“Why?”
“When he was married before to Leslie. He had PTSD and came home after a deployment and hit her one night when he was asleep in the bed with her. He’d had a flashback, Diana, and when Leslie woke up and tried to shake Reese awake, he turned and struck her with his fist. It horrified both of them.”
Diana’s face became somber. “I’m the right person to talk to about this. When Chuck and I started living together, he was afraid of that happening between us. He’s an ex–Delta Force operator and his muscle memory goes into a defense posture if he’s feeling threatened, whether awake or asleep. He worried about that. About hurting me by accident.”
“What did you do? I need to know, because right now, Reese has dug his heels in. He’s admitted he likes me, wants to explore what we have, but he won’t budge. He’s still caught up in the fact that he hit his ex-wife in his sleep.”
Sighing, Diana gave her a sympathetic look. “You need to talk this out with him, Shay. Chuck told me if he ever got into a nightmare or flashback while asleep, to get out of bed and get away from him. He told me that if I rolled over, touched, or tried to shake him awake, he’d lash out and hurt me. Instead, we had this plan that I’d get out of bed, out of his reach. He wanted me to stand at the end of the bed and call out his name. Not scream it or anything, but just keep calling his name, telling him to come back to me, that he was safe.”
“Did it work?”
“Has so far. He gets nightmares maybe once or twice a month. It wakes me up in a hurry, because we’re so close and in tune with one another. I can feel him when he’s stressed. I wake up instantly”—she snapped her fingers—“when he’s trapped in a flashback. So, I ease out of bed as quietly as I can so that I don’t disturb him. I then go to the end of the bed and call his name.”
“Does he hear you?”
“Eventually. He’s so tied up in the reality of his firefight, or whatever he’s replaying, that it might take five or ten minutes of me calling him back. But it works. And that way,” she said, sighing, “it keeps me safe.”
“I didn’t know that,” Shay whispered, giving her friend a kind look. “War . . . it’s so horrible.”
“When you see what Reese goes through, it will tear you up, Shay. But you have an advantage because you were in the military, too. You understand the stressors. I wasn’t in the military, so as a civilian, it’s hard for me to understand that my husband gets trapped in dangerous nightmares where he’s fighting to survive. Every human survival mechanism kicks in. And it can be dangerous for the wife or partner. The way we deal with it works for us. I think Leslie made her mistake when she tried to shake Reese out of it. And Reese, in his nightmare, thought it was probably the enemy grabbing him instead. He would strike out. It wasn’t his fault.”
“But he takes on the blame,” Shay muttered unhappily. “And he’s so horrified by what he did, he’s afraid to approach me because of that one experience.”
Diana looked sad. “This happens all the time to returning vets. And there’s no easy answer, no one answer, that will help all of them. So much of it hinges on the partners talking to one another. Chuck sat me down and we had a no-holds-barred conversation about it. We have guns, but they are locked away. He doesn’t want any weapon or even a knife, anywhere near that bedroom. The weapons safe is in our basement and he wants that kind of arrangement to keep us both safe. And he didn’t leave anything out. It was pretty upsetting to me, and it upset him, too, because he doesn’t like talking about what happened to him.”
“I’m going to have to bring it up,” Shay muttered. She wiped her hands on the paper napkin, gazing out over the busy plaza for a moment. “Every time I do, he backs off. I see the worry in his eyes. I hear it in his voice.”
“But he loves you?”
“I think so. Maybe he won’t call it love.”
“Lust?” she teased.
“I sense it’s more than that, but I’m not in his head, Diana. I wish I were . . .”
“But you love him, Shay?”
“What I feel for Reese is so deep and wide, it takes my breath away. And I discover more and more new feelings for him every day.”
“That’s love.”
“I’ve just started admitting it to myself the past week,” Shay admitted, shaking her head.
“He’s a good man.”
Shay gave Diana a sad look. “If only he would admit that about himself.”