Unburying Hope (10 page)

She reached out her hands across the table and
he looked at her, his eyes heavy with sadness.
 
He pulled his hands slowly to the tabletop and touched hers
cautiously.

“We were the walking wounded for a while.
 
Scrub was the only thing that resembled
home, America, to each of us, no matter where we’d come from.
 
He was the only normal thing in our
day.
 
Our medical officer rationed
out some anti-D’s after that, anti-depressants.
 
Most guys needed something to get over the hump of that
loss.
 
We buried him, then poured
concrete over his grave so the Taliban couldn’t mess with our minds by
desecrating his body.
 
We were
pretty crazy by then.
 
We were
thinking about things we knew we’d never touch again: our bed pillows at home,
the soft fur on the head of that damned hero dog that stole our hearts.”

The food came and they ate quietly.
 
She held his right hand with her left,
until he pulled himself back into the present moment.
 

“Let’s go back to my place, after dinner,” she
said.
 
“We can hang out?”

“It’s not that damn emotional,” he said,
waving his hand.
 
“Seeing that
service dog just brought up a wish that Scrub could be an old dog too.”

His protestations were weak, she could sense a
deeper truth in the connection between the loss of the puppy and some bit of
brokenness in him.

Chapter
Eleven

She hadn’t intended to let down her guard so
quickly, it wasn’t her way.
 
Or was
it?
 
She had been single for as
long as she could remember, like her mother.
  
Was that a choice, she wondered?
 
Or fear.
 
She made it through her days, her weeks, her months by
staying closed, keeping an invisible wall between herself and the world.
 
Except for Frank, she’d been pretty
successful.
 
Until tonight.

He quickly regained his composure in the
diner.
 
She had wondered if he’d
have money for the meal and she’d put two twenties into her pocket just in case
she could help pay.
 
Turns out, he
had some cash, told her he was spacey about paying bills, it wasn’t that he
didn’t have money.
 

When you look for someone to date, she
thought, someone to give a part of yourself to, you look for someone who can
see or feel things on a deep level.
 
Not someone pandering to you or someone so drunk that you know they find
you beautiful now with their hazy eyes but you also know that they will cringe
when they look at you later in the daylight.
 
You’re not ugly, but they were drunk.
 
All the dreams they brought to that
moment with you had nothing to do with you.
 
They were in a hormonal rush, or they had thought up a whole
story about you that was in their head, that you couldn’t possibly know or
fulfill.
 
She’d learned that the
hard way once or twice, took it personally.
 
She’d become a hermit for many nights afterwards.

Was she only attracted to his brokenness?
 
It was as much a part of him as his
eyes, or his muscular torso, or the dent in his head, which she hadn’t noticed
in hours.
 
Funny, how our most
vivid wounds become invisible when we show our true selves, she thought.

They were again sitting on her sofa, but
closer this time.
 

He was quiet, present.

The moment unfolded.
 
First, she saw him look into her eyes.
 
There was pain in his expression.
 
Something in him was questioning his
own ability to contribute.
 
It made
her smile with sadness.
 
It’s like
they each had different sides of the same wound, though she didn’t know how to
breach the gap.

There was no fumbling, as there had been with
other men.
 
Just his eyes, his
past, the things he couldn’t tell her and the things she might never know about
him.
 
She’d been on her own so long
that she understood how you stockpile parts of yourself, your feelings, unsure
that you’ll ever be able to share them, afraid that they might topple under
their own weight before you find a partner.
 

She found herself to be unbearably hot, a
physical manifestation of her own desire to explode out of the silence she’d
held herself in for years.
 
She reached
down to the drops of sweat on her flat stomach, tamping them with the emerald
green cashmere sweater fabric, then suddenly she yanked the sweater up off her
hot chest, over her head, stripping it provocatively off of each arm.

His eyes widened and he grinned.
 
“Um, I am trying to wait until you’re
ready, ma’am, but your skin is so warm.”
 
He reached over and gently massaged her neck.

“Must have been the sweater.
 
It made me hot,” she laughed.

“And the soldier didn’t?” Eddie asked, tracing
her clavicle with his index finger.

She reached down for the bottom of her black
camisole and stared deeply into his eyes.
 
“A few hours ago, it was chilly in here, but not now,” she methodically
danced the camisole up over her head, slithering first her left then her right
arm free.

“Christ, you have a gorgeous body,” he exhaled
hard.

Celeste giggled again, standing up, fumbling
for the button at the waist of her pants.
 
She realized that she was wearing the new jeans that Frank had so
indelicately called ‘GPS for a bed.’
 
The lycra in the cotton clung to her heated skin but she smoothly
sashayed out of them, letting them stay crumpled at the side of the sofa.

“The Signal Corps can’t read the incoming
signal, there’s one message on the radar and another over the walkie talkie,”
Eddie said, holding tightly on the bottom of his own t-shirt.
 
“Is this an ambush?”

Celeste leaned closer to him, licked his ear
lobe and sucked gently, listening as he shook his head moaning.
 
“I’d say the coast is clear,” she said,
then she stood up, took his hand, pulled him to standing and led him into the
partial darkness of her bedroom.

They lay down on her bed, after she pulled the
comforter back to make room for them.
 
