Trusting a Warrior

by Melanie Hansen

  “She made it! She scored!” Renae pumped her fist wildly in the air. “She scored the winning goal!”

  “Way to go, Ari!” Geo put his fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle. “Yeah!”

  He and Renae jumped up and down in their excitement, and Ari turned in their direction, her lips stretched in the widest grin he’d seen yet. Renae caught her breath and threaded her arm through his in sheer happiness. “You see that? She’s smiling!”

  Suddenly, Ari charged toward them, her smile morphing into an expression of red-faced fury. Geo barely had time to brace himself before she slammed into him, fists flying.

  “I hate you!” she screamed. “I don’t want you here!”

  He staggered back, horror turning his blood to ice. “Ari, what—” he choked.

  Tears streamed down her cheeks, her face a mask of anguish. “I don’t want you here! I want my daddy!”

  Sinking to his knees, he pulled her close, ignoring the blows that continued to rain down on his chest and shoulders.

  “I want my daddy! I want my daddy! I want my daddy!” Her howls at last trailed off into sobbing as she sagged against him. Falling back on his butt, Geo hauled her into his lap and wrapped her up tight.

  “I know, baby,” he whispered, rocking her, his own tears flowing unchecked. “I know you want your daddy. I’m so sorry he’s not here.”

  Renae knelt beside them as the rest of the team parents linked arms to form a protective circle around them, a barrier against the phones suddenly pointed in their direction by seemingly every bystander in the vicinity.

  Her hand shaking, Renae stroked Ari’s sweaty hair. “That’s it,” she crooned. “Let it out, my love. Let it out. You’re safe.”

  Geo attempted to let her take his place, but Ari clung to him, her fingers digging into the back of his neck. He subsided, holding on to her, in that moment a willing stand-in for the dad she so desperately missed.

  Lani stood at the edge of the group, her hand over her mouth, her eyes full of empathy and pain. Geo lost sight of her when Renae pressed her tear-stained cheek to his. “Whatever fate brought you here to us now, I’ll be endlessly grateful for it. She’s grieving, thank God. Because of you, she’s finally letting herself grieve, and now I can get her the help she needs.”

  By the time he assisted her in getting Ari home and settled, it was late, approaching ten o’clock. He drove to Lani’s apartment in his pizza-smelling truck, his body numb, drained. All he wanted to do was fall into bed with her and hold her close all night long.

  “It won’t matter if we wait to talk in the morning,” he told himself. “I have a week left. Plenty of time.”

  He trudged up the walk and slipped the key in the lock. The tiny entryway was dark, although judging by the slight glow emanating from the kitchen, the light over the stove was on. Heading to turn it off, he about jumped out of his skin at the sight of Lani sitting at the kitchen table, her fingers knotted tightly in her lap.

  A jolt of unexpected fear made him croak, “Babe? What’s wrong?”

  Her eyes darted back toward the door. He turned to look, and what he saw there made his body go leaden with a weary sadness.

  “Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Can I ask why?”

  “Because I can’t do this.” Her voice was brittle, like glass, the way it’d been when they first met. “This isn’t the life I want.”

  What life? A life of loving each other? A life of respect, and happiness? Of family?

  He wanted to argue, to plead his case. Whirling away, he scrubbed his hand over his jaw, searching desperately for the words that would convince her to try.

  As he did, his eyes fell on the picture of Lani and Tyler. It struck him anew, how Tyler’s seemingly-happy smile masked so much internal pain, a pain so severe it’d wrenched him away from everyone who’d loved him—

  He glanced back at Lani’s bowed head in sudden understanding. Her beloved brother had died. Rhys had fallen in love with someone else. The baby’s father abandoned her by not returning her messages. Geo’s job would take him away for months, a job there was always a possibility he’d never come home from.

  She’d already dealt with so much loss, uncertainty and—Geo squeezed his eyes shut—far too many goodbyes.

