Page 71 of Beneath Your Beautiful
“He’s out,” Sawyer said. “You must have worn him out with all that talking you do.”
“I slept most of the way.” Leaving Brooklyn at seven in the morning was not my idea of fun, especially not after two hours of sleep.
I blasted the music and weaved in and out of afternoon traffic while Sawyer ate his sandwich and drank his tea. As soon as we exited the tunnel, Sawyer turned off the air con and we both rolled down our windows.
He scrubbed a hand over his dirty-blond hair, short on top and shaved around the sides. I hated his military haircut. I hated the way his face looked harder and his eyes looked haunted, like he’d seen too much, and he couldn’t shake the images.
“Did you volunteer for this last mission?” I asked.
“I’m a Marine, Eden. I gowherethey tell me to go. I gowhenthey tell me to go.”
I didn’t know how the Marines operated, but I’d be willing to bet a week’s tips that he put himself forward for this last deployment. “No one deploys back to back like that. You only had a few months in between…” I let my voice trail off. It had been five months, to be exact, between him losing his best friend and shipping out again. But I didn’t know a damn thing about what the Marines did and didn’t do. They did whatever the hell they wanted. Unbelievably, after five years in the Corps and three deployments, Sawyer was still drinking the Kool-Aid. This was the guy who used to believe that rules were made to be broken. He’d spent so much time in the principal’s office, the secretary made a label and stuck it on a chair: Reserved for Sawyer Madley.
Sawyer looked out at the river and the bridges of Pittsburgh, and I wondered how different the world looked to him now. After balling up his empty sandwich wrapper and tossing it in the bag, he whipped my phone out of my purse and entered my password, giving him total access to all the information on my cell phone. I needed better security. Everyone, as in Killian and Sawyer, knew my password and they weren’t afraid to use it.
I watched in my peripheral as Sawyer scrolled through the photos of Mom on the wall.
“Next time give her hair,” he said.
“Next time she’s getting wings.”
“Dad see this?” he asked
“No. He’d be pissed.”
“Secretly, he’d think you did good.”
I knew that was Sawyer’s way of telling mehethought I did good.Secretly, I love your guts too, Sawyer.
He moved on, to a few candid shots of Killian I took last week and a few selfies of us together. Killian hated having his picture taken but he humored me. Uh oh. Sawyer had found my peace wall. I kept sneaking glances at him, trying to gauge his reaction.
“Where is it?”
“At Killian’s bar. In the courtyard.”
“The world is a fucked-up place,” he said, sounding weary and far older than his twenty-three years. If I could replace his sorrow with joy, I’d do it. I’d do anything to see his eyes sparkle with mischief or light up with happiness like they used to. But I didn’t have that kind of power. I didn’t know how to do it for Sawyer or for Killian. Maybe that was why I felt like I understood Killian so well. I’d seen something in him that reminded me of Sawyer, and it made me want to soothe his troubled soul.
He tossed my phone in my purse and leaned back against the seat, arms crossed over his chest. We fell into silence, lost in our own thoughts as I drove on autopilot. Why was the world such a fucked-up place?
I took the Wayne Avenue exit, a road I knew so well but Indiana, Pennsylvania looked so different to me now. It didn’t have the grittiness or the cool factor or the architecture of Brooklyn. Everything looked sterile. Manufactured. Boring.
Over the music blasting from the speakers, I heard a siren. I checked my rearview mirror and groaned. The state trooper was riding my tail, lights flashing.
“Must be your welcome wagon,” I shouted over the music.
“Yeah, it’s good to be home,” Sawyer said. We shot each other a grin, and this time I believed he meant it.
I pulled over onto the shoulder, cut the music, and looked in my side mirror at the approaching officer. He snagged us two miles from home. Wasn’t that always the way? “Doesn’t he have anything better to do?”
“He lives for this shit. Were you speeding?” Sawyer asked, not particularly concerned.
“I have no idea how fast I was going.”
Sawyer shrugged. Neither one of us was paying attention to the speedometer. We both had lead feet.
The officer stopped outside my open window, and I flashed him a big smile. He scowled at me. “Hello, Officer. Is there a problem?”
He put his hands on his hips. “Do you know how fast you were going?”
