Chase grimaced again. As if he understood. “Why don’t you own your own restaurant? You know you’re the kind of person who would really rather the buck stop completely with you.”
“The cost, in Paris. I’m twenty-eight, I’ve been climbing fast already. Owning my own place is my next step. I might not even have any choice about it. This might knock me right down the staircase, so I have to start back up from the bottom and open my own place even to get a chance to cook again.”
Chase said nothing for a moment, his face grim as he worked. But then he said: “You know what I like about you, Vi? One of the things. You take it for granted that you will start climbing back up. You’re not going to stay down there defeated.”
She shrugged, not understanding the compliment. Of course she was going to start climbing back up. How could anyone be willing to stay at the bottom of anything? “If only I could just cook again. Act. Then I’d barely even care, you know?”
Chase nodded and focused on his stitching for a couple of careful double stitches. “Once,” he said suddenly, and his voice choked oddly and he stopped. He took a breath and rolled his shoulders, doing a stretching thing with his neck as if to loosen up his throat. When he resumed, his voice was steady again, although lower than usual. “Once a team of ours went down in the Hindu Kush. They were overrun and…I was one of the two men on the QRF. The quick reactionary force—that’s the back-up, if a mission goes wrong. We got on that helicopter so damn fast, ready to go. To save them or go down trying. I know that sounds…sacrificial or something, but that’s not really what it feels like. It’s just the way we’re made, you know? You’d be the same. You’d find it way easier to be taking bullets and at least giving out some of your own than sitting on the sidelines helpless.”
Her body tightened all through her at the shock of what he was saying. He was talking about real bullets. Not movie bullets. Real bullets, aimed at his body. That strong, warm, human body and that skull that might seem thick enough to stop a bullet, but…wouldn’t. Her breath froze in her chest. She stared at him.
“The same way if you were on a team that was losing badly, you’d way rather be out there with your teammates giving your all to turn it around than sitting on the bench,” he tried.
It’s not exactly like a sports team, Chase. If you’re fielding bullets instead of soccer balls. If you might die. If your teammates do die. God, her heart hurt all of a sudden. As if someone was stretching it in two big hands and it was starting to tear.
“And the fucking assholes in command kept the helicopter grounded,” he said low and viciously. “They wouldn’t let us fly out. They said they didn’t want to risk losing another chopper and even more men and that it was too dangerous during daylight, and we had to sit there all the fucking day listening to them call for help over the radio until the last one died.”
His knee jerked up into the table as he made a hard movement, the crack of the contact sounding through the room. He caught himself and took a deep breath, bending his head. No, it was more than his head. For a moment, he hunched into himself, as if his stomach hurt.
Vi stared at him, beyond words. She felt dizzy, as if she was spinning over vaguely formed mountaintops in another country, trying to peer down through her own fuzzy inability to imagine them to what death and violence looked like in their…snow? Tundra? She handled a lot of dead animal bodies. Did exposed human flesh and bone look the same? Nausea rose up in her.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry.” Her voice puffed out of her harshly, stuffed and strangled. She came off the stool to go kneel across the table from him.
He shoved her words away with a push of his hand, then shoved that same hand across his face and through his hair. Rolled his shoulders. Then shook his head once like a dog shedding water and smiled at her, that easy smile of his. “It was a long time ago,” he said, and only a little roughness under his voice belied the relaxed tone. “I’m a civilian now.”
“Oh, yeah, what the fuck ever.” She put her hand over his, because all words sounded lame, and just held on tight to that callused, scarred hand.
He bent his head and gazed at their joined hands a moment. His eyes closed, and he took a deep breath, his thumb shifting to catch her hand and keep it around his.
“The November attacks,” she said, low. “I mean…I went to the Bataclan all the time. It’s just a couple of streets over. Nobody even knew what was happening, and then…all you can do is leave candles and flowers. When you want to hit someone, to rage. We try not to think about it too much, because…we want to be alive, we want to be Paris still. But…yeah. It’s horrible to have nothing you can do. You don’t know how many people enlisted in the French military the week after those attacks, in order to try to do something.”
“Oh…I have some idea,” Chase said with an odd somber wryness.
When had he enlisted? He must have been a young teenager for the attacks on New York. Too young to enlist yet, but it would have marked him.