Once, before the war, I would have flirted with her. I would have asked her for her number and if she wanted to get a drink.
Those days are nothing but a memory now. Broken by the impotent rage of combat and loss.
"Today was not a good day," is all I say instead. I hate the powerlessness in that response. The weakness.
There's a sadness in those soft golden eyes as she smiles back at me. "Can't be that bad if you're here."
She motions to the polished old money evidenced in every detail of the rich bar. There are oil canvases on the walls in heavy brass frames. Hell, the place even smells like money, or at least what I imagine money smells like. Furniture polish and leather.
We didn’t have much growing up and my mom…my mom died trying to give me more.
I blink, wishing that I wasn't as hazy as I am from the alcohol. "It's not the place that's the problem."
She lifts one perfectly arched eyebrow.
It’s tempting, so tempting to spill my secrets to a stranger. As if we were on a plane and I could tell her everything and she would never see me again when we landed.
But I can’t take that chance here. No one knows the darkness that I struggle to hide every single day. Every time someone thanks me for my service, I feel the need to hide what I was and what I did from the world even more.
My hand shakes as I try to take a sip of the beer. I need to get home. Out of this wide-open, dark space and away from the shame of standing in that quad as the nausea and the fear reminds me once more of what I was.
What I am.
It will never leave me.
I can feel the rush of heat across my skin. The horror mixed with the excitement. The pure, animal pleasure of it all.
It's burned into my pores, like the pounding violence of the fifty-caliber machine gun is seared into my memories.
Her touch surprises me. Jolts me out of the memories I can’t escape. Her fingers are soft against the back of my hand, near my wrist.
"Hey?" I look over at her because I can do nothing less. "Are you okay?"
The shame surges inside me, smothering the thrill.
"Maybe I just wanted to have a drink." I want to flirt. To smile at her and ask her what she's doing later.
But that would be normal. And I am most assuredly not normal. Not anymore.
The words are stuck in my throat.
I look down at my beer, away from the beautiful woman with the dark skin and the light eyes standing next to me. She reminds me of things I used to want.
Maybe I'll give Eli a break and start drinking here. Maybe if I don't go to The Pint so much, I'll fight less.
Maybe if I fight less, I’ll finally start to forget.
A guy can dream, right? Me and alcohol are long lost buddies.
I'm pretty sure there's a name for that. But as long as I've got my shit together, it doesn't f*ck
ing matter.
I'm not in the Army anymore. I can drink at noon if I want without anyone sending the drug and alcohol people after me.
And that's kind of terrifying.
Abby
I should walk away.
I don't need this. I need to get my happy ass to class three blocks away.
But I am stuck, rooted to the pain cast in shadows at the end of the bar.
There was sadness in the way he was hunched over the bar, one hand loosely cradling a beer.
I don't know what hurt him like this. I don't know why I feel this need to care about him when I don't even know his name. There are shadows in his eyes and his mouth is set in a bleak, hard line.
And I am drawn to him. To the need to soothe his pain. To make it stop.
Maybe I'm just feeling guilty about the other night. I didn't ask him his name. I left him standing there, bleeding in the flickering shadows from the streetlight.
So instead of being smart and disciplined and focused on school, I walk up to a stranger in a bar, a man wearing a sadness beneath a dark, swollen eye.
He is so grossly out of place here it's not even funny. The men who drink here are polished and poised. There is no roughness about those men. At least not unless they've had a few too many.
Our boy here, though…There is raw power beneath the Henley stretched across his back.
And beneath that power, a darkness. Something tainted with sadness that has him chasing it away with beer before ten a.m.
I can see him visibly trying to relax. He's breathing slow and deep. I recognize the gesture. I've done it often enough myself.
I don't hate men. I haven't even sworn off dating. But I'm tender from my ex's hateful words the last time I saw him. I’m wary.
Even as I push my friends toward their own happiness, I hold back.
Because it hurts to love the wrong man.
He looks over at me and I can feel the pull of that darkness. That familiar desire is back. The need to fix things. Not things. People.
I can't do this again. Not with him. Not with anyone. I need a nice, normal, well-adjusted guy. Not someone with shadows beneath his eyes who starts drinking before the sun reaches its peak in the sky.