“Fucking Christ,Layla.FUCK.” A growl rips through me as I grip her so tight my knuckles whiten. I come so fucking hard, barely even moving within her. I have no idea how much time passes like this, but when I open my eyes she’s looking down at me.
“Oh my God, that was … just …” she stammers, the pads of her fingers tracing my face, under my eyes, then over my cheeks. I lower us down onto the rug in the candlelight, flipping her off me, and hover over her, looking down at her beautiful breathless face. I nip at her ear.
“Life-changing …” I finish for her. “And that hadnothingto do with God.”
“Well, that feeling should be a religion,” she mutters with a satisfied sigh. “A religion where the only members are us …”
I kiss her copper waves. “Now you’re getting it all figured out.” I chuckle, lying down beside her, sated. She crawls into my arms and my chest twists with the intense feelings of hersnuggling in, but I don’t think, I just pull her closer and stroke her shoulder. Layla looks up, her eyes growing serious as she watches me.
“Why don’t you sleep well?” she asks, reaching up and covering my jaw with her warm hand. Looking at me with the concern of someone who’s known me for years, and I’m reminded how difficult it is to make sense of this connection between us. It’s almost otherworldly. As if I knew her in another life, and maybe I did. I was only drifting through time until the moment her eyes met mine, and then I became grounded. Byher.
“Too many demons live here to sleep.” I point to my head.
Layla’s brows knot in concentration. “From your club life or another?”
“Both,” I answer instantly. “From the life I’ve lived, overseas and here. It’s not that I just remember what happened, I remember the sounds they made when I shot them, the look in their eyes. I fucking remember the smells, the weather … everything.”
I expect her to push deeper, to ask me how I feel, or tell me I can get help for it. I can’t get help. I’ve tried that. My brain is too detailed to forget. But instead Layla pulls my face to hers to kiss me, then slides out from under my arm, standing in her torn clothes as they half hang from her body.
“I’m going to shower. Some barbarian just ripped my clothes to shreds. Join me if you want to,” she says, giving me the grace to keep my demons to myself. She peels her bra off on the way to the shower and tosses it to the floor. One simple action of not prying or trying to fix me and she just solidified what I already knew: Layla Monroe is it for me. She bleeds light everywhere she goes. Even into the places of me that have always been pitch black.
I stand and chase her sassy little ass down the hall, scooping her up and dropping her on her bed as she laughs. She isn’t getting to that shower just yet.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Sean
There is really no way to describe what goes through your mind when you think you’re about to die.
My life doesn’t flash before my eyes. I don’t see any “light.” There’s no time for any of that.
The blast consumes the right side of the truck, causing all of the doors to blow open. It must compromise the buckles on the left-side seatbelts, because both Wolfe and I are ejected onto the dusty barren road, I think I hit my head and then I slide. For a full seven seconds, I slide. When I’m able to open my eyes, I can see Wolfe through the clouds of dust maybe fifty feet away.
A crippling groan leaves one of us, or both of us, as I raise my head trying to see our Humvee through the haze. A small part of my brain understands that my side is torn to shit from road rash, but I can’t feel it yet. Wolfe is calling something. His words echo, I can’t make them out, but I see him already up and running to the truck. I force myself to try to stand.
Yup, my back is fucked.
Pain radiates down my leg and makes it feel weak as I stand. I probably shouldn’t run, but it’s either that or risk being shot.There’s so much adrenaline pumping through my blood that I use it and just go, patting myself down as I run to make sure I still have all my limbs. My Staff Sergeant, Keenan, is alive and seemingly okay. Blood leaks from his left arm and his forehead has a nasty gash from the glass. I can hear him on the radio as I frantically search for Buck. It’s been seconds, maybe a minute, but it feels like an eternity before I hear him moaning.
Fucking Christ. His body is partly pinned under our Humvee, face down in the dirt, but I can see the bottom half of his leg and his toes are pointing toward the sky. My vision tunnels as the opening strings to that fucking Clapton song start all over again; it’s on repeat. I try to comprehend how Keenan’s makeshift sound system is even still working as I skid into the dust beside Buck’s broken body. My shirt is sticking to my arm, soaked in blood. I ignore the pain that starts to shoot through me. I can’t feel it fully yet.
I always sit right. But I chose left so I didn’t have to sit behind Keenan’s beefy body like a sardine and smell his rank chew on the drive. It should be me pinned under this thing with my hips rotated one hundred and eighty degrees, not Buck.
“Chhh-cchhheeseburger,” Buck says, his face half in the dirt, as I lie face down, covering him with my body. There is hardly any part of him still intact. My guts churn and pain shoots through me like multiple daggers are being thrust into my back all at once.
“Cheeseburger, bud?” I say, my voice shaking with shock, but I understand him. “That’s your first choice for dinner?” I whisper, talking to Buck like he isn’t gonna die right here in my arms.
But he is. There’s no question. He’s ripped wide open and I’ve never actually seen a living human body this fucked up before, and after almost three full tours out here, that’s saying a lot.
“Aaaand f-fries,” he stutters.
“Cheeseburger and fries it is. Just gotta get you out of here first, you hang tight. Help is on the way.”
“Three minutes out!” Wolfe echoes in a grunt as he assesses his own injuries.
The sound of a chopper can already be heard in the distance. I flip over onto my back and bite into my lip so hard it bleeds as my teeth chatter and the adrenaline from moments ago starts to leave my body. My arm is ripped open for sure, it’s definitely broken, and I’m skinned alive with road rash.
One of the tires spins slowly above us on our upside-down vehicle. I let my head fall back to the earth, my hand still gripping Buck’s shoulder, whispering to him to hang on as I look toward the clear blue sky. I might fall in and out of consciousness for a short time, I’m not sure. Ringing and the muffled sounds of the music fill my ears as I focus on a lone dove that has just landed on the truck; its wings settle and the lyrics of the song play on. The dove is calm, looking around from the top of the truck as if our world wasn’t just blown to all hell. Nature versus carnage. The shade of the dove’s feathers is almost the same shade as the doors of our now mutilated truck. I don’t know how long I watch the bird for, and I wonder why it doesn’t leave. It can simply fly away at the sight of danger. It should fly away. It should get the fuck out of this desert, but it doesn’t. The dove stays, looking down on me, and I use it to keep my focus as long as I can. The chopper gets closer. Buck groans beside me, the garbled sound of certain death.
