He smiles and indicates the shower with his hand, and I climb in.
Nerves fill me, but I’m determined I’m going to see this through. Maybe it won’t make sense to someone else, I don’t know.
Here’s the thing—yes, this is weird, and sudden, and nothing I expected to happen. But if I have a choice to step off the crazy-making hamster wheel that is life with my mother?
Absofuckinglutely I’ll give Carter a shot. I’m no worse off than I was before if I end up stopping this.
Maybe I have a lot to gain.
Actually, there’s no maybe about it. I have everything to gain, including finally getting a chance to do something thatIwant to do to be happy in my life, with people who make me feel more like I’m family and loved than my own family ever did. I never imagined my deepest, darkest fantasies would coalesce like this, but I’ll take it.
One of the things I know I need to do to be a functional adult is follow my own path and do the things that make me happy, that sing to my soul.
This is one of those things.
I’ve never intimately showered with someone before. In these close quarters, I can’t help but get a good look at the scars on Carter’s body.
He drizzles body wash on a washcloth and hands it to me before he turns to face the wall. “Start up on my shoulders, work your way down.”
I’ve literally never done this with another person before. I tentatively reach out to do it, and he chuckles.
“You can use more pressure than that, boy.”
I do. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Trust me, this doesn’t hurt. I will tell you if something hurts in a bad way.”
It’s impossible for me to identify what feelings are rolling through me right now. I’m completely without a frame of reference.
“Why this, Sir?” I ask as I work my way lower.
“First tell me about when your parents divorced.”
My hand slows, stills. “Why?”
“Because I asked. Don’t stop what you’re doing.”
I take a deep breath and resume scrubbing his back. “I don’t remember everything. It was ugly. I remember them screaming at each other a lot before Dad moved out. I didn’t get to see much of him before he moved to Nevada for work.”
“What about before?”
“What do you mean?”
“What was life like before? All the way down, boy. Ass, and back of my legs.”
I swallow hard but I scrub lower. “Life with Mom was always tense. She was in charge at home. They bickered and fought all the time. I suspect Dad started cheating a couple of years before she caught him. But at least when Dad was home, he’d take me out and do stuff with me some evenings and on the weekends. We’d leave Mom at home, or she was working or something, and go fishing, or see movies. Stuff she didn’t want any part of.”
The scars are even worse down the backs of his thighs and calves. I know now from talks we’ve had that the scarring along his back is mostly from burns, where flaming fuel got under his tactical vest. Shrapnel from the blast mostly hit him lower, along his ass and legs, below the vest. Although a couple of larger pieces did pierce through his vest, one of which punctured a lung. The back of his upper right arm took some shrapnel, past where the vest covered him, and the back of his upper left arm received some burns, because he’d landed on his left side on top of the three downed men he was trying to protect, shielding them with his body.
It worked, though. Even though the blast killed others, the three he covered survived.
At a great personal cost to Carter, and one he says he’d pay again in a heartbeat, because they were men under his command.
That’sthe essence of Carter.
My mother would bitch and feel resentful if she so much as got a hangnail while shopping for a present for me on Amazon. I’ve heard parents say they’d die for their kids. I honestly doubt my mother is one of them.
But this man before me wears the proof of his selflessness in his flesh.
