“Do you often make apple pie in the middle of the night?”
“All the time.” I scoffed.
He grinned. He knew I was lying.
“Will the dreams go away?” I whispered.
His smile slipped away. He sat forward and placed his mug on the coffee table and turned his body toward me. “I hope so.”
“You have them too,” I said, knowing his understanding went far beyond empathy.
“Sometimes.”
I glanced at the scars on his face. Then I leaned my cheek against the cushions. “You should tell me about your problems. It’ll make me feel better.”
He chuckled. “Hearing about someone else’s drama will make you feel better?”
“Yep.”
I thought he might tell me to bug off.
“You really want to know?”
“I really do.”
“I work as an armor man in the Marines. I’m in charge of inspecting the weapons, cleaning them, putting them together properly, stuff like that. A couple years ago, my unit deployed to Afghanistan. It’s a rough country. A hellhole really. The Corps’s presence over there was fairly new when I was sent. There wasn’t much in the way of comfort. We hadn’t been there long enough to get things fully set up. We didn’t have phones, the Internet was shoddy, and mostly we slept in tents.”
I listened aptly, taking it all in, and the writer in me constructed a setting in my head that went along with his words.
“I’m not a grunt, meaning I don’t fight on the front lines… but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t danger.”
“I would think being there was danger enough. For anyone,” I said.
He nodded. “For some more than others. It really just depends on the person’s billet—their job.”
I nodded and he continued. “One night the guys were short staffed and due out for patrol. It’s basically routine—some guys go out and walk the perimeter of the base. They check certain areas, make sure our security is still tight. Make sure no enemy threat is lurking or lying in wait.”
“Right,” I agreed and took a sip of my coffee. The sound of his voice was incredible. I could listen to him talk for hours and not once get bored. There was a richness in his tone, a southern lilt that made his words a little more drawn out than most of the people that lived in this area.
“I volunteered to go with them, me and a couple other guys. We got some weapons and all of us headed out, small groups of us going in different directions.”
He got this faraway look in his eyes, and I knew he was going back there, that whatever scene he was reliving replayed vividly in his mind. I scooted a little closer, something pushing me forward, like I instinctively knew he was going to need the comfort.
“It was pretty typical at first, us just patrolling, making sure everything was fine. And it was. Until we were attacked.”
His voice took on a more gravelly tone. “I was out with two other guys, good guys. Young guys. They had their entire lives ahead of them. One of them just had a baby. All he could talk about was getting home to meet his baby girl.”
Please, God, tell me he made it home.
“We were on the far side of the base, near the weaponry tent. We didn’t keep too much else around the weapons. It was just a safety precaution. There were a few tents here and there, as was the tent I spent a lot of my time in, readying weapons. It was night, so there weren’t many men around. Most were at chow or already bunked down for the night.
“Everything seemed fine and we were about to head back toward the other side of base when I caught a slight sound. The sound of a weapon being cocked. I knew that sound. I knew it better than most. I heard it hundreds of times a day. It was my job to know that sound.
“I pivoted toward the sound, only it wasn’t coming from within the base—it was coming from outside our boundaries.”
A look of sheer despair crossed his face, and I reached out, wrapping my hand around his. He looked down to where my hand touched his. Without saying anything, he threaded our fingers together and gave mine a gentle squeeze.
Then his brows knit together when he took in the bruise and rash across the top of my hand. He lifted my arm and pressed a soft kiss to the irritated area. “IV?” he asked once his lips left my skin.
I nodded. “I have sensitive skin. That tape was brutal.”
“I should have watched the nurse.”
“You did more than enough for me,” I told him.
His thumb began to make slow circles across the back of my hand, and his eyes began to slip away once more. “I called a warning as enemy fire started peppering the sand around our feet. We all dropped to the ground and returned fire, but it was so dark out there it was hard to know where to aim. I listened for the popping of gunfire and aimed in the direction of the sound.”
“If this is too hard,” I told him gently, not wanting to hurt him further by making him speak.
He shook his head. I think he wanted to get it out there.
“There were more of them than there were of us. It became evident that they wanted to raid the weapons tent. They wanted to take all of our supplies and use them against us.”
I said a dirty cuss word. He smiled.
“Gidding radioed for backup, and I knew the men close by were able to hear the gunfire. It wouldn’t be long until we had numbers and weapons on our side. Unfortunately, the enemy seemed to know that too. They launched some sort of grenade right as, blowing up a couple tents and taking out one of the guys. It was Gidding. He was my friend.”
He looked at me. “Sometimes at night, I can still hear him screaming.”
I scooted a little bit closer. He pulled up his left knee and dropped his right foot onto the floor. I settled myself in the small opening between his legs.
“One of the hostile’s made a run for the main weapon tent. Me and Prior went after him. Prior was the one with the new baby. As we ran, a couple of them appeared out of nowhere, aiming their weapons and letting go a couple rounds. Prior took a hit in the shoulder and the thigh. One of the bullets bounced off the ground and hit me in the calf.”
He lifted up the sweats around his left leg and showed me a knotted white scar.
“I let loose with all the ammo in my gun and took the fuckers out. Prior tried to keep going, but one of the bullets hit an artery in his leg. The blood… it was like a freaking fountain the way it spurted from his leg. I picked him up and carried him toward the tent, where I figured we would at least be shielded from more gunfire.”
The image in my head of Nathan bleeding and limping while gunfire and screaming erupted around him made my heart hurt. I pictured the way he must have looked dressed in boots and cammies, carrying an empty gun and his friend who was clinging to life.
“We made it to the weapons tent. I laid him out on the ground and tied my blouse around his leg as tight as I could. I screamed my head off for a medic and sent one of the guys who was running into the fray back out of it to hunt down the Corpsman.”
Nathan looked up at me.
“He didn’t want to die. He had everything to live for.”
“Of course not,” I said sympathetically. I knew then that Nathan’s friend Prior didn’t make it. I knew that out there somewhere was a little girl without a father and a woman with a broken life.
“I told him I’d get him out of there,” Nathan said, his voice breaking on his words.
“What happened?”
“I grabbed a new gun and started fighting, holding them back from the tent. Our guys got a leg up, the hostile’s were waning, and I knew they would be out of ammo soon. When the medic came into site, I grabbed another gun and ran out into the open. The fire started coming my way and I hoped it would create enough of a distraction for them to get to Prior.”
He glanced up at me. “He died, Honor.”