“I didn’t say bad hell. Some people like the exhausted outlaw thing.”
“Do you?”
She looked at me for a long second.
Then she set the food on my counter. “I like you better when you’re not punishing yourself for breathing.”
That landed too close.
Everything landed too close after Destiny.
So I did what men like me did when we were sick of drowning in old ghosts.
I made a choice and called it salvation.
I went all in with Georgia.
For real this time.
Dinners. Movies. Study dates that turned into sleepovers. Sunday afternoons at her parents’ house, where her mom hugged me like I had always belonged at the edge of her kitchen island and her dad asked my opinion on deck repairs like I was a respectable man with respectable answers.
Georgia and I became easy in the way couples did when no one was actively bleeding.
She kept a toothbrush at my place.
I fixed her leaky bathroom faucet.
She learned how I took my coffee.
I learned she pretended to like black coffee around me because she thought cream made her seem less serious, which was ridiculous because Georgia could make a grown foreman cry with a color-coded spreadsheet.
We kissed in parking lots and on couches and against my truck when she laughed too close to my mouth. Her kisses were warm. Sweet. Present. She wanted me without making me feel like the whole universe had shifted under my boots.
Sometimes, I even wanted her back.
Not as a lie.
As a man.
As flesh and blood.
As someone tired of sleeping alone with a ghost.
Georgia was beautiful. Her body was soft and generous and real beneath my hands. Her laugh could pull me out of a bad mood if I let it. Her life had room for me in it without requiring a war council, a security rotation, and an apology to three chapters of dangerous men.
With Georgia, I could breathe.
Mostly.
That was what I focused on.
Mostly.
When my thoughts tried to drift toward Malibu, I put them to work instead.
I finished my degree.
Not a fancy degree. Not anything that would make JD tilt his head and pretend not to be amused. But mine. Earned between runs and repairs and long nights with my laptop glowing incheap motel rooms while brothers snored on the other side of thin walls.
