Page 63 of Swerve
He shrugs, holding my gaze. “If we pull a thread from the person we’ve always been, how do we know what we’ll be when we finish unraveling?”
“We don’t.”
“So I guess I’d have to answer that with, ‘It’s who I am.’ I don’t know how to be anyone else.”
“Was it what you thought it would be?”
“Yes and no.”
“Like most things in life.”
“Yeah. You’re young to have figured that out.”
We’re looking directly at each other, and even in the dimly lit room, I feel like I really see him and that he really sees me. It’s the most unsettling thing I’ve felt in a long time, but I don’t want to look away. I want to see him, want him to see me. “I don’t think it’s age as much as it is experience.”
“Life’s a steamroller. It gets around to all of us eventually. Some sooner than others.”
“You’re strong. Or you never would have made it as a SEAL.”
“I always thought of myself that way.”
“You don’t anymore?”
“I never thought I had a breaking point. Now I know I do. Even steel has a breaking point.”
I see him hesitate, wait for him to go on.
“A tensile test finds out what happens when steel is stretched,” he says. “You can place a steel bar in a device that pulls one end away from the other fixed end. The tensile strength is the maximum amount of stress the bar can handle before it breaks. If I had to describe what it was like to be in Afghanistan, that would be it.”
He glances away, and there is another stretch of silence, before he adds, “We like to think some things are just indestructible. Certain people. Certain places. Maybe that’s how we convince ourselves things are safe enough for us to do. Who would ever have thought two skyscrapers in the middle of New York City could be brought down with airplanes?”
“It was unthinkable.”
“And yet they were. All that steel and concrete couldn’t withstand the impact of a commercial airliner turned into a kamikaze.”
The remembered image is a sobering one. “There really aren’t any words, are there?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t think we’re made to handle the kamikazes in life.”
I think about Mia, the true horror of what has happened in the past few days, and tears fill my eyes. I bite my lip and glance away, reluctant to let him see.
He takes the ridiculous ice pack from my hand and sets it on the counter. We stare at each other in the dim light, and I feel somehow as if I’m really being seen for the first time in a very long time. Maybe because my own mother and father could look at me and know exactly what I was feeling. The thought brings tears to my eyes, and I am instantly mortified that this man whom I barely know continues to see glimpses of my bare soul.
I turn away, but his hand is on my shoulder, turning me back.
We don’t say anything, watching each other, absorbing the silence and all the unspoken things shooting through the air around us. I have never before felt this kind of awareness of another person’s effect on me. The obvious reasons are obvious enough. He is a beautiful man in every way I have ever thought counted. I’ve never felt the physical pull of attraction to be so undeniable. But it is. Undeniable. I think of the reason our paths have crossed—my missing sister—and my emotions are in a sudden jumble again.
He wants to kiss me. I know this as surely as I have ever known anything. I feel the pull of it in the air between us, an electric current with its own charge.
He wants to.
But he doesn’t.
His restraint impresses me even as I am disappointed.
Knox
“Some seek the comfort of their therapist’s office, others head to the corner pub and dive into a pint, but I chose running as my therapy.”
