by Nella Tyler
“It’s no less than you deserve,” Chase said as his eyes closed. “You deserve magic.”
“I have you,” I whispered back to him. “That’s all the magic I need.”
We fell asleep in each other’s arms that night, and even when restless sleep drove us to separate edges of the bed, our hands or legs entwined somehow, longing for that simple contact to remind us both that even in sleep, we were not alone.
Chapter Four
Chase
As usual, Daniel was late. I wasn’t that bothered by it today, however, because my thoughts required a little quiet. Two weeks on and I was still thinking about Braden. I knew it was wrong to compare, but I just couldn’t help it. My life and my job seemed so superficial when next to Braden’s and I couldn’t help but feel inadequate.
I knew my inferiority complex was self-inflicted – the rest of my family was nothing but proud of me and I knew that Braden was, too, but still I couldn’t seem to get that little voice out of my head. Every time silence crept in and I was left alone for any stretch of time, I would hear the voice speak up, soft at first and then insistently louder. It was telling me I needed purpose in my life. It was telling me I needed something to fight for.
Lauren had spent the last two weeks trying to make me feel better, and I was grateful for her presence. She knew when to leave me to my quiet moods and when to engage me in distracting conversations. Sometimes she sang just to make me laugh; the other night she had cooked me a special meal, and just this morning, she had left a little note taped to the bathroom mirror.
Usually, she could draw me out of my cloud of thought, but lately it hadn’t been working so great. I was still grateful she tried, but there were moments when I just needed to feel inadequate. A part of me wondered if I was just being self-pitying; another part of me hoped this was just an extended phase that would soon pass.
“Hi, dude,” Daniel’s voice cut through my thoughts as he approached from the walking path. “Sorry I’m late.”
“What’s the excuse this time?” I asked, bending down to make sure my shoelaces were secure.
“Umm…overslept,” he said as though he himself were not sure.
I rolled my eyes. “They’ve invented this new thing. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it’s called an alarm clock. They even put it in your phone now.”
He smiled sheepishly; his blue eyes were pale and they still had traces of sleep in them. “I’ve never paid much attention to my alarm.”
“Lucky me,” I sighed. “Shall we start?”
“Let’s go,” said he agreed as he started jogging on the spot, waiting for me to stand.
We started down the track together, with Daniel puffing harder than necessarily. By this point, though, I had gotten used to it and it barely irritated me anymore.
“Lauren didn’t want to join us?”
“She has a training session with a client this morning,” I replied. “She was out of the apartment before I was even up.”
“Geez, she gets up that early?”
“Always has,” I nodded. “Ever since she started track in high school, she’s always been an early riser.”
“I had a date last night,” Daniel confessed as we turned the corner and made for the second round.
“Oh?” I said, trying to muster up some interest and keep my head in the conversation. “How’d it go?”
“Disastrously,” he sighed. “Everything started out so good. She turned up at the restaurant and she was actually really pretty.”
“Wait, this was a blind date?” I asked.
“Beth set me up with her,” he nodded. “She had blue eyes that matched mine and long, curly hair. She had a hot body on her, too.”
“But?”
“She spent the first hour talking about her ex-boyfriend and the second hour talking about her cat, who she refers to as ‘her baby.’ By the third hour, I was pretty much certain the reason she had broken up with her boyfriend was because of the damn cat.”
“You were pretty certain?”
“Well, I kind of zoned in and out during that first hour,” he admitted. “She wasn’t the most riveting conversationalist.”
“Obviously not,” I said with an amused smile. “I’m thinking you didn’t invite her back to your place?”
“No, I went to hers.”
“You went home with her?” I asked incredulously.
“Hey, no judgment please,” he said defensively. “Not all of us have steady girlfriends and regular sex. It’s been a few months and I needed to get laid.”
I nodded sympathetically. “Fair enough. Was the sex at least worth the dinner?”
He shook his head in frustration. “We were making out on the couch when that stupid cat of hers started hacking up a hairball. I was just about to undo her bra when she pushed me off her and ran to the cat. Long story short, we ended up at the vet clinic downtown.”
“No way!” I laughed without reserve.
“Oh sure, laugh,” Daniel said through narrowed eyebrows. “Asshole.”
“You may be too close to the situation to see how funny it is,” I said with a shrug.
“Yeah, blue balls make it hard for you to see the humor in much of anything,” he sighed. “Seriously, though, you have no idea how lucky you are to have found a girl like Lauren. She’s smart, funny, pretty, and totally sane.”
“She is all those things,” I nodded. “Hang in there, though. You’ll find your Lauren.”
Daniel shot me a look that was highly skeptical. “Let’s take a break for five minutes before we continue,” he said, shooting his hand out to stop me from attempting the fourth round.
“Seriously dude?” I asked. “We just started.”
“It’s freaking early,” he said dismissively as he sank onto a bench by the path.
I stretched next to him, making sure to let my muscles breathe a little. I didn’t want to stop; I wanted to keep moving – it is harder to think when you were on the go.
“Are you all right?” Daniel asked pointedly.
