Awake and Alive Page 2

  Jed nodded, his gaze as wide and awed as Max felt. It had been a long time since Jed had last felt the physical effects of a real appetite.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Guess I must be.”

  Max grinned. Grinned so hard his cheeks hurt. Jed smiled back, and the words he’d repressed earlier came rushing back. “I bloody love you. You know that, right?”

  Jed’s gaze softened. It was almost imperceptible, but the single tear on his cheek gave him away. “I do, and I love you too. More than you know. Now let’s go make dinner.”

  A FEW weeks later, Jed found himself in a new version of his own personal hell, staring at a broken kid curled up in a ball beside him. He was young—younger than Max—but his face was old. Old and weathered by life, like he’d seen the worst the world had to offer, over and over again.

  And perhaps he had. Veteran. Jed turned the word over in his mind with a strange, muted sense of disgust. The kid—Brady—was twenty-two years old. Twenty-two. How the fuck was he a veteran of anything?

  He glanced around. It had been an hour or so since Carla had duped him into accompanying her to the VA center and abandoned him in the psych department. She’d claimed she needed help with something, but he knew better. Women were something of a mystery to him, but he knew an attempt at cunning when he saw one, and that chick was definitely up to something. Why else would she have dumped him here, of all places?

  Beside him, Brady muttered something. Jed leaned closer, recognizing the melodic lilt of Arabic. “No one’s going to hurt you here, kid.”

  Brady turned glazed eyes on him and stared. Jed had been sitting beside him a while now, but it was the first time either of them had spoken. “You speak Arabic?”

  “I’ve heard that phrase before. Where did you hear it?”

  “Abu Ghraib.”

  “Do you know what it means?”

  The young soldier nodded. “The interpreter told us.”

  Jed absorbed the information with a bitter smile. The atrocities committed at the notorious Baghdad prison had swept through the war-torn country like a plague, alienating the population from the invading coalition even more than they’d been before. “How long were you there?”

  “I don’t know. We went there to deliver a prisoner. I feel like I never left.” Brady hugged his knees closer to his chest, and for the first time Jed saw the dark, ominous bruises on his neck. Self-inflicted bruises from a noose or ligature.

  Jed glanced around him again, taking in the blank, hollow stares of the other men, the lost, helpless faces of their loved ones, and the oppressive silence of the unit. He’d heard about places like this, and seen signs of PTSD in himself, but he’d never seen it on this scale before. The unit was like another world, like the worst kind of hell he’d never thought to imagine.

  His gaze fell on a table loaded with blank paper and wax crayons. It seemed out of place—like it belonged in a kindergarten—but he supposed pencils and pens weren’t a good idea in a unit full of resourceful, suicidal men.

  He got to his feet, waited a moment for the dizziness that never came, and crossed the room to the table. He wasn’t used to his renewed sense of balance. The tiny robot in his belly had changed his life, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, standing up was no longer a game of Russian roulette.

  He selected a black crayon and a few sheets of paper. Brady hadn’t moved when he returned to his spot beside him. Jed regarded him for a moment. “What other Arabic do you know?”

  Brady shook his head. “Don’t know nothin’.”

  Jed set the pile of paper between them and sketched out a short phrase of flowing Arabic script. He set it aside and drew another, then another and another. He taught Brady the translations to little effect until he came to the last one. The phrase came to him from a poem he’d once seen sprayed on the wall of a holy building in Jerusalem. He’d altered the translation to suit his purpose, but the sentiment was the same.

  “I laugh in the dark,” Brady repeated dully. “I like that one.”

  Jed folded the paper into a small square and held it out. “Live by it, then. If you don’t laugh, you’ve really got nothing.”

  He left Brady to his staring and searched out Carla. He found her on a bench in the corridor, watching Brady with a speculative look on her face. He trailed to a stop beside her with a heavy sigh. His patience with her games was wearing thin. “Spill.”

  “I think you should volunteer here.”

  “That’s nice.”

