. And then it can’t shut off. The adaptogen puts the Master Gland in your pituitary back into control and it shuts off the cortisol until or if it is ever needed again. You have to admit that coming back into civilian life that we aren’t under constant life-and-death threat. So? The cortisol, according to Taylor, remains off and no longer flowing into the bloodstream to keep us hypervigilant and anxious.”

  “I have that very same anxiety,” he grumped. “I’d give anything to get rid of it. That’s the symptom that keeps me awake at night.”

  She reached out. “Then when this blizzard is over, give Taylor a call and make an appointment. The adaptogen is very cheap, and Taylor will guide you through it and be checking the lab tests on you within that thirty-day period.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, that sounds hopeful.”

  “Laura and Lily both saw a lot of combat, Travis. You’re a lot like them in your symptom picture from what you’ve shared with me.”

  “Are they married?”

  “No. Not yet, at least. I know Laura is sweet on a wrangler, Cody, who works at Maud and Steve Whitcomb’s ranch. We’re all hoping something blooms between them and we can have a wedding sooner, not later.” She smiled. “But Laura is afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Afraid she’ll be a burden to Cody. She’s seen a lot of the marriages of PTSD warriors self-destruct.”

  “Having this stuff,” Travis warned, “does tear a marriage apart, Kass. I’ve seen it with my buddies who went home after so many deployments. It tore their marriages apart within a year.”

  “I know,” she said. “My ladies all have stories about other women they knew who were also in combat going home and their marriages blowing up in their faces and getting destroyed. It’s such a sad thing.”

  “But this medicine that Taylor has? Do you always have to take it?”

  “No, usually not more than once for thirty days. Taylor is monitoring you at all times with lab tests. It does require a medical person to be involved. You can’t do this on your own. There’s some testing before you take it to see if your cortisol is outsi
de normal bounds. If it is, then she’ll probably give you the adaptogen. And once the anxiety leaves you, she’ll retest you at the thirty-day time to see if the cortisol is back within normal bounds.”

  “Is it for Laura and Lily?”

  “Laura has a little bit outside normal, but she was in a firefight where her team got overrun. She was one of the few survivors from it. Taylor told her that she’d probably never have ‘normal’ cortisol levels, but the adaptogen has taken away ninety-five percent of her anxiety. She can live with five percent, believe me.”

  “That sounds so damned hopeful to me.”

  “I’ve seen both ladies change back to who they used to be before combat and PTSD. It doesn’t mean they don’t still have flashbacks or nightmares, but at least they can sleep at night, they aren’t irritable, angry, and hypervigilant like they were before. Now they no longer have these symptoms, and it’s changed their entire world.” She rubbed her hands together, giving him a sudden grin. “That’s what we’re all hoping, anyway!”

  Giving her a sour look, he said, “I think I’d like to have Taylor’s phone number.”

  “Best holiday gift you could give yourself,” Kass told him, rising and going to the other side of the door and lifting her purse from the hook it hung on.

  Waiting until she sat down and opened it up, drawing out her cell phone, Travis added, “Once more, you’re saving my life, Kass.”

  She gave him a warm smile. “Don’t look at it that way, Travis. I want the boy I grew up with to come back to me. I know he’s still in there. I sense it.” She quickly got her text up. “Give me your cell phone info and I’ll give you Taylor’s information.”

  Travis had his cell phone charging on the kitchen counter. He unplugged it and turned it on. “Okay, give me my new lease on life,” he teased, holding her softened green eyes. “I’ll do anything to make this anxiety go away permanently.”

  Chapter Six

  The blizzard was amping up in strength and the amount of snow falling was rapidly increasing from where Travis stood by the spruce tree near the window. He’d put on Christmas music that played quietly in the background. If Kass hadn’t dropped out of the blue and back into his life, he wouldn’t have trimmed the tree at all. It was all he could do to cut it down and bring it in the house. He just didn’t have any desire to celebrate anything, even Christmas, anymore. That was how far he’d sunk into his depression.