His shirt and pants and socks were strewn around the room before he
threw back the sheets and she smiled as she pulled him tightly against her
body.

“You still have your boxers on,” she pouted.

“You’re still wearing your bra and undies,” he
said.
 
“Stalemate again.”

She laughed and he took her face into his warm
hands.

“Celeste, I want to have sex with you so
bad.
 
You have always turned me on.
 
But I’m not a one-night stand guy.
 
So if that’s what this is for you, I’d
be pissed but I’d leave.”

Celeste rested on her side, looking closely
into his eyes.
 
“Are you for real?”

“I’m a gentleman,” he said.
 
“Goddamn, I didn’t fight for so many
years so I could push myself on someone.”

“Years? That’s an eternity,” she said.

“Yeah, well, you do what you feel you have to
do in life.”

“Why did you fight?” she asked, pushing
herself against his body.

“I thought it was the right thing to do.”

The fullness of his lips brushed against her
lips, teasing her.
 
She’d never
felt more naked, more visible and she looked at his face, his grayed tan skin.
 
The emotional mask had slipped away and
she could see the unbroken dreams of the broken man in front of her.

“I’ll take mine off in a few minutes,” she
said, “but first tell me something about you that no one else knows.”

He thought for a few minutes, lying on his
back to stare at the darkened ceiling, the room lit by the hall light outside
the bedroom door.

“No, you have to face me,” she said, gently
poking his hard biceps.

He turned to face her and she could feel his
apprehension fade as he looked more deeply at her than she’d felt before.

“Sometimes I’m scared shitless,” he said
quietly.

“You?” she blurted out, half biting her lips
to pull back the word.

His mouth opened into a sad smile.
 
“Fuck, yeah.
 
Me.
 
Not
now.
 
But sometimes.”
 
His eyebrow raised and he held his lips
in an uneven smile.

She looked at the dent in his forehead, the
only clue of a simmering internal damage that Eddie held so tightly that it
only flashed in moments like this.

“What about you?”

“There’s a lot about me that no one knows,”
she said softly.
 
Her mind wandered
through her past, through so many moments of solitude, the stark difference
between the hope-filled inner world in her heart and the unchallenging world of
her empty days.
 
“If I could, in a
few days, I’d set my life up completely different than this,” she said, waving
her arm towards the undecorated bedroom.

Her bed was cozy, inviting, but it was the
lone palpably conscious place in the whole apartment.
 
Not so much for sex, she thought, because the sex was never
connective and usually left her feeling more alone, but because it was the
place of dreaming.
 
Its comforter
held her, its fluffy pillows supported her as she lay dormant, living other
lives in her sleep.

“I can dig that,” he said.
 
“I don’t feel you grounded here.
 
I used to garden with my grandfather,
remember?
 
I can tell when
something hasn’t put down roots.”

“But I’ve been here forever,” she protested.

“Eucalyptus trees grow so tall, but their
roots are just below the dirt,” he said.
 
They can suddenly explode if fire is nearby, like they’re waiting for a
way out.
 
A eucalyptus can grow
really fast, huge in a decade or two.
 
Maybe this isn’t where you’re meant to put down roots.”

She thought for a moment, her eyes still on
him, about the lease she reluctantly signed each year, for only one year at a
time, her pen barely able to form her signature, her inner voice screaming
about escape while the muscles in her hand jerkily move to the bottom of the
document, scratching out a recalcitrant autograph, trading her fantasies for
the substance of her job, twelve months at a clip.

“This isn’t my place either,” he said.

“Don’t you military guys move every four years?”
she asked.

“I’m not in the service anymore,” he said.

“You did your time?”

“Nope.
 
I got out.”

She felt an unspoken seawall go up, the quiet
lapped against it, threatening to drag their intimacy out in an undertow.

Instead, she brightened.
 
“So what’s with all the tree
knowledge?
 
Were you a tree in a
past life?”

He smiled, wryly.
 
“You should have seen the trees in the Sofed Koh, the alpine
mountains in Afghanistan.
 
We were
only there for a month or two at a time, but it was like a primeval Christmas
tree farm, a huge forest with a million flowers growing underneath.
 
The smell was incredible.”

Celeste felt herself drawn to the conundrum of
the wounded soldier, energized by the memory of a green Eden.

He looked at her with side eyes, she saw and she
grinned at him hugely, opening her arms wide.
 
“Oh my god, you are adorable,” she said, wrapping her arms
around him, pulling him close, feeling his tight chest against her soft
breasts.
 
She pushed away for a moment
to whip her bra off, pulling it over her head in one piece, kissing him deeply,
her tongue playing with his, enjoying his obvious delight at her interest.

She ground her body against him, then reached
into the covers and pulled her panties down both legs.
 
She watched as he pulled his boxers off
and she was aware suddenly of the very real existence of a bond that, while not
obvious, was deep.
 
Two lovers who
could see each other with eyes closed and she met his aroused thrusts with her
own kindled force, freeing her body to the throbbing passion, feeling the
strength of her dreams like a tree, not needing deep roots, able to sway, get
lost in the blinding orgasm that came forcefully, inciting the explosion that
would incinerate the invisible hold that the physical world could have on a
soul.