Oh how naïve he was.
She was fucking infinite.
Caroline
I liked the bike.
No, I loved it.
Not just because I got to be pressed up against Liam, as close as I could and I didn’t have any choice in the matter.
Not just because the road stretched out in front of us and we sped past towns, landscapes, everything. The world was outside, off the bike. It was simpler on the road. You’d think the time spent driving would invite dangerous contemplation, but it did the opposite, it did the thing I’d been trying to figure out how to do for the past decade and a half. I got it.
A little bit of it at least.
But mostly I was loving it because Liam and I couldn’t speak. You’d think, by now, with us finally alone, with us driving toward a home he couldn’t escape from, it’d be time to talk. To ask a fuck of a lot of questions. To tell him what he’d done to me. In detail. Swear at him.
But I didn’t want to do that.
Not after he’d held me in his arms, pressed me to his body, cradled me like I was a baby, kissed my head and whispered nothing and everything in my ear for the half hour it took me to regain myself.
He didn’t look at me like I was weak when I finally found it in me to talk. He blamed himself. He tortured himself, I saw that. Not just for leaving me in the motel room, but for leaving me at all. Because he likely blamed himself for the fact I even had this trauma in the first place. I wanted to blame him at the start too. I wanted him to blame himself.
But the more I saw, the less I wanted to blame him and the more I just wanted him.
So I was glad that we couldn’t talk. So he couldn’t tangle me any more in this web than I already was.
Or was I tangling myself?
I parked my rental car in an empty spot in the town’s small hospital.
Liam didn’t drive me to the hospital.
For obvious reasons.
It wouldn’t have been surprising if his parents were at the hospital, visiting. They had stayed close with our family like one of those weird, tragedy anomalies. Because I didn’t care what anyone else said, tragedy didn’t bring people together, make them appreciate what they did have. It only pushed them farther apart. Look what happened to me. It pushed me across oceans, into hot zones, battlefields, and mass graves.
Anywhere but this town.
This beautiful, picturesque, classic American small town. Without a Starbucks, with a grocery store owned by the same family for years, exorbitant prices and little variety.
The town that had turned into a prison after we got the news. I’d been home for the summer, seeking solace in a place that gave me comfort, safety, and memories of Liam around every corner.
And then, after the funeral, after all of that countless, horrible death stuff, I went straight back to school. I didn’t come back, even for holidays. I’d make up excuses. Take extra classes, anything to keep me away.
Then I got a job as an intern in New York. Worked two other jobs, lived in a studio with three other people, was constantly hungry, worried about money and had no free time. It was the closest to happy I’d ever been.
Because I didn’t have time to think about how fucking unhappy I was.
That’s when I met Emily. She was also an intern at a PR firm, using the word fuck as much as she could, sleeping with anything with tits—including her trying me until I told her I was straight and we decided to become best friends instead. She accepted all of my fucked-up things. Like the fact I never talked about my family, my past, never dated and was never standing still long enough to…feel.
And then we both started moving up, stopped having to work in shitty bars and coffee shops. I got a job at The New York Times. Writing shitty copy but enough. And then, they had a shitty assignment that was dangerous, with crap pay and no guarantees of safe return.
I took it without hesitation.
I’d watched war coverage with a different kind of morbid fascination than the masses. I couldn’t tear myself away from the faces of the soldiers. I looked for his face in every one. Even though I knew he was dead. But the only way I’d really known was to go over there and see it all for myself. Make sure it was real.
So I accepted. Readied myself as much as anyone could ready themselves for such a thing. I wasn’t scared. What left did I have left to be afraid of?
I discovered I did have things left to be afraid of when I went home to inform my family—the people I’d tried to make strangers and they didn’t let that happen—of what I was doing, where I was going.