Page 59 of Swerve
“Grief does not change you. . .It reveals you.”
?John Green
SHE DISAPPEARS INTO the bedroom, waiting for the overconfident cat to clear the doorsill before she firmly shuts the door behind her.
He flicks off the lamp before taking off his shirt and jeans and sliding under the blankets. The sofa is a good foot shorter than he is, so he tries several different positions before conceding to his feet hanging over the far arm.
He stares at the dark ceiling above him, wondering what made him offer to stay here tonight. He realizes it is definitely out of character for him, but then what had happened to Madison Willard was beyond anything he’d thought to expect.
Tomorrow, he’ll make sure Emory has a gun for protection and knows how to use it. Then tomorrow night he’ll be back in his own bed. Waking up to find out that something has happened to Emory Benson isn’t a regret he wants to add to his list.
Because it’s already a long list.
Sounds come from her bedroom, drawers opening, closing. He hears the soft tone of her voice, a meow from Pounce.
He closes his eyes, waiting for sleep. But the images that start to pan through his mind aren’t exactly sleep-inducing.
Emory Benson isn’t his type.
He doesn’t go for serious, driven women who expect a relationship to have a purpose, a destination.
He’d made that mistake once in his life, even though he wasn’t put-off by the realization going into it. But then the vows his wife had taken had not included any expectation of PTSD and all its accompanying demons. She hadn’t known he would come home a different man. For that matter, neither had he.
~
Five Years Ago
WE DON’T GO into things expecting them to change us.
Knox certainly hadn’t.
The end of his deployment should have been a cause for celebration.
The night before he had left to return to the states, he had Skyped with Mariah. She was so overjoyed that they would only be apart another twenty-four hours that she could not stop smiling. He’d sat inside the tent, sweat trickling down the back of his neck, his gaze glued to the screen, a smile he did not feel inside pasted on his face as he’d listened to her plans for what they would do when he got home from Afghanistan.
“I am going to devour you,” she said, “as soon as we get through the door of this house. If I don’t attack you in the car first, that is. And I might. It’s been a year, Knox. Oh, my Lord, I have missed you so much, baby.”
“I’ve missed you too,” he said. And he had. But why couldn’t he feel that? Why did he feel as if he had been soaked in some kind of numbing solution so that a real feeling seemed incapable of finding its way from his brain to his heart?
He stared at his wife’s face on the laptop screen, noted with detachment that she might be even more beautiful now than she had been when he’d last seen her just over three hundred and sixty-five days ago.
To deal with their separation, she had made her already healthy fitness habit a near addiction, running six miles every single morning and teaching a spin class five days a week.
“I can’t believe we’re finally going to live like normal people,” she said, leaning in to the camera and giving him a glimpse of the cleavage revealed by the neckline of her workout shirt. Her skin was still flushed from the class she’d finished teaching just before their call.
“I know,” he said. “Me either.”
And he couldn’t. Because for the life of him, he didn’t think he had any idea what that was any more.
But he had done his best to show excitement over the life they would be living together for the first time since they had gotten married.
The thing was, sitting there, listening to his happy wife, he didn’t know how to tell her that he wasn’t the same man she had married.
And he didn’t know if he ever would be again.
~
IT DIDN’T TAKE long for Mariah to start to realize this.