  On shaky legs, he made his way over to her and rested his hand lightly on her nape. With a muffled sob, she lifted her face to look at him, her eyes dark with misery yet her mouth firm with resolve. They stared at each other even as a strange sense of peace swept over him.

  If what you need right now is for me to leave you on your terms, then sweetheart, that’s what I’ll do.

  Because he loved her. And because in asking him to go, she trusted him to know what she needed, and to understand it.

  Tears stinging his eyes, Geo took that trust and tucked it away deep inside, even as he cupped her cheeks in his hands and kissed her oh, so gently.

  Then he strode to the door, grabbed up his neatly packed bags, and left.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  She missed him with an unrelenting ache.

  It was always there—at work, at home, everything in between.

  One morning there came a knock on the door, and Lani swung it open to see Devon standing there holding a bag of fresh bagels.

  “Food and friends,” she said with a tentative smile, “the best cure for a broken heart.”

  “Ha.” Lani stepped back to let her in. “If there’s a cure, I’ll take it.”

  They unpacked the bag and made coffee in a companionable silence. When at last they were seated at the table, steaming mugs in hand, Devon said, “If you want to talk about it, I’m listening.”

  Lani toyed with a piece of blueberry bagel. Her appetite was nonexistent, like it’d been the whole three weeks Geo’d been gone, but for the baby’s sake she forced herself to take a bite. “I guess the gossip finally reached you, huh?”

  Devon gazed at her over the rim of her coffee cup. “Well, when Geo went back to his original platoon and you went radio silent, it didn’t take much of a detective to figure it out. C’mon, honey, talk to me.”

  “What’s there to talk about?” Lani shrugged. “We were friends with benefits and the benefits ended.”

  “Bullshit.” Devon’s eyes were steady on hers. “If you don’t want to talk about it—especially with me—I’ll respect that. But at least be honest with yourself about what you two were to each other.”

  At those words, Lani’s attempted belligerence drained out of her, leaving that ever-present ache behind. “I love him,” she said quietly. “And I sent him away.”

  “Oh, honey. Why?”

  “Fear.”

  Devon’s face softened, and she reached out her hand to cover Lani’s. “Of what? What are you afraid of?” Her voice was exquisitely gentle. “Talk. To. Me.”

  The memories crashed over her, of Geo on the ground with Ari in his lap, rocking her, crying with her. The protective tenderness on his face, in his voice, as he’d comforted her...

  One tear leaked out, then another.

  “Because that night,” she whispered, “for the first time, I could picture him as a father. An amazing, loving, wonderful father, and he’d take such good care of us—when he was around, that is.”

  Suzette. The son Harry would never meet. A government car. Tabitha’s long, blond hair...

  She wiped her cheeks. “I can’t be with a SEAL. I can’t do this again, risk losing someone I love, that my child loves.”

  As she clutched Devon’s hand, those years with Rhys swirled before her eyes—the sum total of his absences far outweighing the togetherness; the neediness she couldn’t hide, couldn’t overcome; the vulnerability that made her feel like a bug, speared by a pin and writhing in failure...

  Devon’s eyes shone with sympathy and understanding. “No one can blame you for t
hat,” she said quietly. “Least of all Geo. What did he say when you talked to him about it?”

  That brought Lani up short.

  “He, uh, didn’t really say anything,” she admitted. “I’d made my decision, so it was time to rip the Band-Aid off, you know?”

  “Oh.” Devon was quiet for a moment. “Well, obviously you have to do what’s best for you. Always.”

  She left not long after, with hugs and reassurances that Lani’s village was just a phone call away. When she’d gone, Lani puttered around the silent kitchen, Devon’s question echoing in her ears.

  “What did Geo say?”

  Her heart gave a painful thud at the memory of his stricken face, then his silent departure. What could he have said? She’d packed his bags and had them waiting by the damn door, for fuck’s sake! Short of planting her foot firmly on his ass and shoving him out, she couldn’t have made her wishes more clear: Leave now.

  Besides, what would she have done if he’d insisted on talking? Listened calmly, rationally?

