Page 59 of The Fall of Rome


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Bella cleared her throat, “What just happened?”

I sighed, “The clinical term… Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

“He gets stuck in his head sometimes,” Bec explained. Both Bella and I looked at her with surprise. “What?” she asked.

“My mom says that, too,” Bella explained. “It seems you know him just as well as she does.”

Bec shrugged and then turned back to the dishes, “Well, I have spent a lot of time with him, you know. Speaking of… how much time do I have left? I want to try and get through the rest before we leave.”

I stifled a chuckle at Bella’s look of despair, knowing she was going to have to rewash every dish if Bec got her way. “About an hour before we have to head back.”

Bec nodded and went back to work.

“Why didn’t you tell us you had PTSD?” Bella asked me just as Luna wandered in.

Luna stopped in her tracks. She was dressed in a black button-down, her hair slicked back. She was the restaurant's main bartender for the dinner service. “Who has PTSD?”

I raised my hand, “I do.”

Luna looked at me with shock, “Why didn’t you tell us this?”

I shrugged, “I didn’t think it mattered.”

“Of course it matters, you idiot!” Luna exclaimed. “You would want to know if one of us had to deal with something like that.”

“Why are you yelling at your brother this time?” Mateo asked as he walked into the kitchen from the back office.

“He has PTSD and didn’t tell any of us!” Bella exclaimed.

Mateo looked between his daughters with a look of amusement, “I love you both, but it was obvious.”

I smiled at Mateo, because, of course, he had picked up on it. “How did you figure it out?”

Mateo turned my way, “I remember practically dragging you out of bed every day until you enlisted. It wasn’t that you weren’t a morning person; you weren’t a ‘waking-up’ person. Since you’ve been home…” he shrugged, “I’ve noticed you don’t really sleep. I figured something was keeping you up at night.”

I sighed resignedly, “Yeah, there is.”

Bec glanced at me over her shoulder, a soft smile on her lips. It was nice having her support. Even if she didn’t interject anycomments, I knew she was there in the moments that I needed her. But she was right when she’d said I needed to talk about what had happened.

I took a steadying breath, “Sometimes I feel like you all expect me to always be ‘Happy Rome’, who’s never upset. It makes it hard to tell you when things aren’t going well… when I’m fighting my own mind, and my own memories.”

Bella and Luna stared at me with sad eyes before the former wrapped her arms around me.

“You don’t always need to be ‘Happy Rome’,” Bella mumbled, “I just want you to be my brother. That’s it.”

“Oh my God,” Luna cried, also wrapping her arms around me, sandwiching me between my sisters. “Don’t ever think you have to always be okay. Talk to us, tell us what happened… tell us what’s going on.”

I couldn’t help but laugh as my sisters held me tight, “I’ll try to be better about that.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

BEC

“Clean bill of health, bitches!” I exclaimed to a laughing living room.

I had been getting frequent checkups with an in-house doctor since the incident a couple of weeks ago. It had been weeks of being bored, driving Rome wild, and calling my brother multiple times a day when I needed attention. I hadn’t been so needy in the past, but not having work to keep me preoccupied was forcing me to reveal parts of myself that I hadn’t seen before.Namely, I needed stimulation in my life to keep from going crazy.

The headaches had ceased, and the nasty cut was mostly healed. Rome had taken out the stitches for me about a week ago. There were moments when I forgot about his history in the Army until he’d whip out skills like that. It shouldn’t have been as attractive as it was.