by Lori Ryan
“But then you left.”
Her comment drew him back to the present and once again he had to fight to steady his breathing. Yeah. Leaving hadn’t been easy either. He’d had to draw on every ounce of control he had to walk out that door instead of hauling her upstairs to her bed.
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Why did I kiss you or why did I leave?”
“Both.” She shut his office door behind her and stood watching him as though she was terrified of the answer. Damn, this woman. She really had no idea the kind of power she had over him.
Logan drew in a deep breath through his nose before answering.
“I kissed you because I couldn’t help myself,” he said quietly, eyes watching hers as they flared in surprise. “And I walked away because I’m not okay.”
She blinked slowly at that. “You’re not okay.”
She said this more as a statement than a question and he got the sense she was acknowledging a fact they had both known for some time now.
Logan repeated the sentence over in his head. I’m not okay. He hadn’t actually said that before and he felt a small blow at the acknowledgement. Both a blow, and in some ways, a lightening or relief. It was as though saying the words to her somehow helped him to move forward, no matter how small a step it was. I’m not okay.
In the Teams, you’d be pulled from any assignments requiring security clearance if you were diagnosed with PTSD. It was so ingrained in him not to ask for help, not to admit there was a problem, it was hard to do so now, even though his clearance and status as a SEAL was no longer in jeopardy. Saying the words relieved some of that, though. The stigma was still there, but he could breathe, suddenly.
“And what are you doing about that?” Sam’s question threw him off guard.
“Excuse me?”
“What are you doing about that?” Sam repeated in a tone that told him she thought he was an idiot for not having some plan to address this issue. But how could he address it? What the hell could he do to get back to, well…he didn’t even know. Normal was what he guessed he should be striving for, but he didn’t even really know what that was. And, he knew after the things he’d seen and done, normal wasn’t an option anymore. Not for him.
“What am I doing about it?” he asked and he felt about as stupid as he sounded. Just keep parroting her words back to her. Freaking brilliant.
Samantha’s face softened and she smiled at him, but there was a sad patience to the smile. “What are you doing to get yourself okay?”
He wanted to get angry, to storm at her and tell her where she could take her suggestions that he simply do something. But he couldn’t. When he looked at her, he saw she waited with no judgment on her face. Simply watched him as though she expected him to have a plan. When one wasn’t forthcoming, she tilted her head. Were he not fighting the turmoil her questions seemed to have let loose in him, he might have thought the move adorable. Instead, he just fought the rising tide of panic inside him. Don’t do this, Sam. Don’t go there.
Whether she saw the panic in his eyes or simply knew him well enough by now to know this conversation wouldn’t end well, she turned to leave.
She stopped with her hand on the doorknob and looked back at him.
“You know, Logan, you do deserve to be happy. You might not be like a lot of your buddies you talk about with families to feed and no prospects for a job. You might not be fighting critical injuries or learning to walk with a prosthesis or two, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be happy. You have every right to the same counseling and help that they do. You need to stop punishing yourself for landing this job with Jack. You need to stop thinking you don’t matter just as much as every one of the men you fought with, even the ones who didn’t come home with you; who won’t ever come home. You deserve peace and happiness and everything you fought over there for all of us to have back here. You get to have it now, too. That’s part of the deal.”
Well, damned if she didn’t cut right through all his shit, straight to the freaking issue.
And then she walked out.
Well, hell.
Logan stared at the closed door for a long time and tried to figure out what he was feeling. He didn’t really have a clue, but he knew one thing. If getting help, if finding a way to be okay again, meant he could have a life with that woman—even only the shot at a life with that woman—he wanted it.
He picked up the phone and dialed Chad’s extension.
“Yeah?”
“How did you do it?”
“Uh…”
“When you came home,” Logan clarified. Chad had been out of the military for years, but he’d been in spec ops, too. Logan knew Chad had seen some shit, but he seemed to have a life now. He seemed to be functioning all right. At least better than Logan was. He had a wife he loved and who loved him back. They had a daughter. Chad didn’t seem plagued by memories like Logan was.
Logan cleared his throat and continued. “When you came home, how did you—”
Chad cut in when Logan floundered again. “Hang on, man. I’ll be right there.”
Logan stared out the window until he heard Chad open the door behind him. Chad didn’t hesitate. He walked in and handed Logan a business card for a counselor. Ernie Green.
“This guy,” Chad said, pointing to the card. “Go see him. He’s a veteran, and he’s become a good friend over the years. He gets it. It doesn’t fix everything right away, but he can help.”
Logan nodded and Chad turned without another word and left the room. Logan looked down at the card and took another one of those deep breaths he’d seemed to be needing a lot of lately. Sam’s words echoed in his head: What are you doing about it?
He lifted his phone and dialed the number.
Chapter Nine
Logan walked into the office four days later feeling just a bit better than he probably had in all his time since his return to civilian status. It had still been a pretty rough drive into the office, but since he was now coming in at a little more normal time of day, he’d hit some traffic. But he hadn’t broken into a cold sweat sitting in that traffic. He’d handled it. Sure, his grip on the steering wheel had been tighter than a pilot’s ass in a tailspin, but he hadn’t been in a full-blown panic.
