Page 44 of Guarded Knight

But I’m not sure how to broach the subject and I’m simultaneously fretting about meeting my new doctor.

But keeping things to myself hardly creates a sense of calm.

Twenty minutes of silence. Then thirty. Then forty-five. It stretches between us, thread pulled tight between two fingers just waiting to snap.

The only sound is the music, low and brooding country soul, from the truck’s speakers. Only the GPS breaks the quiet now and then, cutting through like an unwanted third party.

I don’t look at him, and he doesn’t look at me.

But I’m aware of every breath between us. Every gear shift. Every flex of his hand on the wheel. Every brush of his arm when he reaches for something on the console.

It’s nothing.

It’s everything.

By the time we pull up to the hospital, I’m not sure what’s got me more rattled, the appointment, or being alone with him in a place that reminds me how this chasm all began.

He kissed me in a hospital.

It was right before his first deployment. He was fresh out of SEAL training. His head was shaved, and I remember thinking he was hotter than ever like that. The shadow of his buzzed jet-black hair gave him an edge, but something about it made him look soft, too. Touchable. His jaw was tight, his posture military straight. His eyes burned brighter.

He looked like sin and salvation wrapped into one.

I’d been admitted with a chest infection after a cold spiraled too far. No makeup, greasy hair, cheeks blotchy from days of coughing. Next to him in that uniform, I felt like a wet rag tossed in the corner.

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful, G,” I said, turning my head. “But I’m not exactly dying for anyone to see me like this.”

“Why?” he asked, voice soft. “It’s just me.”

Exactly.Especially you.

He read my mind, my need to be pretty at such a young age; it mattered more than it does now. He reassured me, made me feel special, and…he kissed me.

The world dropped away. My body, so heavy for days, felt light. Untethered. His lips were soft but certain. He smelled like soap and steel and something sharp and clean. It wasn’t a wild kiss. It was reverent. Measured. Almost polite.

That kissed turned into another, small moments of me giggling behind closed doors, snatching another behind them when no one was looking, in the middle of a Sunday dinner while Gabriel and I offered to get whatever was missing from the table or in the hayloft of their barn when I told my mom I’d take the lasagna she made for Luis and Carmen over… we clung to those last moments before he deployed, never defining them until he had to leave.

That’s when he told me he could never ask me to wait. It stung. I wanted him to want me enough to ask me for more, but in light of how old I was already, that this medicine didn’t exist, that I was possibly only a decade away from dying, it was also selfless.

Then his mom died.

War happened.

And the man he told me I had wasn’t there anymore when I saw him next.

We arrive at the hospital, and he parks in the structure, engine idling for a beat longer than necessary.

I reach for the door handle, but he signals for me not to open it. He rushes out to open it for me and offers me a hand.

I don’t need it but I want it.

I don’t want to be alone.

Not right now anyway.

I’ve only just gottenup on the table, the crinkle of butcher paper loud beneath my skin. The gown is open in the front, standard for a pulmonary exam, and no one ever warns you just how cold it feels when you’re braless under fluorescent lighting, trying not to look as vulnerable as you feel.

The nurse gives me a kind smile as she finishes jotting something on my chart.