  Carla narrowed her eyes. “Don’t be a dick. I’m serious.”

  Jed tore his gaze away from Brady and leaned against the big blank wall of the newly refurbished corridor. “Care to explain?”

  “I think it would be good for you.”

  “Why?”

  Carla shrugged, but Jed wasn’t buying it. She’d obviously heard or seen something to make her think he needed to be here… here amongst other wounded soldiers and veterans. “What did Max tell you?”

  “What makes you think he told me anything?”

  “Cut the crap. You need to be honest if you want me to take you seriously. Don’t throw some bullshit theory at me and expect me to jump.”

  Carla sighed. “Don’t get pissy with him, okay? He’s trying to understand.”

  Jed waited, aware that Max had trouble dealing with all the crap he threw his way, and who could blame him? It was Max who woke him up when he was thrashing around with nightmares. Max who took his hand when he forgot where he was. Max who brought home an abandoned puppy when Jed hadn’t spoken a word in days.

  “Glenn told me you all have PTSD in some form or another, even him. That you’d be robots if you didn’t. He said the best therapy for you is teaching someone else to get over it.”

  “Glenn says a lot of things.”

  Carla smiled, and Jed resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He’d noticed the spark between Carla and Glenn, and he wondered if Glenn had put her up to dragging him to the VA center in the first place. Carla was an intuitive chick, but her rhetoric sounded like something Jed had heard a thousand times over in a place far, far away….

  “J LIKES poetry, man. Ask him.”

  Jed glanced up, distracted for a moment from the strategic conversation he was having with a helicopter pilot. It was a distraction he didn’t have time for, but the humor in Paul’s tone was addictive. “Ask me what?”

  Paul jumped down from the back of the truck. The annoying journalist who’d been on base for the past few days followed, hot on his heels. “Ross wants to know how educated we are. I told him you’re a nerd. He doesn’t believe me.”

  Jed passed a disinterested gaze over the reporter. The guy was older than all of them except Glenn, but he didn’t seem to know shit about shit. And he wasn’t allowed to ask much, at least not from Jed’s crew. No cameras, no recorders. Just a notebook and a pencil, and some heavy-assed censorship from the powers above.

  Still, his question seemed pretty benign. Jed figured he’d throw him a bone. “If I am a nerd, I’m an uneducated nerd. None of us went to college.”

  “Not even Glenn?”

  Jed inclined his head to where Glenn was counting out morphine rations. “Ask him yourself.”

  “I will, later.” Ross edged his way closer to where Jed and the pilot had spread their maps out on the hood of the truck. He wanted to look, Jed could tell, but he didn’t. “Paul said you wrote a poem on his bunk once. What was it?”

  Jed shot a glare at Paul, feigning hurt. “You don’t remember?”

  Paul shrugged. “Maybe. I was pretty drunk. Was it the Russian one?”

  Jed didn’t answer. Paul was good at playing the dumbass jock, but there was far more to him than that. Far more to all of them than that. Paul frowned. In Jed’s peripheral vision, he saw Glenn drift closer, his amusement clear.

  “I know it,” Luke spoke up from the back of the truck. “It’s the one with women cutting shit up, right?”

  “Shut your mout
h. I know it.” Paul seemed annoyed, and that shit was fucking hilarious. Jed waited, and sure enough, Paul managed to recall the first three lines of the poem. He said them slowly, like he knew something was missing.

  “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come to cut up what remains… um… just roll to your rifle and blow up your brains. That’s it, right?”

  Jed rolled his eyes. “Something like that.”

  “Who wrote that? Some Russian tsar, or something?”

  Jed cut his gaze at the reporter. What the fuck? What kind of writer was this dude? “It’s Kipling.”

  “Oh.”

  Jed suppressed a sigh and turned his attention back to the waiting pilot.

  Glenn snorted and thumped Ross’s back. “Don’t sweat it, man. Jed’s smarter than all of us. If he doesn’t get dead in this dumbass war, you’ll find him growing old in some dusty library at the end of the world, reading books to the masses.”

