“Ido. You sound like someone just shot your dog. That level of misery has to be from love. Or kidney stones. I hear they’re pretty painful.”
“Maybe I am,” I grumble. “And you can tell Freya she’s right. It does change everything. Hell, I used to envy the guys who had families waiting home for them. Now? I don’t know, man. How do you handle it, leaving Freya like you do sometimes? Knowing you’re making her worry?” I try to console myself with the thought. I really don’t want Millie worrying about me the way she worries about her brother. Nothing like a little dose of martyrdom to ease my pain.
“It sucks. No lie there. But the reunions are pretty epic,” he offers with a grin in his voice. “So you’re just going to go and not tell her how you feel.”
You’re just going to go… I hear the veiled warning in his words. Yeah, he’s definitely hearing stuff at the Pentagon that is making him think I’ll be headed somewhere unpleasant. “She knows how I feel.”
He snorts. “Typical guy response.”
I shrug inwardly. “I’m a typical guy.”
“Look, if you don’t tell a woman how you feel, she’s not going to know. She’s not psychic, you know. If you love her, you tell her. Anything less makes you an idiot.”
I laugh. “Great. Then my choice is between being an idiot or a selfish prick. Love my options.”
“How does telling her you love her make you a selfish prick?”
“I can’t tell her I love her right before I leave. It’s like I’d be guilting her into worrying about me. Manipulating her feelings. I want her waiting home for me, sure. I want her there when I arrive back on base like all those other girlfriends and spouses. And frankly, I even want her to give a shit if I come home in a body bag.”
“Rather pessimistic.”
“But plausible and you know it. And thanks to her brother’s experience,sheknows it. So, you want me to tell her I love her to basically manipulate her into giving me what I want? And how exactly does that make me anything but a selfish prick? My parents always did that. Used the wordloveto manipulate me. Guilt me into putting up with them. I’m not going to pull the same kind of stunt with Millie. So, yeah, I’m going to walk away from her without telling her. And I’ll do itbecauseI love her.”
“You really think that’s going to stop her from worrying about you?”
I bristle, rejecting the idea. “She won’t worry about me. Hell, I don’t even know if she loves me. She’ll move on.”
“Bullshit. She’ll worry. And there’s nothing worse than worrying about someone who you think doesn’t even love you back.”
I frown, pondering whether he’s right. “So that’s the only advice you’re sharing with me tonight? No romance tropes from your wife this time?”
“Nah. Life isn’t a book, man. If you want a good ending, you have to write it yourself.”
Long after our conversation ends, his words still hang thick in the air in my apartment, almost suffocating me. Because it’s true. But worse—Millie and I wrote our ending long before there were such emotions involved.
Long before I realized I love her.
Stupid ending.
I sit at my desk staring at my houseplant that I’ll be handing over to my neighbor when I next deploy, just like she kindly agreed to earlier this week. I hardly know her. She’s about sixty-something and we’ve maybe shared a couple dozen words since I moved in.
And I’m handing off the only living thing that relies on me to this woman I barely know without even an afterthought.
That pretty much sums up my life.
Then my eyes migrate downward, and I look at the envelope that I had set down on my desk for safe keeping.
And it suddenly occurs to me.
Saying goodbye to Millie a few days ago wasn’t our ending.
This is.
About ten years from now after I retire, I’ll open this and it will be the last time I’ll have any kind of contact from Millie. I wonder where I’ll be, or who I’ll be with. I’d like to think I’ll eventually find a woman who is willing to put up with my career. But right now, I can’t imagine her. Because that space in my heart where she’ll perhaps reside one day is still occupied by Millie.
I lift the envelope. It’s thick, and I picture all the drudgery of forms that awaits me inside of it. Then I smile, thinking of how she filled them out for me. Even now, years from the day I’ll be able to even consider setting up a new career for myself after retirement, she took the time to do this.
Because she believes in me that much.