Page 126 of Preacher Man

“I would never have known you had PTSD, so I think you’re managing it as fine as you can, Preacher. What about this, if we sleep together and it looks like you’re having a nightmare I won’t try to bring you out of it, I’ll go to another room.”

She really wanted them to sleep together.

His head came up, she was pinned with green and curiosity.” You’d take that risk?”

“Yes. I want to be close to you in bed,” she paused. "If that's what you want."

When he only nodded, like words were too big for his tongue to form, she smiled, and leaned over his forearm to kiss his cheek, he caught her face, turned the chaste kiss into something hotter until she was left breathless. She curled her feet under her butt, leaning into his body.

“Will you tell me about Shane?”

******

To tell the story of Shane he had to go back to the beginning. "I was eighteen, fresh out of high school, I scraped by with my GED, I wasn’t what you’d call academic so it was funny my parents assumed I would hit up colleges. I was already disappointing them so why not go the whole way right? I enlisted without telling them, they were furious. I think Ma cried for a week. I was a cocksure kid, imagine that huh?” He smiled across to Ruby. “Thought I knew everything, I was untouchable Teflon. My big brother with his idol walk, finished his four years of college, ready to start in the family construction business, what do you know, the jerk enlisted right alongside to watch out for me." Preacher inhaled air into his tight lungs, why the fuck was he telling this story? He knew how it ended, and no matter how many times he said it the ending always gutted him.

Ghosts sat on his shoulder, weighed down his chest as he continued. "Shane was the better soldier, he took to it like he was born to defend the world, he was just that type of guy, everyone loved him, looked up to him, I fucking ached to be like him so I worked my ass off and I got there, after two tours I made rank, had my own men under my command. Youngest officer they’d had that year.

“When we were due to come home I knew I wasn't ready, everything we'd seen overseas, it changes you, no one can understand unless they were there, it’d worn Shane down, he'd started heavy binge-drinking, I wanted him out, and I thought he was, until he discovered I'd signed for another stint." His smile in remembrance was forced, pained, he felt Ruby's hand touch his forearm.

The gutting wasn't yet, but this memory always hurt him for the fact he'd misled his brother, the man he worshiped above everyone. Shane had only been in the army, to begin with, because of him, he'd no interest before, and it was destroying him. "We fought that time for the first time since we were boys. He was so pissed, but worse, he was sad, we said some hateful shit to each other. He re-signed up that week. Motherfucker didn’t even want to be there anymore, and he stayed because of me."

"He sounds like quite a guy, Asher. To do that for his brother, so you weren't over there alone."

"Yeah. He was the best. And, a dickhead. Who the fuck does that? He should have been at home, making babies with his girl, settling down, using his Captain America cape for good, not trailing around the desert keeping my ass out of trouble."

"What a jerk." She smiled entwining their fingertips. He grabbed on and didn’t let go. “I bet you got into a lot of trouble.” Her hand was a touchstone to the present as he let his mind go back in time.

To that Thursday. An ordinary day. Patrol, nothing unusual, when you'd seen it all, every atrocity known to mankind, the cruelty one person could do to another without blinking, man or child, nothing shocked anymore. Preacher's troops were meant to head back to base at six and then they had three glorious days off, there was never much to do, but for the fact, he could sleep was good enough for Preacher. He'd grinned over to Shane in his UCP combats carrying his gun and both men stepped into the street together heading away from the few shacks in the middle of Puli Khumri, if not for the war and the blistering heat that made Preacher think he was being boiled alive every minute of the day, he could have enjoyed the scenery. He was hot, sweaty and tired as fuck, ready for his bed even though it was not quite six yet. "Hold up, I forgot my water bottle," he told his men.

"Asshat, you'd forget your head if it wasn't screwed on. I'll get it, I need a piss anyway." His brother told him. He could still hear the timber of Shane’s laugh.

Preacher counted in his mind the steps Shane took away from him. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six and then ... one of the tin shacks no bigger than a post office, a local feed house for the cattle, blew the hell up. It hadn’t even been on the watch list. Who the fuck would blow up a shack full of cow feed? Later, much later, he could only guess it was because of the soldier presence. His entire life changed in that lone second with smoke filling the air.

It all happened so fast, pandemonium came soon after. Those harrowing minutes all blended together as one clusterfuck. He wasn't unused to the unexpected happening, it was what they were trained for, but what he didn't have lessons in was watching his big brother being blown apart. He’d tried to get to him, he’d tried so damn hard, the flames, the carnage, his own body injured from the fallout, the thick smoke, the teammates that were left had had to bodily drag him kicking and screaming away from the area.

Sitting next to Ruby, with her scent enveloping, his chest inflated tamping down the panic he had buzzing in his head, he let it out raggedly, voice flat as he looked at the compassion on Ruby's face as he'd recounted those tragic devastating events. "So, he died. There was nothing left of him, nothing left for me to hold as he died, he was just gone. I fucking hated him for a long time, Rubes. We were all in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why him? How dare he just up and die like that."

"Selfish." Her voice watery, he didn't know he'd twined her fingers until he felt her stroking his. He let his eyes drift to their linked hands, better that than to look in her eyes, he couldn’t swallow pity.

Shane had died. That was that.

"I was discharged with honors not long after."

"Were you injured in the blast?"

"Nah, not really." Only shrapnel, his two knee joints blown out, now replaced with metal plates, all his ribs busted, oh, and the jagged piece of building that had ricocheted in the explosion and punctured a major artery, he'd been told afterward he'd died once on the operating table. He'd wished for a long time they'd left him that way. "Just a scrape or two. Two of my men didn’t make it, though. One died right there, another in surgery.”

“Once I got home, I didn't stick around long after that, couldn't take my parent's grief." Or the way they didn't blame him. Why the fuck not, Shane was dead because of him, HE blamed himself.

"That's how you met Grinder?"

"Yeah, a couple years later, complete random meet one drunken night, ended up at theSoulsafter that and the rest is history."

“It’s perfectly acceptable to have survivors guilt, Asher. He was your brother and the worse thing possible happened right in front of you. That’s going to have an effect. But you shouldn’t blame yourself.”

His face became a hard rock. It was the only way he knew how to cope with the enormity of it all. Demons found you, in the dark, in secret hidden places, they found you, it was the reason he'd never took to drinking his problems away, why would he want to be delirious and pounded by demons simultaneously? He took his self-reproach sober straight up with a twist.

“I’m not a good person, Rubes. I all but abandoned my crew afterward, we were tight, best friends, like family really, it’s day in day out drag down bone crushing mind numbing danger with only each other to watch your back. But after I got out...“

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