trouble. If you want to crawl into a hole and kill yourself after this delivery is done, that’s your affair. But right now my life and the lives of my parents and brother are in your hands. The state of your head damned well is my business.”
His glare flickered briefly and he had the good grace to look away. Score one for her.
She continued, “You, my friend, present every symptom in the book of survivor’s guilt.”
He reared back at that. “I am
“I never said you were. You’ve suffered terrible wounds, both physical and emotional. You shouldn’t underestimate either.”
He snorted. “I’m the one popping painkillers and sweating bullets over whether or not I can do this mission.”
“Your body is only part of the equation. What about your soul? I’ve looked into your eyes, John. I’ve seen your pain. Please don’t turn away from me.” She would’ve added that she wanted to help, but it sounded too doctorish in her ears, and he’d clearly had his fill of platitudes from medical professionals. She had to keep this real. It had to stay personal and private between them.
He crossed his arms, his body language screaming defensiveness. “I hate to burst your bubble, Sigmund, but we don’t have time for me to go through a couple months of counseling before we continue with this mission.”
She shook her head. “This won’t be a project for a few months, John. You’ll need long-term and qualified counseling to deal with these issues.”
He threw up his hands. “Great. Just what I need. Years of shrinks poking around inside my noggin! So much for the rest of my career.”
She asked reasonably, “What’s more important? Your career or your life?”
He stared at her in angry silence.
Yup. Survivor’s guilt all the way. He didn’t value his life at more than a plug nickel at the moment. She shrugged. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do. It’s your life. Your decision. But I do have a right to ask if you’re going to be able to do what needs to be done for me and my family.”
He stared at her a long time, the look in his eyes grumpy and bordering on rebellious. She did her best to let all the compassion and calm acceptance she could muster seep into her own steady gaze. She dared not look away from him right now. He’d leap all over any show of weakness from her, and she needed him to face this thing head-on and not turn away from it. She didn’t know a blessed thing about sneaky missions and intelligence briefings, or the covert insertion stuff he’d talked to his buddies about earlier, but she did know he wouldn’t be good for a damned thing if he didn’t at least start to deal with his guilt, and soon.
“We need to get going,” he finally said woodenly.
She sighed and nodded. “Okay.”
“You rest. I’ll pack up and fix us a bite to eat.”
She watched in silence as he took down the tarp and packed it away. He sat down on the other end of her log and passed her a steaming pouch of…something.
“Uhh, John, what am I supposed to do with this?”
“Eat it.”
She recoiled in horror. A handwarmer, yes, but a meal? No way! She took a cautious sniff. “What is it?”
“Freeze-dried chili mac,” he replied cheerily enough to rouse her suspicions. He waved his steaming pouch. “Or you can have my beanie weenies if you like…but they give most people gas like crazy.”
She answered dryly, “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass on the beans.” She poked her plastic spoon at the glop in her bag. Bracing herself, she blew on a bit of it and gingerly put it in her mouth. It wasn’t bad in a better-than-nothing way, but gourmet fare it was not. However, she needed the calories if today’s hike was going to be anything like last night’s marathon from hell. Of course, she didn’t have any right to complain if he dragged her up and down the mountainsides; after all, he was doing this at her request to save her family.
She finished choking down the chili mac. By about halfway through the freeze-dried meal, it actually started to taste decent. She cringed to imagine how many taste buds she’d killed to arrive at this state of culinary acceptance.
John efficiently collected their trash and stowed it in his pack. He pointed the way for her to walk up the hill, while he walked backward behind her, fussing periodically. Finally, she stopped and turned around to face him. “What
“Erasing our trail.”
“You don’t plan to make the rest of this trek backward, do you?” she asked in surprise.
He laughed. “No. I’m just making it hard for an amateur to follow us. We don’t have time for me to completely counter-track our passage.”
“Counter-track?”
He nodded. “That’s where I erase our trail so that even a professional tracker can’t follow us.”
“Why are you messing with our trail at all? Don’t the bad guys already know we’re coming?”
“Our bad guys aren’t necessarily the only fish in the pond out here.”
“Oh, good Lord. Are you saying we may have to fight off other bandits before we reach our own personal bandits?”
He grinned widely at that one. “Something like that. I’m hoping that the very act of halfway hiding our trail will deter the casual bandit from fooling with us. There are some truly serious bad guys out here, and I expect the local yokels will want to avoid tangling with the big sharks.”
“So you’re basically trying to make our trail look like a…a big shark’s.”
“Exactly.” He beamed at her.
“You live in a very strange universe, John Hollister.”
His grin widened as he dragged a bundle of twigs across a patch of dirt. “Welcome to my world, darlin’.”
Geez. No wonder the guy was a mess. Except he didn’t strike her as the type to fall apart. Most of the time he was so strong and centered and mature, like he solidly knew who and what he was and why he existed. But then she’d catch a glimpse of that shadow in his eyes, a vast, empty place of pain and loss. Something really terrible had happened to him. She almost would rather not know what could have rattled a man like him so badly. She was by no means qualified to take on his demons, but unfortunately, she might be all John had. She wouldn’t presume to consider herself his soul mate or the love of his life, but she was his lover for now. Hopefully, that would count for something. Like it or not, it was up to her alone to throw the guy a lifeline.
She waited until they’d hiked all day and half the night and had crawled once more into a tiny pup-tent affair that John had rigged up. It was drizzling on and off outside, but he’d managed to find them a dry spot to lie down and had rigged the tarp to keep the rain off them. Clever man. Handy to have around.
To his credit and to her encouragement, he lay down first and then stretched an arm out to her, offering his shoulder for her to sleep on. Given the sharp bite to the air tonight, she was all over cuddling up to his big, warm body.
Once she had her arm and a leg tossed across him, trapping him in place, she launched her first life line at him.
She murmured casually, “How did you get shot, John?”
He turned to stone beneath her. Right there, a full-body transformation to granite. Cold and hard and unyielding. His silence was deafening.
“You need to tell someone. And hey, you’ve already shared your body and soul with me.” She added winningly, “I know about your guilt problem and I haven’t run away.”
“You can’t run away,” he bit out.
“Maybe. But I could also have pretended not to notice it, or I could have blown it off as no big deal. But I called it what it is and I still don’t hate you.”
The tension humming through him was terrible. Yup. She’d put her finger exactly on the heart of the issue. As she’d suspected. Whatever incident had injured his back was also the source of his emotional wounds. He’d linked the two together. Physical pain and emotional pain all in one big messy jumble in his noggin.
He let out a long, shuddering sigh. It wasn’t an answer, but it was a good sign that the granite had thawed to, oh, brick.
“Talk to me, John. Tell me whatever you want to about your back, about how you hurt it, or how it feels now, something. But you’ve got to start talking. If you bottle this up inside you forever, it’ll eat you alive.” She propped
