Patriotic Duty (12 page)

CHAPTER 16

I
heard from Riley almost daily for the first two weeks he was home via emails
and texts. They were short, but they were there. After that, calls and emails
got less and less frequent, and while I tried not to panic, telling myself I
knew this was going to happen from the day he asked me out, it still stung.

“Girl, I told you. You
need to let that guy go. He’s back home now. You know he probably has like ten
girlfriends back near that base he lives at. Trust me, I lived in San Diego,
all those military guys want is some woman to wait for them while they’re
deployed. Then when they get back, boom! Dump city!” Miranda managed to blurt
all that out while applying mascara to her long eyelashes in the rearview
mirror of the car. We were on our way to lunch again on a particularly boring
Tuesday.

I looked sideways at her.
“You shouldn’t stereotype all military guys like that, Miranda, I mean, really.
They’re not all bad. A lot of them have families and stuff.”

She snorted. “Yeah, after
they’ve already screwed everything that walks!”

I sighed and decided I
wasn’t going to argue. It’s not like I had a leg to stand on with my argument.
Riley had called once, texted twice, and emailed me four times in almost six
weeks.

But
who’s counting?

Miranda had been on me for
the entire nine months he was gone. She wanted me to hook up with guys with her
while her baseball boyfriend was out of town, but I just couldn’t. Aside from
Travis (Miranda had been pretty mad at me when I let him go), I flirted and
even made out with one guy on the dance floor once after too many shots, but I
really hadn’t been with anyone else which surprised her, but it surprised me
even more. I had been objecting with my heart what my head and body were trying
to overrule.

Later that evening I was
putting Aiden to bed and I heard my cell ring. I saw Riley’s face on the caller
ID and answered, plopping myself on the bed, sitting cross-legged.

“Hi,”
came
his sultry voice on the other end of the line, and my stomach clenched with
excitement and happiness.

“Hey,
sexy.
What’s up with you? I haven’t heard from you in a
while.”

He was quiet for a minute
and then spoke, “I know. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Look, Riley… I can see
what’s happening here. You’re home now, back to reality. No more living in the
fantasy land you got to live here.”

I could hear him blow out
a breath. “It’s really not like that, Cara. I’ve just been doing a lot of
thinking, and since you can’t move here, and I obviously can’t move there, I
just don’t see this working.”

This was a rehash of
conversations we’d previously had and I was tired of hearing it. Yet, my heart
still beat painfully in my chest and I nodded. “I know, but I just want to see
you. Yet, I don’t know what the solution is here. I guess until my son gets
older and I can move without him forgetting about everyone here…”

He cut me off. “You’ve
thought about moving here?”

I paused and blew out a
breath. “Yes. Since my sister lives there I would know someone, and I’d like to
be able to afford a house one day for my son, but there’s no way I can here,
it’s too expensive. The problem is my entire support system is here, including
Aiden’s dad. It’s not an easy choice, nor is it one I will make lightly,
Riley.”

“I understand,” he said
quietly, then paused a long time before he spoke again. “Look, I think it’s
only fair to tell you I’ve met someone here.”

I closed my eyes and
gasped, putting my hand over my mouth to keep the sob that jerked in my chest
from erupting. I didn’t speak. I couldn’t speak.

“Are you still there?”

I forced in a deep breath
and kept my voice somewhat steady. “Yes. But what do you want me to say to
that?”

“I’m just trying to be
honest here. Look, I won’t lie to you. While I was overseas, I thought about
you every single day. You’re all I thought about, in fact. I looked forward to
your emails and lived for the phone calls I was able to make. I was always in a
bad mood until I could hear your voice. Hell, I had even picked out an
engagement ring and everything, but I was so unsure, I just didn’t know…” he
trailed off.

At that, the sob couldn’t
stay down and it lurched out of me like a clutch being popped on a new
stick-shift. I let out a squeak as a tear fell and splashed onto my bare legs.
I shook my head. “Now why did you have to even tell me that, Riley?”

“Because I never thought
you believed me when I told you I loved you all those months I was deployed. I
told you, but you never seemed to buy it. You sure didn’t ever tell me you
loved me.”

“But I did,” I whispered.
“I said the same back to you, every time. But after you hung up,” I confessed.

Another long pause hung in
the air, followed by a long sigh, and he finally spoke again, his voice hitched
with emotion. “There will always be a part of me that loves you, Cara. You’re
unforgettable and I’m probably going to regret this, but I don’t see how else
it can work.”

“Especially
when you’ve met someone else, right?”

“Now that, I didn’t plan,”
he said somewhat defensively, but quietly.

I shook my head again and
wiped a hand across my cheek to clear the itchy tears.

Damn
if I hadn’t heard that line before.
“One never does...”

I heard him sigh.
“Goodbye, Cara. Thank you.”

He hung up and I chucked
my cell phone on the bed with force.

