“Of course,” I replied, my voice gruff.
“Is this real? You and me?”
“Yes,” I answered without hesitation. God, I would never deny her again.
“Then I am promising you now that I will spend however long we are together fighting that battle with you. You don’t have to disappear. You can take me with you, if you want to. I’m not going to push you. I’m not goingto … I don’t know … try to love it out of you,” she said with a small, humorless laugh and a melancholic smile. “All I’m saying is, you don’t have to fight it alone. Okay? I’m here.”
Sid had said something along those lines years ago, and while I heard the words and believed he meant them, I wasn’t listening. I didn’t accept them as a truth I wanted to reach out and grasp. I hadn’t wanted them to save my life because to me, it wasn’t a life worth living. But now, here, with Laura … I listened. I wanted to. Because suddenly, there was nothing more I wanted than to live a life with her in it.
I nodded, and then, with a little hesitation, I admitted, “It was her name.”
Laura looked into my eyes, confused. “Whose name?”
Swallowing, I went on, “Lizzie. One of the soldiers … one ofmine… her name was Lizzie. She was a mom to two girls, married to a nice guy. She was a good friend. A woman pretending to carry a baby killed her. I could’ve saved her if I had been fast enough, but … I watched her die instead.”
Laura nodded, an expression of sadness and empathy falling upon her face. She didn’t try to tell me it was okay. Didn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. But she listened and pressed her hand to my cheek and whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah,” I replied just as quietly through a strange blend of sadness and gratitude. “Me too.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
After we showered—separately, unfortunately, but Laura’s small shower couldn’t accommodate us both at once—she insisted on giving my beard a trim. She admitted with a grimace that she had never loved the clean-shaven look on me, but she offered to neaten it up a bit.
“I used to help Brett every now and then,” she said, maneuvering me to sit on the toilet in the small bathroom. “He always liked the way I did it, and … I dunno. It was sort of nice.”
I pretended to sigh wistfully. “It is my favorite thing to hear you talk about doing things with another man.”
She collected her supplies from the vanity cabinet and huffed a laugh. “It’s kind of hard tonotmention him at all when he’s the father of my kids. We were together foryears.”
“Wewere a thing for years too. Does that mean you mentioned me to him?” I asked teasingly as she came to stand between my spread knees.
With a finger beneath my chin, she tipped my head back and looked into my eyes. “Of course I did.”
The sentiment made me feel both triumphant and sad. Sad for him, to be aware of the man who’d prevented her from loving him fully—or so she had said. That must’ve stung.
He must hate me, I thought.Doesn’t even know me, but he hates me.
Story of my life.
Laura lathered my neck, just beneath my jawline, and used a straight razor to meticulously clean up the edges. She patted my face dry with a soft towel that smelled like her and trimmed the scraggy ends of my beard with a pair of scissors. Then she cleaned it all up with an electric shaver.
Her eyes met mine every so often between moments of deep concentration, and she’d smile or sigh or blush, and every single time, I would be left with a disbelief that I washere. Just a little over twelve hours ago, I’d been ready to end my life, and now I knew I was exactly where I needed to be. With her.
“So, can I ask you a question?”
I nodded, watching her as she ran the shaver over my beard with practiced precision.
“You keep saying you drink a lot … what do you mean by that?”
“I mean what it sounds like. I drink a lot.”
She tipped my head to the side to have better access to my jawline. “So, like … are you an alcoholic?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But if you drink a lot, and you rely on it for whatever reason …”
“No, I get what you’re saying,” I replied. “But I don’t need to drink all the time. Sometimes, it feels that way. But usually, it’s just to quiet my brain.”
