Page 39 of Falling for a Grumpy Hero
FORD
S un blazed down on me from above, the sky blue and clear. Not a breath of wind moved through the air and old-school rock music played from speakers we’d carried onto my next-door neighbor’s porch. The party was well underway and so far, everyone seemed to be having a blast.
Laughter echoed all around me, my neighbors standing in little groups scattered around the cul-de-sac. Kids raced around with water pistols and some zoomed past me on their bicycles, shrieks of joy or protest over having been hit with a jet of water piercing the street every so often.
Mostly organized chaos was the closest I could get to describing it, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it might be. In all the years I’d been living here, I’d heard the music, the laughter, and the shrieks, smelled the scent of barbecue on the air, and I’d kept my curtains shut tight.
The party had always annoyed me to the extent that the last few years, I’d deliberately left for work before they’d started and I’d locked myself into the office until long after the festivities had been over. All to avoid exactly where I was now.
Somehow, I’d even ended up manning the grill. A high honor, I supposed, to be trusted with their hamburgers on a day like today.
As I flipped the burgers, I lifted my gaze and immediately sought out Lila again.
She was mingling and smiling, her red hair like a strawberry halo around her head in the sunshine.
I’d been stealing glances at her all day, wondering not only how the hell she’d managed to convince me to come to this thing, but also why it didn’t feel like the world was ending now that I was here with her.
“Hey,” a guy said as he walked up to our group around the grill. I’d been chatting with some of my neighbors, mostly older men, but the dude joining us now hadn’t been one of them. “You’re Callahan, right?”
I glanced at him, a little frustrated that he’d grabbed my attention from Lila just as she’d dropped her head back to laugh, but I gave him a curt nod. “Yeah. That’s right. You are?”
“Barry Moore.” He grinned and extended a hand toward me, using the other to point at a house down the block. “I moved in there a few years ago. Never got a chance to meet you before, though.”
“Yeah, I’ve been busy.” I shook with him, expecting him to fall into the conversation he’d interrupted with the others about swimming pool maintenance, but he sidled up to me instead. I frowned, flipping the burgers at the other end of the grill and hoping he’d leave me alone.
I was out here. I’d come to the party and I’d been talking. I didn’t need him right next to me. Especially not since I could feel him staring at the side of my face like he was trying to figure out if he recognized me.
“You served, right?” he asked a moment later. “I think I heard from someone that you were in Afghanistan?”
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I was there.” I slid the spatula underneath a burger that one of the little boys had come to carefully select for himself earlier. “Any reason why you’re asking?”
“Oh, sure. Yeah, I was there too. Just over a decade ago now.”
The guy was friendly enough, just making conversation from the sounds of things, but my blood started cooling when he mentioned the time period. “We were there around the same time, then.”
My gaze cut to the side and as soon as I looked at his face again, I knew that he knew. There was something about the way his jaw tightened as our eyes met that told me he’d been somewhere around there when it’d happened.
Somehow, half a world away, someone who had been there had ended up living on my block a decade later. Fucking fantastic.
“You were in that heli that crashed,” he said, confirming my suspicions. “The lone survivor, if memory serves. We heard about it. I thought I recognized your name the first time I heard it, but I wasn’t sure until just now.”
As he was speaking, I felt the darkness creeping up on me like thunderclouds gathering in the distance of my mind. The storm was rolling in and there was suddenly not a damn thing I could do to stop it.
I swiped the boy’s hamburger from the grill, wanting to keep the promise I’d made about saving it for him. Memories started flicking at the edges of my brain, the acrid scent that had pervaded my nostrils as soon as we’d gotten hit mingling with the smoke drifting off the barbecue.
Barry was still speaking to me, telling me where he’d been stationed and how they’d heard about the crash, but I didn’t really hear what he was saying. Feeling like my head had been thrust underwater, it was like I could make out vague sounds but not enough to hear him clearly.
Oxygen stalled in my lungs and panic slid through my veins like an oily paint I already knew I couldn’t scrub off.
The memories became thicker, more visceral.
It was like I could feel the weight of my rifle pressing against my thigh.
Shouts echoed in the distance, either from children around me now or soldiers in the distance past. I couldn’t tell.
Just as black spots started dancing around in my field of vision, the sound of Lila’s laughter reached my ears, so beautiful, and lyrical, and real. As if suddenly released from a giant hand, I crashed back into the present, snapped out of my spiral—but only barely.
I sucked a breath of air into my lungs and blinked away the black spots, surprised to find that around me, no one even seemed to have noticed that I’d been well on my way to a full-blown panic attack.
