“Why?” she asked.
“Nightmares,” he answered as he shifted his position to sit up and use the headboard for a backrest.
“Can you talk about them or is it classified?” she asked.
“I have talked to the VA therapists,” he answered.
She sat up and shifted both her pillows around to lean against. “Did it help?”
Ford shrugged. “Not so much.” Did he dare tell her that it wasn’t just his grandfather’s snoring that sent him to sleep beside her after that first night?
“Want to get it off your chest now?” she asked.
“You go first. What was keeping you awake?”
“Decisions I’ve made and ones I need to make.” She pushed back the covers and crossed the room to pick up two bottles of water. She handed one to Ford and twisted the cap off hers, then sat down on the edge of his bed.
“Want to elaborate?” he asked.
“I’m going to resign my position at the school where I teach. We’ll probably work on moving Aunt Sharlene’s things over to Nita’s place most of the summer. I can’t imagine letting our family land be sold to a stranger, and none of them are getting any younger.” She took a long drink of her water. “But I’m wondering if this is really the right path for me, or if I’m doing it to please Aunt Sharlene. I don’t like to think about it, but if I put the pencil to the paper so to speak, it’s not hard to figure out that if they all three live to be a hundred, I would only be fifty-three when they were gone. That’s not old in today’s world, and I would have made them happy for twenty years.” She took another drink and smiled. “And I’d get two vacations a year.”
“Are you willing to give up your hopes and dreamsfor twenty years?” Ford asked. “What’s the top item on your bucket list?”
“To have a family,” she answered.
Ford shifted one of his pillows over to the other side of the bed and propped it up against the headboard. “You might as well get comfortable.”
She slung her legs up onto the bed and changed her position. “I can have both. I’m only thirty-three, and Aunt Sharlene is giving me her house. A ranch would be a good place to raise kids, don’t you think? But we’re talking too much about my insomnia. What’s keeping you awake?”
“Of course, a ranch would be a wonderful place to raise a family. I was happy when I got to spend time there and often wished that I could live on the ranch with Grandpa and Granny.” Ford could have listened to her read the dictionary or even the Bible for hours, just to hear her voice. “When are you going to tell the folks?”
“Not until we start home. I want to think long and hard about it and be sure. If I told them now and then changed my mind, it would break Aunt Sharlene’s and Nita’s hearts. I can’t do that to them,” she answered.
“I understand.” Ford could feel the electricity between them and wondered if she was getting the same vibes. “I’m still thinking about the whole idea. Maybe whichever way we each swing, we could tell them together.”
“We’ll see, and now enough procrastinating on yourside of this conversation,” she said with a smile. “Tell me about the nightmares.”
Ford took a deep breath and opened his mouth, but then he didn’t know where to begin. He took a drink of water and looked over at Joelle. “The last mission that I went on is what keeps me awake. I don’t want to relive it again and again every night and wake up in a cold sweat while I’m frantically trying to figure out what I could have done different.”
“In your heart, do you honestly think anything you could have done would have affected the outcome of whatever happened?” Joelle asked.
“It was like this,” Ford answered. “My whole team was strung out on high ground in…” he paused, “in a black ops mission. We were in camouflage and thought we were hidden well, just lying there with the wind creating little dust devils in the sand. The target that we were there to take out was coming down a valley, and our fingers were on our rifle triggers. I heard the whir of a helicopter above the loud beating of my heart, and for a split second, I thought it was one of ours. Then I realized it wasn’t a chopper coming to take us away once the mission was completed. Bullets began to rain down on us. It was over in seconds, but I was the only one to walk out of there alive. If I hadn’t been so focused on my job, I might have warned the others and we might have been able to roll down off that high spot to hide behind the rocks.”
“And this is your recurring nightmare?” Joelle reached over and laid her hand on his.
Ford inhaled deeply and thought twice, then three times, about admitting that she was his lucky four-leaf clover. He turned to watch her expression before he spit out, “Except when I’m sleeping close to you. I think maybe you have magic powers.”
“The only power I have is that I don’t snore. That lets you fall into a deep enough sleep that you don’t dream. You’ve been on alert for so many years that your nerves are strung up like a tight barbed-wire fence,” she said and then added, “But, Ford, I’m so sorry you lost your team. Losing my folks was tough, so I understand your pain in a measure. I still have dreams about them, but they are not nightmares. And in my opinion, for what it’s worth, you could have done nothing to save them in that split second. Just think of it this way—you were saved for a reason. Find it and move on. Your team members would want you to be happy.”
“Have you ever thought of being a therapist?” he asked.
“No, I haven’t.” She squeezed his hand. “I think maybe we’ve both had a therapy session tonight, but morning is going to come around in just a few hours, so we should get to sleep.”
She scooted down in the bed, turned on her side to face him, and closed her eyes. “Sweet dreams.”
“‘Sleep tight, and don’t let the bed bugs bite.’” He finished the old saying.
He eased down in the bed and wished that he could kiss her good night—even if it was just on the forehead. Before he could do that, he had to get a clear vision of what his future path looked like. There was no use in starting something that couldn’t be finished and could end up with broken hearts and hard feelings. He finally closed his eyes and dreamed that he was an old man sitting on the porch at the ranch and watching his grandchildren play with puppies out on the front lawn.
