Protect Me Not ((Un)Professionally Yours 2)

“What are these for?” she asked, lifting the purple heart and turning it over in her hands.

“That’s the uh...purple heart. They awarded it to me it for getting shot.” And he hated the sight of it. It reminded him of Dylan, who had received the same medal posthumously.

A medal for dying.

“And these?” she asked, pointing at the rest.

“Mostly rifleman awards,” he said with a dismissive shrug, wanting her to move on.

“Why are they just lying here?”

“I usually keep them in that drawer, but I was looking for something earlier and forgot to put them back.”

“You keep them in the drawer?” she repeated flatly.

“Yeah.”

She gave him a look that he had difficulty interpreting, her eyes were shadowed and she seemed troubled.

“Why aren’t they on display like your brother’s guitar picks and your mother’s vase and whatever the heck that is?” She waved a finger at his dad’s box-framed cigar foil band collection, which was hanging above the floating shelf housing his brother’s guitar picks.

He shoved his hands into his back pockets and hunched his shoulders defensively.

“I guess I don’t see any need to display them.”

“But why not?”

“Being a good shot bears little relevance on my current life. And getting shot is nothing to brag about.”

Her frown deepened. She carefully placed the medal back on the table, before turning and heading toward the opposite wall.

The Wall.

The six-foot-wide, nine-foot-tall expanse between his television stand and bedroom door. Filled with nothing but framed photographs. Looking at it objectively, Ty could admit that it was too much. It looked like those remembrance walls that often popped up after mass tragedies.

He loved the people in those photographs, he missed them, but this suddenly felt creepily obsessive.

Her back was to him, and he couldn’t see her face. She stood—hands behind her back again—head tilted upward as she perused the pictures from top to bottom.

“I’ve been meaning to take some of those down.” He sounded embarrassed, apologetic, and self-conscious, even to his own ears.

“They’re lovely pictures,” she said her voice not betraying a single emotion. She didn’t look at him, but he could tell from the left to right, up and down movements of her head that she wasn’t missing a single photograph.

“Chance says it’s a shrine.” Fuck. Why had he said that?

Her head stopped moving and she slowly turned to look at him.

“So, they’re all—?”

“Dead, yes.” He wiped his hands on the dish towel slung over his shoulder and hesitantly closed the distance between them until he was standing beside her.

“My parents.” He pointed to a picture of the smiling older couple. They were holding hands and grinning into the camera. His finger moved to the left, a laughing young man with a motorcycle helmet tucked beneath his arm. “Tanner.”

“And who’s he?” she asked, pointing to a picture of Dylan. He was wearing a tux and had Ty—also in a tux—caught in a headlock. They were both laughing. “I recognize him from that picture of your rifle company—did you call it?—in your bedroom.”

“Dylan. My best friend. We grew up together, he was like another brother to me.”

“Do you have anything of Dylan’s here?” she asked.

“What?”

“You have those weird foil things—which I assume belonged to your father—your brother’s guitar and picks, your mother’s pottery. Do you have anything of Dylan’s?”

“Uh…I have his Navy Cross.” The medal was displayed in a lit shadow box, with a picture of Dylan in his dress uniform. The box sat on a tall, round table against the wall to the right of his plasma unit, close to Tanner’s guitar. She had missed it on her first go-around. “It was awarded posthumously. His wife and family wanted me to have it. He got it for saving my life.”

It had been a generous gesture—meant to comfort him—they weren’t to know how much it had hurt in the beginning to see the damned thing every day. Over time, the pain had dulled to a numb ache. Still, he’d had an obligation to honor his friend’s sacrifice, which was why he’d had the case custom-made for the medal.

She walked over to the table and stared at the display for a long moment. Her silence teemed with the unspoken, and he wished she would say what was on her mind.

Instead, she leveled him with a penetrating stare, and two devastating words.

“I see.”

I see.

Small words that carried immense weight.

She saw…

Her gaze was on his face, bouncing between his eyes, and Ty held the unshakable belief that she truly did see. That she understood everything about him in that moment.

And it fucking terrified him.

“Do you?” The question was a whisper, and her prettily arched eyebrows crinkled the skin above her nose. He found himself elaborating. “People don’t often see me, you know? Nature of the job. I blend in. They see what I want them to see.”

Her breath escaped on a quiet exhalation. She turned and took a step toward him.