A Lot Like Perfect

One

The guys on Isaiah West’s SEAL team called him Elmer, like the glue, but it wasn’t because his feet were extra sticky. Unfortunately. That would have come in handy if he hoped to win the bet he’d just taken to walk the entire length of the wooden railing that edged the loft in the old barn he’d signed up to help renovate.

Isaiah jumped up on the cracked, peeling rail and eyed the dusty expanse of the barn floor a good fifteen plus feet below the outer edge of his black Converse. No problem. It wasn’t that far down. A bet was a bet, and compared to some other ones the guys on his SEAL team had thrown out, this one was pretty tame.

Isaiah refused to call any of them former SEALs. Or a former team. The five of them were no such thing, despite a discharge from the Navy that the brass might label honorable but still didn’t change the involuntary part.

“You’re not actually going to do it. Are you?” Tristan Marchande called up to him with faint amusement as if he couldn’t believe Isaiah would entertain such a notion when Marchande had been the one to issue the dare in the first place. As he usually did.

What, like Isaiah was scared? Piece of cake after walking the roofline of a four story building to avoid an al-Qaeda welcoming party outside of Ghouta. He’d done that with two Colt M4A1’s slung across his back while wearing combat boots with knives stuck in each one. But not because Marchande had bet him. Because taking out insurgents in the Middle East had been his job for almost a decade.

And now it wasn’t.

Some days it was easier than others to accept. Today wasn’t looking so good.

“You see me doing it, don’t you?” Isaiah shot Marchande a look designed to shut him up but he had a feeling he’d only generated a good deal more amusement.

Which was fine. He didn’t mind providing entertainment for the team if it kept them all motivated, though the other guys he’d served with in Syria were off on their own renovation projects.

The five of them had volunteered to help expand the tiny town of Superstition Springs in an effort to stave off developers from leveling the place to build a shopping center. Caleb Hardy, the best SEAL Isaiah knew, had recently been elected mayor in a surprise victory, and the man needed firepower in his corner to make good on his campaign promises—namely that he’d get the town up and running as a tourist destination. Before that could happen, the residents, which the SEAL team now counted themselves as, had to turn it into a functioning town.

Being a SEAL had been in their blood, given them a reason to exist. Taking that away with an honorable discharge changed nothing other than the fact that they could no longer collect a paycheck from the Navy. Or participate in the ops currently underway in the Syrian theatre. It was a fair sentence for the crime of accidentally destroying the wrong village. But no less disheartening.

With that crimp in their strides, they’d limped from California to Superstition Springs, a town near Austin, Texas to figure out how to breathe again. Or maybe that was just him. The rest of the guys were handling being cut loose from their platoon a lot better than he was.

For their part, Isaiah and Tristan had gotten schoolhouse duty, or rather Hardy had assigned it to them without much discussion. This old barn needed to become an institution of learning inside of a month, but instead of working on installing the weather-proof exterior panels like he should be, Isaiah was busy testing out the quality of the loft railing. For a measly dollar.

He took a step and the rail teetered, nearly throwing him off balance. He flung up an arm to counter his weight. Shoved a shoulder down to lower his center of gravity. Perfect.

“If you fall, try to land on your head,” Marchande advised. “That’s the part with the most cushion.”

“Har, har,” Isaiah said without a drop of humor. If he fell, the pain would be no less than he deserved.

He took another step, compensating for the weaknesses in the railing’s construction. And the fact that it was probably a hundred years old. Two hundred if it had been an original part of the area back when Superstition Springs had been a mining town.

“Why are you letting Tristan egg you on?” Cassidy’s voice floated up to Isaiah from the vicinity of the barn’s double doorway, her dislike of his teammate coloring her question.

When had she gotten back from town?

He cut his eyes toward her without moving his head. Aria Nixon and Cassidy Calloway had both stepped inside the barn and stood watching him with arms crossed, clearly having heard more about the genesis of the bet than he’d like. The long-time residents he and Tristan had been paired with for this job had left for lunch a while back and obviously, Isaiah had lost track of time. Figured the better-looking half of their renovation crew would show up while he was mid-dare.

“For the money,” Isaiah deadpanned and took another step. A dollar was a dollar.

That was his standard answer but far from the truth.

The truth was, he couldn’t breathe sometimes. The crushing weight that had dropped on his chest after Syria never seemed to go away and the fresh air in Texas hadn’t helped as much as he’d hoped. How did he pick himself up from having unwittingly participated in a military strike against civilians, most, if not all, of whom had died? That had been the most horrific of the many, many things that had gone wrong in the little village of al-Sadidiq near the border of Lebanon.