Page 8 of Hold on Tight

“You wouldn’t really want that, now, would you? Near stranger, gimpy leg? Not exactly the best raw babysitting material.”

“You forgot grumpy asshole,” she said.

Again, a flicker of something behind his eyes. “I was about to get to that,” he said.

“You know what? Forget it.” She reached into her purse and pulled out an old credit-card receipt and scribbled her cell number on it. “If you change your mind about getting to know Sam …”

She held it out. He hesitated a moment, then took it.

She felt Jake watching as she walked away.

Chapter 3

He held the piece of paper, still tightly folded, and looked through the window at the boy and his mother.

She was still beautiful. Butter-yellow hair, pink-cheeked fair skin, and a milkmaid’s voluptuousness. He could remember how much he’d wanted her, wanted big handfuls of her, the satin feel of her naked body. How much he’d wanted to bury himself in her.

For weeks now, for months, nothing had penetrated his sexual deadness. His doctor had said to be patient, that the cocktail of medications he’d spent weeks taking on and off could mess him up for a while. That, and survivor’s guilt, and the depression that tended to go with it. Whatever the reason, it had felt as if nothing could reach down to where the real impulse lay, as if the neurons that had once connected his vision and his desire had been snipped.

Now those same neurons sparked and his dick stirred like something coming out of a long hibernation.

I want to fuck her. Still.

It had been so long since he’d wanted anything, it caught him off guard. And as if that realization had propped open a door, it let in the darkest of all the dark thoughts:Mike will never do that again. Not that. Not anything.

He squelched it—the desireandthe reminder that his friend was dust.

He wanted to look away, to break her spell. But he made himself look at Mira because then he wouldn’t have to look at the boy. Because as much as he didn’t want to still want Mira, hereallydidn’t want to know how it would feel to look at the boy.

He unfolded the piece of paper she’d pressed on him. Her name, first and last, and cell number. And then one more word:Sam.

He’d wondered if she’d written something more.You’re his father, asshole. Get with the program. But it was only the series of neatly printed numbers, separated with little dots instead of dashes.

He should have known Mira wouldn’t do anything the ordinary way. She was a girl who’d done a gutsy—if risky—thing when she’d taken her clothes off at the lake all those years ago. She was a woman who’d raised a seven-year-old boy by herself.We don’t need anything from you. We’ve done perfectly fine without you up to this point.

She was a woman who wasn’t afraid to call out a guy who was treating her like crap. She’d called him a grumpy asshole.Guilty as charged.

He remembered, with a pang, how he’d rejected her plea for a relationship. When she’d gotten out of his car in front of her house, he’d almost jumped from the car and run after her. Called her back. Begged her forgiveness, begged for another chance. Begged to have back that last week he’d forfeited.

She snuck a look in his direction, and he cast his gaze away from hers and crumpled the paper so she couldn’t see that he’d opened it.

Even if that boy in there was his, there were good reasons for Jake to stay away from them. The time he’d spend in physical therapy this morning was the only plan he had for himself today. If this day stayed true to form, he’d spend the rest of it sleeping. Or not-drinking. Not-drinking was an activity that now occupied huge portions of his life, the legacy of watching his father drink himself to death and his mother rebuild her life afterward, stone-cold sober. Jake, for his part, doled out Gentleman Jack whiskey to himself as if he were a stingy, hostile psychiatrist prescribing medication. Watching the clock as the numbers gathered themselves toward five p.m. Allocating doses at regular intervals through the evening. Carefully cutting himself off before he could become a drunk ex-soldier. A drunkgimpyex-soldier.

He was allex. There was nothing to him now, no present, no future.

He’d once heard some football players interviewed about what they’d do if they injured themselves and couldn’t play anymore. They’d been smart, articulate guys who’d given plenty of good answers to the other interview questions, but when the reporter asked that question, they’d gotten deer-in-the-headlights looks on their faces and gone silent. There wasn’t a good answer. What would you do if your reason for being, the thing you were both mysteriously good at and most loved to do, wasn’t there for you?

When he’d decided that he could make something positive out of his life, that he could do something thatmeantsomething, it had been an impulse more than a reasoned decision. It had been a goal stitched together from other pieces of knowledge about himself. He was a tough three-season high-school athlete—football, basketball, baseball—not a superstar at any of them, but strong, varsity, a contributor. Coaches commented on his tirelessness. On his discipline. On his ability to step up and lead or blend as a team player, depending on what the situation called for.

He’d been sent home from school on 9/11, and he sat in his parents’ living room and watched, transfixed, as the planes hit over and over again in repeated news clips. As people jumped, like insects, like toys, improbably, impossibly. As paper floated up like some terrible reverse rain. As the towers collapsed under their own weight. He’d sworn he’d do something. Not just hand wringing and mourning, but something concrete, something big.

Even when he’d enlisted, he hadn’t known for sure that it would feel like he’d found his purpose. That being a soldier would feel likehim. But once he fought, he knew. He was meant for it.

That part of him was dead now, a much neater and keener incision than the mess that the bomb blast had made of his foot and lower leg. He’d lost his sense that there was meaning in what he was doing, his conviction that he was doing the right thing, his willingness to trade lives for lives. The man he’d fought beside was dead, and he would never again be certain that what they’d done was worth what they’d lost.

The thing was, when you killed the part of you that knew your purpose, that possessed that sharp, youthful certainty, there was very little left. Numbness. The sick acid panic that he could never shake. The world through a fog of purposelessness and, when he permitted himself, Gentleman Jack.

He squeezed his fist tighter, crushing the paper into a hard knot.

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