  No way. The walls around her heart had sprung back up, thicker and higher than ever, infusing her with a clawing desperation to leave him before he left her. If he’d pushed it, she would’ve gotten angry, defensive, possibly said things she didn’t mean...

  Things like, “I don’t love you.”

  The ache in her chest disintegrated into splinters of pain, and Lani dropped her forehead to her folded arms, the sudden truth sweeping over her. Geo had let her push him away, had gone without a fight, because he’d realized—in that moment—it’s what she’d needed him to do.

  With that, the last wisps of the mental fog that’d been her constant companion for the last three weeks finally cleared. Springing to her feet, she ran to the hallway closet, where she reached up on the shelf and pulled down Geo’s Metallica T-shirt, neatly folded.

  Clutching it against her, she headed to her bedroom. After Geo had gone, she’d cleaned her apartment like a crime scene. All his favorite condiments? In the trash. A half-finished grocery list written in his distinctive scrawl? Thrown out. After that, when she’d dumped her basket of clean laundry on the bed, there, at the bottom of the tangled pile, she’d found Geo’s T-shirt.

  The sight of the faded material had broken the dam of her tears. She’d wept for hours, remembering the last time he’d worn it—the morning he’d surprised her in bed with a beautiful stack of pancakes he’d gotten up early to perfect. He’d fed them to her, interspersing each bite with a sticky, syrupy-flavored kiss, until at last she’d wrestled him out of his clothes and made love to him with a fervency that’d left hickeys on her neck and scratch marks on his back.

  Eyes stinging at the memory, Lani traced her fingers over the cracked, faded letters, finally letting the enormity of what she’d done sweep over her.

  Geo loved her. Without a shadow of a doubt, he loved her, and not only that, he understood her. But when the time came for her to understand him, be there for him, all she’d managed to do was regress back to the old Lani, the one who reacted by curling up into a spiky, self-protective ball.

  “It’s like you haven’t learned a thing,” she berated herself. “Not a goddamn thing.”

  Maybe it wasn’t too late.

  Her fingers trembling, she snatched up her phone and texted Renae: Do you know when Geo’s platoon is back in town?

  A few minutes later, a reply: Day after tomorrow, I think?

  Lani’s heartbeat kicked into a gallop. Okay. She had time. She had time to make this right, to at least let Geo have a say before she unilaterally decided their future.

  I’m coming. Don’t write me off just yet.

  * * *

  The C-17 touched down with a thump and whine of the engines.

  “We’re home, buddy,” Geo said wearily to Bosch, who stood up in his crate before performing a perfect downward dog.

  “Oh, my God, kill me now,” Lennox groaned as he limped toward the open ramp at the rear of the plane. “Everything hurts.”

  Geo glared at him for a moment, then shrugged. For once he agreed with the prick—everything hurt. He fought not to groan himself, but the hours of sitting in a cramped webbed seat got the best of him.

  “Damn those Greenie Beanies,” he muttered, bending stiffly to unlatch the door to Bosch’s crate and snap a leash onto his harness. “Those are some tough-ass motherfuckers.”

  And he was getting too old for this shit.

  The hazy Coronado sky was a beautiful sight. At the base of the ramp, the ragged platoon gathered around Alex. “Well, we got our butts kicked, fellas,” he rasped. “Those dudes hiked us into the ground. Fuckin’ embarrassing.”

  “Not embarrassing, more like humiliating,” someone else grumbled.

  It was true. The Army Special Forces, or Green Berets, were known for their brutal ruck marches, their ability to hike for days with heavy combat loads. When an SF friend of Alex’s had challenged him to bring his platoon and join them deep in the forests of West Virginia, the SEALs had been enthusiastic, and confident they’d at least be able to keep up.

  Instead, most of them had struggled even to finish.

  By the second day of the four-day ruck, Geo’s heels were so blistered he’d had to cut out the backs of his boots to ease the agony. SEALs were popping ibuprofen like candy, their self-confidence growing dimmer by the day. At the end of the march, egos in tatters, they’d had to admit defeat.

