Page 46 of Melting His Grumpy Heart
“How long were you together?”
“Five years in total.” Jake’s grip tightened on the glass again, before he forced himself to relax. “Good years, mostly. Or I thought they were.”
The rain surged briefly against the window, a sudden increase in intensity before settling back into its steady rhythm. Jake found himself focusing on the sound, using it to anchorhimself in the present rather than the past he was forcing himself to revisit.
“My deployments were hard on him,” he continued, finding it easier to speak to the flames than to meet Ru’s gaze. “I was away for months at a time, our contact was necessarily limited. There was no way for him to know if I was safe.”
He swirled the spirit, creating a small whirlpool. “I can’t blame him for that part. It’s a lot to ask of someone. The waiting, and the not knowing. He used to say it was destroying him,” Jake said quietly, remembering the late night phone calls, the tense video chats. “He said that every time I left, he’d wonder if it’d be the time I didn’t come back. If—if he’d get that knock on the door, the official visit those left behind dreaded.”
Jake abandoned his glass and rubbed his hands down his face. Pain bloomed in his chest as the story he’d believed he’d never tell was dragged out of the deep, dark place he’d confined it to. The urge to push it back was strong, but Ru deserved some kind of answer even if it did rip Jake to shreds.
“We’d been together for about a year when he first brought up the subject of me leaving the service.” Jake’s jaw tightened against the memory. “He said we could never build a real life together with me disappearing for months at a time, that we couldn’t plan a future around deployments and security clearances. Almost from the moment we met, he’d talked about getting out of London.” Jake forced himself to meet Ru’s gaze. “He claimed he was tired of the city, of the noise, the pollution, and the constant pressure. Said he wanted something better, somewhere better. And that together, we could have that.”
Jake ground his teeth, his jaw cracking. He grabbed the bottle and sloshed some of the whisky in his glass. Taking a deep mouthful, he closed his eyes against the hot, alcoholic burn. “The countryside, he said. Somewhere open, wild. A complete change.”
Jake slammed his glass on the table, shoving it away. In front of the fire, Monty jumped up onto all fours, ears pricking, and on full alert. Jake bent forward, petting the dog, who settled down once more.
“So there it was. It was an ultimatum. Leave the service. Start fresh together. Or stay in, keep the life I’d built, and watch our relationship crumble under the strain.”
“You were given an impossible choice. Whatever you decided, it’d have torn you in two.”
“It did,” Jake said quietly. “Fifteen years in. First my regiment, then making it into the SAS. I was a part of something that mattered. It was never just a job, because something like that couldn’t be. It was family, it was brotherhood. It was everything to me. And I was being asked to turn my back on it all.”
Jake fell silent, recalling the weight of the decision he’d been forced to make. Now, like then, it felt visceral as everything he’d locked away and refused to think about came hurtling back towards him. The sleepless nights as he’d weighed his career against the man he loved. Because when you loved someone, truly loved them, how could you keep doing something that caused them such pain?
“You made the decision you believed to be right.”
Jake looked up, meeting Ru’s eye. He’d couldn’t miss the question beneath the statement:would you make the same choice again?
“I can’t even begin to tell you what it cost me, in here.” Jake thumped a fist to his chest. “But I had to decide, one way or another. So I bought this place. Somewhere open and wild. Phil’s complete fucking change.” He didn’t bother trying to keep the bitterness from his voice. “When faced with the reality of what he’d claimed to want, he wasn’t quite so keen. There’sno upmarket little village ten minutes down the road selling pumpkin ravioli and macchiatos.”
Jake raked his nails through his hair. That wasn’t completely fair. Phil had relocated his work, happy to only have to travel to London, to the office, once a month. The man Jake had given everything up for had settled in. Or so Jake thought.
“As soon as we moved in, I started the business.” He glanced around the room, encompassing the life he’d built from the ashes of his military career. “I threw my back into it as I thought we were building a new life together.”
The next part was the hardest. Jake stood abruptly, needing movement, needing distance. He crossed to the window.
“I kept journals,” he said, the words coming slower now as he stared into the night. “Had done since my first deployment. Observations and thoughts. Processing the things I’d seen and done. Some of it, I knew, should never have reached the page because I was flying close to breaching the Official Secrets Act.” He paused. “It was private and personal, and helped me deal with stuff. None of it was ever meant for anyone else.”
The silence in the living room was absolute, even the rain seeming to pause its hammering against the window. Jake made his way back to the sofa.
“Phil knew they existed. He also knew they were off-limits.” Jake’s voice had dropped to nearly a whisper, the words dragged unwillingly from some dark place he rarely acknowledged even to himself. “I kept them in an old tin box. The lock was broken, but never thought, never imagined, I’d need to lock them up, or hide them from him.”
“He read them.”
A statement, not a question. Jake nodded.
“We had some of his friends up for a weekend.” Jake’s throat worked as he swallowed. “It was Friday night, and there’d been too much booze. One of them made some commentabout ‘Jake’s war stories’, mentioning something specific from Helmand. Something I’d never told anyone except the pages in those journals. I thought I’d misheard at first. Then another one of Phil’s friends joined in, mentioned a mission that had gone wrong. Details no one could have known.” Jake’s voice had gone flat. “Phil tried to change the subject, but it was too late. He’d been caught out gossiping. I could see it in his face when I looked at him. Guilt, but no shame.”
“Fucking hell.”
Jake barked out a hard, humourless laugh. “Yeah, you can say that again.”
“What did you do?”
“I confronted him, later, when everyone had gone to bed. He didn’t even try and deny he’d read them. He said they were fascinating, that I should contact the big publishing houses. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, he thought I was some kind of bloody Andy McNab. He either didn’t get what he’d done wrong or he was refusing to admit it, to both himself and me. It wasn’t a big deal. That’s what he said, thatit wasn’t a big deal.”
Jake hands bunched into tight fists, his nails digging deep into his palms as he relived the moment when everything he’d given up his life in the forces for began to wither and die.
