Page 90 of The Chain

They order pizza and Rachel lies next to Kylie until she falls asleep. When Kylie is finally down for the count, Rachel texts her oncologist that she’ll call her in the morning. She hopes she isn’t dying. That would be the kicker to all of this.

She goes downstairs. Pete’s outside in his sweats chopping firewood. There are now half a dozen stacks of wood, each about six feet high. Definitely enough firewood to get through the winter and a zombie apocalypse or two. He comes in with a bundle of wood and lights a fire in the grate.

Rachel gets him a Sam Adams and he pops it and sits with her on the sofa. Something stirred in her when she saw Pete chopping that wood. Something ridiculously silly and primal.

She’s never known Pete well enough to have a crush on him. He’s always been away somewhere. Iraq, Camp Lejeune, Okinawa, Afghanistan, or just traveling. He’s very different from Marty. Taller, leaner, darker, moodier, quieter. Marty is handsome from fifty paces; Pete is more of an acquired taste. They don’t look alike or act alike. Pete is introspective; Marty’s an extrovert. Marty is the life and soul of the party; Pete is the guy in the corner browsing the bookshelf, checking his watch to see if he can quietly slip away.

Pete finishes the beer in one gulp and gets another. She lights him a Marlboro from Marty’s emergency bar-exam carton. “And we have this,” she says, producing a bottle of twelve-year-old Bowmore. She pours them two fingers each.

“This is good,” Pete says. He likes this feeling. This little booze buzz. He’d forgotten what that felt like. It’s a completely different type of high than you get with the opiates. Heroin is a protective blanket you throw over yourself. The most beautiful blanket in the world, a blanket that eases the pain and lets you sink into an autumnal universe of bliss.

Booze brings you out of yourself. Or it brings him out, anyway. And yet he doesn’t quite trust these emotions.

“I’ll just check the doors,” he says, clearing his throat. He gets up abruptly, takes the nine-millimeter from his bag, patrols the perimeter, and locks the doors.

Task completed, he has no choice but to sit back down on the sofa. He makes a decision. Time for him to tell Rachel the truth about himself. Both big secrets. “There’s something you should know about me,” he starts hesitantly.

“Oh?”

“It’s about the Marines. I was…I was honorably discharged, but it was a close-run thing. I avoided a court-martial by a whisker for what happened at Bastion.”

“What are you talking about?”

“September fourteenth, 2012,” he says in a monotone.

“In Iraq?”

“Afghanistan. Camp Bastion. The Taliban dressed in U.S. Army uniforms and infiltrated the perimeter fencing and got onto the base and started shooting up planes and tents. I was the duty officer of the engineering unit at hangar twenty-two. Except, well, except I wasn’t on duty. I was high in my tent. Just pot. But still. I’d left a senior sergeant in charge.”

Rachel nods.

“When I got over there, all hell had broken loose. Tracers and RPGs and total confusion. RAF guards shooting at Marines shooting at army. There were these private security contractors who just happened to be there, and they prevented a massacre. Never in a million years would I have thought that a Taliban team could penetrate that deep into the base. Prince Harry from England was there that night. The VIP area was two hundred meters from the firefight. It was a complete disaster, as you can imagine, and I owned a big chunk of it.”

“Pete, come on, that was six years ago,” Rachel protests.

“You don’t understand, Rach. Marines died, and I played a part in that. They punished me under Article Fifteen, but it would have been a GCM if they hadn’t been worried about the publicity. I quit anyway a couple of years later. Six years before my twenty. No real pension or benefits. What a complete asshole.”

She leans forward and kisses him gently on the lips.

“It’s OK,” she says.

The kiss takes his breath away.

You’re very beautiful,he wants to say but can’t. She’s exhausted, thin, and frail but still gorgeous. That isn’t the problem. The problem is articulating the feeling. He feels his cheeks redden and he looks away.

She pushes back a strand of dark hair from his furrowed brow.

She kisses him again, this time more seriously. It’s something she has been wanting to do. She’s worried it will be anticlimactic.

It isn’t.

His lips are soft but his kiss is strong and powerful. He tastes of coffee, cigarettes, Scotch, and other good things.

Pete kisses her back hungrily, but then after a minute, he hesitates.

“What?”

“I don’t know if I can,” he says softly.