His chest lifts with a deep breath, and I’m hit with a wave of panic that something between us has changed since yesterday, that he’s grown bored with me overnight. That he’s decided he doesn’t want to do this, after all.
I hate this insecurity swirling inside my head and my heart. I’m not used to feeling it; I’ve managed to avoid it all this time by not committing to people. And now, here I am, finally ready to commit, and I’m already losing my cool.
“She was right. About my ghost,” he says quietly, his gaze holding to the ocean’s water line.
I sigh with relief. This isn’t about us at all. “What do you mean?”
He clears his throat, as if voicing the next words is going to be hard. “We used to go on these regular raids through Marjah, routing out insurgents. There were a lot. I can’t tell you how many rounds of ammunition I fired in my time over there. Anyway, there was this one day on my second tour, we had a tip on someone and I was out with my team, hunting them down. We found ourselves driving into this long corridor in our Humvee. And there was this little girl running at us, with these big blue eyes and dark hair, and wearing a backpack. The Taliban were known for using children in these kinds of attacks. Where we were, with buildings on either side, we’d be leveled by an explosion. She was so little, six or seven. She was scared, I could see it in her eyes.”
I’m trying to picture this but I’m struggling, partly because I don’t want to. I’ve always rolled my eyes at Dakota when she talks about auras, but right now the very air around Sebastian has chilled. I’m shivering.
He heaves a sigh. “We yelled at her to stop, but she kept coming. I was the only one who had the clear line of sight. So I took it. She went quickly. We scouted the area for insurgents before we closed in to secure the backpack. There was a blanket, a bottle of water, and naan wrapped in cloth.” I look over to see his profile, an image of sorrow, as his voice grows thick. “She wasn’t coming to kill us. We found out later that she had no home, no parents. She was running to us for help.”
My chest begins to throb. “But . . . that wasn’t your fault.” Even as I say it, I understand that wouldn’t mean anything to the man who pulled the trigger. To a man with Sebastian’s discipline and code of honor. Something like that must have destroyed him.
He says nothing, peering down at his boots.
“So what happened?”
“It got swept under the rug as a wartime casualty and everybody moved on.” He pauses. Everybody but him, I’m guessing. “The next time a kid darted out from behind a car at our outfit, I froze. Even when my commanding officer yelled the order to fire, even when I saw the IED in his hand, I couldn’t pull the trigger. He lobbed it at the Humvee in front of us and blew them up.”
“The one your friends were in?”
“They were all my friends,” Sebastian explains quietly. “But, yeah. That’s the one.”
This story is getting worse and worse.
Sebastian has an army of ghosts trailing him.
I reach over to take his hand and squeeze it. He turns my fingers in his palm, lightly tracing the splotches of color with his free hand.
“I took some shrapnel to the back. Kirkpatrick, my commander at the time and a fucking dick wad, wrote me up for insubordination. When I filed my papers to leave the navy, I ended up with an ‘Other than Honorable’ discharge.”
“What does that mean?”
His lips twist in a bitter smile. “It depends who you ask. For someone like you, who doesn’t know anything about the navy, it doesn’t mean much at all. For someone like my father, who retired as a highly decorated navy captain, it’s almost as bad as if I were some street thug, murdering innocent human beings.” He pauses. “It means that it can be hard to get a job, and a lot of veteran benefits don’t apply to me, even with my years of service.”
“But you did get a job.”
His lips twist in thought. “Yeah. Through a friend.”
“Well, then . . . screw that less than honorable discharge, because you’re doing what you’re good at anyway. Right?”