He didn’t know if it was the two counseling sessions he’d had in four days or what, but on the off chance it was, he’d be keeping those appointments.
Ernie Green had turned out to be maybe fifteen years older than Logan, a veteran who’d served in Desert Storm. He was so freaking laid-back, he actually managed to get Logan talking. And that was something Logan hadn’t thought anyone would be able to do.
During the first session, he’d just smiled amiably at Logan and said, “So, what do you feel like doing?”
Logan had looked around at the pool table, the couches, the small refrigerator and the multiple old-school pinball machines that filled the room before answering.
“I thought we were supposed to talk,” Logan said as his gaze came back around to the man in front of him.
“Sure,” Ernie had said. “We can talk.” He’d walked to one of the couches and sat, his khaki pants slipping up to show the barest snippet of a prosthesis on each leg. Logan hadn’t realized he’d been frowning at the man’s ankles until Ernie had called him on it.
“Desert Storm. IED. Lost ’em both below the knee.” He had said all this with an easy smile that suggested he didn’t give a shit if anyone questioned him about his legs.
Logan had nodded before sitting on the other couch. “So, how does this work? I tell you my problems and you tell me how to fix them?”
“Shit,” Ernie had answered with a grunt as he reached into the fridge and pulled two bottles of water out, tossing one to Logan and opening the other. He had taken a long swallow before continuing. “You can tell me your grocery list if you feel like it. You’re the boss in here. We can play pool, shoot the shit, or sit here and stare at each other.”
<
br /> Logan had schooled his face and eyed the man. If anyone other than Chad Thompson had told him to come see this guy, he likely would have walked out the door. But Logan trusted Chad. Completely. If Chad said he needed this guy, he’d stick around long enough to give him a shot. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t give the guy some shit.
“I thought you were supposed to be a licensed therapist or something. Shouldn’t you be trying to help me?”
“Eh, all right. You want to play it that way, we can. Tell me about one of the guys who didn’t come home. Out of all the guys you wish you could bring back, out of all the men you would gladly flush your own life down the toilet for, simply for the glimmer of a shot at bringing him back. The guy who was worth all of your lives put together, the whole effing team of you would have thrown yourselves on a grenade to bring this guy—”
“All right! I got it. I got it.” Logan had sat and stared open-mouthed. Would it be inappropriate to tell this guy he’d changed his mind and he wanted to play pool?
The silence dragged on. After several long moments, Ernie slapped his hands on the arms of his chair and shoved himself up to his feet. “Pool it is, then!”
The crazy bastard had walked to the pool table and begun racking the balls, nodding to the pool cues hanging on an adjacent wall. “Pick it. You break.”
And, then they’d played. And that’s all they’d done. A little small talk here and there, but that was it. They just played. When the fifty-minute hour—what the hell is that about?—was over, Ernie had nodded at Logan and said, “I’ll see you in two days. Same time.”
And that was it.
The following session, Logan had walked in, caught the bottle of water Ernie tossed his way, and they began to play again. No pressure, no nothing.
And, within twenty minutes, Logan was talking.
“His name was Dopey.”
Ernie grunted. “Back in my day, we had names like Cowboy and Ice Man. Dopey? You guys went with Dopey?”
Logan had been surprised to hear himself chuckle and a little of the tension seeped out of him. “Yeah. Nick James. We all called him Dopey because he was so damned much like the dwarf, Dopey. Smiling and happy all the freaking time. Everyone’s friend no matter what. In the beginning, I think people thought he was a bit slow, because he had this way of talking really slow and he didn’t say a whole lot sometimes. He turned out to be the smartest of all of us.”
“How so?” Ernie asked, leaning over the table to line up a bank shot.
Logan shook his head and a bitter half laugh came out of him. “He was actually pretty damned philosophical. One day, we’re all sitting around. We’d been told to get ready for a call out, then nothing. You know—”
“Hurry up and wait. And wait. And wait. And wait,” Ernie said.
“Yeah. So, we’re waiting and someone pulls up some article about an asshole somewhere burning the America flag in protest. We’re all feeling pretty pissed off about it because, you know, we’re being deployed left and right. Sometimes we’re in these places dealing with sand in our damned underwear and heat like you’ve never felt in the summer, snow up to our freaking ears in the winter, getting shot at and blown to shit, and—”
Logan had stopped then, swallowing as the memory hit him hard. “Well, you know,” he said, not wanting to mention the shit they had to see, the shit they had to do. Not wanting to talk about what it was to take a life, even when you knew it was their life or yours. Even when that person would put a bullet through your skull with no qualms about it because of what you stood for. Who you stood for.
Ernie simply nodded. They’d stopped playing pool for a minute, but Logan bent back over the table, taking a shot to the corner pocket and sinking it with a satisfying shunk in the pocket.
He was quiet for a minute, eyeing the table and then lining up another shot before continuing.
