How crazy he must think she was, if something as ordinary as a passing train sent her into a fit. It had all happened so fast. She didn’t have time to prepare for her reaction and so she freaked out instead. Now on top of feeling the emotional toll the episode had taken, she was embarrassed too. A silly train. She couldn’t even watch or listen to the whistle of a silly damn train without losing it.
Another swipe of her face ensured that the flow had stopped, but she was thankful for the near darkness that hid what was surely her reddened face.
Feeling a give in the mattress, she looked up to see Tyler sitting on the opposite side of the bed, facing the wall with his elbows resting against his knees. His head bent down and his shoulders slumped forward. He looked as battered as she felt.
His voice sliced like a knife through the black silence, pushing all tension and anger aside, leaving only a genuine concern between them. “How bad is it?”
He knew. He knew without having to ask. But then of course he would. He was a smart enough man to figure it out. As much as she wanted to tell him to screw off, she couldn’t. This was Tyler. Not some nosy busybody interested in her life for no good reason. She recognized his sincerity as what it was: a true concern for her well-being. Quickly thinking about her answer, she searched for a blasé excuse to hand him, but expelled the truth when she opened her mouth. “Not nearly as bad as some.”
• • •
Tyler felt like a piece of him ripped away, as if nothing he thought true was right. Sera had come back from Afghanistan physically unwounded, but she was suffering in a way neither he nor could anyone else really understand. She hadn’t been acting quite right, but he hadn’t been able to put his finger on it and chalked her weird behavior up to seeing him. He was sure his presence wasn’t helping matters, but she was dealing with more than just the awkwardness of meeting up with an old flame. She had PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. He’d only imagined possible physical wounds, nothing else, because Sera had one of the most strong-willed minds he’d ever met. “Is that why you got out?”
Hoarsely, she answered, “Yes.”
“Was it voluntarily?”
“No.”
The fact that they were having this conversation was bad enough, but hearing the aridity in her voice and knowing Sera wasn’t the type to let anything get her down, stabbed his already tormented spirit. Running his hand through his hair, he fought the urge to grab her and hold her against him. He couldn’t stop thinking about how her mouth—a mouth that was normally so full and pretty—had twisted into a ring of awful terror. Nor could he forget the way her shoulders and arms had shaken as violently as the rails of the train tracks. He’d almost been afraid she might fold over into her sobs and fall out of the truck. He’d even imagined her body withering to the ground and wondered if he hadn’t been there to keep her in place what she might have done. The sound of her cries continued to echo in his ears.
Never in his life had he wanted to hold her so badly, yet the sheer look of being entirely somewhere else halted the need. He thought he’d heard Sera at her lowest before her deployment, when she’d called every other day on the verge of tears while lashing out. But that had been about him and her concerns for their relationship. It had nothing to do with a fear of carrying out what she’d enlisted to do.
Knowing he’d been quiet for far too long, he stretched out beside her flat on his back. She lay motionless with the covers pulled up high to her neck. He knew she’d lie like that all night without another word if he didn’t press for more. Yet he had no clue of what to say either. Finally gaining some ground on the flood of emotions filling his body, he asked, “Have you talked to anyone about it?”
“I have. It didn’t really help.”
“There’s medication they can give you.”
“I know all about the crazy pills.”
He wasn’t sure if her obvious offense to the medication annoyed him or filled him with relief to know she hadn’t changed as much as he thought. After dabbling with drugs in her early teen years before coming to live with Roy, she’d sworn off even drinking. It was one of the many things they had in common, because having an alcoholic father made him leery of the stuff as well.
At least now he knew that it wasn’t him keeping her up at night. Although he wished it was. He could put his guitar away and let her sleep. She couldn’t tell the nightmares or whatever else haunted her dreams to give her peace.
Not knowing what to say next, he turned over, facing her rigid body, and hated what his soft, lovable Sera had become: a hard, broken, and distant woman. The need to reach out and touch her became almost consuming, but he knew it wasn’t the time to act on selfish impulses. Balling his hands into fists so he wouldn’t do just that, he asked, “You want to talk about it?”
“Not really,” she said, and paused before speaking again. “I don’t want your pity, Tyler. I don’t need it. There are a lot more that come back with far more difficulties than what I’m dealing with. So please don’t look at me or treat me like I’m fragile or crazy. I’m not going to shoot up the town or go berserk. I know that’s what people think when they hear PTSD. It’s not like that.”
He almost laughed. Just when he thought the woman he used to know had all but disappeared, her spunky side came through. “You were crazy before you went into the army, so I don’t associate the two together.” Joking, he threw her a smile he knew she couldn’t see. However, when she turned toward him, even in the darkness, he sensed she wore one as well. “Talk to me, Sera.”
After a few moments she finally said, “It wasn’t all that bad. Mostly my time went fairly smoothly. Being away from all your friends and family is the worst part.”
