Page 77 of Mariposa
“Truck all fueled up?” he asks, chewing his gum harder. His mustache lurches upward as he chews through a cheeky grin.
“Yup.”
Reaching into my pants for a cigarette, Booker catches up to my side as the sun sets. We walk toward our housing area while a cool, dry breeze blows through us, and I gaze at the mountains with a pink and purple sky above them.
“And I’m guessing your balls are empty?”
I stop in my tracks, giving him a death glare. I don’t need to pull off my sunglasses for him to know he’s pushing it. Clenching my jaw, I continue to narrow my eyes at him while he raises his hands, surrendering the topic while chuckling. My silence is his warning.
“I’m going to fucking kill you if you don’t shut the fuck up,” I snarl.
Bringing the cigarette between my teeth, I light it.
He shrugs.
“Anyways, I came to find you because Delta wants to pull a few off the team for a humanitarian mission tomorrow. It should only be a couple of hours.”
Blowing out the smoke, I shake my head.
“I don’t like it.”
I have a bad feeling.
“I don’t, either,” he shrugs, grabbing a cigarette from my pack.
Twisting my neck side to side, my bones pop as that familiar stress of war creeps into my veins.
“Violet isn’t going,” I say, taking another hit. Booker quirks a brow at me. “If she volunteers to go when you announce it tomorrow to the team, you make sure she’s not on that list.”
I don’t want her to go anywhere if I’m not there.
“Roger that, Master Sergeant.”
Everyone isat the pit tonight. Drinking, watching movies, shooting the shit, and I’m in my office alone, going crazy. I enjoy being alone, and I’ve gotten used to it since my divorce. Being in the military for so long, I’ve adapted to a quiet, alienating lifestyle. My mother and siblings live in Colorado, and I’ve been stationed on the East Coast for as long as I’ve been enlisted. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them, but they send a care package my way for each deployment.
I’ve never cared about any of the women in the past I’ve fucked from time to time. I didn’t care to know their names or if they were messing around behind someone’s back. It’s quite frankly none of my business, and I’ve never developed feelings for another person since my ex-wife.
But Violet Isla has ruined me by giving me a taste.
Who the fuck is she engaged to?
Flipping my next wooden project over, I concentrate harder as I use a small blade to get the details just right. Carving wood always relaxes me, but it’s not easing the need to know what’s going on in her pretty little head. Marriage is an eight-letter word of straight bullshit. It’s an eight-letter word of false hope because promising yourself to another person is as utterly depressing as it sounds. If I can stop another person, namely Violet, from staying clear of that false commitment, I’ll do it.
With each passing second, I grow more stressed. I keep carving hard, deep, concentrating, and lost in thought as Johnny Cash’s rendition of “Hurt” continues to play. My knee bounces up and down fast, anxiously.
Fuck, I need another drink.
Grabbing my full glass of whiskey, I down it in one go. The liquid burns down my throat fast, and I place the glass back down harder than I should on my desk.
There isn’t a high divorce rate in special operations for no reason. Who wants to wait months to a year for their partner to come back home? Who wants to put themselves through lonely nights and days in a duty station far from home, worrying if they’re dead or alive?
As I cut deeper and faster, the song slowly feels as though the volume is being lowered, and I’m back in North Carolina as a twenty-four-year-old again, remembering the day I lost my reason why.
“Please...don’t do this.”I breathe out as my throat threatens to close on me. The look in Penny’s eyes tells me that she’s checked out a long time ago, and this is what I’ve come back home to.
An empty house. An empty wife.
"I'm sorry, Kade. I'm done waiting around. I'm done crying myself to sleep.” She looks around the empty house before she pins her eyes back to mine like she’s ready to leave. “I resent…” she pauses with a deadpan expression. There’s a crisp, cold cut to her words, leaving me in a state of desperation. I don’t recognize her or this new tone of voice she’s using when she looks at me. This is not my high school sweetheart. This is a stranger who can’t stand being a Special Forces wife for another second.
