Page 59 of Justice for Francesca

He nodded.

“No need to say more.”

“No, I… I think I want to tell you, but not here. Will you stay?”

“I intended to. If you wanted me to, that is.”

“Sweetheart, at the risk of scaring you completely out of my life, I don’t want you to ever leave. That’s a discussion for when this is all over though.”

Part of him wanted to ask about the day’s events, but most of him needed to forget about it for just a little longer. To ignore the reason for her even being in his life a second time and what was keeping her here. Eventually, it would all be resolved, and then he’d have to worry about where she was going, if she’d be back, and what that all meant for them. Right now, though, he just needed their bubble to remain intact.

He helped her slide off his lap and redress herself so they could head downstairs to his apartment. Standing, he tucked himself away, and he realized he hadn’t used a condom. When she moved to step toward the elevator, he put his hand on her arm. “Francesca, we didn’t use any protection. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Do I need to call and get you something?”

“I’m on birth control,” she assured him. “Again, wasn’t the plan when I came here, but I wasn’t that far gone that I didn’t realize what we were doing.”

“Healing my pain with great sex?” he teased.

“It was good,” she agreed. “But it will be even greater later on.”

She started toward the elevator once again, leaving him stunned for a moment. When the elevator doors opened, it jolted him back into movement. Joining her in the carriage, he threaded his fingers with hers for the one-floor ride to his apartment, then dragged her through the space to the bathroom.

After a quick checkof her stitches and a shower, he helped her back into his bed. He lay with his head and shoulders against the headboard, and her body was pulled in tight to his side, their arms around each other. Francesca said nothing, which he appreciated. Deciding to share this part of his life with her was big enough. Actually doing it required a certain amount of mental preparedness that today had not really allowed for, but clearly, his reactions meant that he didn’t have a choice to wait.

“You know the basics of my assignments with the Raiders. The core of our group was together for probably somewhere between ten and twelve years. People floated in and out, but there were nine of us who were incredibly tight. On our lastdeployment, we lost three guys. We were ambushed in a zone that had supposedly been cleared of rebels. Needless to say, that info was not verified, but our commanding officer sent us in anyway. Someone set off a flash-bang to disorient us, and they tried to pick us off one by one in the confusion.

“I blew an eardrum in the initial attack. Didn’t feel any pain until everything was done. Adrenaline, I guess. Keys, our drone operator got everything scrambled like eggs inside his head, so he must have been extremely close to a second flashbang’s hit. He was the newest amongst us… barely twenty years old. And Mayhem… he died trying to protect Keys. His death was the worst to take. He had the sweetest fiancée back home—that was a complete and total shitshow situation—and a twin brother twenty feet behind him on the trail, shot but alive.”

“How the hell did twins end up in the same unit? Isn’t family together a no-no?”

“I don’t know all the ins and outs of it. Chaos wasn’t with us all the time. He floated in and out over the years. I had a feeling they said he was a Marine but that he was really something else. We only saw him on a certain type of mission.”

Her arm snaked across his belly and hugged him tighter to her. Her lips pressed against his pec. Other than those two gestures, she lay silently at his side, waiting for him to continue.

“Loud bangs or light flashes bring on flashbacks. I tend not to go in the magic room at Elysium. It’s not that I can’t go in there, but Cosmos usually goes with me, or Michael does, in case I happen to drift away.”

His chin brushed back and forth against her forehead. “Tilly though. Before that box opened, I thought I’d seen the worst humanity could do to another person. It was the swords. Honcho had tripped some sort of horrific booby trap where handmade spears ran his body right through, which is how the arm severed. I don’t know if he bled out from the loss of his arm, or if he diedfrom the trauma of the multiple impalings, and in the long run, I guess it doesn’t really matter. We wouldn’t have been able to save him.

“Anyway, I’d had a couple of other flashbacks during the course of the day. Vomited after two of them. Panic attacks after all three.”

He’d said nothing for the longest time, so Francesca asked the question he knew was coming. “What do you do to come out of them? Are they always that bad?”

“No. I think I’m one of the luckier people. Most of the time, I slip in, they’re momentary, and I slip out. I typically break out into a cold sweat, and my heart ramps up. I can usually wrestle them back down quickly with just deep breathing, but today…”

“Today was too close of a memory. Too much stimuli.”

“Yeah,” he murmured. This part of what he needed to tell her would be the worst. He had no idea how she’d react. “Those three separate panic attacks. Afterward, I walked into the bathroom and opened my medical supply drawer.”

“The one you were in the night I was stabbed?”

“Yup.” He ground his teeth together and refused to apologize. It was just the way things had been. “The first year home? It’s an understatement to say I wasn’t coping well. A lot of military people struggle returning to the civilian world because they no longer have the structure they're used to. I was no different, especially with what happened before I retired. It didn’t take long before I was spiraling badly. The military gave me rules, regulations, procedures, orders. Everything was tightly controlled, and at home? It was a free-for-all.

“Sure, I suffer from PTSD. I sense most military who served in combat zones do. But it wasn’t even the trauma of losing Honcho, Mayhem, and Keys. Yes, I grieved. Yes, I still relive their deaths over and over in flashbacks. I’m sure all of my unit does, to some degree. We were tight, and their deaths hit ushard. As a medic, it was my job to take broken bodies and heal them. It was something I could control. But I felt like I failed my brothers because they were injuries Icouldn’tcontrol. I couldn’t reattach an arm in the middle of the jungle. I couldn’t close a hole in a chest that was almost as big as a man’s head. And I couldn’t unscramble the soup someone’s brain became because of a grenade. Fuck… all because some jackwagon had gambling debts. I couldn’t control that either.”

He sighed. “Then I came home to the girlfriend’s issues who thought that marriage and a family would lead to normalcy. The military was trying to convince me to re-up. My family was trying to help me recover, but they had no clue what I was dealing with or how to help, and how could they? It was impossible for them to even begin to understand what I’d seen and done in twenty years. I was being torn in a million directions. No matter what I did, I was hurting someone with my choices, and because I couldn’t control how others felt, I felt even more lost. Being who and how I am, it was killing me that no matter what I did, I was useless to the people I loved, as well as myself.

“To this day, I’m not even sure when the drug use started. Those first months home are such a fog in my memory, I’m not sure I ever will know. Drugs, however, I could control to a certain extent. My medical training allowed me to understand what the effects were. I knew how much I could take. When I felt myself begin to slip into panic or despair, the drugs evened things out. The illusion of control.

“Thank God Cosmos was paying attention. He’d been my best friend all through high school, and we kept in touch my entire military career. We spent time together during my leaves. The first time he found me on the brink of an overdose, he made it his mission in life to extract my head from my ass and offered me a chance to learn to regain control. He introduced me toBDSM as a means to show me that I did still have control. I’d only suppressed how to master it. People within that community have needs. Needs I could help them meet. It gave me a sense of purpose again. A direction that allowed me to once again help people. The Library helped me turn that helpless feeling back into a sense of control so that I could come back to myself.”

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