A pain seared through his torso. She’d been lonely. Of course she had. Thousands of miles from home in a country full of people who didn’t want her there and the one person who’d promised to love her for the rest of her life had walked out merely weeks before she’d gone. It wasn’t exactly what he wanted to discuss. He hoped for more of a direct explanation of what happened, but as long as she talked, that was all that mattered. His conscience would just have to suffer through and deal with the guilt of his past actions later. “Did your mom not write?”
“She wrote. And your mom and Roy made sure I received something every week. I got so much stuff I had to start giving it away.”
More than once in those twelve months he’d thought about writing her. He had even typed out a couple of emails, but he could never bring himself to hit send. Her lack of response to the ending of their relationship had told him more than any words could. She was hurt beyond words and the thought of reaching out, only to be ignored again, would have been harder to bear than hearing her lash out. Thinking she just needed some time, he thought she would come around eventually, if for nothing more than to give him a piece of her mind. That hadn’t happened either. Not once since she returned from Afghanistan had she tried to contact him, nor had she acknowledged the tickets he’d sent her to his show in Austin shortly thereafter. He’d taken the chance of them both being in Texas to try to reach out. He didn’t know if she went and couldn’t blame her if she didn’t, but it was the last hope he had to try to get back the girl who had literally knocked him off his feet. A small laugh escaped with the memory of her first day of school in Cobb City.
“What?” she asked, clearly seeing he thought something was funny.
“I was thinking about your first day of school here.”
Not one bit happy about coming to live with her kidless uncle, whose wife had died and lived in the middle of nowhere, Sera was a hellcat on wheels. Her first month there was nothing but battle after battle. Roy had rules to follow and chores he expected her to do, which weren’t things she handled very well since structure had never been a part of her life. Roy also didn’t let her get by with much, not even when her sharp temper flared and she pushed Tyler after he bumped into her while playing volleyball in the gym. There was no major squabble. Caught off guard
, he stumbled backwards to the floor. They stared at each other sternly until she walked away, but when he got home that afternoon, Roy brought her over to apologize. Apparently one of the other kids had gone home and told their parents all about the new unruly girl at their small town school, who in turn took it upon themselves to call and let Roy know just what a handful he had taken on. Sera later told Tyler that having to apologize to his mother for acting like a five-year-old was the first time she could remember being truly embarrassed about something she’d done. She also said how surprised she’d been when he was waiting at her locker the next morning. From then on, they were practically inseparable.
“I was a little high strung,” she said.
“You think?” he teased again.
“Come on, seriously. I wasn’t that bad.”
No, she wasn’t, he thought. In fact, she was pretty damn cute, the reason he’d purposely bumped into her, trying to get her attention. He got it all right, and then she got his and she’d had it ever since.
“Nah. Actually you’re quite adorable when you’re mad.”
When a long silence followed, Tyler wasn’t sure what he said, but it was clear he’d said something wrong. Sera breathed in deeply and then he heard a faint sniffle.
“Sera, what’s wrong?” With no response, he rubbed his thumb across her cheek to ensure he was correct. The moisture immediately tightened his chest as did the turn of her face away. “I’m sorry,” he added.
“Sorry for what?” Her voice broke as she continued to fight the tears.
Sorry for being an asshole. For letting you go. Allowing you to go through all of this on your own. Not being there when you needed me. “I’m sorry for hurting you.” That pretty much summed it up.
“Don’t,” she said with a shake of her head.
Her last word came out fragile, radiating the ache in Tyler’s upper body to his arms all the way down to his stomach. More tears followed, cutting his injured soul open further.
Unable to thwart temptation any longer, he reached out, prepared to meet her resistance when he pulled her close. But instead of fighting him, she settled into the crook of his shoulder.
Chapter 7
Before Sera had the chance to pry her eyelids apart, her heart rate fluttered toward the ceiling. The irregular beats rushed the flow of blood through her veins so fast that she was sure her eardrums would explode. The unbearable throbbing kept her pinned to the bed, unable to move. Nightmares weren’t usually her problem. Once asleep, she normally stayed there. It was the drifting-off part that she had trouble with.
Trying to remember what had been so terrible as to wake her in the middle of the night, she blew out a few small breaths, gulping back the saliva stranded in her throat. It wasn’t Rollins’s blood-soaked face that popped in her head. Tyler’s tormented eyes were what she’d been dreaming about.
With her pulse slowing, she finally opened her eyes, but it wasn’t dark, like she expected. A slice of daylight cast through the window, showing off the mid-morning sun. The sharp rays reminded her of the lights from the train from the night before. It wasn’t a dream. Tyler was—turning to the side, she saw Tyler lying next to her. The incident by the railroad tracks was real. A flush of embarrassment came as she recalled all the details. The train, her meltdown, her and Tyler’s talk, her crying, then the two of them laughing and then her crying again before the sleeping pill she’d taken right before she slipped into bed took effect. The last thing she remembered was not having the energy to fight the strength in his arms as he gathered her into him.
