Page 119 of Cowboy SEAL Homecoming

Still that pleasant smile didn’t leave her face, even as she perched herself on the arm of the well-worn couch. “You didn’t come to talk, but maybe you’d be okay with listening for a little bit?”

Alex shrugged. He was here to prove a point after all—that he didn’t need this. Why not listen?

“See that picture?” she said, pointing to the fireplace mantel and a picture of a man in an air force uniform.

“My father,” Monica said conversationally. “You remind me of him.”

“All us military guys alike?”

“Not by a long shot. But he was a leader, much like you.”

Alex didn’t know what to say to that, especially since he remembered all too well her saying her father had come back from Desert Storm a changed man.

“It took me a long time to understand him. A lot of years, a lot of maturity, and a lot of studying and working as a therapist. It’s a strange thing to help people because of the person you couldn’t help, and a stranger thing to finally understand him through other people.”

Which didn’t make any sense to him. He’d always understood his father. A good man. An uncomplicated man. Said what he meant or said nothing at all.

It hurt a little, because even in this mental fog Alex knew he wasn’t being honest. Not with the people around him, and not with himself.

He was a mess. He was broken. He was unfixable.

“My dad, and a lot of men like him, survive the military thinking everything is under their control. The good things were because of him, and bad things were really because of him. Because if he had to admit that shit happened because of bad timing or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he’d have to admit and accept he had no control out there, and that’s fatal to a soldier, isn’t it?”

Each word hit with startling accuracy, like bullets. Piercing through the skin and the heart. Alex stood completely still, staring at the picture of a stranger, but he felt every blow.

“He held on to his control even when he was retired, because it was his comfort zone. His safety blanket. Because thinking we have control, for those of us who want it, is safe. It’s easy. It’s a hell of a lot harder to realize it doesn’t matter what we do or decide or want, the universe doesn’t give a shit.”

It was that damn same realization again. That it didn’t matter. That he couldn’t fix anything. That Monica was absolutely right. The universe around him definitely did not give a shit what he wanted, what he was trying to do.

“So you’ve got this all coiled inside you,” she continued, curling her fingers into a fist and tapping it to her stomach, dark-blue eyes making unerring contact. And it didn’t escape Alex’s notice she’d gone from using my father or they to you.

Still, he didn’t stop her. He didn’t know how.

“And you push it down, and you control it, but see, your brain isn’t under your control. Not completely. Not when you sleep, so that’s when it kicks your ass. And it will. It just will—until you stop trying to control it into submission.”

How?he wanted to ask, and yet the word wouldn’t form.

“It’s hard to convince a man who survived that way that it isn’t your world to shape,” she said, and maybe it was the emotion in her voice that kept Alex from stopping her. “That you can’t keep everyone safe, and you can’t always be fine. I tried to convince him he was not worthless without a mission. You are not pointless. I think that is the hardest thing for men in your position to understand and accept.”

Alex felt a lump in his throat, and when he swallowed, it didn’t dissolve. With no mission, he was pointless. Hell, it felt like with a mission, he was worthless. He didn’t know what to do if he wasn’t saving people. If he wasn’t fixing the bunkhouse or building this foundation. If he was doing that, he wasn’t this broken thing.

This broken thing that seemed to envelop him deeper and deeper, stronger and stronger, until he could barely function in his denial. Because he wasn’t a stupid man, even if he was a stubborn one.

Things weren’t right. He wasn’t right, and he didn’t know how to change that. He’d run into gunfire and hell, but he’d always, always run from all this emotion inside of him.

“So that’s all it takes to fix a person?” he asked hoarsely. “Accept you’re not pointless without a mission?” How the hell would he ever do that?

“I can’t make you who you were before, Alex. No therapist could,” she said gently. “But none of us are what we were before war touched our lives. I can’t fix you. You can’t fix you in the military sense of solving a problem. You are not a problem. You are not defective, and believe it or not, therapy isn’t here to fix you. It’s here to give you the tools to deal with the way you’ve changed. This, here, is you.”

Thunder rumbled in the distance, lightning flashing in the windows, but the rain hadn’t started yet. He had time.

“There are so many things you have to offer. You don’t have to be perfect, or feel in control, to offer them. It’s a tough lesson, and you can’t expect it to happen overnight.”

It was those words more than all of the rest that cracked something open inside of him that had been locked tight for a long time. Maybe since before his navy days. Maybe since his mom had died. To consider his father hadn’t wanted him to be in control after Mom died, he’d just wanted him there. To consider Gabe and Jack didn’t need him to be the perfect leader anymore, they might just need him to be a friend. To consider Becca might…mean what she said. That she didn’t need him to be all right, she just needed him to let her in.

“I know you’re no stranger to hard work, Alex. Healing is hard work. It will take time, but if you allow yourself to open up to the conflict you’re feeling instead of shutting it all down, some of that healing is going to happen.”

Then Monica smiled a real smile, none of the fake-pleasantry stuff. “Love is also a great help in that department. The giving of it and the receiving of it. You have a lot of people who love you.”

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