“Worse.”
“What’s worse?”
“I had it all lasered off when I was nineteen.”
She laughed a soft laugh. “Why would you do that?”
“My sophomore year at Canoe U,” I started, and she snorted at the nickname for the Naval Academy. “I was approached by a woman off-campus who wanted me to do some modeling. Pose for a cadet calendar kind of thing.”
“Oh my God,” Dani said softly, covering her mouth and trying not to laugh, and at that moment, I would have told her a thousand embarrassing things just to keep her smiling and bringing color back into her pale cheeks.
I nodded. “Yep. When she saw my hairy chest at the first session, she handed me a card to a laser hair removal center and told me not to come back until I’d had at least two sessions. As you can imagine, I’d already bragged to a bunch of my pals, including Darren and some female cadets I had the hots for, that I was going to be on the cover of a cadet calendar. There was no way I was going to let a little hair be the reason I came up short.”
She was smiling and chuckling. “How many sessions did it take?”
I laughed. “A fucking lot.”
“As many as it takes,” she almost whispered, and I nodded.
“But after the second session, I was good enough to be oiled and posed.”
“I need living proof of this endeavor,” she said, her smile still in place.
“I’m sure it’s still out there somewhere.”
I had a feeling resourceful Dani was going to turn up with that calendar shortly. She’d hold it over my head the best she could. It was pretty fucking humiliating. One of the instructors at BUD/S had found out somehow in the middle of our training. He’d had photocopies of it placed in and on everything I owned. We even took target practice with it. It had been everywhere. Me, bare to the waist, with a pair of red, white, and blue briefs peeking out of my unzipped cammies. There were a lot of comments made about those briefs during the seven months of BUD/S—hell, some of my brothers had still been making comments about it before our last mission.
“The first time I met you, I thought you could be the poster boy for the SEALs, and now I know it’s the literal truth,” she said, still hiding that sexy smile and laugh behind her hand.
“Nah. The real poster boy was Darren.” My heart stopped and restarted when I said his name. I didn’t say it often. It was off-limits at Tristan’s.
Dani’s smile faded, and I wanted to kick myself, but she didn’t say to stop. She didn’t reject the name like it caused her physical pain.
“He was a golden boy, more Captain America than Iron Man. I think the SEALs are probably closer to Tony Stark than Steve,” she said.
As I let her words settle over me, I realized she was right. Darren had almost been too good for the SEALs. “You know, I never once heard him brag about his grades or his stats or his kills. It’s pretty commonplace for our community to hold themselves up as gods and trash talk everyone else.”
“No, you don’t say?” Dani said sarcastically, and my lips quirked.
“Darren never did. Not once. I would be pissed as hell at someone, cussing them up and down, and he’d just shrug, do his job, and keep going. He was always, one hundred percent of the time, the better human being.”
My emotions threatened to overflow. I got up, grabbed another water, and pounded half of it before I sat back down. She’d adjusted, just a hair, so her chin was now resting on top of her knees, and she was watching me as if she could read my story by searching my skin.
“I didn’t know Darren very well, but I’m pretty sure he’d insist you were a damn good human being yourself.” She said it with such sincerity, such conviction, that it struck at the hard corners of my burnt heart and chipped at them, trying to bring the muscle back to life.
I didn’t say anything; I looked down at the water bottle. It wasn’t true. All I’d wanted my whole damn life was to make sure I was there to keep the people I cared about from dying. Before I had to pull a dark-haired woman in a nightgown from a pond again. And I hadn’t been able to reach Darren in time to do that. If I’d been thirty seconds faster…
I shook my head.
“They don’t give a Silver Star to just anyone, Nash.”
My throat locked up at the mention of the medal I’d never wear. The burn of tears hit my eyes, but I wasn’t going to cry in front of her. Not today. Not ever.
“That star means shit, Dani. They gave me a medal for bringing home my best friend’s body…you get that? His body!”
She got up out of the bed, taking the three steps to reach me in the chair, and placed a hand on my chin, drawing my face upward so I was forced to look into her exquisite face. A face showing empathy and heartache that was directed at me. She was hurting…for me. It stunned me into silence. It was Dani who spoke next.
“You brought home two of your men and yourself alive, and you didn’t leave their bodies behind. You single-handedly held back the enemy so that could happen. That isn’t nothing.”