She hated to cry more than anything and now she’d done it not once, but twice in one night. The tears she’d shed for Rollins were easily explainable. It was a traumatic experience even if no one lost their life. However, the tears that came when Tyler began flirting weren’t as easy to acknowledge. He said she was adorable when she was mad, which may not have been much, but she knew Tyler. She knew what that low drawl in his voice meant, and it hurt so badly to know that he could forget how callous he’d been. After planning a future together, he’d ended their engagement with a few words left on a voicemail.
Trying to derail the downturn of emotions that were again piling up, she glanced at the clock and saw it was after nine. A decent night’s sleep in comparison to the couple of hours that she normally got. Yet the rest didn’t resolve her fatigue. Every one of her muscles ached like they did every other morning, and her eyes swelled from the tears she’d shed. If only she could get through a day without feeling like a tightly wound-up jack-in-the-box, ready to pop at any given moment. Everyone kept saying in time it would get better, and some aspects of her disorder had, but others seemed stagnant.
Lack of sleep and the inability to do certain things still interrupted her quality of life, as the army psychiatrist put it. Quality of life—ha! She didn’t really care how great the quality of it was. She just wanted it to be her own and not dictated by something that had happened to her.
Ready to forge some distance, she sat up, happy that she and Tyler had fallen apart at some point during the night. At least she didn’t have to add “waking up tangled together” to her list of regrets that morning. But as she took one long look at his thick shoulders before leaving the room, she couldn’t help but think how good it felt when he touched her. Even with all the hurt of the past, she still found comfort from being in his arms.
• • •
Tyler paused just inside the kitchen. Sera sat at the table with one leg pulled up in the chair and wrapped tightly with her arm. Her head cocked slightly to the side, throwing her long hair over a shoulder as she pored over a crossword puzzle book. She would have looked peacefully engrossed if it weren’t for the constant tapping of her pencil against the tabletop. The intrusive sound conveyed clear agitation on her part, which left him somewhat relieved that she was already out of bed when he woke. He’d had two pretty shitty days so far, and he hoped to bypass another if at all possible, and waking up together would have definitely jump-started another toxic day.
After pouring a cup of coffee, he sat at the table, trying to work up the courage to bring up the night before. A week ago, the only real problem in his life was that of his upcoming single. Now he stood under a waterfall. The problems kept piling up and pouring over top of him. All of which revolved around one thing, or rather person: Sera. How was she going to feel about the release? And how was he supposed to find some contentment when the two of them were barely speaking while staying under the same roof? Which brought upon his biggest problem of all: making things right between them was no longer enough. From the moment he saw her standing out in the yard, he knew all the feelings he’d been trying to ignore were still there. He loved her. Simple as that. All the proof he needed was the feeling of completeness he had while she’d slept in his arms.
Any progress they might have made was gone, though, when she didn’t so much as look up to wish him good morning. He should have expected as much. She was never one for easily confiding her feelings. It had taken more than a year after moving to Cobb City before she began telling him about her life in Chicago. A life so different from the small-town upbringing he’d had. He couldn’t begin to imagine the disjuncture of having to attend a different school each year because her mom found a newer or cheaper apartment in another part of the city. The absence of a father or even a name of the man who’d helped create her had never helped either. Not to mention the string of boyfriends Sylvia had in and out of the house. Some were kind to Sera, while others preferred she wasn’t around. By the age of ten she was staying at home by herself while her mom worked the night shift. By thirteen, she was sneaking out at all hours. It wasn’t until the police brought her home stoned for the third time that Sylvia decided she needed help. Roy stepped in. Tyler didn’t want to think about where Sera’s life may have led if he hadn’t. Yet she’d never let any of that beat her. She was tough, that was for sure, but even the tough needed someone to lean on from time to time.
Af
ter turning his coffee cup around in circles for the better part of five minutes, the silence began to wear on him. “Sleep well?” he asked.
• • •
“Yeah,” Sera answered, swallowing down just how well she’d slept with him there.
Somehow in the span of the ten minutes since Tyler walked into the kitchen, she’d forgotten that she was supposed to be keeping distance. The hour-long talk she’d just had with herself about how she couldn’t get swept up with how good he looked or the familiarity of their past and the fact that she still somehow trusted him was as if it never happened. All she could think about was how good his arms had felt around her in those few minutes before she drifted off to sleep.
“Have any plans for the day?”
Detecting a strain in Tyler’s voice, as if he was trying his hardest to keep the flow of words coming steadily, but with apprehension at the same time, she forced her head down. She didn’t want to look up and see what she knew was there. Tiptoeing around what he wanted to say infuriated her. She hated when people treated her differently because of her problems. Yet she also knew it could work to her advantage too. If things continued to be awkward between them, they’d be less likely to have canoodling little chats like they’d done the night before.
“No,” she replied back, keeping her focus on the paper in front of her. She wasn’t even sure what number on the puzzle she was working on. Her thoughts were stalled on him and his close proximity. She was pretty sure his eyes were glued to her, but she didn’t dare look up to see. She reread one of the clues, but then realized she’d already answered that number and went to the next. Looking over it once, twice, three times and still unable to comprehend a word she read, she jumped ahead to the next.
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