  “Missed your calling, huh?”

  Though Jed knew the journalist’s question was meant for him, he didn’t respond. He was done shooting the breeze. He had shit to do, like planning a fucking mission that could get them all killed.

  Glenn’s laugh was dry. “Hell, yeah. Jed’s a people person, a teacher, a leader of men. Can’t you tell?”

  The journalist didn’t look convinced, and the conversation moved on, as did the war machine.

  The next night, Jed’s crew flew behind enemy lines and dropped unnoticed into a Kurdish village. The mission went as expected: brutal, dangerous, and long. It was two weeks before they made it back to base camp.

  Jed found the reporter the night after their return. The guy was sitting by the wheel of a Humvee, smoking a cigarette like it was his last night on earth. Jed considered walking on by, but something made him turn back.

  “Hey, Ross?”

  Ross looked up. The surprise in his eyes made it obvious Jed was the last person he expected to see. “Yeah?”

  “Paul forgot the last line of the poem.”

  “The Kipling one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you going to tell me what it is?”

  Ross didn’t reach for his ever present notebook, and Jed wondered if he thought Jed didn’t know himself. He turned his back on the reporter and walked away. He was nearly out of sight when he tossed the line over his shoulder:

  “And go to your God like a soldier.”

  “WHY DO think you didn’t end up like that?” Carla pointed at Brady. “You’re older than him. You’ve seen lots more horrible things.”

  Jed let the present filter back into his consciousness. “Maybe I didn’t see them when I was twenty-two.”

  “Yes, you did. You were in Somalia when you were twenty-two.”

  Dammit, Glenn. “So?”

  Carla sighed. “You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to do.”

  “I’m trying to—” Carla stopped and threw up her hands. “Okay, I admit it. I don’t know what I’m trying to do either. I just don’t want you to end up like my abuelo: old and terrified of things you’ve never told anyone about.”

  JED LEFT Carla and drove home with their conversation playing on his mind. Her concern wasn’t unfounded, and he felt a little bad for shooting her down, but not bad enough to burden her with the bullshit that came with a decade of active service.

  Glenn was right: they all had PTSD and there would be something wrong with the world if they didn’t. Trouble was, he didn’t feel in the right place to deal with it. Not yet. There was something else he had to do first. A loose end, if you could call the overdue line-of-duty investigations into that fateful day in Kirkuk a loose end.

  Perhaps he was in denial. He was scheduled to fly out to Fort Carson in less than a month, and he still hadn’t told Max he was going.

  Max.

  Jed let the image of his lover’s bright smile distract him from morbid thoughts of a military review. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was early evening, the time Max usually came in from the boat shed. He’d be cooking supper now, his skin damp from his evening shower. Jed bit down on his lip as he turned up the long road to the lake, and with his foot pressing down on the gas, it wasn’t long before he pulled up in the yard.

  With Desta at his heels, he found Max pottering by the stove, shirtless, cooking up enough pasta to feed every soul he’d ever met. Jed leaned over his shoulder and swiped a mushroom from the pan. Max elbowed him and his smile lit up the world.

  “Hungry?”

  “Mmm. Whatcha got?”

  “Duh. What does it look like?”

  Jed fought the urge to lift Max off his feet and spin him around the kitchen. Instead he sunk his teeth into the skin of Max’s bare shoulder and left the room to clean up. His belly wasn’t the only part of his body going through a rebirth, and he’d get his own back later.

  Not much later, as it turned out. Clearing up after dinner got out of hand, and a jovial water fight over the sink turned into something else. Max put his fist through a cabinet door as Jed fucked him over the kitchen counter. The encounter was explosive, dangerous in its intensity, and after, Jed wondered if the heat between them would ever fade.

