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BREAK MY FALL Chapter Fourteen
Josh
There is still an hour before I’m supposed to meet Abby. I take a long pull off my beer, wishing the time would hurry the hell up already. Caleb is at the end of the bar, talking with a girl who clearly looks like she’d believe him if he told her he was a Nazi hunter.
“Doesn’t he have some hapless girlfriend, or is every female of the species at risk?” I ask Eli, only mildly curious why he’s on the prowl tonight.
“Apparently she caught his dick playing hide-and-seek somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be and she dumped him,” Eli says quietly.
I raise my glass in mock salute to her. “Guess she’s smarter than I gave her credit for.” Anyone with a brain in their head isn’t going to be able to stand being around Caleb for more than ten minutes.
I glance down the bar. Caleb is leaning a little too close to the girl. There is a comfort in his every move. A confidence.
“He fits right in here, doesn’t he?”
Eli shakes his head, his eyes dark. “He’s got just as much a place here as you.”
I tip my glass. “Sure enough.”
Eli opened this bar specifically to draw in local veterans and apparently, he’s got a knack for finding the walking wounded and bringing them into the fold. I admire him for what he does. I couldn’t do it, but he’s right in more ways than one. We need each other—we’re the only people who get what our brothers and sisters in arms have gone through.
Guys like Caleb don’t need people like me. He’s an officer, a West Pointer. Caleb fits here among the rich kids and the big brains. But even with all that, I can’t for the life of me figure out why Eli scooped him up. He reeks of old money and East Coast elitism.
I sigh over my beer. I really don’t feel like fucking dealing with everything about Caleb that drives me over the cliff of sanity. He hasn’t seen me yet, which is a good thing. I’m going to finish my beer and get the hell out of here.
“Fine. But it’s on you if he triggers my PTSD by talking about how hard summer camp was at West Point.” A joke is easier than the truth.
And the truth right now isn’t something I can risk unpacking. Not without bringing up some really bad memories.
Eli grins and it’s amazing how not scary he looks when he smiles.
Then again, going to war changes a guy. I’ve never seen what he looked like before the war. I suppose going to war counts as a transformative event. I’m damn sure not the person I was before I left.
Just like that, old pain resurrects, and I take another long pull off my beer, trying to find something to anchor me to the world before I slip into an alcohol-induced abyss.
I deliberately circle my thoughts back to Abby and meeting her in an hour. I glance at my watch. Fifty-three minutes. I haven’t seen her since that moment after class, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her. It was the closest thing to aroused I’d felt in as long as I could remember. I’m twenty-five years old. I’m not supposed to be celibate, but the fucking war has neutered me.
The door to the bar swings open, and I see her the moment she steps into the dark interior.
Something is wrong. I was supposed to meet her. And yet, she’s here. One look at her face and I’m on my feet, crossing the space to her. “What is it?”
I want to put my arm around her. I want to pull her close and let her lean before she collapses. “Can we go somewhere?” Her voice breaks, shattering my heart with it.
“Yeah. Sure. Let me close out my tab with Eli.”
I step back to the bar and hand Eli my card. Caleb stumbles back to the bar from the latrine. His Brooks Brothers shirt is untucked and wrinkled and he smells like he crawled out of a bottle of tequila. He slaps me hard on the back.
I barely manage to keep my expression neutral even as I shift to keep him away from Abby. There’s something about the way he looks at women that’s…unsettling. I’m trying to behave, if only because Eli asked me to and because Abby is here.
I’d really like to avoid her seeing the worst of me at the moment.
I just want to get out of here, away from him and the thousand bad memories he’s resurrecting just by breathing. I might completely lose my shit if he starts in about what a badass he is.
Hatred is a powerful thing and Caleb—not the person but what he represents—is on the short list.
Jesus, Eli needs to close my tab out so I can get the hell out of here.
“Hey, look at you.” Caleb glances over at Abby and nudges me in the elbow. “Finally gonna get some, huh?”
Just like that, Caleb crosses the line. It’s an innocuous statement, one that shouldn’t set me off. But I know this guy and I know where his mind just went, taking Abby with him into the filth and the grime and the grit. My hand moves before my brain fully engages and I shove him back. “Watch your mouth.”
He smiles and it is cold and patronizing. “No need to be so fucking sensitive. She’s just a piece of ass.”
I react before I really think.
I slam my fist into his face. His cheek splits open and the sight of his blood feeds the need in me for violence. To hurt him for those hateful words. I hope to Christ Abby didn’t hear him.
The blow sends him sprawling across the barroom floor, and I’m about to follow him down, but Eli is there, blocking me from taking his fucking head off.
I shake my hand and take a step away from Caleb, who has managed to push himself upright. Blood splatters on his pale blue Brooks Brothers button-down.
