Page 67 of Because of Liam

Chapter Forty-Two

Everything is pretty muchin place. I look around the living room. “Cold” by Crossfade is playing in the background, loud enough to make the windows rattle. ?I haven’t listened to music this loud in a while. Not since moving in with Logan. No. That’s not true. I listened to music as loud as the speakers would go the first two days I was here. I haven’t since the day after River dumped her fruity drink on me. ???????????????????????

For a whole year the only way I could drown out the phantom sounds of bullets and explosions out of my head was to listen to music. Loud enough to do damage to my ears. For a while I hoped if I went deaf, I’d stop hearing the sounds inside my head. Futile, I know. The sounds were inside of me. They pounded in my veins, in the beat of my heart, and they’d wake me up drenched in sweat in the quiet of the night.

The nightmares, more real than the facts I remember. I’d wake up with the taste of blood in my mouth. The sting of burning metal cutting my flesh. The pain, so intense and so real, it left me paralyzed for minutes at a time. Then the fear would hit me and keep me trapped inside my mind, inside the nightmare, even when my eyes were open and I was awake. My breath caught in my chest and burned until I could finally breathe again, sucking air and life into my lungs. In those moments I understood why we lost so many vets after the war. After they came home. You may leave the war behind. But the war never leaves you. You may think coming home will erase the nightmares, but it doesn’t.

You’re no longer the person you were before. You become a version of yourself you don’t recognize at times. Anger is real and close to the surface, and it doesn’t take much for it to explode.

When I left the hospital, I knew I couldn’t go back home in that state. Logan and Mary were the only two people I cared about, or at least that’s what I told myself. I didn’t want my parents to see me like that and I certainly didn’t want Logan and Mary to look at me and . . . and what? I had no idea. I didn’t like the person I had become and I didn’t want anyone else to have to deal with it. Deal with me. I made the choice to enlist alone, I’d fix myself alone as well. Stupid, I know. But my state of mind back then was not something anyone could call stable.

I spent a year traveling all over Europe. Working odd jobs, sleeping on the street sometimes. I could have gone into my bank account. I could have used the money I had there and stayed in hotels, but I didn’t feel I deserved any kind of comfort. Any kind of joy or forgiveness. It has taken well over a year to get to this point . . . and River, for me to see there was nothing I could have done differently. Hannah’s death was not my fault, but the guilt still eats at me. More so because I never went back to see her family. I have a few things of hers. Letters she wrote to her husband and daughter and the promise to hand deliver it to them if anything ever happened to her. I have a necklace she bought from a street vendor, a gift for her daughter. I don’t know why she had me holding onto it. I told her she would have to deliver it herself, but she made me promise her I would keep those things for her. So, I did. I kept the small package she gave me, exactly the way she gave it to me. Inside the plastic bag still. It’s in the bottom of the backpack I traveled thousands of miles with, now sitting on the back of my closet.

Another way I have failed her. I haven’t delivered those letters to her family.

I shake my head, trying to get rid of the thoughts and tell myself I’ll deliver the letters when we finish this thing with the asshole. I’ll wait until the girls graduate and then make the trip to Texas. I feel like a coward. I don’t want to face her husband and daughter. I wasn’t ready to see them before. There was just too much damage. I’m ready now. I have to do this.

I’m lost in thought. Lost in the past. My eyes looking around me but unseeing. When the gentle touch brushes my back, I jump. I’m ready to fight. Training taking over, instinct overriding everything else, until my mind focuses again and I’m back in the house. Back in the present. It takes me a second to recognize that the person standing in front of me is River. To realize that the hand on my back means no harm. I try to shake the feeling off. I blink a few times. I want to smile at her. I want to assure her I’m okay, but my lips have forgotten how. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t look scared. Maybe she should. But no. None of that happens. Instead, she steps closer to me and her arms wrap around my middle and her head rests on my chest. I heave a deep breath in and her scent grounds me first. It centers me before my body realizes hers is wrapped around mine. My body remembers and my arms come up to pull her closer to me. No words are said. The music is still too loud for any kind of vocal communication, but River doesn’t need words to speak to me. To quiet my mind, to fill my dark spaces with light. We stay like this for a while, in each other’s arms. Me, feeding off her touch, smell, and strength and her eating away at my darkness.

My lips find her forehead and I let them linger in a kiss I don’t want to end. There is nothing sexual in this moment. Just trust, comfort, and . . . and something else I don’t dare name just yet.

She pulls away from me and steps up to the docking station where my iPhone is hooked to. The sudden silence is louder than the music playing.

There’s this whole silent conversation that passes between us, before words are spoken.

“Are you okay?”

“I am now.”

“Where did you go?”

“A place I never want to go back to again.”

“Then don’t.”

“I don’t know how to do that just yet but having you near me helps. You ground me.”

“We ground each other.”

This makes me smile. I want her. And it’s not just sex. It’s not just the fact I haven’t gotten laid in almost two years and she’s pretty much the only girl I’ve talked to since coming back stateside.

She smiles back. “I knocked, but I don’t think you would’ve been able to hear a stampede of T-rexes coming through the door.”

The visual makes me laugh.

“I let myself in. I wanted to know if you need any help here. Skye and Logan went to get food and drinks.”

She’s looking around the room. I removed any identifying objects, like pictures and anything of value that could be broken or stolen and took it upstairs. We moved the furniture around so people will be able to move more freely. The cameras have been installed and the computer in my room is set up to get a live feed.

“Everything is pretty much done. Can you find the cameras?”

She looks about the place, checking the corners of the room and up the walls. She turns in a small circle and my eyes go straight to her ass. And she catches me. A smirk on her face.

“I can’t find them. Where are they?”

I point the cameras to her. One on the ceiling fan right above the middle of the room. One more on a wall disguised as a thermostat and another two on top of the bookcase in the far wall. They are hard to see even if one knows they are there.

“Wow, they’re so small.”

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