She tells me about the double date and what Harper said. I’m irritated Norah approached her to begin with, but I can also understand it completely. She clears her throat. I meet her eyes. “I’ll ask one more time, Ben. Only because I love you and I want a future with you. Do I need to be worried about your friendship?”
I grab her face with both hands. Her pretty eyes and her thin lips are things I’ve found comfort in for a while now. A salve. A patch. She arrived in my life at the perfect time. “I love you, Norah,” I say, brushing my lips on hers. Her eyes flutter closed and then open again, searching mine in earnest. “But my friendship with Harper is something you should always be worried about.”
Pressing her lips together, she leans her forehead on mine. “I already knew that, though. Didn’t I? Guess I need some time to figure out if that’s something I’m willing to live with.” Maybe it’s that I’ll never be able to live without Harper. That the empty well inside me only craves one person, and even if I wanted to fill it with someone or something else, it would stay a dark, pitiful cavern of loneliness.
“Any woman I’m ever with will have the same concern. She was first,” I explain, shrugging. “I can’t give you what’s already gone.”
She’s too good for me. I’m left with a fleeting sense of guilt. I wish she were a one-night stand. Maybe then she’d smack me, storm off, and leave a dead fish in the back of my truck. Instead, she leaves the bathroom and my house quietly, asking once more if Harper needs anything before she leaves.
Harper is in the kitchen making herself a sandwich when I finally steel myself away. My cell phone vibrates on the counter in front of her. She doesn’t look at it. She maintains pure focus on the ham and Swiss on rye. She has her hair pulled over the front of her neck, trying to hide the mark I desperately want to see.
It’s work calling. With a pounding heart, I silence the call. Maybe if I silenced the call all those years ago this vision in my kitchen would be less of a nightmare. Harper licks her thumb to get errant mayonnaise off and puts the jar back in the refrigerator. “I still have the mustard out. Want one?” she asks, finally looking up. “You still hate mayo, right?”
I nod, eyeing her neck. “No, thank you,” I growl.
My cell phone starts buzzing again and I have to close my eyes and take a deep breath. Harper puts the knife down on the counter with a loud clank. She pulls her hair back and looks to the side. “What? Just say what’s on your mind.”
The cell stops vibrating. I can think clearly. “How did we get so messed up? Why did we complicate things? We could have so easily been done. Happily ever after.”
“Life doesn’t work that way,” she whispers.
My cell phone goes off again. This time Harper looks at it. “The truth always hurts more than lies. It’s easier to swallow down a bunch of lies than face the one truth that changes everything.”
I hold my arms out to the side. “What changes? We’ll be perfectly happy for the first time since the last time?”
Clearing her throat, she turns around and leans against the counter with the sandwich in her hand. She takes a careful bite, chews, and swallows it. “Do you remember when I had to take Bobo to the vet to put him to sleep?” Harper turns to look at my face, her eyes turned down in the corner. “You kill people.”
“Bad guys,” I insert. “What does that have to do with Bobo?” My voice cracks on the last word.
“You kill bad guys for a living and yet the thought of putting your cat to sleep brought you to your knees. It was easier for me to do it. You could pretend it didn’t happen if you didn’t see it. You could lie to yourself.”
I swallow down the panic the memory causes. My childhood cat lived almost twenty years. Cancer stole his body, but his mind was still there. A nightmare I’ve had on repeat since I can remember dreaming is that of me in a cold vet’s office. I’m standing in a small room, surrounded by white, and I’m holding an animal. It’s never the same animal, but my feelings are always the same the moment the doctor walks in holding a syringe needle. Panic. Soul crushing pain. Fear.
Immobilized by the dream world, I watch through glassy eyes as the breathing creature I love fades away. First the chest stops moving, then the eyes close, and lastly, the freezing temperature in the room transfers to my fingertips and the body goes ice cold. Typically, at this point I’d always wake up with a sheen of sweat and terror in my heart.
Harper is the only person who knows of the nightmare and subsequent phobia, which is why she was the person I called when it was Bobo’s time. She’d just moved back to the West Coast and there wasn’t a second of hesitation when she came into my house without knocking, hugged me, kissed me on the cheek, picked up the soft sided cat bag from the living room floor, and left to do the thing I couldn’t do. When she returned with his urn of ashes a week later, it was no nonsense for her. A part of life. She never spoke of what happened in that room. I never asked—would never dream of asking. I saw the urn on the fireplace as a weakness. A thing that labeled me damaged. Bobo’s ashes remind me I’m human.
Harper clears her throat after she takes the last bite of sandwich. She’s watching me through narrowed, tired eyes. Rinsing her plate, she puts it in the dishwasher.
“The lie is always easier,” she repeats.
“What’s the lie?” I ask. My phone vibrates once more and I can’t ignore it any longer. It’s obviously something important. Holding up one finger to halt her, I answer the call. As I suspected, I have to leave. They’ve found a terrorist quad in the underground tunnels in Washington State.
Speaking softly, I confirm I’m on my way into work to catch the bird out. Even as I say this I wish I were lying to Tahoe. Wish I didn’t have to tell the truth to everyone else. I hang up and find her in the living room, a photo in her hand. She pulled it out of her open suitcase that’s haphazardly spilling across the coffee table.
She hands me the wooden frame. It’s scuffed around the edges. It has seen a few moves in its lifetime. “I don’t know what the lie is anymore, Ben. Maybe it’s time to face the truth.” We’re graduating high school. Melancholy, forced smiles on our faces, the blue gowns swallowing our bodies. Her head lying on my shoulder.
I study the photo and remember the mix of emotions that day. “I have to go. You’ll be okay here? I should be back soon.”
She takes the frame from me and tosses it back on top of her jumbled suitcase. “The truth is, happily ever after was shot the second you became a SEAL.”
There aren’t enough hours in a lifetime to tackle the monumental oceans between me and the person I’m closer to than anyone else in this world. I offer her a weak smile, promise her she’ll be safe, and thank her once more for Bobo.
Grabbing my keys off the hook by the door, I turn to face her. She approaches quickly and hugs me. I kiss the spot on her neck one more time, trying in vain the erase the hurt. “I have a work party next week. Will you be back? I don’t want to be alone,” she rushes out. The vulnerability shows despite what she’s just admitted. Perhaps it’s in spite of it. We both know the game of cat and mouse has to end eventually. Doesn’t it? “Work friends will be there and I don’t want to talk about Marcus. They won’t ask if you go with me. That’s if Norah doesn’t mind.”
I reply without hesitation—the way I always will. “I’ll be your plus one.”
I squeeze her a little tighter and then leave. My mind slowly clicks into another mode, the one in which I hunt down and kill bad men with heaving chests and warm blood.
