Page 39 of Doing Life

“I hate that you’re hurt. I wanted it just to be me.” Lance dropped his shoulders. “I feel like shit that I didn’t ask.”

“You were caught up in your own shit, and it was big. I wish…” Sloan chewed on his bottom lip a second. “I wish that you could have let me help, but I’m trying to understand why you couldn’t. I’m trying to be here for you now, not in a ‘oh, I want to take care of you’, or ‘oh I feel sorry for you’ way. Fuck, man, I just love and miss you. I missed hanging out, and hanging out with you now? It feels right. Itisright, because we’re together. I still love you. I still like this—just being together and bullshitting and knowing that I’m with my person. I missed my person.”

Lance nodded, once. “Me too, so bad. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a shit-ton of hard things in the last year—last few years even. That was the hardest. I dreamed for months that I would wake up, and I would be able to see, and you would be sitting there.”

“They wouldn’t let me,” he said.

“No?”

“It’s not like we were married. They wouldn’t let me in, once you said I couldn’t visit.”

“I wish we had been.”

“Had been what?” Sloan didn’t follow.

“Married. I wish we had been. I wish you could have just said, ‘no fucking way’. You know, I never did open my eyesand be able to see again. I never opened my eyes and it was okay.”

“Well, anytime you want to open your eyes and know that I’m right there beside you, all you have to do is say the word. There will never be a time that you call where I am not there. Not so long as I am alive. Not one time.”

“You can say that, but do you really want to take care of a blind guy for the rest of your fucking life, Sloan?”

Sloan blinked. “You’re getting pretty good at taking care of yourself.”

“I’m working on it, but I’ll never be able to drive. I’m not sure I’ll work again.”

“Yeah, I bet you do. Work, not drive.” He chuckled. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does though! I don’t want you to resent me.”

“Babe, you’re putting the cart before the horse.” Sloan started them moving again to catch up with Abby. “I just want to be with you. We can work out all the hard life stuff as we go. We were always both good tacticians.”

Lance snorted. “I don’t feel like I was sometimes.”

“Why?” It didn’t make any sense. Lance had been their medic, the first one in and last one out, absolutely freaking unafraid.

“It doesn’t feel like any of it was real. Not you, not the downtime, but the job, the actual service. They say that’s the PTSD. They say that’s how this works sometimes. It doesn’t feel real.”

It was real. That wasn’t how he handled it. He didn’t guess because he remembered it every second.

“Do you miss being in?”

He shook his head. “God, no. I thought I would, but, I like my job. I like being a cop. Now I feel like I’m doing good things.” He had no idea if he was going to do it forever. He might go to work for a private security firm. Maybe he’dtake a welding class and start making fascinating pieces of art and giant mailboxes.

He didn’t know, but he knew he liked what he was doing right now.

“I can’t decide if I miss being in, or if I just miss who I was when I was in. It’s all so fucked up and melded together. It doesn’t matter, you know?”

Sloan could see that. No matter what, none of them were the same people they’d been when they went into the service. Lance was just a huge example of the difference between when a man enlisted and when he mustered out.

“Makes sense man.” What else was Sloan supposed to say? Some shit was hard. Some shit was easy.

“Did you see it when it happened? Like did you see it all?”

Sloan froze.

Because he had. He’d seen every fucking second as if it were in slow motion.

They’d been clearing out some rubble trying to get to a school where there were families needing medical attention, their vehicles lined up along the road.

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