Out of every fight and war that I’ve been in, this is the hardest.
Finally, I breathe. Ready.
As ready as I’ll ever be.
“It’s been fifteen years since I left the Army. Three months before that something happened that made me leave. The Taliban and all the other petty fucking warlords were on their back foot at the time, but things were steadily heating up. They’d just had their presidential elections the year before and that year, 2005, they were electing parliament and every fucking warlord wanted a piece of the power and the Taliban was out to fuck everything up. My unit was deployed near Kandahar. It was hell in every fucking sense of the word.”
I stop.
Even now, all these years removed, I can still smell the dust and grit of that blasted fucking wasteland. My skin prickles, hands clench into fists, and I take several deep breaths before I feel like I can continue on.
Just a thought brings on the feelings of war, and I have to fight for my life to keep from being swallowed by it.
I teeter on the edge of that black abyss.
If I didn’t have Addie here, it’d swallow me.
But maybe, with her, I can get a handle on it.
“My best friend and I served in the same unit. His name was Derek. Derek Mayfield. He lived three houses down from me back in Marietta, Georgia. We were just two fucking kids who used to ride our mountain bikes through Kennesaw Mountain Park and had our first beers Junior year of high school at Blake Fairchild’s graduation barbecue. Just two dumb fucking kids who happened to be excellent soldiers. In boot camp, he earned the nickname ‘Snake’ because he got spooked by a kingsnake that he thought was a coral snake. Screamed like you wouldn’t believe. So we kept sneaking snakes into his bunk at night. It was our duty. And it got him every time. Back then, I was just Logan Wood — soldier in the US Army Rangers. A dumb kid, a decent soldier, and someone who had the privilege of serving with his best friend,” I say, and I can’t help smiling at the memory. The snake prank got him every single time, and he had a hilarious scream. “So there we were, a couple of Rangers in Kandahar. We’d served during the initial invasion of Afghanistan and then we found ourselves back there all over again, stalking the smuggler’s trails in from Pakistan, hunting militants in fucking gorges and goddamn desert canyons.”
I look at her.
She’s watching me with her full attention, with nothing but concern and care in her eyes.
“You want to know what hell is?” I say, my voice burning in my throat. “Hell is weeks upon weeks of nothing but baking in the sun while you’re stuck in a fucking box that some fuckhead desk jockey decided was good enough to be an operating base. Weeks interspersed with moments, minutes, hours, of combat with people who think it is their holy fucking purpose to kill you. Hell is making it through that until it’s nearly the end of your deployment, when you’re out on patrol with your best friend, already talking about what you’re going to do when you get back home. Home. The land of beer, barbeques, friends, family. Love and life and everything good. It’s what you fight for and it’s what keeps you going. And then your friend thinks he sees something. So you steer the humvee off where he’s pointing, even though it’s off course, outside of your mission parameters, you do it because you trust him. He’s your best friend. And you listen to him. You listen, even though you fucking shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have. And then it happens. Oh, fuck. Fuck. It fucking hurts.”
And I can’t go any further.
My voice catches, digs claws into my throat to keep from coming out and, even when I look at her — the woman who is the center of my fucking world — I see his face. See it as it was in those last moments. Shredded. Skin torn away. Bones cracked. Teeth — white stained with blood — shine out of the hollow mangle that used to be his mouth. That mouth that used to laugh at my jokes. Scream at snakes. That spoke for the best friend I had since I was a little kid.
I loved him like a brother.
And I can still feel the wounds. Still feel the shrapnel in my shoulder. Still feel the heart-twisting terror that ripped me apart when the bomb went off. Endless pain.
Adella puts her arms around me, gives me a hug that helps me find a center, something to hold on to amid the sea of pain I’m drowning in.
“Snake. Logan. I. Am. Here. For. You,” she repeats. Forceful. A command. Words that cut through the fog in my mind. “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”
How the fuck did I find a woman with a heart like hers?
And why does it have to be her? The one woman that I can not have, no matter how bad I want her.
I push that thought aside. There’s time for that later. I need to bare my soul to her. To the first person who’s shown that they care with all their heart.
“I should’ve told him no. It was off our designated patrol route. It was against orders. But he swore he saw something, and we both thought we were experienced enough to handle anything. So I listened. We took a turn, we went after what he thought he saw, and then an IED ripped apart the humvee and took my best friend’s life and put