It felt as if my heart had
been squeezed with a vice and ripped from my body. No, that’s not right. If it
had been ripped out, I wouldn’t still be feeling its pain. My chest physically
hurt, a suffocating, crushing feeling, similar to drowning. I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t see. And I was angry, so very angry. Livid at myself for falling for
this soldier boy who I vowed I wouldn’t fall for. For letting him
plow
into my heart and hold it in the palm of his
camouflaged hand and take it with him halfway around the world when that wasn’t
part of the plan. I was meant to let him go after the summer was over; but I
guess, as they say, the heart wants what the heart wants. We can’t choose who
we fall in love
with,
we can only control the actions
that come after. Those clichéd words offered me very little comfort and I still
struggled to breathe through the crushing weight on my chest.

I wiped away the endless stream
of tears and pulled my iPod from my nightstand, scrolling ‘til I found the
Garth Brooks track I was looking for. As “The Dance” crooned into my ears, I
tried to let go of the burning, crushing pain in my chest, but it hung on for
dear life, attaching itself to my soul.

CHAPTER 17

Four months later

I
drove my little Acura down the windy mountain road that would take me to the
large prison complex. My stomach was a bundle of nerves. I couldn’t imagine anyone
who wouldn’t be nervous on their first day at a new job. I pulled up to the
front gate and showed my ID to the correctional officer manning the gate and he
handed me back my ID with a smile, pushing a lever to raise the large orange
barrier arm that had been blocking my entrance.

While I still worked for
the prison system, I had received a promotion to the prison in Colorado. Yes, I
had applied for it. My ex and I had been fighting more recently and I just
couldn’t take it anymore. My mom and stepdad were talking about making a fresh
start and moving back to Colorado, too (they had moved there ten years ago,
hence the reason my sister still lived here, but then had moved back to
California when I had Aiden). After a particularly nasty court battle where my
ex filed a motion to keep me in the state, he lost and I was granted permission
to leave and take my promotion, with a very ugly visitation schedule that was
going to cost me a fortune in plane tickets for visitation.

At
least he still wanted to see his
kid,
I
kept justifying to myself, as I thought about Miranda and
Ashlynn
and her prick of an ex.

I had quickly found a nice
apartment on the west side of Colorado Springs that had two bedrooms and was
fairly new, and even had a nice swimming pool and gym.

I had not contacted Riley.
After his phone call all those months ago, I had decided it was best to scrub
him out of my life – make a clean, even break – one I felt would heal faster
than a slow, ripping tear. So I deleted him from Facebook, removed his number
from my cell phone, and as I refused to change my email address (God, what a
pain in the ass that is!), I did remove him from its address book. I hadn’t
received any emails from him, so it wasn’t like he was looking to contact me
anyway.

All of these things did absolutely
nothing to make me stop thinking of him, however. Every day, something would
remind me of him and I would fall apart again,
then
have
to force myself to climb back out of my dark pit.

Miranda was none too happy
at me for moving. But after my breakup, I will hand it to her, she was a rock
star.

“I’m so sorry, honey. I’m
so, so, sorry. I know I gave you shit, but I could tell you loved that boy. He
was a good guy, I could tell,” she had said, trying to comfort me after I had
gotten a grip and called her.

I shook my head. “I don’t
know what happened, I really don’t.”

She laughed humorlessly.
“The military happened, babe. It’s the way it is. It’s a volatile life, not
everyone is cut out for it, not even the people in it sometimes.”

I nodded as she’d hugged
me.

She really had been my
rock through all of it, even though she hadn’t been supportive at first. I
thought she’d be happy we were over, but she seemed genuinely sorry and I was
grateful.

She had come out for a
long weekend with
Ashlynn
and helped Aiden and me
move in and got to see where I was going to work. It was sweet of her, as I
know things were hard on her too with being a single mother with no help.

As I parked my car in the
employee parking lot, I walked up the massive stone steps that took me past a
large flag pole and saw a group of men in Kevlar and helmets, clearly getting
ready for some sort of training. I felt like a raw piece of steak being dangled
in front of the proverbial dog as I walked by. I smoothed some hair behind my
ear and kept my face down. I’m sure they were just wondering who the new person
was.

This prison was quite
different from the one I worked at in California and I realized after my first
day was over that I was going to have a lot of adjusting to do. Male inmates
are very different from females and come with a new set of problems, along with
being easier in some ways. For instance, they will take “no” for an answer, as
I learned quickly. Females always want to know “why?”

I picked up Aiden from his
first day of daycare at the new facility and the director told me he did great,
interacted with the other children well, and didn’t cry. I was hugely relieved
and was so glad he loved his new daycare.

I opened the door to my
little apartment and sighed when I saw how much unpacking I still had left to
do.

Grateful for central air,
I turned it on, and after changing into some shorts, I made a snack for Aiden
and began unpacking some boxes. I’d been here two weeks and had yet to get
everything unloaded. My laptop was still packed and I rummaged through boxes
until I found it. Of course the cord wasn’t in the same box so I had to look
through four more boxes to find it.

Who
packed this, anyway?

I plugged it in to let it
charge, and after it booted up, I searched until I found the
wi-fi
for the apartment complex and connected to it. As I
pulled up the Internet, I unpacked some more and then sat down on my bed with
my laptop in front of me.

