Page 80 of Stay with Me

There was another toe-curling laugh. “You’re not tired now, are you?”

“Yes,” I lied. “I’m exhausted.”

“Is that the reason why you’ve been squirming around since I got into bed?”

I pried my eyes open with a big, dramatic sigh. “You’re not tired?”

“Not anymore,” he replied, and oh wow, his voice did that deep thing that made my lips part. “You doing okay with everything?”

Aw damn, now the mushiness was back in my chest. That was sweet of him to ask. God, he was so nice, and I wasn’t even drinking tequila, and I wanted to tell him. “Yes. And no. I mean, it could be worse.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” The bed did a little jiggle, and I could tell he was closer. I could feel his warmth under the covers. “I know of a couple of places where your mom might be. We can check them out tomorrow before we head to the bar.”

I nodded. “That ... that would be good.”

“And Reece will make sure Mack isn’t around in a week. You don’t have to worry about him.”

“But I have to worry about Isaiah?” I asked in a quiet voice.

The bed moved again as Jax rose onto his elbow. He was close, not touching me—shirtless—and I could feel his eyes on me, even in the dark. “We should find your mom.”

I got my answer without the question even being answered. My lips were back to being pressed together, and there was this lump in the base of my throat. Mom ... what had she gotten herself into? Needing to focus on something else, I thought back to when Reece was here. “You saved Reece’s life?”

Several seconds passed, and then Jax settled behind me, closer yet again. I could almost feel his legs behind mine. “It’s not really bedtime material.”

I figured that. “I want to know.”

“Do you really?”

Asking myself that same question, I realized that I really did want to know—to know more about him. “Yes.”

There was one more pause. “We were in Afghanistan together, a part of a scouting group. There were at least twenty of us and we’d done it so many times it was like habit. All of us were on point, but we weren’t worried, but that’s the thing about habits. They can break you, too.”

I bit down on my lower lip, unable to imagine the kind of world he’d seen.

“We were outside a small village—a village that looked like any number of them we scouted in the past, but it was different. Turned out to be heavily armed, and not all of them were a part of the cause. There was a roadside bomb.”

I flinched. Oh my God, a bomb? You didn’t live in America for the last decade or so and not be familiar with the destruction a roadside bomb, even the small ones, could wreak.

“It was an ambush,” he added quietly, almost like an afterthought. “These things happen a lot. One minute everything is going smoothly, and then the next, the whole world is blowing up. Our group was scattered. Reece took a shot to the gut. I got him out of there.”

The next breath I took felt funny. “You got him out of there?”

“Yeah.”

And that was all he said about that, but I knew there had to be more. It wasn’t as simple as getting someone out of there when bombs were going off and people were shooting at you. “Was ... was that something that kept you awake at night?”

He didn’t answer for a long moment. “Some nights ... I dreamed that I didn’t get to Reece in time. Then other nights, I saw the things that went down that day. Crazy how the brain holds on to those kinds of images.”

My chest started to ache. “And whiskey helped with that?”

“Sometimes,” he murmured. “It sort of dulled everything—dulled the detail.”

I wanted to ask more, but then he asked a question that caught me off guard.

“Did you like doing the whole beauty queen thing?”

My eyes went wide. “I ...” I didn’t want to answer the question because I didn’t like to even think about it, but I doubted Jax liked to talk about people shooting at him and bombs, so I owed him. “I liked it sometimes.”

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