“I’ve told myself that every day,” he said, closing his eyes. “Hasn’t made it any better.”
“Do you regret it?”
“What?”
“Suckin’ it up to protect your family.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Really?” I asked, knowing damn well I was poking the sleeping dragon in the eye, but something told me I needed to. “It sounds like ya do. Sounds like you’re upset that ya gave up your crusade just to keep your family safe and you’re mad at ’em for it.”
“I am not mad atthem,” he snarled, and I grunted when that surprisingly hidden strength of his came out, and when he shoved me and scrambled back to glare at me as he hunched next to the bed. “I’m mad at the fuckers who created the very situation I’m stuck in. I’m helpless to do anything but their bidding because I have the ‘audacity’ to care about people, and that can be used against me. I’m mad because I can’t make that stop, and that sometimes I wish I didn’t care so I could keep going after the bastards, keep putting on the pressure.”
“But you can’t, can ya?” I asked, not caring that I was probably going to have a new bruise from how hard he had launched me away. “Ya still care. Ya stillwantto care.”
“Yeah, fine, okay?” he snapped, snatching the blanket from the bed and wrapping it around himself as if that was going tocreate a barrier between us when his issue wasn’t because his dick was hanging out. “I want to care, I still need to care, okay? And now I’m also realizing that you are added to that list of people I care about, that I have to worry about. So fuck you, and fuck everything that you think you’re being clever with right now!”
“I’m not tryin’ to be clever or smart or anythin’ like that,” I told him softly as I reached out, knowing it was a risk but knowing it needed to be done. He might think he wasn’t the sort of person who responded to being touched, but I knew differently. Maybe it had taken me sleeping with him to understand it, but I could see the loneliness in him, the way he had separated himself from other people for whatever reason.
My family had never been afraid of showing their love physically, and I had picked that up naturally. Somewhere along the way, it made sense, and I followed through on it. But maybe he had never been given the chance to understand that about him. But I had seen the way he relaxed when I touched him, the way he sighed in contentment when he nuzzled against me in the dark, and the way he smiled when I ran my fingers through his hair.
He didn’t stop me as my hand closed around his arm and my thumb stroked his skin. “Ya care, Walker. There ain’t nothin’ wrong with carin’, okay? That’s what I’m tryin’ to say right now. Ya aren’t a good soldier, not like we were expected to be, but ya are still willin’ to fight. But ya realized the cost of fightin’ and decided it wasn’t worth it. Ya didn’t fail, ya chose love.”
He bowed his head, staring down at where my hand was wrapped around his arm, and closed his eyes. “Sometimes…sometimes I think it would have been easier if I had been there with the rest of you. If I had been there and done the stupid shit I always did?—”
“And died with ’em?” I asked softly.
“Yes,” he rasped after a moment of silence.
I wanted to tell him that then he wouldn’t be here with me now, that I wouldn’t have discovered so much more about myself. That without him here, I would be the loneliest creature to walk the planet because right now, I had someone who understood what it meant to be one of us, to hurt and ache because you were the last of your kind. That when it came down to it, I was selfish enough to want him to live, so I didn’t have to be alone anymore.
“Me too,” I said instead, because it was just as true as everything I wasn’t saying. “But we weren’t, and we’re here…aren’t we?”
“We are,” he said in a tired voice. “God save us, we’re still here.”
“Broken, hurting, bitter, and lost,” I said, cupping his face gently. “But we’re here, that’s gotta mean somethin’, don’t it?”
“It means we’re here,” he said bitterly. “There’s no fate or luck or divine intervention; we’re just here…coincidence.”
“Don’t mean we can’t make it mean somethin’, does it?” I asked.
His eyes flashed open, and he stared at me in shock. “What?”
“We’re soldiers. I was a good one, maybe even perfect. An’ you were…well, a bad one,” I said, smiling when he gave a choked laugh. “But we’re here. Maybe it was God, maybe it was fate, maybe it was luck, or maybe it was just coincidence…but we’re here. The best thing is…the best we can do, right?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be lost and confused and hurting? Aren’t you here because you can’t get better?” he asked, but there was no judgement in his voice, only hope and desperation.
“I was, but I guess meetin’ you again made me see shit differently,” I said with a chuckle, pulling him close and wrapping him up in my arms. Never was I more glad it had been a leg rather than an arm I’d lost than right then, as I could wraphim in a tight hold. “All we got is right now, and maybe right now it’s just us, the two of us but?—”
“There’s others,” he said softly. “Like Clay and even Isaac, for you.”
“And your sister and your, uh, nieces?”
“Niece and nephew. I’m so scared for her.”
