"Day or night, if you want to talk, it’s the least I can do after everything you’ve done for me these past few weeks."
"Thanks for understanding and not running from the truck right now," he says.
I’m staring into his eyes, wishing I understood why he would think I’d run when he needed someone to be here. "I wouldn’t run away from you," I assure him.
"That means a lot, Mel." With a deep breath, he places his hand on the gear with a questioning look.
"I put the truck in neutral and pulled the emergency brake. I couldn’t see if your foot was on the brake."
"You think fast on your toes, huh?" he asks. It’s the first Brett-like statement he’s made since we ended up against a snowbank.
"Not usually," I tell him. "Are you okay to drive?"
He takes another breath and forces a small smile. "I’m okay. I promise."
Brett places his hand around the back of my seat, glances out the rear window, and switches the gear to reverse, backing away from the snowbank.
It only takes a few minutes to get to the restaurant, and Brett seems to have shaken off whatever he was going through. "This stuff happened a lot when I got back from my first tour, butI haven’t had a deep, long-lasting flashback in at least four years," he says.
"I’m sure trauma can trigger them," I say.
"Maybe," he says. "Are you still up to having dinner?"
"Of course, I am.”
"Okay, don’t move," he says, jumping out of the truck. I watch him walk behind the trunk and over to my side. He opens my door and offers me his hand. "I might have almost gotten us killed tonight, but I can still be a gentleman," he says, trying to laugh through his obvious discomfort.
As we walk toward the restaurant, hand in hand, we both seem to notice a lack of other cars around us in the parking lot. "Um," he says.
"I don’t see lights on inside," I reply. When we reach the door, we find a sign, saying: the power is out.
"Damn," he says.
"Wow, our luck is top-notch tonight.” I try to laugh the unnecessary tension away. “It’ll be a night we remember—for sure.”
"How about we order take out and bring it back to my house," he offers.
"That sounds like a nice idea."He’s bringing me to his house. I haven’t even thought about where he lives, how he lives, what kind of person he is when keeping up with a house. "It’s not fancy, but—"
"I just want to spend time with you, so you don’t need to worry about making anything fancy for me.”
Brett smiles at me, and his body appears to relax as we walk back to the truck. He opens the door for me again and waits for me to buckle before closing the door.
"We can go somewhere else, but you know the options in town are slim," he says.
"Delivery is my favorite," I reply.
"What kind of delivery?"
"Chinese."
"Me too," he says, starting up the truck.
Brett’s house and town are about twenty-five minutes away from the where we were, so he called in an order on the way, hoping we wouldn’t have to wait long for our food. He pulls up to a log cabin style house. It looks fairly new, along with the neighboring houses in the development.
"I love your neighborhood.”
"It’s a young development. They were building on lots when I was moving home, and I snagged one up at a good price."