I had emails in my Yahoo
account, which I never check, and pulled them up out of curiosity. I had four
emails from strange addresses and I contemplated deleting them without reading
them, but I was able to see the first line of the emails and I saw the words
“Match.com” and I groaned.

Miranda had signed me up
for Match without me knowing and then she showed me later on and we laughed at
some of the responses I’d gotten. When the free trial was over, we’d both
forgotten about it.

I read all four emails,
and three I deleted but the fourth intrigued me a little. This guy was smiling with
warm brown eyes, a goatee and a black cowboy hat. He said he was just looking
for a nice girl and he had “no preference” on whether the person he met had
kids already or not.

He piqued my interest a
little and I stared at the screen and wondered if I should return his email.
His name was Kevin, and while he looked a little on the stocky side, he did
look very nice in his photos and he just seemed so… normal.

I got up from the bed and
decided I would do my nightly chores of unpacking, cooking, cleaning, caring
for Aiden, and then make my decision after that.

As I went on with my
chores, I chastised myself for thinking about going out with someone I met on
the Internet. Then I thought briefly about Riley and I was still in my ‘anger’
stage of grief and quickly flicked his perfect face out of my mind. Of course I
had wondered if I would run into him when I moved here, but for all I knew, he
had left and been stationed elsewhere, or maybe he got married to that girl. I
had no idea and I had to constantly resist from Internet stalking him to find
out. He never was real active online anyway so I knew I’d be wasting my time.

Thinking of Riley made me
angry and I decided I needed to get out and meet new people from around here. I
only knew my sister so far, and I knew I’d make new friends at work, but that
was almost an hour away and not everyone lived around here.

I put Aiden to bed and
went back online and reluctantly decided to respond to Kevin. By the time I
woke up the next morning, I had a very nice email from him, inviting me out for
dinner.

I thought dinner was a bit
of a commitment but I wasn’t sure how all this Internet dating worked, so I
agreed. I had a date for Friday and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, but I
did have a slight bit of excitement at the thought.

***

By the time Friday rolled
around, I had been hit on twice and asked out three times by various male
coworkers. The prison I worked at was a complex, meaning three prisons on one
site, almost 1,000 employees. I had met so many new people this week, that
aside from the caseworkers in my unit and my new boss, there was no way I was
going to remember everyone’s names – not to mention the inmates who constantly
stared at the new girl walking around. It was a stressful week but I told
myself I just needed to get used to it.

My younger sister,
Katelyn, was a college senior and we weren’t very close due to our being almost
five years apart in age, but she loved Aiden to death and was more than happy
to watch him for me on Friday night as I went on my date with Kevin. After I’d
moved here, I’d filled her in with everything that had happened over the past
year and she was just so happy to have some family around again, that I could
tell we would be become even closer now.

With butterflies trying to
fly out of my stomach and up my esophagus, I parked my car and walked into the
bar and grill type restaurant we’d agreed to meet at. I was thankful the GPS on
my phone helped me find it on the first try, as I had no idea where anything
was around here.

Kevin said he’d be in his
black cowboy hat and a black button-up shirt. I had on cropped denim pants with
a pink button down shirt and pink tie up espadrilles with a rather large cork
heel. It added two or three inches and it was on purpose that I wore these. If
Kevin was not still taller than me with these on, I probably wouldn’t see him
again. I loved tall men and had my standards, as shallow as that sounded.

I was seated in the
waiting area when he walked in. He spotted me immediately and smiled, walking
over and shaking my hand as I stood. We were about the same
height,
he was maybe a smidge taller. He had a friendly face, and was a bit pudgy but I
wasn’t going to be
that
shallow and
sit there and judge him or overanalyze him. It was just dinner.

He seemed very happy to
meet me and as we ate dinner, we chatted very easily, and he was very sweet and
pleasant. He asked about my son and my move from California and my divorce and
he loved hearing about my job.

Kevin worked in the
shipping and hauling business, but I didn’t quite understand exactly what he
did and mentally realized it didn’t matter because I probably wouldn’t be
seeing him again.
Super sweet guy, but zero chemistry.

Zero.

I insisted on paying half
the check so I wouldn’t feel indebted to him in any way and we parted with a
hug.

As I lay in bed later that
night, I was touched with a twinge of disappointment that there hadn’t been any
sparks with Kevin. He definitely wasn’t my type, as sweet as he was, and I
really hoped he found someone because he seemed like a great catch. Just not
for me.

I felt hot tears sting my
eyes as I lay awake, looking at the ceiling. The urge to look up Riley was
getting stronger and I had to beat it back with a stick, reminding myself that
if I should be careful what I wish for and that I might not like what I find. I
just couldn’t afford more hurt, and I became half terrified and half hopeful
that I would run into him.

I sat and wondered what
his reaction would be if I did run into him or somehow get ahold of him and
tell him I lived here now. Maybe he’d leave this other girl for me? After all,
I had him first. I did think that was a selfish way of thinking, and the other
girl, whoever she was, didn’t deserve this type of pain either.

I fell asleep with the
thought of justification that maybe I should look him up online to see if he
still even lived here, and that if he had been moved or maybe deployed again,
that I could breathe a sigh of relief and not worry about it.