“It’s decaffeinated.” She smiled slightly. “I was never much of a coffee drinker, but it was the first thing they gave me back at Bagram. It tasted like heaven.”
He shifted his gaze out over the water, the exact location where he’d spent countless hours doing boat drills and night swims. Down the beach was the pile of rocks that had nearly knocked him unconscious during BUD/S.
He turned to look at her and forced himself to man up.
“So you can’t get to sleep?”
“I get to sleep okay,” she said. “It’s the staying asleep that’s hard.” Ignoring the lounge chairs, she sat down on the concrete and leaned back against the wall. “You ever get that?”
He didn’t want to tower over her, so he sat down beside her and rested his beer on the concrete. “It’s been a while.”
The breeze picked up, and she wrapped her hands around the coffee cup. “I keep having these dreams.” She paused. “Or maybe flashbacks would be a better word.”
He watched her profile. The yellow glow from inside spilled onto the balcony, and he realized every light in the suite was blazing.
“It’s always the same.” She looked at him, maybe giving him a chance to change the subject. “A burst of gunfire. The SUV skids to a stop.” She looked down at her coffee. “I never knew, before that moment, that fear has a taste. And all I can think is that this can’t be happening, but it is.”
He watched her, feeling sicker by the moment.
“Then they throw a hood over my head and stuff me into a truck. All around me, I can hear them shouting and cursing. And then we’re moving again, and I can’t see anything, but the fear is suffocating, and I realize my whole life—all of it—has been reduced to two things: I’m American and I’m female. And the terror’s so thick it’s like I’m drowning in it.”
He took her hand and held it. His touch seemed to steady her, and she took a deep breath.
“That’s the flashback I keep having. The moment it started. I think the worst of it’s still blotted out. I don’t know.” She pulled her hand away and curled her fingers around her coffee mug. “New pieces are coming back, though. Voices. Faces.”
He cleared his throat. “Any names?”
She looked away and seemed to think about it. “Rasasa. I remember Khalid saying it. I don’t know if it’s a person or a thing.” She put her coffee aside and pulled her knees to her chest. “I don’t know anything, really. It’s all so fuzzy. Maybe the opium was a good thing.”
He watched her, wanting her to keep going and also wanting her to stop.
She turned to look at him. “Do you know what happened to him? Khalid?”
The question surprised him. “There’s a lot of people looking for him, last I heard.”
She shook her head. “You wouldn’t think I’d care, but . . . he was the only one who showed any spark of humanity. It’s ironic, really. The whole reason I went there was to help children. Kids not much younger than him. Looking at it now, it seems so naive. So much has changed. I feel . . . warped, in a way. Because of fear. And I hate that. I don’t want to be a slave to fear the whole rest of my life.”
Luke tried to just listen, tried to dial down the anger inside him. He hated the pain she was feeling—and the men who had caused it, he hated them more. “In BUD/S training,” he said, trying to sound calm, “they use fear to make you better. They throw it at you every way they can, physically and mentally. Whatever you’re afraid of—drowning, diving, jumping out of a plane—they figure out what it is, and they hit you with it. They do everything they can to bring your darkest fears to light, because that’s when you tap into your deepest survival instincts.”
She looked at him, and he knew he had her complete attention.
“They push you to your breaking point. Then push you some more. Starting out it sucked, and I kept thinking, ‘Focus on tomorrow. Just make it to tomorrow.’ And then it got worse, and I thought, ‘Just make it to the next hour.’ And by the end I just wanted to make it to the next minute. One minute at a time, you survive. That’s how I did it, at least.”
She gazed up at him, and he wondered where she’d gone in her head all those days she’d lived in that hole. “So what was yours?” she asked. “Your fear when you started?”
“I don’t know.” He paused. “No, that’s not true. I do know. It was HALO jumps—high altitude, low opening. I’ve never been a big fan of heights, and the first time I got up there, my heart damn near stopped.”
“What about now?”
“Now?”
“Yeah. What keeps you up at night now?”
A lump rose in his throat, and he looked out over the water. He wanted to say something glib and lighten things up, but he couldn’t think of anything. “I’m afraid of letting people down.” He looked at her. “Not being there when one of my brothers needs me, maybe because I’m injured or out of the op for some reason.”
She stared up at him for a long moment. A tear slid down her cheek, and she brushed it away. “God, you must hate me,” she whispered.
“Why would I hate you?”
“Your friend died because of me.”
“Whoa. Back up. Not because of you. Because of some Taliban fuckhead with an AK.”
She flinched at the words.
“Sorry.” Shit. “I’m just—”
“You’re angry. It’s okay.”
He clenched and unclenched his teeth. “I’m angry, but it’s not because of you.” He looked at her and tried to explain. “I’m angry because the last few years, it’s like we’ve been fighting the enemy with one hand tied behind our backs. I’m angry because some people seem to think the war’s over, we won. Let’s pack it in and go home. Meanwhile, the enemy is out there flourishing, and the people trained to fight are being held in check. And all the spin doctors create this illusion that it’s safe for aid workers and relief orgs, and it’s a fucking lie.” He shook his head. “Sorry. I’m pissed off at things I can’t control.”
She choked out a laugh. “Yeah. I think I’m in touch with that emotion.” She wiped her cheeks and took a deep breath.
“Didn’t mean to rant.”
“No, it’s good,” she said. “You should say what you believe. I think you’ve earned the right to have an opinion.”
She rested her head on his arm, and his heart did a little flip. He looked through the bars of the balcony and tried to focus on the waves.
“Were you really afraid of heights?” she asked.
“I was. Nearly booted my guts up on that plane.”
The wind picked up. She shivered, and he resisted the urge to put his arm around her.
He stared at the surf and wondered again what the hell he was doing here.
“I’m afraid of the dark,” she said softly.
“Do you sleep with the lights on?”
“Yeah.”
Her head felt warm against his arm. He looked down at the pale wisps of her hair, and his pulse started to thrum.
“I don’t want to do that forever, though. It feels, I don’t know, irrational. Like I’m giving into fear.”
“Give yourself a break,” he said. “You just got home. You need time to get your life back.”
She pulled her head away and looked up at him, and the expression in her eyes made his chest hurt. “Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For talking.”
He leaned down and dropped a kiss on her forehead. It was a friendly kiss, barely a kiss at all. Any other girl, any other moment, it would have been no big deal, but the second he did it he knew it was a mistake. She slid her arms around him and nestled her head against his chest, and panic spurted through him.
He couldn’t do this. He could not stay out here another minute with her, not without doing something truly dumb.
“It’s late,” he said. “I should get going.”
She nodded against him. “Can I ask you something?”
No. No, she could not. “Sure.”
“Will you stay here tonight?” She tipped her head back and looked at him. “Please?”
* * *