“I don’t know.” He shifted in his chair. “What if she doesn’t feel the same? What if she leaves anyway?”
“Then she leaves, and you stop wasting each other’s time.”
He studied the grain of his camouflage ACU trousers, failing to find a way to contradict Ethan’s point.
“Are you nervous about all that financial stuff you mentioned?” Ethan pressed. “Do you think she’ll rip you off if you leave her alone in your house? Are you worried she’ll pawn your stuff and take off?”
“She wouldn’t do that. I trust her.”
“Do you think she’ll be unfaithful?”
“No.”
“Has she told you she loves you?”
He swallowed hard. “No.”
“Do you love her?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never loved anyone. I don’t think I know how.”
Ethan leaned back in his chair, blue eyes narrowed in scrutiny. “Sure you do. Everyone does.”
He shook his head. “You can say that because your parents are still together. I don’t even know what my dad looks like. I got married in a casino, to a woman I’d known for less than twelve hours, because a roulette ball landed on green. Believe me, I don’t know how.”
“That’s all procedure. Love isn’t the form you fill out when you come home from deployment, it’s the courage and loyalty you showed while you were there.”
“Whatever,” Chance muttered, suddenly unable to sit still a second longer. He sprang up from his seat and began pacing the small office, pretending to look at the vintage war posters adorning the walls but seeing something far different—an empty house, an empty heart, an empty life.
“I just don’t think I could find anyone else like her,” he managed eventually, still facing the wall. “She’s hard and soft at the same time. She’s tough, funny, smart, calls me on my shit. That doesn’t mean I love her.”
“What does it mean?”
“That she’s screwing up my deployment. How can I enjoy myself over there when I’m missing her the whole time?”
When he finally got up the nerve to turn around, Ethan was failing to hide his smug smile.
Chance’s sigh was exasperated. “You think I’m doomed.”
“I think you’re in love. And I think you should tell her.”
“Well, thanks for absolutely nothing, Captain Fletcher. Next time I come to you for romantic advice, remind me how useless you’ve been today.”
“I love you too, Sergeant. I’d ask you to invite me to the wedding but it already happened.” He grinned as he swiveled back to his computer. “Get out of my office.”
“Gladly.” Chance threw the door open so hard it bounced in the frame, not bothering to look over his shoulder to see the middle finger Ethan was undoubtedly offering.
His footsteps echoed in the empty corridor as he made his way out of the building. It was almost dark as he crossed the parking lot, the sun hanging on just above the horizon as if reluctant to say goodbye for a whole night.
He slid into the Challenger’s driver’s seat, shut the door and ran his hand over the dashboard. He loved this car. He knew that for a fact, felt his attachment to this hunk of glass and metal right down to his core. It was probably the only thing he’d ever loved. Until now.
He left the post and drove toward home, the built-up military complex immediately giving way to flat wheat fields occasionally interrupted by dirt driveways and weathered signs announcing the names of cattle ranches.
Almost all of the ranch houses he passed on his way to and from the fort were too far back from the road to be visible, but every so often he saw a well-used pickup turning into one of the driveways, and once he’d even been caught behind the school bus for the rural district. He imagined the orderly, wholesome lives those children led. Glasses of milk with dinner, swimming lessons, drawings taped to the refrigerator.
He tried not to dwell on the way he was raised, having decided years ago that there was no changing it and he’d done all right in the end so he might as well get over it. But as the Challenger growled down the long country roads toward his house, toward Tara, he thought about his mom.
He remembered the way she flirted with his junior-high principal, breezing into the office in her short skirt and high heels, switching between flattery and mutual concern until the wheezing old man agreed not to suspend him. He smelled the alcohol on her breath when she came home from work, ignoring his sisters’ chorus of complaints as she turned on the kitchen radio and raised the volume, taking him by the hand and dancing him around the room until one by one the girls got bored and walked out and it was just the two of them, spinning and jumping and laughing. He saw her bleach-blond hair tangled and gnarled first thing in the morning, her long, intricately manicured nails tapping against her coffee mug, her squint-eyed smile as she peered at him through her hangover and croaked, “How’s my boy?”
She’d made a lot of mistakes. She was irresponsible, she was an alcoholic, and she had no idea what she was doing when it came to raising five children as a single mother. And she hadn’t changed. She still called him for money, she still drove drunk, she still brought home more men than paychecks. But he knew she tried her best—he knew she loved him.
Maybe he was exactly the same. Maybe he did know how to love someone. It just looked a little different than most people. Like intense conversation over several rounds of beer in the small hours of the morning instead of six months of roses and boxes of chocolate. Like slurred vows in a casino atrium instead of a unity candle and a best man’s speech. Like a feverish, blurted declaration before six months of combat deployment instead of Thanksgiving dinner at the in-laws’.
Tara was the only woman he’d ever met who seemed not only capable of keeping up with his blazing journey through life, she was raging a path all her own. She was hot-tempered and stubborn and foul-mouthed, and she burned so brightly he couldn’t bear to look away, so hungry for her light and fire and energy that he wondered how he’d ever managed to survive almost thirty years of darkness before he met her.
He loved her. It was too fast, too untested and the surest truth he’d ever known. He couldn’t wait to tell her.
It was nearly full dark by the time he turned the Challenger up the driveway. The porch light was on and he could see that she’d pulled the Malibu out of the carport and parked it parallel to the front of the house. The trunk was open, and so was one of the backseat doors. As he passed it to park his own car he saw a bag stuffed with clothes poking up out of the trunk. He shut off the engine as Tara appeared on the doorstep carrying a cardboard box.
She was packing her car. She was leaving him.
Seven
A sharp pain throbbed in her left temple, a telltale sign of gathering sobriety. She gulped some beer from the bottle on the side table, but she knew there was only one way to avoid the oncoming hangover—sleep. And lots of it.
He was at the window, naked, holding the ugly floral curtains a foot apart and peering through the space between.
“What time is it?”
