The Edge Of Courage

barest hint of jasmine.

It was dinner, he reminded himself. That’s all. Only dinner. Nothing was expected of him. There’d be no repercussions if his behavior wasn’t exactly normal.

He could get through this.

He looked at Mandy. She seemed made of shimmering light, backlit by the setting sun as she was. Unreal. He looked beyond her, down the rolling hills to the town several miles away. Maybe he wasn’t really here. Maybe this was a dream.

A rare, good dream.

He set his hat on the porch railing, sending a glance toward the pasture he’d worked earlier. If this were a dream, he should be able to conjure up his Zaviyar, running toward him on short, toddling legs, squealing with the joy of seeing his father, his arms outstretched as he reached to be picked up.

The boy was precocious as hell. By the time he was two years old, he could speak in full sentences. Rocco wondered what more he’d learned in the time they’d been apart. God, he missed him. He blinked, then saw only the bare field. The space was silent and still. And empty.

A nightmare then.

Rocco sighed as the vision of his son evaporated. This was not a dream, but what had become his life. He sat woodenly in his chair when Mandy took her seat. She was talking, but he still didn’t hear her. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. He couldn’t handle sympathy or questions or concern or anger or any fucking thing.

He had to go back to Afghanistan. Soon. He couldn’t tackle the trip in the state he was in. He focused on his plate. He had to get better, get free of the cloud infecting his mind. If he didn’t, he’d get himself and Zavi killed.

“Your boy’s dead, Rocco. He died in the explosion,” his doctor had told him at the field hospital where they’d taken him after the hit on the cave. “You’ve got to accept that. He’s gone.” Rocco couldn’t accept it. He still felt him.

Mandy filled his salad bowl, then served him a wedge of lasagna and offered him the breadbasket. He looked at the basket but didn’t take a roll. She set one on his plate, then filled their tea glasses before serving herself similar portions. She began to eat. He thought she was still making conversation, but he didn’t look at her. His skin felt uncomfortable, like he’d put it on backward. There was no place about the table that he could rest his gaze, no place that it wouldn’t get tangled in the loud, crazy colors.

Silence settled about them. He wasn’t certain if it was the unnatural silence that clogged his mind, or if the grasshoppers had really stopped snapping about, the birds had stopped chattering, and Mandy had stopped talking.

He looked across the table. She’d set her silverware on her plate and was simply watching her hands in her lap, her shoulders a little slumped.

He sighed. This was such a mistake. He shouldn’t have let her force him into this. She’d made a feast for him, and it would all be wasted. He sat as still and silently as she did, waiting for what would come next.

“What’s going on, Rocco?” she asked after a moment.

He pushed his chair back and stood up. His napkin was in his hand. When had he put it in his lap? He didn’t look at her. “I can’t eat. I can’t. I’m sorry.”

He took a step away from the table, but she was faster as she moved to block him from the stairs. “Why, Rocco?”

“Mandy, don’t do this.” He did look at her then, into her fresh, emerald gaze.

“You have to eat. Not much, but something.”

“I ate this morning. I ate a lot.”

“That was this morning. You jogged-what, six miles? And put in a long, hard day. Now it’s this evening and you need to eat again.”

“I can’t.”

She held her ground, waiting for an explanation. “Help me to understand.”

“I need my hunger.”

Mandy frowned. “Why?”

Rocco looked beyond her to the wide, circular parking area. He looked at the fields to his right and the town in the far distance to his left, looked anywhere but at her and her silent demand for the truth. Shit. She was going to make him say it.

He shoved a hand through his hair and faced her. “It’s the only way I know I’m not hallucinating. It’s the only thing I know is real.”

She blinked, obviously expecting him to say just about anything but that. “If your mind is in a place where the real is unreal and the unreal is real, can’t you conjure up hunger, too? How can you trust that your hunger is real?”

“Jesus, don’t start fucking with my head. It’s mangled enough.”

“I know.” She nodded. “So let’s do this differently.” She studied him. “I need you to trust me.”

Trust her. What did that mean? He’d seen that same look in her eyes when she worked with Kitano, always calm, steady as a rock. Relief leaked in through the cracks in his wall, soothing the ragged parts of him. He wanted to trust her, trust someone, because God knew he couldn’t trust himself.

He nodded.

“Okay. Sit here on the step.” She sent him a look. “Please.”

He did as she requested. She went to the table and picked up his salad bowl, plate, and glass, then sat next to him on the porch.

“I’m going to feed you. I want you to take as much as you can.”

Rocco lurched to his feet, powered by the anger that flashed through him. “I’m not a goddamned baby.”

She looked up at him from where she sat on the weathered, whitewashed boards. “I’m well aware that you’re a man.” A blush crept from her chest to her neck as she spoke. He watched the color blossom across her skin, feeling a corresponding heat in his body-but moving in an opposite direction. He gazed at her, wondering how to interpret what he was seeing, what he was feeling.

Curious, he sat back down. She cut a small bite of lasagna and fed it to him. He chewed it as he watched her. When he swallowed, she gave him another bite. She smiled at him. “Do you like it?”

He liked the way she was looking at him. “Yes.”

She gave him a bite of the salad. “Does it taste okay?”

“It tastes cold.”

She fed him a forkful of lasagna. “And this? How does it taste? It was my grandmother’s recipe.”

“Warm.”

“Those are temperatures, not flavors.”

“Mandy,” he sighed, “food doesn’t taste like anything to me right now. Just temperatures and textures.”

“Oh.” She looked at the plate she held. “I suppose that’s part of your not having an appetite.” She served him another bite.

He took the fork from her. Cutting a small bite, he fed it to her, watching as her lips closed over the tines. He slowly drew the fork from her mouth, feeling the pull of her lips against the thin strips of stainless steel. Again, the warm flush spread across her skin. He swallowed, anticipating the next bite she would feed him. He suddenly realized he’d sit here and eat the whole goddamned lasagna with her if she’d keep looking at him as she was.

Mandy took the fork back and used the side of it to cut another bite. Instead of lifting it to him, she pushed it around on the plate as if she were preoccupied with a thought. He waited, knowing she would broach the topic that was bothering her once she found the right words.

“Rocco, what did you do in the war?” she finally asked.

“I was a linguist.”

She lifted the bite of lasagna to him. “What does a linguist do?”

He watched her as he chewed. How would she judge him if he were to tell her how he’d spent the last decade. Three years in training, then seven in the field? “They do different things. Translate stuff.”

She paused in feeding him another bite. “You were Special Forces, like Kit, weren’t you? A linguist in the Green Berets doesn’t just translate, does he?”

“I wasn’t in the Special Forces.” Nor was Kit, but she didn’t have a need to know that. He considered how to