Hitting him felt better than it should have.
Eli steps between me and Caleb and jabs his finger toward the door. “Out.”
I guide Abby out of the bar, unsure of where to put my hands, what to do with them.
“Friend of yours?” she asks. There’s forced lightness in her voice, a tension that mixes with whatever was there when she came into the bar.
I need something to fill the void between us. Something to distract me from the look in Caleb’s eyes that filled me with disgust. Maybe I was just looking for a fight.
I was, but that doesn’t mean Caleb doesn’t need his ass whipped. Just thinking about it gets my blood burning again.
“Not exactly.” I drag my hand through my hair and breathe slow and deep.
“Looks like there’s a history there.” Her voice is quiet. Husky and thick and reserved.
“He’s…he reminds me too much of my old platoon leader.”
“Sounds like you miss the guy.”
Her comment catches me off guard and I smile unexpectedly. “Something like that.”
“Do you miss it? The Army?”
I swallow at the innocence in that question. How can you miss something that destroyed you? That would have taken everything you had? “Yeah, I guess I do.”
“What do you miss?”
“Everything. The guys. The stupid shit my soldiers used to do.” I hesitate. “The sense of purpose, I guess. That what I did mattered.”
She stops then and her fingers find mine. She cups my face with her free hand, her touch soft and oh so compelling. “What you do matters, Josh,” she whispers. A moment before she kisses me.
There is darkness in that kiss. A reaching out, grasping for something to hold on to. I’m pulled under, needing, hoping.
The drinking, the emotional distance—I feel a deep sense of shame because those things extend from my time in the Army. And I’d give anything to be back there now in the stink and the heat and the chaos.
I’m supposed to be an educated man; I’m supposed to know better than to bury my emotions in a drink or six, lamenting the loss of purpose in my life.
Until I met Abby, I was content to burn away the best years of my life missing the worst years of it. Now? Now I am being drawn slowly toward the light, after being in a pool of darkness for far too long. There is a faint stirring of arousal that is so much more than a fleeting sensation of an erection.
It’s hope.
Hope that maybe what ails me is only temporary. That maybe, just maybe, I’m not forever fucked up from the war.
That maybe someday I can put the pieces of my broken life back together because I’ll have something or someone else that makes me feel like a man again.
But until that day comes, I’m stuck. In the shadows. Wanting, wishing, hoping for a chance to step back into the light.
Abby
There is too much churning inside Josh—inside me—and I’m not sure I can handle him falling apart if I’m already so close to the edge myself. I needed an excuse to touch him, to lose myself in his taste, his touch.
I need to escape. Before everything comes spilling out and Josh looks at me like I’m damaged and unworthy and unlovable. I’m not sure what it would do to me if he ever looked at me like Robert did.
It might break me.
“I needed that,” I say quietly against his mouth when I can breathe again.
“Yeah?” He strokes his thumb over my cheek. The roughness of his touch is a balm, calming and exciting all at once. “What happened?”
“Friend of mine was slapped around by his boyfriend,” I admit after a moment.
“Graham?”
I frown, unable to look away from the genuine concern in his eyes.
“You know him?”
“We chatted at the Baywater.”
“No smartass comments?”
“You keep being surprised by the fact that I’m not some mouth-breathing Neanderthal.”
“Well, the Army isn’t exactly known for being a bastion of tolerance.”
“Maybe before the war. Now all we really care about is whether you can do your job. Gay, black or otherwise, most people don’t give a shit. Will you do what it takes to get everyone home? That’s the stuff that matters.”
There’s a roughness in his voice. There’s more to that story.
“You’re not going to ask?” he says after a moment.
I shrug, grateful for the distraction from my own worries. It’s so much easier to focus on someone else’s. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not particularly.” There is something dark there, simmering just below the surface. Ready to break free at the slightest provocation.
“Then I won’t ask.”
He makes a noise. “You’re pretty uncurious for a girl.”
I tuck my hands into my jacket pocket and we start walking again. “I guess I understand not wanting to talk about everything with everyone.” I look over at him. “People aren’t entitled to having their curiosity satisfied.”
That noise again. I can’t decide what that means.
But I don’t ask. For now, I’m content to be with him. To be facing down at least one shadow of the nightmares that haunt my life.
He glances over at me, and I can physically feel the half-truth standing between us. “Why did you come to The Pint tonight? I would have met you at work.”
I shrug again. I’m not being deliberately coy. I just can’t find the words to tell him how much it hurts seeing Graham in pain. “Maybe I just didn’t want to be alone.”
He stops walking. He slides his hands over my shoulders and turns me to face him. His palm is warm on my cheek, his thumb slipping over my skin. His face is cast in shadows from the streetlamps overhead.
