The Last Hour (10 page)

Maybe I should call him.

No. This was in-person conversation. I was flying back to New York on Wednesday. It could wait until then.
 

Jesus. Whatever. Okay, I was going to try to get some sleep. I put out my cigarette and quietly made my way back into the apartment. My bag was still next to the front door, where I’d dumped it as we came in. Both of us were a little too excited to think about niceties at that point. A trail of discarded clothing led from the front door to the bedroom. I got my toothbrush out of my bag, ducked into the bathroom and brushed, then went back in the bedroom.

She was still sleeping peacefully.
 

What were the odds of me having the nightmare again?

Pretty damn good.
Shit.

I leaned over and very gently kissed her on the forehead. In her sleep, she smiled, and that sight almost broke my heart. So I grabbed one of the pillows off the bed, tossed it on the floor next to her, and lay down. The carpet was itchy, but I’d slept in worse places.

The sun was shining in my window when I awoke on Saturday morning. The warmth flooded my body, and I stretched. I was sore. Okay, it had been a long time since that happened to me. The long muscles in the back of my legs and thighs and butt were sore as hell. Actually, I was sore in places I didn’t even know
could
be sore. My past sexual experience had been with other graduate students, and once, as a fumbling, inexperienced eighteen-year-old on a road trip across the country with another fumbling, inexperienced eighteen-year-old, while we tried to stay very quiet because Julia and Crank were in the next room, and there were some things my big sister didn’t need to know.
 

This was different. Ray had been an athlete in high school and college, and most recently had been hiking around the mountains of Afghanistan carrying fifty pounds of gear. He was
in shape.
I’m no slouch. I go to the gym three afternoons a week. And when I’m in the field, I’m hiking long distances, sometimes ten or twenty miles or more. But he had tired me out.

I felt a smile on my face thinking of it.

I rolled over, stretching my arms out for Ray, and he wasn’t there. Huh. Feeling unexpectedly disappointed, I sat up and saw him.

He was curled up on the floor next to the bed. I sighed, and looked at him, my breath catching in my throat a little. I mean, it was obvious why. He was afraid of having the nightmare again. He slept on the floor of my room to protect me. A wave of unfamiliar emotion swept through me. I felt my eyes water suddenly. Because he had options. He could have gone to the hotel he’d reserved. Or slept on the couch. Or risked having the nightmare again.

Instead, he stayed next to me.
On the floor.

Well, screw that. I grabbed my pillow, threw it on the floor next to him, and cuddled up next to him, pulling the blanket over us both. He smelled a little like cigarettes, and a lot like sex and sweat.
 

My movement disturbed him, and he slowly opened his eyes.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” I said.

“Good morning, beautiful,” he replied. His voice was rough.

“You didn’t have to sleep on the floor.”

He tried to look sheepish. “Yeah, well. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But I’m sore now.”

I tried to suppress a snicker. “So am I.”

Alarm immediately appeared on his face. “You’re not hurt, are you?”

I closed my eyes for just a second, trying to gather some patience. “Ray ... I was being a smartass. I’m sore because of the
sex
, not because of the other thing.”

“Oh…” he said. Then he recovered his composure. “Well ... in that case ... might need to help you limber up some. Stretch those muscles some more.”

Now I did laugh, and I picked up my pillow and hit him over the head with it. He grabbed me and pulled me on top of him, and given that neither of us had any clothes on, there was no doubt at all what his intentions were.

I laid my index finger across his lips and said, “I need thirty seconds. Morning breath.”

Then I jumped up and ran for the toothbrush.

Two hours later, we were finally sitting over breakfast at the Park Grill, and I decided it was time to push a little.

“Talk to me about the nightmare,” I said.

Ray grimaced. “I guess I owe you that.”

I held up a hand. “You don’t owe me anything yet, Ray. But ... maybe you owe it to yourself—to let yourself heal. You don’t have to talk with me about it, Ray. But talk to someone. Dylan maybe. Or a doctor.”

He nodded, sighed, and then said, “It’s more complicated than that.”

I leaned forward, grabbed his hand, and then I plunged off a cliff.

“Ray, listen to me.”

“Okay,” he said, slowly.

“I’m going to say this once, and if you aren’t ready for it, then ... well ... that’ll suck.”

His mouth twitched, just slightly upward, on one side.

“I’m serious,” I said. Then I took a deep breath, squeezed my eyes shut, and probably way too quickly to understand, I said, “I think I’m falling for you.”

I waited ... ten, maybe fifteen seconds. Then I opened my eyes.

He had a huge grin on his face. Almost a smirk.

“What?” I said, my voice rising into a squeal that was probably really unattractive. His grin grew bigger, into a genuine smile, so I balled up my napkin, which still had crumbs of blueberry muffin all over it, and threw it at him. It hit him right in the face and fell to the table.

Ray burst into laughter, then said, “Babe. I feel exactly the same way. In fact….” With those words, he leaned forward, and whispered in a low, fierce voice, “I’m falling in love with you, Carrie Thompson.”

It would have been the perfect, utterly romantic moment. Except he had a blueberry muffin crumb on his nose.
 

“Um….” I said.

“What?”

I shook my head, then reached out and grabbed the crumb. “Blueberry,” I said.

And then we were both laughing. He pulled me to him and we kissed, hard, and he said, “Let’s take a walk. And ... I can tell you some of it.”

And so we walked, holding hands, toward the park. He let go of my hand and put his arm around my waist, pulling me closer to him. I leaned my head close, and Ray started to talk.

“So ... let me ask you this ... how much do you know about the war?”

“Basically nothing.”

“Read any books about … wars in general? Fiction? War movies?”

