“I’m so glad.” I paused and took a long, deep breath. “I’ve been struggling with this a lot too, and I’ve been working through a lot of my own issues in the last few weeks and trying to figure out what I want. I had a long talk with Rachel today, and she helped me see some things. I’m still processing through a few others, but there’s a part of my past that you don’t know about, and I think this will all make more sense if I tell you now.”
“Okay.” Jack’s expression was much more relaxed than when the call had begun, but there was a seriousness in his eyes that let me know he understood that what I was about to tell him wasn’t easy.
“I know I told you that I was married before and that my ex-husband cheated on me. But, obviously, it’s not as simple or cut and dried as all that. The other part of that story—and I don’t like to talk about it at all, but I think you should know—is that my ex was a Marine. And it was while he was on a deployment, he cheated on me. We were living on base at the time and one of the other wives, who was a friend of a friend, told me she and a few of her other friends had received explicit messages and pictures from my ex. So, there I was in the middle of a state I’d never lived in before, surrounded by a bunch of people I didn’t really know. While I was waiting and checking off the days and counting down the hours for my husband to return to me, he was out in some desert and using his internet time to message and exchange inappropriate pictures with other women. You know, dick pics.”
“I’m so sorry, Holly.” Jack paused and shook his head slowly as though he couldn’t quite believe what I just told him. “I can’t even imagine how hard that must’ve been. I’ve spent my entire adult life on military bases, and sadly, I’ve seen and heard some of the same types of horror stories. It kills me to know that you had to go through that alone.”
“It’s not a piece of my past that I like to talk about, for obvious reasons, but since we are together, I need you to see all of me. I don’t bring any of that up to make you think I’m worried you’re going to make the same choices. I’m not. But I need you to understand that my anxiety and general unease with this whole situation has more to do with the past than it does with the present. Not knowing what was going on between us took me back to that dark period. And it’s not something that you can change or something I can snap my fingers at and forget about. It’s just something we have to work out. Hopefully, together.”
“Together,” Jack echoed. “Holly, I want you to know that—”
An ear piercing shriek sliced through Jack’s words. My eyes darted across the screen, trying to figure out where the siren was coming from. After a jarring moment, the look in Jack’s eyes betrayed the answer. The sound was coming from his ship.
“Holly…hold on…” He launched up from his chair and disappeared from view. My heart raced as the seconds ticked by, waiting for his return.
A break in the siren cleared the way for an announcement. A loud, commanding voice interjected, “This is not a drill!! This is not a drill!! General Quarters General Quarters, all hands man your battle stations, proceed up and forward on the starboard side and down and aft on the port side! This is not a drill!!!”
“Jack?” I cried out.
He returned to his desk but didn’t sit down. He braced his hands on the desk and leaned forward, his face close to the camera. The picture was so close that I could see every stress line pulling at the corners of his eyes. His mouth was a hard line, firmly set. “Holly, I have to go.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, unable to keep the panic out of my voice.
He cocked his ear as the message replayed. When his eyes shifted back to mine, they were wide and while he looked confident, there was something about the look that spooked me. “I’m sorry.”
My mouth dropped open, trying to figure out a way to make him stay, to tell me what was happening, but he bolted out of sight in such a hurry that he left the camera on and the call still running.
I stayed there, frozen in place, unable to look anywhere other than the empty screen and the place where Jack had been sitting moments before and wondering when he was coming back again.