He’s calm now; the violence in him either contained or dissipated. Not gone for good, though. I’ve seen this kind of violence before and it’s never really gone. There’s a storm brewing in the distance. Thunder rumbles closer from the west.
“We’re going to get rained on.” My voice is thick. I wasn’t lying. I don’t want to be alone.
I’m tired of running from the memories of the past. Tired of pretending to have all my shit together. I want to ask him to take me someplace.
Tired of having to be strong for everyone around me. Tonight, just for tonight, I want to lean on someone else. Even if that leaning takes the form of something hot and mindless and slicked with sweat, it will allow me to pretend, if only for one moment, that I am just a regular person. That I don’t have to be strong all the time.
I take a single step closer to him. The muscles in his throat move as he swallows. His lips part, his breath is warm on my skin. His fingers spasm against my cheek.
No, the violence in this man is not gone.
And I’m afraid. Not of him but of what he represents. I’m afraid of my reaction to this man, to the violence in his soul. Fear and arousal are twisted inside me. I want this.
I want to do this without shattering.
But it might break open all the old wounds before I’m able to handle them.
“I don’t live far from here.” His voice is harsh. Rough and strained.
Like the man. Caged and contained by a façade of modern life.
His thumb pauses against my cheek. His mouth is there, just there. A breath from mine. I am aching, hurting and needy all at once.
I close my eyes and lean in, resting my forehead against his. For a moment, the world falls away and it is just him and just me, and we are alone in the shadows and the light.
I’m terrified of taking this step. There’s no going back after this.
And I want this. I can handle this. If I keep telling myself it, it will be true.
“I would very much like to go home with you.” The words do not get caught in my throat. They flow between us, carrying the invitation, the request from my lips to his.
A shudder runs through him. I can feel the vibration in the space that separates us.
“Abby.”
Both hands are cradling my cheeks now. As though he was holding something fragile and worth more than a thousand suns.
But it’s just me beneath his fingertips.
He says nothing more until I open my eyes. The storm is there, looking back at me. Watching. Waiting.
“Tell me what has you sad.” Such a simple request. One that I think I love him for.
I slip from his touch and thread my fingers with his. I’m not sure how much I can talk about tonight. Not sure what I can resurrect without falling to pieces, something I’m trying desperately to avoid.
I take a deep breath and hold it until it burns.
When I finally speak, it’s not what either of us is expecting. “I suppose you’re used to being asked about war.”
His fingers spasm against mine and it is a long moment before he answers. “Yeah.” Another silence. “Though not as much here as you’d think. I thin…I think people here don’t really want to know about it.” He glances at me. “Or at least what they think they know about war.”
I offer a half-hearted smile. “They’re against it.”
He makes a noise. “Right.”
“There are a lot of assumptions about you. Because you’re a veteran.”
“I think I’m always one step away from becoming every stereotype they already think I am.” He pauses. “I feel like every time I open my mouth, I risk finally meeting everyone’s expectations. The angry veteran. Can’t piss him off. PTSD might start acting up and he might snap and shoot the place up.”
He’s trying to be flippant but it fails beneath the weight of his bitterness. It surprises me, honestly, at the level of anger in those words.
“I get that,” I finally tell him. “Not the angry veteran, but the expectations? I think it makes life just that much harder for me here because I’m always worrying how people will take what I say or do.”
He holds the door open to his apartment building. It’s an older brick building at the edge of campus. Not far from the bars and the old shops that were the first in the area to be gentrified.
I follow him silently down the worn carpet corridor to an old door that looks like it’s been painted over a dozen times or more.
He pulls out his keys and opens it, letting me into his world, his life.
But I don’t have time to take in his apartment.
As soon as the door closes behind us, he backs me slowly against it. I’m aware of his space at the periphery of my senses, but it is Josh who holds my attention.
His body is long and lean against mine, a solid wall of muscle that surrounds me. His mouth hovers just near mine. He does that a lot. This almost-but-not-quite-kissing thing.
It’s driving me a little insane.
“You never struck me as worried about what people think.” Soft words that are a balm on the ragged, exposed wounds I’m trying to bandage over once more.
“Maybe there’s a lot you don’t know about me.” Sometimes, the truth is easier than a lie.
“What made you hurt tonight?” he whispers against my mouth.
“Maybe I’m trying not to think about it.” I want to lose myself in his kiss, but he’s holding himself apart. Just enough to make me contemplate serious bodily harm.
He makes a warm sound. “So you need a distraction?”
Oh sweet baby Jesus yes please.
But I can’t talk. Because he covers my mouth with his and I am gone, sinking into the sensations he strokes to life inside me with each flick of his tongue.
**ONE CLICK BREAK MY FALL**
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