“And, we’d all do it all over again in a heartbeat for our country. So, to see some guy burning the flag—” He shook his head. “Dopey. He just stops all of us. He tells us all we’re wrong. Of course, we look at him like he’s nuts, but he doesn’t care. He says, we’re all wrong. That burning the flag is a right and it’s a right we have to continue to protect no matter what. He says it’s a right that should never, ever be exercised, but if some asshat back in the states is dumb enough to exercise it, we need to protect his right to do so. Because that’s what makes us different, you know? That’s what makes the United States so great. It’s the fact that you can say and do those things, that you can say and do what you believe in and you can stand up for what you believe in. And, that’s what we’re over here fighting for, he says. We’re fighting so that asshat can burn the flag.”
“Do you think he was right?” Ernie’s tone had held no judgment. He had only been asking the question.
“I don’t know.” Logan stared out the window for a minute before continuing. “It still pissed me off to hear about some guy doing that, but I do think Dopey had it right that we have to stick up for all the rights we have here, you know? Even the ones that make me want to bash someone’s head in from time to time. It’s what makes America better than any other country on the planet.”
Ernie was quiet.
Logan took another shot, but missed miserably and he fell back onto a stool to watch Ernie clear the rest of the table. The guy sure didn’t pull his punches at the table just because you were paying him for his services.
“Dopey didn’t make it home with you?” Ernie’s question had gutted Logan. Logan could still hear the sound of what seemed like a hundred tridents being pounded into Dopey’s casket as his fellow SEALs said goodbye to one of their own.
Logan shook his head. “Nah. Never made it. Carried his body out, carried him all the way back to the evac point, but—” He hadn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t have to. Ernie got it. The pain of that moment when you realized there was no more you could do. No way to turn back the clock. No take-backs. A life was gone.
Ernie hadn’t been able to offer some magic answer for that. They’d just kept playing pool and talked about little everyday things after that. What his job was like at Sutton, who he thought would win in that weekend’s game, stuff like that.
But walking into work on Friday, Logan felt lighter somehow. Rather than head back to his office, he walked into Samantha’s office and shut the door. She had four windows open on her screen, fingers flying as she copied and pasted, and flipped from window to window. She looked up, a startled expression on her face, like she hadn’t realized he was there until he shut the door. He felt his lips pull at the sides. If it wasn’t so dangerous for her, he’d laugh at the way she was so completely unaware of her surroundings. She just got lost in her computer and sometimes didn’t come up for air or food until someone came to pull her up.
Logan did just that now. He rounded her desk and hauled her up out of her chair, pulling her against him with one arm. His other hand found her hair and tangled in the mass of it, pulling her toward him as his mouth found hers. Hungry and greedy and not stopping to think about what he was doing any more.
“I’m doing something about it now,” he said when he’d dug up some sanity and pulled back from her.
She blinked at him. Once. Twice. Several more times, before she spoke. “Doing something about what?”
“About not being okay. I’m fixing it. I’m still not okay, but I’ll get there.”
“Oh. Okay.” She nodded.
“Will you be there when I get to okay?”
“When you get to okay?” she parroted back and he realized it didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but before he could say anything else, she nodded. She must have understood his rambling well enough.
“Yeah. I’ll be here.”
“Good,” he said and walked out, walking with a hell of a lot more purpose to his step as he made his way to his office. It felt really good to be starting to get to the other side of “not okay.”
Chapter Ten
The fl
ashback took him completely off guard. One minute he and Ernie were playing pinball, and suddenly the stench Logan would give anything to erase from his body’s memory overwhelmed him. It was the smell of fire and char and acrid smoke—of death. It was a smell he would never try to explain to anyone because he would never want anyone who hadn’t experienced it to have to live with it. And it engulfed him now as images flashed before him. An explosion, the bodies of three of his teammates going down. Injured irreparably.
Then, the noises. The simultaneous loudness of screams, his commands and the commands of his team as they worked to save lives slipping away faster than they could grab and hold them, coupled with an underlying silence. The silence of what wasn’t being said. The feel of Dopey’s body hanging limp over Logan’s shoulder. The weight of him as Logan carried him out of harm’s way only to find no more harm could come to him. He was beyond reach now.
“Logan, you with me, buddy?” came Ernie’s soft, steady voice. The low lilt of it soothed as Ernie drew him out of the flashback.
“I want you to focus on the room we’re in, Logan. Notice the desk and the papers. The chairs and pool table. The pool balls. The refrigerator. Can you take a look at those things for me? The carpet under your feet? The feel of the chair arms in your hands. Focus on it all.”
Logan looked around at all the things Ernie named, but he knew his gaze was frantic, almost panicked, as he tried to find the items Ernie listed. He felt a vise grip on his chest, his lungs. There wasn’t any air getting in. It was all being sucked out of him as panic rose up and swallowed him whole.
“Let’s take a few deep breaths now, Logan. Breathe with me—in through your nose, out through your mouth.”
As Ernie spoke to him, Logan felt himself coming out of it, his heart rate still racing, but the sense of being in another time and place, a place he couldn’t control, eased.