“What?”
“It’s just that you don’t seem like yourself,” he said, looking at me curiously. “You’re not still upset with me for being late, are you?”
“No, of course not,” I said shaking my head. “I’m fine.”
He looked at me as though he didn’t quite buy it.
“What?” I said self-consciously.
“You seem to be preoccupied with something,” he said after a moment, and I felt a blaze of guilt shoot through my face.
“You wanna talk about it?” he asked.
I took a deep breath and sat down next to him. “Nah, it’s nothing important, really. It’s just that I’ve been thinking a lot lately.”
“About?”
“Braden,” I admitted. “And his work overseas.”
“What about it?” Daniel asked with interest.
“Have I ever told you that there was a time when I wanted to enlist?”
He looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Seriously?”
“Yup,” I nodded.
“When was this?”
“Right before I started college,” I admitted. “I was about 17; I was looking for something in my life, and the military had always been in the forefront of my mind ever since Braden left.”
“But you didn’t end up enlisting?”
“No,” I said. “I ended up picking the same college that Lauren did. We started classes, we met you all, and that was that. But it’s always been there in the back of my head…the need to enlist, the desire to fight for something.”
“Geez,” Daniel breathed. “Does Lauren know about how you feel?”
“Of course,” I nodded. “In fact, when I told her how I felt, she told me I should enlist.”
“Now?” Daniel balked.
“Yes,” I replied. “She said that if I felt this strongly about it and if the need to enlist hadn’t left me in all these years, then maybe it was something I was meant to do.”
<
br /> “Wow,” he said taking that all in. “Are you really considering enlisting?”
“I…no,” I said quickly. “No, of course not.”
“Why not?” he asked. “I mean, according to everything you’ve just told me, I think Lauren’s right. Maybe the only way to get this out of your head would be to actually go through with it.”
“I just…it’s more complicated than that,” I sighed.
“Okay,” Daniel nodded. “How?”
“Well, enlisting would mean giving up my NFL career, for starters,” I tried to explain. “And, I don’t think I can afford to do that. But the most important thing is that I’d need to leave Lauren behind. I can’t do that to her.”
“Isn’t that her choice?”
“It’s my responsibility to think of her and put her first,” I said insistently.
“If she’s encouraged you to enlist, then I’m sure she’s already aware of what she would need to go through,” he pointed out.
“She believes I’ll finish my term and come back to her,” I said.
Daniel raised his eyebrows. “Isn’t that’s what’s going to happen?”
“That would be best case scenario,” I said. “But she’s not thinking of worst case scenario. What if I don’t come back? Or what if I come back broken, maimed, defeated? I can’t put her through all of that.”
“Again, don’t you think that’s her choice?” he insisted.
“She will always put me first,” I said with conviction. “And that means that I need to put her first. In this case, putting her first is considering the possibilities that she won’t even entertain. If I came back injured, she wouldn’t even bat an eyelid. She would become my caretaker and my nurse and she would never complain about it. If I came back with PTSD, she would suffer through my tantrums and my mood swings and my insults and she would never show me her hurt.
“And if I didn’t come back at all…she would suffer silently through the rest of her life and curse herself for ever encouraging me to enlist. I know her, Daniel. She is the best woman, the best person I know, and I need to make sure she’s all right. I can’t do that if I’m halfway across the world fighting for my country and myself. A part of me may need to enlist, but a bigger part of me needs to be with Lauren. Does that make sense?”
“It does,” Daniel said in a hushed voice.
I was about to say something about Lauren when my phone rang and I reached for it instinctively. My brow wrinkled as I registered my mother’s number on my screen. “She never calls at this time,” I said mostly to myself as I answered the call.
“Mom?”
“Chase…” her voice was weak, shaky, and bordering on breaking. The sound of it sent a thrill of fear shooting straight to my heart.
“Mom, what’s wrong?” I demanded urgently.
“Oh, Chase…” her voice broke on my name, and I could the sound of her jagged sobs as she pushed away from the phone. A second later, the line became clear again and my father’s steady voice took control.
“Come home, son,” Dad said. His voice was clear and steady, but I could sense the distress lurking underneath it.
“Tell me what’s happened?” I asked seized with an instinctive fear.
“It’s Braden,” Dad replied. “It’s your brother. He was wounded on the ground in the Middle East. We don’t know exactly where.”
“Fuck,” I said, finding it hard to breathe. “Is he okay? Will he make it?”
“We don’t know much,” he replied. “They’re flying him to the nearest hospital…but…but—”
“But what?” I demanded rudely, uncaring of how I sounded.
“He’s lost both his legs…but at least he’s alive. At least he’s alive.”
“I’m coming over now,” I said and hung up instantly. Daniel was looking at me as though he was frightened and he wanted to run somewhere and hide.
“Is everything—”
“It’s my brother,” I said through gasps. “I have to go.”
“Of course.”
I started walking towards my car as nausea overtook me. I sped up my pace, but that only made the nausea worse. I managed to make it to the parking lot before I keeled over between two, large ferns and threw up right on top of them. Then I wiped myself off, got into my car, and drove to my parent’s house, praying that the loss of Braden’s legs would be the only thing we would have to mourn.