I shook my head. “Don’t laugh. I mostly read contemporary romance. It’s got to have a happy ending.”

He nodded, seriously, and said, “I’d never laugh at that. Real life should be that way.”

I smiled and squeezed his hand. Maybe
our
life could be like that. But I didn’t say it out loud.

“Anyway,” he said. “What about ... you’ve probably studied group dynamics? Mob behavior, that sort of thing?”

“Um, hello, that’s what I do. Sort of.”

“Right. Sorry ... I guess I’m avoiding the issue.” He sighed, then said, “Look ... things got ... savage over there. We had a lot of casualties, very quickly. My whole fire team was decimated ... two guys killed, and Dylan wounded. And it just got ... worse and worse.”

I just held his hand as we walked. I knew this couldn’t be easy to talk about. All I could do was listen, I guess, and be there.

“Anyway ... the thing is. I saw something. A…”

He stopped again. He was struggling to talk, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, his jaw so tight with anger I was shocked. He stopped walking and faced me, and said, “I witnessed ... a war crime.”

He looked me in the eye and exhaled as he said the words. I took his other hand in mine. What did he mean? What war crime?
What had he seen?

He looked at me and said, “Carrie. You need to know ... I’m falling for you. Hard and fast. But the possibility exists….”

His face twisted, and he stopped talking again. I lost patience and said, “What? What is it?”

He squeezed my hands, closed his eyes and whispered, “Before I left the Army, I ... I put together evidence. Photographs. Notes. And I wrote a report about what happened. And I dropped it in a mailbox addressed to the Inspector General’s office in Washington.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Carrie ... what I’m telling you is ... eventually someone’s going to do an investigation. And I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“But ... you did the right thing. You reported it.”

“I didn’t stop it.”

“Could you have?”

He looked away from me, his jaw tight, his expression almost tortured, and he said, “I don’t know. I just ... I don’t know. I wish I’d tried.”

And then he shook. Just once. Like ... an eruption. The emotion that was running through him was suppressed, raw, bitter. So I did the only thing I could. I wrapped my arms around him, and I whispered in his ear, “We’ll get through this together.”

I
t was silent in the waiting room,
except for the occasional quiet talk at the nurses’ station and echoes down the hall of people walking, talking. But in here? Nothing.

Sarah sat in the corner. She had her knees pulled up, feet resting on the edge of her seat, arms wrapped around her legs, chin resting on her knees. She stared off into space, not moving. She hadn’t spoken since the doctor left, forty-five minutes before. Every once in a while, she’d look around the room, glance over toward me, then go back to staring into space.

I couldn’t help but wonder what was going through her head, what she was thinking and feeling. I tried to imagine myself, at seventeen, knowing that they might have to amputate my leg in order to keep me alive.

I’d be pretty screwed up too.

In the meantime, I sat next to Carrie, opposite where Jessica leaned against her. Jessica had her phone out. She was online, and as best as I could tell, she was messaging with friends about the accident. Carrie was slumped back in her seat, her head resting against the wall, mouth slightly open, eyes closed. She wasn’t asleep. I knew that because every time we heard footsteps approaching or near the room, her eyes would open, searching out the sound. She was waiting for further word from the doctors.
 

I rested my hand on hers. Actually, when I wasn’t paying attention, it was
in
hers. I don’t know if it helped. I don’t know if it made any difference at all, if she had even the vaguest sense that I was there, that I was thinking about her and hurting for her and praying for her. All I could do was try. All I could do was be here. All I could give her was my love, even if she never knew.

I guess there was one other thing I could do. I could fight. I could fight to survive. I just didn’t know how. I couldn’t touch anything. I couldn’t change anything. How the hell do you fight to survive when you’re nothing but a ghost?
 

She looked so tired. We’d had ... a not very easy time. Was it just two weeks ago she’d come into the condo and collapsed on the couch next to me, and said, “Let’s just run away?”

I hugged her and said, “Okay. How about the circus.”

She nodded, her face serious. “Okay. But why the circus?”

I shrugged. “You’ll be the lion tamer. I’ll be your sexy assistant. They’ll never find us.”

She had laughed, hard. It was the first time she’d laughed in a week or more, and I wanted to savor it, put it in a bottle so we could take it out and listen any time. But her laughter didn’t stay. In fact, after a few moments it turned to tears, and I had pulled her to me in a tight embrace and whispered back to her the same words she’d once said to me. “We’ll get through this together, babe. I promise. I’m here for you. Forever.”

What if I couldn’t keep that promise?

I needed to get up and take a walk or something. Sitting here feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to help anything. I stood up, and it was odd and disconcerting that I felt no need to stretch, or anything, after sitting hunched over for so long. It drove home my condition more than just about anything else possibly could have.

My condition: I had no condition. I didn’t exist.

My eyes fell back to Carrie in her seat, still looking as exhausted as I’d ever seen her. I couldn’t just walk away. I couldn’t leave her alone. I walked back over and got on my knees right in front of her. I put my hands in her lap, and leaned as close as I could, and whispered, “I love you, Carrie.”
 

Then I kissed her.

Her body gave an involuntary shudder, and tears started rolling down her face. Silent tears, as she raised her hand to her mouth and bit one of her knuckles, trying desperately to suppress grief. Her eyes had gone bloodshot, and her expression looked as if ...
 

 
... as if she’d just lost everything.

I jerked back.
That
wasn’t what I’d intended. Oh, Jesus. Carrie bent over in her seat, turning her face away from Jessica, and stifled a loud sob. Jessica dropped her phone, moved forward next to Carrie and whispered something I couldn’t hear.

Carrie shook her head violently. Then she replied to Jessica. “I’m … what am I supposed to do?”