“Practitioner of bartitsu. You know, Sherlock Holmes. Walking stick fighting, old chap,” I said lightly. As the eyebrow arched higher, I said, “I’ve got an old injury. It flares up sometimes.”
“Right,” he said with acceptance. His attention returned to his phone, though he didn’t resume typing on it right away. He stared at it for a long, heavy moment as thoughts turned behind his eyes. Only once I’d joined the queue to drive out of the base did he start his messages again.
I let the silence linger until we’d turned onto the road to head into town, bounded by the Rocky Mountains on my side and vast plains on his. Pikes Peak judged us from on high, still in a sparse snowpack finery. That layer of snow thinned more every year, and lasted fewer months before the heat drove it away.
“Talking to your parents?” I asked.
“Good guess. I wanted to let them know I’d arrived safely.”
“Not a guess. Your information packet said your parents are the most important people in your life.” I didn’t look at him, just kept my eyes on the road.
That’s how these careful car discussions work. No one looks at each other. No one pressures the other to interact. You create a space and you allow the words to fill it, like a gentle stream that has to gain momentum before it becomes a river.
“They are. Family’s everything. My family has helped me through the toughest times of my life. Basic. First deployment. Owen cheating.” His voice hardened at the last. That wound wouldn’t mend for a long time.
Three representative events chosen to illustrate how his family had helped him. I knew he’d left out plenty of times his family had kept him afloat. Battles must have gone wrong. Squad mates must have died with their blood staining red-brown rock. He’d selected two events any soldier had endured, but his ex cheating? That was both a message for me and a personal landmark he couldn’t fail to point out.
“Heartbreak’s the worst,” I said, letting a bit of my own pain out to show its spikes. “I don’t know if I wish my ex had cheated on me or not. On one hand, cheating is a horrible betrayal that leaves you gutted and doubting your own worth. You lose your trust in humanity, you never want to reach out again. But, on the other hand? You also gain a rock-solid justification for bitterness, moping, and angst, without any room for waffling about on if you were right to leave your ex’s sorry ass in the dust.”
“That’s fair,” he said, attention back on his phone. “Not sure I can think of much worse than a partner cheating on you. Especially when you’re on a whole other planet.” A pause, then he asked, “What did your ex do?”
“Decided she wanted a certain lifestyle my own life couldn’t afford. I’m a history teacher. Sometimes, I sub in for a science teacher when his allergies act up. I have student loans to pay off and I don’t want more to add to them because spending my life in debt sounds awful. I’m never going to be rich, or prestigious.” I shrugged and paid more attention to the cows in the rolling pastureland beside me than my passenger.
Everything I’d just said was true. My own representative events to illustrate why my ex had left me out of the blue one day. And I’d left out plenty of information myself, because with that information came the secrets I held closest and bled over the most.
I wanted to marry Jackson. I wanted to give him those secrets when the time came. That level of emotional intimacy did demand a certain amount of buy-in on his part. I’d thought Joan and I would have a wedding by the end of the year when I shared them with her. She walked out before six weeks had passed. I had my own wounds to lick in the solitude of my pain.
“That’s some bullshit, right there,” Jackson said with a snort. “You were a teacher when you got together, yeah?”
“Yep.”
“Then she knew what she was getting into. She wanted a richer lifestyle, she should have found herself a rich boy to start with.”
If only it were that simple.I didn’t say that. “Yeah. Anyway, I didn’t necessarily blame her. She couldn’t join up because of medical reasons. She wanted better for herself than a teacher with a limp. If she’d cheated, at least I would have had that airtight justification for wanting her gone. As it was? I kind of understood where she was coming from.”
“Fuck that.” I caught the motion of Jackson shaking his head in my peripheral vision. “How long ago was that?”
“About a year, now. I took some months to get the moping out of my system and return the ring. Then I started on the application process for Mail Call. Which has been smooth as silk.”
“Ha.” He glanced over from his phone screen. “What about your family? They help you through it?”
“God, no. I haven’t talked to my family in years.”
He stared at me. “Why the hell not?”
“Because they’re awful. My family is like a school of opinionated, snobby piranhas. They’ll eat you down to the bone and leave nothing of you left.” I glanced over so I could smile at him. “That was one thing I liked about you. You’ve got a family. Maybe it was wrong of me, but I hoped I might inherit yours when we got married. Gorgeous husband, close family, all in one.”
The blush tried to sneak past me, up his neck and ears, but I saw it anyway. “Mm. I don’t know if I could do that. Cut my family out, that is.”
“They made it easy. When I was twenty-one, they threw me out and disowned me. That was a bridge not just burned but annihilated. They disagreed with some of my life choices.”
Startled offense bristled through the silence. For a moment, I worried he’d wonder what the hell I did to deserve it, write me off as a bad cause for a family man, and give up the notion of a marriage with me right there. Yet when I stole a glance at him again, I found a righteous indignation that didn’t seem intended for me.
“What. The fuck,” he said. “No good parent does that. They don’t just leave their kin to fend for themselves because they don’t like something. That’sshit, Bastian.”
“Not my favorite, either, but if they didn’t want me, I didn’t want them. I just got on with my life.” Badly. In debt and racking up more to chase a dream I’d set aside because they refused to let me pursue it. If they wanted to hate my life choices, then I’d ensure theyreallygot their panties in a twist when they heard what I did next.
It backfired, of course, but for a while there, I was the High King of Parental Defiance and I’d loved it.