Chapter Nine: Noah
“You were in the Marines, right?”
I’m halfway through a push-up when Lila flings the question at me out of nowhere. I pause, hovering a few inches above the tile, and do the quick work of reorienting my brain around the unexpected inquiry.
I’ve gotten good at it since my discharge two years ago. It’s no longer repression and avoidance, but a careful process that, once my therapist guided me through it a few times, has become an automatic way for me to accept the bad things I’ve seen and understand they’re part of the past. Not the present.
As in, I’m looking at glossy linoleum, smooth and flat underneath my strong and healthy body. Not concrete rubble cutting into my half-conscious form. I’m breathing clean, September-chilled air floating in through the open door of thetruck bay, not dust-clouded wind that clings to the lining of my lungs.
I hear my Station 47 family chatting and laughing all around, not the high-pitched ringing that comes in the aftermath of a deafening explosion. I smell gasoline and my laundry detergent and Lila’s floral perfume, not smoke and blood.
The entire routine takes me barely two seconds, but Lila is already rushing to speak before I can respond.
“Was that rude of me? God, I really just threw that at you out of nowhere. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
I push myself up fully and then shift to sit up on my knees. She’s perched on a stool, fiddling with her phone, currently attached to a small tripod and a portable ring light.
“Why would it be rude? It’s just a question.” I toss a grin at her when she glances up briefly. “Yeah, I was a Marine.”
“What was it like?”
The most difficult thing I’ve ever done. They tear you down and build you back up again. Sometimes in training I couldn’t tell the difference between the sweat and the tears on my face.
“It was challenging.”
Lila observes me. I feel a little itchy under her gaze, especially when she looks this serious. I prefer to be the reason people are smiling or laughing. And this woman, with all her golden charm and sparkly eyes, is usually quick to smile and laugh.
“More challenging than being a firefighter in New York City?” she presses. Her phone and the attached equipment lay useless in her lap as she fixes her full attention on me.
When she enlisted my help for content creation today, I didn’t think it would come with an interrogation. Not that I really mind. If a pretty girl is requesting my presence, I’ll happily tell her whatever she wants to know, even if it’s as mundane as my grocery list or my leg day routine.
“Yeah.” When she waits for me to elaborate, her lips pouting thoughtfully, I give in way too easily. “Um, they sent us to Eastern Europe during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, just in case.”
“Oh.”
“And some of us didn’t like sitting around and waiting to be useful, so we volunteered to fight with the Ukrainian forces.”
Lila blinks at me in surprise.
I shrug, as if it’s really no big deal.
“I wasn’t there for long, but it was pretty gruesome,” I admit.
“That’s very heroic of you.”
“Not really,” I respond automatically.
She tilts her head to the side quizzically. It’s an adorable gesture, but this is a serious conversation.
“I don’t really see it as an act of heroism that I volunteered. It wasn’tmyhomeland that was getting attacked. I had the privilege of choice, but the men I fought beside were watching their own people suffer. They were truly fighting for something. I was just there because I felt I had a duty to do the right thing.”
“That’s… wow.”
“I could have chosen not to fight or at least just gone home when we were granted leave, you know? But a lot of them didn’t even have homes to go back to anymore.”
Lila frowns. I try not to flinch.Don’t frown. I don’t like it when I make people frown.
“Anyway, I ended up busting my leg, so they sent me back to the States, gave me a fancy medal, and now I have a really sexy scar on my thigh.”
