“Yeah, thanks,” Jackson said. He neatly caught the shorts I tossed at him and pulled them on over his narrow hips.
Then I had the most appealing man I’d ever seen walking around my house in my shorts. Long night for the old trouser snake.
I showed Jackson to the laundry room then cleaned up after supper. If he ever wanted to have any guests, we’d need more plates, and we might consider silverware that both matched and hadn’t come from a thrift store. Pleasant domestic thoughts drifted through my mind as I dealt with the remains of a barbecue, and I thought I could get used to this.
My husband still hadn’t emerged from the laundry room when I had the kitchen sorted, so I went in after him. “Do you need me to show you how to work the washer? It’s pretty standard, but there are a lot of choices on the panel…”
He stood in front of the washer with a photograph in his hand. At first, I wondered if it were a picture he’d found in his bag, maybe a lost friend or a particularly sharp memory. His face wore a complicated expression, concern and melancholy and wistfulness all at once. Then I realized what he had in his hand and I kicked myself.
Ever discovered an unwashed sock that fell between the washer and the dryer? Months later, that sock is rank, and stiff, and not a happy thing to find. It was like that.
“Oh. Hey, sorry about that. I took all those down but found that one on the way out the door this morning. Forgot I’d even put it up. I meant to throw it in the box with the rest of them, but I didn’t have time to open the box, put the picture in, then tape it up again before I left,” I said.
He didn’t look up at me. “This you and your ex?”
“Yep. That’s Joan and me. Let me put that in the box.” I held out my hand.
No move to hand the picture back. “She’s pretty.”
“On the outside, yes. She’s very pretty. On the inside, she’s a woman who wants what she wants, which is fine, you know? Except when ‘what she wants’ would negatively impact my life and mental health. What she wanted was more important than my needs, to her. I don’t blame her. I just don’t want to go back to that.” I shrugged and breathed out a tired sigh.
Now he moved, turning toward me with an apologetic look on his face. “Sorry, Bastian. I found this picture on the washer, and- You look so comfortable together. In love. Like you fit.”
“Apology accepted.” I flashed him a reassuring smile. “I’ve been where you are, Jackson. It’s so hard to trust that the next person won’t fuck you over, when the last one did. You wonder if I’ll want to go back to Joan, or to women in general. I wonder when your trust issues will take you away from me. Not a good cycle for us to be in, huh?”
“It’s not.” He tossed the photo onto the washer again, then crossed the intervening space between us so he could wrap his arms around me. “I’m sorry.”
I held him tight, heartbeat to heartbeat. “It’s okay. It’s just something for us to work on.”
“It was such a long deployment,” he said, voice muffled as he tucked his face against my neck. “So much shit happened. So much awful, tragic shit. I’m still goddamn raw. I don’t know why that picture hit me so hard, babe, but it did, and you don’t deserve this.”
My poor soldier. Brave and wounded in places where you couldn’t see the scars. I stroked his hair as I said, “It hit youbecauseyou’re raw, Jackson. Raw and exhausted to the bone. You need time to rest and heal. I will be with you every step of the way. Okay? I’m your husband. I’m never leaving you.”
I felt a hot, wet tear drip onto my bare shoulder. His body wracked with a silent sob. We stood there in my laundry room, clinging together as if our lives depended on it, and I held him while he cried for all the still-bloody places that needed time to mend.
* * *
The next couple days passed in a gawky domestic bliss. We bought him new clothes. He picked out a grill. I took him to the gym I used and converted my membership to one for married couples. We navigated the pitfalls of learning to live with a new roommate. I introduced him to my favorite toilet plunger, since with my plumbing issue, the toilets clog if you sneeze on them.
Time wears off the rough edges of new life situations. Given a couple good nights of rest, and a few days together, Jackson and I turned into any other old married couple who teased each other in the grocery store and spent nights in front of the television, curled under a blanket. We introduced each other to our favorite movies and television programs. He wrinkled his nose when I turned on the news.
“Thought I came back to Earth to avoid that shit,” he said, as a story on the recent Mars battles popped up in the broadcast.
“Sorry,” I said, and I meant it. “I make a point to watch the news every Sunday through Thursday. Then I go to my classes the next day, and I discuss it with my students.”
He shifted so he could look at me. “Yeah?”
“Sure. I watch this,” and I nodded to the television, “then I ask them, ‘What do you think history will say about what we saw on the news?’ We take a few minutes to talk about the events, compare them to events in history, and try to deduce what they’ll look like in a history book fifty years from now. Will our forces be hailed as heroes? Will they be villains? Are we on the right side of history?”
“So, are we?”
I lifted a shoulder. “That will depend on who wins. Who owns the textbook companies, who buys books for the schools, even where in the world those books are taught. I’d like to think we will be, though. It’s hard to say. I don’t have access to the classified stuff. Just the broadcasts sanitized for the public.”
Tension had tightened his muscles, and I didn’t think he realized it. I guessed he was waiting for me to ask him if Mars were really that bad, or beg him to tell me war stories, or even ask him to confirm it was worse than the broadcasts made it out to be. Instead, I curled myself back up against his side.
“If you prefer, I can watch the replays while I drink my coffee in the morning. You’re right, and I’m sorry I didn’t think of it. You shouldn’t have to watch this,” I said.
He craned his head down to look at me. “That’s real thoughtful, Bastian. Thanks. How about I tell you if I’m not up to it on a night, and you can catch the replay? Otherwise, I’ll watch with you. Maybe I’ll have an insight or two for your classes.”