Barry was still telling literal war stories, a faraway look in his own eyes as he swept a hand out dramatically.
“Never thought I would see such vast landscapes, you know? Nothing but sand and mountains for miles. It was incredible.”
Behind me, the older men had moved on from discussing their swimming pools and were engaged in a heated debate about lawn care. Children were still zooming around on their bicycles or chasing their friends with those water pistols.
Absolutely nothing had changed, yet it felt like everything had. The only person who might’ve noticed something had gone wrong was Lila. She appeared at my side seemingly out of thin air, gently bringing a palm to my forearm and laying it down as those cornflower blues fixed onto mine.
“Despite your best, highly procrastinated efforts, you didn’t win best lawn this year,” she said, but as she stared up at me, worry tightened the corners of her eyes and she stepped into me as if she knew I needed that contact to keep me grounded in the present.
I slid an arm around her hips and brought her soft body closer to my own, finally feeling like I could breathe again as I smiled down at her. “Maybe next year.”
“Oh, I have big plans for the yard before then,” she said cheerfully, leaning into me and finally averting her gaze. “You’ll definitely win then.”
I laughed and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “You can do whatever you want to my yard, baby. I’m just still not really going to care about winning.”
She giggled, wrapping her arms around my waist and resting her head against my chest. I refocused on the burgers but held her with one arm and used the other to ensure that I didn’t betray the trust that had been graciously bestowed upon me when I’d been assigned grilling duty.
But the darkness was still there, creeping and spreading like wisps of smoke just below the surface.
Her laughter had broken me out of the spiral and her presence now was doing what it could to keep me anchored, but I honestly wondered how long I was going to be able to keep these tendencies at bay for her sake.
Lila stayed where she was for a few minutes, just holding me and watching as I flipped the burgers, but finally, she let go and introduced herself to Barry and some of the others. The block party went on, but eventually, as the sun was dipping low on the horizon, she and I started heading home.
It took a while because everyone wanted to talk to her as we said our goodbyes, and I imagined what this could be like a year from now. Five years.
I imagined weekends spent listening to the projects she had planned for the house, making multiple trips to the hardware store, and having to chat to every neighbor on the street whenever we took Rook for a walk.
The emotions that spread through me as I allowed myself to envision that as my future left me feeling weirdly warm and happy.
But as I waited for Lila to finish talking to a woman who wore exclusively yoga pants, Barry drifted closer again.
He wasn’t coming over to me, just making his rounds with his wife as they said their own goodbyes, but the sight of him was enough to send me careening right back to the edge of the abyss.
Closely cropped hair told me memories of the landscapes weren’t the only thing he’d brought home with him. Even the way he moved told a different story. He still stood just a little too straight, his posture just a little too rigid.
Obviously, he was doing a better job than I was fitting into the community and pretending that he’d left everything he’d seen and experienced an ocean away, but I could see now that wasn’t entirely true.
Watching him laugh while practically marching his wife from group to group, I felt the bad memories stealing closer again.
No one I’d ever spoken to had managed to leave it all overseas. Some simply made the adjustment more easily than others.
As Lila slid her fingers between mine, I grasped her hand and followed her to my house, but I also thought of Luke and how happy and excited he’d been. I thought about his girlfriend and the ring he’d brought. About the life he’d wanted to make with her when he got home.
What the hell did I do to deserve the kind of life he should have had? Why did I survive and he didn’t?
Lost in thought, I was only vaguely aware of the orange glow of streetlights and the weirdly peaceful look of my house as we approached it. The lights were on inside and the yard was neater than it’d been in a long time, and I felt my heart give a longing twang.
What I wouldn’t give to have had Luke here today. He probably wouldn’t have settled in Florida with his folks and his girl, but he might’ve visited. Might’ve?—
“Are you okay?” Lila asked as we walked into my house. Rook had been waiting and she smiled, pushing her hand into his fur, but looked at me over her shoulder. “You’ve been even quieter than usual since this afternoon.”
“I’m fine,” I said, turning to shut and lock the front door behind us. “It was just a long day, is all.”
She straightened up and walked toward me in the foyer, a soft smile on her lips as she looped her arms around my neck. “Are you sure that’s all it is? Was it too much for you?”
“Nah.” I took her hips in my hands and lowered my forehead to hers, breathing in the sweet scent of her as I walked her backward to my room. “I’m just real glad it’s over now.”
The dark clouds remained, the storm raging in the corners of my mind, but with her warmth against me and the night wide open ahead of us, all I needed to keep sane was her.
For as long as I could focus on her, I really would be okay.
Once she left though, all bets would be off. I just wasn’t about to tell her that.