  Later that night, Jed lay on his back in bed. Max lay beside him, massaging a nagging pain out of his abdomen. It happened from time to time. The pacemaker in his stomach made his gastroparesis easier to manage, but it hadn’t gone away. The difference now was that the toe-curling spasms didn’t make him puke and were often cured by a Tylenol and the magic of Max’s hands.

  With the pain all but gone, Jed opened his eyes and smiled at Max.

  Max grinned and pressed a kiss to his scarred stomach. “All right?”

  Jed hummed, but though he was more content than he’d ever been, the sound came out noncommittal.

  Max sat up. Jed tried not to ogle his perfect form, but failed. Max was beautiful, inside and out, and next to Jed’s battered, scarred body, he shone like a star. A lithe, wiry, dark-eyed star….

  “Jed.”

  “Hmm?”

  “What’s up? Does your belly still hurt?”

  Jed closed his eyes as Max combed his fingers through his hair. “Not at all.”

  “Then what?” Max kissed Jed’s cheek and waited.

  Knowing he wouldn’t quit, Jed opened his eyes with a sigh. “I got an earful from Carla today. She wants me to volunteer at the VA.”

  Max didn’t seem surprised. “So that was her grand plan? I knew she was up to something, but she wouldn’t tell me what.”

  “Did she tell you she was going to dump me on the psych unit for the day?”

  “No. Is that what she did?”

  “Uh-huh. Left me in a room of catatonics.”

  Max smiled in a way that told Jed that, despite the heavy subject matter, his chagrin was amusing. “Was it terrible?”

  “Yeah,” Jed said honestly. “But not for me. I can handle that shit. It’s… disturbing, but I know if it was going to play out like that for me, it would’ve happened already.”

  Max said nothing. He was the best medicine for the depression that Jed was coming to realize had manifested in him years before they’d ever met, but it wasn’t something they talked about much. They didn’t need to. It was everywhere they turned, even on the good days.

  “Maybe you could take the dogs with you. Desta could cheer anyone up.”

  Jed chuckled. Flo had become a regular on the children’s ward since his stint in the hospital. Max often took her when Jed was summoned to see Dr. Howarth. And the idea of Desta on the psych ward wasn’t a bad one. It sure beat scribbling with crayons on the floor.

  “Maybe I’ll go when he’s a bit older, then.”

  Jed said it as much to himself as anything, but Max smiled and kissed his cheek. “You can do anything you want now, Jed, whenever you want. Your life is your own.”

  Jed grinned in answer and rubbed his
chin on Max’s head. Max was right. Of course he was, but it wasn’t about want. After all, Jed was awake and alive. What more could he possibly need?

  About the Author

  GARRETT LEIGH lives in a small commuter town just north of London with her husband, two kids, a dog with half a brain, and a cat with a chip on her shoulder. She’s twenty-nine, and now she’s reached that milestone, she intends to stay there for the foreseeable future. Garrett has been writing just about her whole life, but it’s been about three years since she decided to take it seriously. According to Mr. Garrett, it was either give the men in her head a voice or have herself committed.

  Angst. She can’t write a word without it. She’s tried, she really has, but her protagonists will always, always be tortured, crippled, broken, and deeply flawed. Throw in a tale of enduring true love, some stubbly facial hair, and a bunch of tattoos, and you’ve got yourself a Garrett special.

  When not writing, Garrett can generally be found procrastinating on Twitter, cooking up a storm, or sitting on her behind doing as little as possible. That, and dreaming up new ways to torture her characters. Garrett believes in happy endings; she just likes to make her boys work for it.

  Garrett also works as a freelance cover artist for various publishing houses and independent authors under the pseudonym G.D. Leigh.

  Social media:

  Website: http://garrettleigh.com

  Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Garrett_Leigh

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/garrettleighbooks

  Cover art enquiries: blackjazzdesign@gmail.com

  By GARRETT LEIGH

  NOVELS

  Only Love

  ROADS SERIES

  Slide

  Rare

  Published by DREAMSPINNER PRESS

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  The Roads Series from GARRETT LEIGH