He laughed. And damn if it didn’t feel good. He didn’t want to be grilled, but talking to Rosie was different. “You obviously heard every detail,” he said with a smile. One that felt a heck of a lot easier today.
“I was shamelessly eavesdropping,” she said, then turned forward again to call to the
boys, “Don’t get too far ahead of us old folks back here.” Then she spoke to him over her shoulder. “You said some days it was boring over there. Really? Boring?”
“Yeah.” He half snorted the word. “Tower duty could suck. Six hours of watching for anything suspicious. But we did good works too, trying to build trust with the locals. We constructed schools. Even dug a well for a small village whose well had become contaminated.” It had felt good at the time. Worthwhile.
“Did you ever get time off?”
“Not a lot. Idle hands and all that. They wanted to keep us busy. But we figured out how to have fun. Me and my buddy Zach, Zach Smith—they called us Alias Smith and Jones—he was a huge prankster. We both were, to be honest. One time we switched the gear for Shrimp—he was the tallest guy in our unit—with Dozer.”
“Don’t tell me. Dozer was the shortest.” The laughter in her voice filtered back to him, doing things to his insides.
“You got it. So Shrimp tries to pull on his pants and starts cussing up a storm that the locals he’d paid to do his laundry had shrunk all his stuff. And Dozer says, ‘Give me twenty bucks and I’ll let you use mine ’cause they seem to have stretched.’ Swear to God, Shrimp gave him the twenty bucks.”
He hadn’t thought about all that in years. They’d played a whole lot of harmless pranks, and it kept the guys laughing. Over there, laughter had been like medicine.
Talking to Rosie was like medicine now.
“Why did Shrimp have to pay someone to do his laundry?” she asked, holding a low-hanging branch out of the way so it didn’t slap his face. “Didn’t you guys have some sort of unit that did all that stuff?”
“Nope. You did your own. If the base was big enough, you might have a couple of machines or even a real laundromat. But small bases without any running water, you’d have to handwash it all in a bucket.” Or you stank, he mentally added.
“Now I’m feeling all high maintenance for needing running water for my washing machine and my dishwasher and my garbage disposal.”
He thought of Karmen. Before she’d joined up, she’d been a real girly girl, according to Mrs. Sanchez, her mother. But Karmen had lived like the rest of them with never a complaint.
“You’d have done fine,” he told her. Rosie was the furthest thing from high maintenance. “You get used to the food and the routines and the job and the people.” He’d gotten used to it, even the guard tower, though, thank God, he’d eventually been promoted out of that duty. He’d reenlisted a few times and might even have re-upped again.
If he hadn’t lost his team.
In all the time he’d been back, he’d never thought of any of this. Not until now. He’d only thought about that day, the IED, his team, Karmen. But he’d realized when he was answering the boys’ questions the other night that every day hadn’t been a firefight. Sure, there’d been bad times. But there’d been a lot of good days too.
And talking to Rosie about it was as much a release as letting it out with Noah last night had been.
“Thanks,” he said softly.
She stopped a second, looked back at him. “For what?”
“For listening.” And for not asking the hard questions, he thought to himself. He had the sense, though, that when the time was right, he could tell Rosie. She would listen like a friend.
Because, he suddenly realized, she was his friend. She always had been, since the day Ari had introduced her.
* * *
When they returned to Gideon’s apartment complex for an afternoon of swimming, the boys rushed off to Noah’s room to change into their swim trunks. Rosie had her bathing suit in her carryall.
As Gideon went into his bedroom to put on his trunks and she used the hall bathroom to change into a one-piece and a semi-sheer cover-up, Rosie marveled at how differently today had turned out to be. Far from what she’d expected.
After last night’s almost-kiss, she’d assumed he’d tell himself he’d been crazy and resume efforts to block her out. But if anything, he’d seemed more easy and open with her on the hiking trail than he’d ever been before. He’d talked about the war, what it was like in the Middle East, about daily life. He’d even laughed—with her, not just the kids. There hadn’t been dark clouds hanging over him. Twice in two days, he’d opened up about his life over there.
He was letting down his walls, not just with the boys, but with her.
He was starting to see things differently, that it hadn’t been only darkness. There’d been good things too. And he’d shared all that with her. He’d let her help him, taken what she had to offer. Just the memory of it made her heart feel fluttery.
Gideon’s apartment was surprisingly kid-friendly, with bean-bag chairs, a big-screen TV, an Xbox, lots of children’s books, and a toy box full of Lego pieces and robots and dump trucks and cranes and diggers. Noah was a great one for building. Ari said he wanted to be a structural engineer when he grew up. Trust the son of a robotics billionaire to decide at such a young age that he wanted to be something so specific.
Rosie was about to plop down on the love seat to wait for Gideon and the boys when she saw the painting. Right before she almost crushed it.