Page 32 of Misadventures of a Curvy Girl
Ben
I know it the moment it happens. Telling Ireland to go is the biggest mistake of my life.
I know it like I know the Kansas sun on my back or the weight of body armor on my shoulders. I know it like I know the green of Caleb’s eyes.
I know it so much it hurts.
But even as I watched her wheel around to leave—gorgeous even covered in dust—I still couldn’t make myself go after her. She almost died because of me, and how many people were hurt and killed right in front of me in rubble-strewn hellholes just like this one? It’s sheer luck she’s alive, and the knives of terror that stabbed through me while we were digging her out drove so deep I couldn’t think straight.
Then the soldier in me took over, because that’s what happens when I panic now. The sensitive boy who would have cowered behind Caleb at the first sign of trouble—he had no one to cower behind in Afghanistan. And so he learned to survive on his own.
I don’t even really know what all I said to Ireland to make her leave—only that I followed her flinches to the words that would hurt the most, the ones that would drive her away. Words that would condemn me to hell, but even as I held her in my arms frantically kissing her hair, my brain wouldn’t stop shouting get her to safety, keep her safe, keep her safe, get her out—
It was the only thing that penetrated the lingering terror and the relief she was okay—relief so deep that I knew I was already falling in love with her.
Keep her safe.
Keep her from harm.
Get her out.
“What the fuck?” Caleb demands. He’s scrubbing at his face like he does when he’s frustrated. When he’s furious. “Why the fuck would you say something like that?”
My mind is still looping through its carousel of nightmares—the ceiling coming down over Ireland, blood-spattered dust in Helmand, yanking on debris not knowing if I’ll find a corpse underneath—and I can’t force out the right words. “She needed to leave,” I say instead, my voice harsh and shaking. “She needed to go.”
“No, asshole, she didn’t,” Caleb spits out. “I thought you liked her. I thought you understood that I liked her. That I wanted more than just a night with her.”
I can’t reply because I do like her. I do understand. I also want more with her, lots and lots and lots more, but my head is still crowded with flashes of her trapped under the wreckage and old memories from the war, and my heart is still squeezing with panic and the desperate need to get her to someplace safe, someplace away.
“Goddammit, Ben, answer me,” Caleb grates out. “Just fucking answer me. You don’t get to be a shell, not right fucking now. You don’t get to go cold and empty after what you just did.”
A shell. Cold and empty.
I hear the words like a faraway train, knowing what they are, yet they’re so distant I can’t reach them.
“She had to go someplace away from here,” is all I can manage, and Caleb’s jaw sets. He’s so fucking handsome like this, streaked with dust, his beard setting off the perfect planes of his face. He’s so handsome…but he’s looking at me now with an expression of pure disgust.
“We’ve always done things together, Ben, and I won’t stop now. But I also don’t know if she’ll ever forgive you for this, and I don’t know if I ever will either.”
And with that, my best friend, lover, and essential part of any relationship I’ve ever had, walks out the door.
It takes me almost an hour.
I’m behind the bar, sitting with my head between my knees the way I used to sit after getting roughed up by bullies in school, and I’m trying to do all the breathing exercises they teach you in therapy. I’m trying to put all the bad memories back where they belong and pull myself back to the present.
It’s hard.
It’s harder than it’s been in years. It takes all the things I’ve learned plus the sedate presence of Greta-dog curled up next to me to claw my way up and out.
At some point, I slowly surface again. I can think Real-Ben thoughts and not Shell-Ben thoughts. I realize with dawning horror what I’ve done. I’ve hurt Ireland. In my mindless need to stop the terror, I’ve hurt her, and it gouges a fresh hole in my scarred heart.
I stumble out of the bar, my heart hammering against my ribs and anxiety crawling up the back of my neck, and there’s no sign of Ireland or Caleb anywhere. Even Caleb’s truck is gone.
He took her back to the farmhouse. Maybe they’re still there?
God, let them still be there.
