Page 3 of If This is Love

Even with awful breath, at least dogs were faithful.

I threw back the sheet and shifted to sit on the edge of the bed, hunching forward over my knees and resting my elbows on them, my head dropping below my shoulders. The burn was there like it was every morning, spreading across the skin of my neck and shoulders and reminding me of every doctor I’d seen for the past ten years who basically called me crazy.

The burning sensation was all in my head, and there was no rash, no abrasions, nothing anyone couldsee, so there was nothing they could do about it. They weren’t liable for it. There was no proof that the burn, which scorched my skin every morning and whenever I was particularlyagitated, was a result of the chemicals I was exposed to during six deployments, and so it wasn’t their problem.

And never-fucking-mind.

Just like everything else, it was just my responsibility to deal with it.

Before dealing with it like I did every damn day, I held Gunner’s face in my hands, looking into his deep brown eyes. I stroked my thumbs back and forth across the sides of his snout, and he reached his wet nose forward to bump my upper lip. Quickly swiping the back of my wrist across my mouth to rid it of dog snot, I rubbed behind his floppy, yellow ears and lowered my cheek to the top of his head.

“Good boy, Gunner,” came my sleep-rasped words like they did every morning. “Good boy, Gunner. Good, good boy.”

His thick tail thumped the rug, the dull, quiet thud the only sound in this old, empty house, and I gave him a couple more firm rubs before standing up. Picking up my phone, I gave it a compulsory glance and remind myself of what the mission was today.

It was Thursday. I needed to go check on my crew that was supposed to be finished painting the new wing of the high school this afternoon. It was also the designated day of the week to balance the books, and this Thursday of the month, invoices needed to be sent. It was also the first Thursday in February, which meant I had to attend a meeting that Chloe had called.

Chloe. The woman who’d made a man out of my baby brother, Luke, in only a matter of weeks just this past Christmas—after I had spent twenty-three years trying and failing to do the same thing.

But never-fucking-mind.

Before all that, Gunner and I had an appointment with the jogging trail that wrapped around the neighborhood I’d lived in my entire life.

I crossed the room to press the back of my hand against the window. The cold snap was back again this morning. It had been a weird winter. A hell of a lot colder than normal but interspersed with random spring-like weather thrown into the forecast for days on end, and then another bitter-cold snap. Four days ago, the sun had pierced the dense, white clouds that had hung low above the little neighborhood at the hairpin bend of the Mississippi, and the weather had been perfect enough to improve even my mood.

But just like everything that improved my mood, the perfect weather was short lived, and the icy-slushy-biting-coldshitwas back again.

But never-fucking-mind.

Gunner and I had a morning run, so I pulled on gray sweatpants and a black hoodie, and then I strapped on his vest, and off we went before the morning nicotine cravings could take over. Delaying the first cigarette of the day was progress toward quitting smoking, and the morning runs carved into our schedule like etchings in granite were an easy way to do that.

We always jogged toward the sunrise. Three miles toward it until the fiery-orange ball was hovering just above the waterline on the horizon, a quick breather and stretch, and then three miles home.

Just as Gunner and I were descending the hill that exited the trail, Connor and Liza Deneau were jogging up it while pushing a jogging stroller, in which their little toddler girl, Savannah was snoozing and all bundled up. Actually,Lizawas pushing the stroller up the hill, her expression intense and focused while she puffed out steady breaths that tossed flyaway strands of her long, brunette ponytail out of her face. Connor was just leisurely jogging behind her.

“Morning, Gabe!” she chirped a bit breathlessly but not completely winded, smiling brightly at me as she crested the hill and picked up her pace. “Hi, Gunner! See y’all at the meeting later!”

“Morning,” I mumbled, casting a cursory glance at them behind me. “Sar’nt Deneau, you got an injury or something this morning?”

Connor turned to look at me, jogging backward and grinning guiltily with his palms lifted. “No, sir, she insisted upon pushing so she can get more cardio.”

“Right,” I mumbled, turning back to the concrete below my feet. “See y’all.”

Back at my house, I stooped to pick up the morning paper off the driveway and led Gunner inside. The newspaper immediately went on the coffee table in the living room, and yesterday’s went straight into the recycling bin. Food was immediately in Gunner’s bowl, and I immediately filled a cup with scalding, bitter, black coffee. He scarfed down his food, and I took my coffee out to the back porch so I could sip it and smoke without having to listen to my completelysilenthouse.

The silence had taken some getting used to, but then I decided it was fine. Better to have silence than walk around on eggshells because you couldn’t make your wife happy, and her breaking that totally different type of silence with discontent sighs and remarks laced with unrestrained disdain and dissatisfaction.

I had learned to endure the tense shared silence and catty comments, and once the house was truly silent after Mia left, I fashioned my ideal mental escape.

Women were treacherous and trifling, and yet, I was an idiot who was still attracted to them for some reason. Having been marriedanddivorcedandnow basically used-up at thirty-three, my days of involving myself with the untrustworthy sex were over—but I was still a thirty-three-year-old guy who got morning wood and needed to deal with it somehow. And Idefinitelywasn’t thinking about my backstabbing ex-wife when I took care of it.

The fantasy woman I had built in my mind was the first indulgence I gave myself when Mia walked out of the house I’d given her for the very last time. When she left, I’d been faithful in every way a man could be faithful for fifteen years, from the moment we started dating while still in high school, which meant I never even let myselfthinkof another woman, let alone allow my body and eyes to wander.

But when Mia left, I engaged my imagination with purpose like I never had in my entire life, and I concocted my own ideal woman. And she was a mental collage of every appealing facet I’d ever observed across every woman I’d encountered, and she wasperfect.

First of all, the fantasy woman was everything Mia wasnot. She’d had all kinds of things to say about how disappointed she’d become with me. I’d lost muscle mass after I’d come home from my last utterly chaotic deployment; partially from mental stress and partially from being laid up due to shrapnel I caught on the right side of my torso. But it didn’t matter to Mia. She liked guys with big, beefy muscles like I had before. In fact, she used to eyeballConnor, who had always been completely yoked—including now while his super sweet but spindly-armed wife was pushing the jogging strollerinsteadof him, but never-fucking-mindthat.

Mia also didn’t like that I had stopped shaving and sported a dark beard a lot of the time. She didn’t like that my hair was longer than the regulation high-and-tight. Shereallydidn’t like that the allegedly “phantom” burn across my neck and shoulders tended to flare up when we’d try to make love, and she turned that around on me. She used that as the reason why she’d started talking to other men. Just like the VA doctors, she insisted that the burn was in my head, and I just didn’t want her anymore.

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