Chapter Five
Lauren
The library was engulfed in the kind of late-afternoon synergy that made for optimum study-group atmosphere. We had picked a little alcove at the back of the library where the large tables had been pushed up against the windows. The windows overlooked the main college lawns, and I could see small groups of students dispersed around the grass, eating, talking, and lying back with their faces towards the sun.
It was a beautiful day, but I was just as content to be spending it inside the library. I loved libraries; even when you were alone, it didn’t feel that way. I wasn’t alone today, in any case; Maisy was sitting opposite me, proofreading her essay, and I could see her dark eyes flitting back and forth across each sentence. Grace was sitting next to her with her head buried deep in a book about Greek legends, and Jeremy was sitting beside me. Every few minutes, his eyes would flit over to me and even though I was engrossed in my own essay, I couldn’t help but notice.
“Shouldn’t you be working on your essay?” I asked, turning my eyes away from my paper. “Didn’t you say you still had some research to do?”
He reached into his bag and pulled out two, large, hardcover books. “Here’s my research,” he said, looking at me with his light-brown eyes.
I raised my eyebrows. “What is the point of having those books if you’re not going to read through them?”
“I’ve been reading through them the whole morning,” he replied. “I was taking a break.”
“Doing what?”
“Admiring the way your hair curls at the edges,” he said with a cheeky smile. Grace tittered from behind her book. Maisy didn’t even look up; she was too used to Jeremy’s persistent flirting.
I rolled my eyes at him. “You should be studying.”
“I am,” Jeremy nodded. “I’m studying you.”
I gave him a harsh look, though I was struggling to contain my smile. “You never stop, do you?”
“Nope,” he said with a wink. “It’s not in my nature.”
Maisy looked at us over her laptop. “You realize that Lauren’s been in a long-term relationship since she was like three, right?”
“Oh, I realize that,” Jeremy nodded unperturbed. “But I like a challenge.”
Maisy shook her head. “You are such a dork,” she told him.
“Ouch,” he said, holding his heart as though Maisy had sent something shooting at him. “You wound me. You would me deeply.”
She sighed in frustration and closed her laptop shut. “Whose brilliant idea was it to allow Jeremy into our study group?” she demanded. “He is the most distracting person I’ve ever met.”
I laughed. “Sorry, that was my bad.”
“Geez,” Maisy said shaking her head. “You have a habit of bringing in strays, don’t you?”
Jeremy feigned another expression of pain and hurt. “Your words sting, Maisy. I hope you know that.”
“Apparently you have extremely thick skin,” she retorted. “I’m sure you’ll bounce back.”
“You’re just jealous,” Jeremy said winking at her.
“Jealous?” Maisy repeated incredulously.
“Sure,” he nodded with a self-satisfied smile. “You’re just jealous that you’re the only one here I don’t flirt with on a regular basis.”
“Ha!” she mocked and rolled her eyes. “Please.”
Jeremy turned to me and raised his eyebrows pointedly. “She wants me.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. That was the reason I liked Jeremy. He was playful and un-phased. He didn’t mind being insulted, he didn’t mind being
laughed at, and he didn’t mind being the butt of the joke. He could be aggressively flirty sometimes, but I knew that it was all in good fun and he wasn’t as ass about it.
I was hoping that one of these days Maisy and Jeremy would finally put all their sexual tension to rest and simply go out on a date, but it seemed both were in complete denial about their chemistry. I decided to stay out of it; I wasn’t close enough with either one of them to be able to advise them in that respect.
“So,” Grace said as she closed her book and looked around the table at all of us. “What are your plans for after graduation?”
It was the most popular subject at the moment for all the seniors. I for one was not daunted by it, but I knew most other students were. I saw Maisy pale a little and even Jeremy let out a low whistle that spoke volumes.
“Are you asking only because you want us to ask you what your plans are after graduation?” Maisy asked shrewdly.
Grace smiled. “Maybe a little.”
Jeremy and I laughed out loud, and we had to remind ourselves that we were still in the library. “Well?” I said. “Go on; tell us.”
“I got a great job lined up,” he said excitedly. “It’s in this little publishing company that specializes in adult coloring books. I’ll be on the creative design team that comes up with the ideas for new books. I might even get to interview the artists.”
“That sounds fascinating,” I said. “Wow.”
“Yup,” Grace nodded.
“How did you manage to find that job in the first place?”
“My cousin told me about an available position, and I sent in my resume with my portfolio,” she explained. “I went in for the interview a couple of weeks ago and they told me I was on the short list last week. They called this morning and told me I had the job. I start soon after graduating.”
“Congrats, Grace,” I said sincerely. “I’m happy for you.”
“Even though I don’t look it, I’m happy for you, too,” Maisy nodded. “I’m just frightened for myself and that’s taking over my facial features.”
Jeremy laughed and turned to me. “What about you, gorgeous?” he asked. “What are you plans? Modeling, maybe?”