Surviving Ice (Burying Water 4)

His strong arms rope around my body, pulling me in tight. “I think it’s perfect.”

“Does it say Ivy?”

He lays a gentle kiss on my forehead. “I said it was perfect, didn’t I?”

Yeah, I’m beginning to think that Esmeralda was right.

Ned would like my new anchor.

“I look like a three-year-old who got into an art studio,” I muse, scratching at the dried splotches of green and yellow paint that cover my skin, my clothes. They’re probably in my hair, too.

Sebastian gives me a sideways look as we wade through the sand toward the crop of rocks. It’s the very same pile at Ocean Beach that I sat at while designing his reaper. “No, you don’t. Not at all.”

His recently smooth jaw is already covered by a thick coat of stubble, and I can’t help but reach up to scratch my fingers across it now. “You going to grow that back out?”

“You want me to?”

I shrug. “I’m good with it either way.” As long as I have you.

He throws an arm around my shoulders, pulling me into him. Though that dark cloud that formed during dinner with Esmeralda last night still hovers, I’ve managed to get a few smiles out of him this morning.

“I come here sometimes, to think,” I admit, settling onto my favorite perch, which gives me a perfect view of the surfers in the water.

“I can see why.” His gaze narrows as he watches them, too. It’s six forty, and the sun is just cresting over the horizon behind us. The circles under his eyes are probably as dark as mine, but if he’s tired, he doesn’t let on. “Do you feel better about the shop now?”

“Now that I’ve vandalized it, yeah,” I chuckle.

Reaching down to pluck a perfectly intact seashell from between the rocks, he flips it between his fingers. “Now what?”

I shrug. “Now I call my cousin and tell him I want to keep it.” I sigh. “It’s what Ned would want. It’s what I want.” Oddly enough, saying the words out loud for the first time brings me a sense of peace.

“Because she was right, wasn’t she? It’s an anchor.”

I glance up to see that distant worry in his eyes. Esmeralda’s words are still lingering in his mind, too.

“One of them.”

His chest lifts with a deep breath, and I’m hit with a wave of panic that something between us has changed since yesterday, that he’s grown bored with me overnight. That he’s decided he doesn’t want to do this, after all.

I hate this insecurity swirling inside my head and my heart. I’m not used to feeling it; I’ve managed to avoid it all this time by not committing to people. And now, here I am, finally ready to commit, and I’m already losing my cool.

“She was right. About my ghost,” he says quietly, his gaze holding to the ocean’s water line.

I sigh with relief. This isn’t about us at all. “What do you mean?”

He clears his throat, as if voicing the next words is going to be hard. “We used to go on these regular raids through Marjah, routing out insurgents. There were a lot. I can’t tell you how many rounds of ammunition I fired in my time over there. Anyway, there was this one day on my second tour, we had a tip on someone and I was out with my team, hunting them down. We found ourselves driving into this long corridor in our Humvee. And there was this little girl running at us, with these big blue eyes and dark hair, and wearing a backpack. The Taliban were known for using children in these kinds of attacks. Where we were, with buildings on either side, we’d be leveled by an explosion. She was so little, six or seven. She was scared, I could see it in her eyes.”

I’m trying to picture this but I’m struggling, partly because I don’t want to. I’ve always rolled my eyes at Dakota when she talks about auras, but right now the very air around Sebastian has chilled. I’m shivering.

He heaves a sigh. “We yelled at her to stop, but she kept coming. I was the only one who had the clear line of sight. So I took it. She went quickly. We scouted the area for insurgents before we closed in to secure the backpack. There was a blanket, a bottle of water, and naan wrapped in cloth.” I look over to see his profile, an image of sorrow, as his voice grows thick. “She wasn’t coming to kill us. We found out later that she had no home, no parents. She was running to us for help.”

My chest begins to throb. “But . . . that wasn’t your fault.” Even as I say it, I understand that wouldn’t mean anything to the man who pulled the trigger. To a man with Sebastian’s discipline and code of honor. Something like that must have destroyed him.

He says nothing, peering down at his boots.

“So what happened?”

“It got swept under the rug as a wartime casualty and everybody moved on.” He pauses. Everybody but him, I’m guessing. “The next time a kid darted out from behind a car at our outfit, I froze. Even when my commanding officer yelled the order to fire, even when I saw the IED in his hand, I couldn’t pull the trigger. He lobbed it at the Humvee in front of us and blew them up.”

“The one your friends were in?”

“They were all my friends,” Sebastian explains quietly. “But, yeah. That’s the one.”

This story is getting worse and worse.

Sebastian has an army of ghosts trailing him.

I reach over to take his hand and squeeze it. He turns my fingers in his palm, lightly tracing the splotches of color with his free hand.

“I took some shrapnel to the back. Kirkpatrick, my commander at the time and a fucking dick wad, wrote me up for insubordination. When I filed my papers to leave the navy, I ended up with an ‘Other than Honorable’ discharge.”

“What does that mean?”

His lips twist in a bitter smile. “It depends who you ask. For someone like you, who doesn’t know anything about the navy, it doesn’t mean much at all. For someone like my father, who retired as a highly decorated navy captain, it’s almost as bad as if I were some street thug, murdering innocent human beings.” He pauses. “It means that it can be hard to get a job, and a lot of veteran benefits don’t apply to me, even with my years of service.”

“But you did get a job.”

His lips twist in thought. “Yeah. Through a friend.”

“Well, then . . . screw that less than honorable discharge, because you’re doing what you’re good at anyway. Right?”

He studies the sand for a moment. “Right.”

No wonder he doesn’t like talking about the navy. I wouldn’t either if those memories were tied to it. And it sounds like he doesn’t have anyone in his corner, now that he’s trying to move on. “Are you and your parents close?”

“Not really.” He hesitates. “But I haven’t made much of an effort, to be honest. I haven’t made an effort with anyone.”

“Where are they now?”

“Still in Potrero Hill.”

I frown. “Don’t you live in Potrero, too?”

A slight frown touches his forehead. “Right.”

So they’re probably minutes away from each other? While I’m not necessarily one to push family bonding, after watching Ian miss out on making amends with his father, I don’t want to see it happen again. “Thanksgiving is in a couple of days. Maybe it’s time to make an effort?”