  “Let’s see you fast-rope onto a moving ship in high seas now, asshole,” Alex had growled to his friend, a Latino guy who’d barely seemed to have broken a sweat the entire march.

  By the time everyone had showered, had their wounds patched up and taken a long nap, all was forgiven.

  Now, safely back in Coronado, Alex dismissed them for a forty-eight-hour liberty. “Rest up,” he said. “Next week we’re headed for Langley and the CIA workshop that got rescheduled before. After that, well, you’ll see.”

  He grinned wolfishly to a chorus of answering hoots, but instead of excitement, all Geo felt was weariness.

  More of the same. It was all just more of the same.

  And he’d lost Lani over it.

  The FNGs would offload Bosch’s crate and most of the gear, so Geo caught a ride to the kennel and gratefully handed him off to one of the staff, saying, “He could use a good bath and a brush. It’s been a long week for this guy.”

  Instead of going on the ruck, Bosch had stayed behind to work with a couple of the new SF handlers in order to show them exactly what a well-trained K9 could do. The handlers had had nothing but the highest of praise for him.

  After getting him settled, he ruffled Bosch’s ears with a promise to come check on him in the morning, and then he headed for the team quarterdeck to downstage his personal gear and clean his weapon. He winced at the sight of his blood-stained and ruined boots.

  “Fuck you, old man.”

  The next equipment cage over, Lennox flipped him off, and Geo desultorily raised his middle finger in return. As he’d expected, the team guys had treated him with a wary caution at first, but as the brutal exercise wore on, they’d thawed little by little, until by the end, everything was more or less back to normal.

  Which was the reason Alex had arranged that particular training trip, he suspected.

  Yeah, I owe you a big one, Master Chief.

  Even he and Lennox had reached a sort of uneasy truce, which was a relief in and of itself. After all, they’d be deploying together by the end of the year.

  Once his weapon was cleaned and secured in his locker, then and only then did Geo allow himself to turn on his phone. He held his breath as it booted up—which seemed to take for-fucking-ever—but once it did, not one of the notifications that scrolled past was the one he was looking for.

  He closed his eyes. A little over three weeks now, and not a word.

  How long sh
ould he wait? The more time went on, the more he started to doubt himself, to doubt that he’d done the right thing in walking away from Lani that night. He’d thought to give her a little space, a little time to think, and then wait for her to text him wanting to talk.

  But she hadn’t.

  Geo blew out a ragged breath. Had he only imagined the feelings he’d sensed from her? He knew where she stood on his career, and if she’d sat him down and told him flat-out she couldn’t do it, he would’ve respected that. Hated it, mourned it, but understood it.

  Instead, he’d been left in some kind of hellish limbo, not sure if he was supposed to be trying to move on or not.

  Standing and shouldering his backpack, he called goodnight to the other guys and headed out, squinting into the late-afternoon sun. Damn. The week at Fort Bragg and then the week in West Virginia had kept him busy, but now an endlessly lonely forty-eight hours stretched out before him.

  His phone buzzed with another notification, and Geo glanced at it before rolling his eyes. Well, apparently the next two days didn’t have to be lonely: Been a long time since I’ve fucked your sweet ass. How ’bout it?

  Ash had helpfully attached a pic of his erection, in case Geo missed the point.

  With a laughing sigh, he texted back his regrets. Another time, hot stuff. I wouldn’t be good company tonight.

  An almost immediate reply. You know sex doesn’t have to be on the table, G. Nick and I are always here if you just wanna talk.

  He texted back a kissy-face emoji before putting his phone away, thinking that he’d go back to the barracks and grab a shower before seeing if he could take Ari for ice cream. Thank God that night at the game ended up being the breakthrough Renae had been waiting for.

  “She’s opening up to her therapist more and more,” Renae said tearfully one night over FaceTime. “It’s like a floodgate. She’s held so much in, and she’s been blaming herself the whole time. I had no idea. None.”