Waiting for Her Soldier

Copyright © 2013 by Cassie Laurent.

All rights reserved.

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Waiting for Her Soldier
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. This book or portions thereof may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any form whatsoever without direct permission from the author.

This book is intended
Only for Mature Audiences 18+
. It contains mature themes, substantial sexually explicit scenes, and graphic language which may be considered offensive by some readers.

UUID: 8b30acd3-ead4-41c5-9d8e-2b92eb17ffa0

I stared at the letter as it sat on the kitchen counter. Then I picked it up again, holding it under the dim stove light. I read it over once more. It was so simple, yet so cryptic.
I have to talk to you
.

I hadn’t seen or heard from Darren in years. Then only reason I knew he was still alive was that I occasionally ran into his younger sister when she came into the little sandwich shop I had started a few years ago. I always asked how he was doing and Angie, his sister, always said he was fine, but that he really didn’t say much to her in his letters. That was just his personality, to keep his feelings to himself. I told her to give him my best, but I wasn’t sure if she ever even bothered mentioning me after all that had happened between Darren and I so many years ago.

You see, Darren and I stopped talking even before he shipped off for Afghanistan. We’d been best friends throughout high school, having grown up in houses right next door to each other. Maybe, in the back of our minds, we’d always nursed small crushes on each other, but our relationship was deeper than that. We’d looked out for each other, helped each other out. I helped him study for his finals and I watched him play quarterback on all those chilly Friday nights in fall. When he asked me to prom, I was shocked, but we went as friends, not lovers. We’d always done everything together, so it just seemed to make sense that we would go to the big dance together as well.

Once we graduated, things started to change. After we’d gone off to separate colleges, we started drifting apart. When we were home that first year for Christmas break, Darren introduced me to Jessica, his new girlfriend. I don’t know what Darren was thinking, but somehow he seemed to expect that we would become best friends. I tried to be cordial, swallowing my pride and my jealousy, but Jessica made no secret that she despised me. She seemed to think that I had designs on breaking up her and Darren, but the truth was that I just missed my best friend.

I wanted Darren to be happy, but I also missed having him in my life. I didn’t think Jessica was the right girl for him, and I told him so in a long e-mail a few weeks into the spring semester of freshman year. But I had underestimated just how paranoid and sinister Jessica was: she had been looking through his phone and his e-mail, and when she found my message she absolutely flipped and told Darren she would break up with him if she ever caught him speaking to me again.

I didn’t hear from Darren for months. Then one day I received a call from an unlisted number. I didn’t answer and let the call go to voicemail, a decision I would later regret. It was Darren calling me from a marine base in North Carolina. He was shipping out to Afghanistan in two days. He just wanted me to know he was leaving. Then he hung up. I tried calling back, to get some sort of clarification or explanation, but when I returned the call the number wouldn’t connect.

I cried myself to sleep that night. I’d lost my best friend before. Now he was going to Afghanistan where I knew I might lose him for good. I read the news. Life was still harsh over there. I knew Darren was tough, one of the toughest guys I’d ever met, but this wasn’t a high school football game. This was a real war in a hostile, foreign land halfway around the world.

I dropped the letter back down to the counter. I hadn’t expected this. I’d just come home from a long day at the shop and the last thing I was prepared for was the resurfacing of all these emotions, my hurt feelings that I’d tried to suppress for so many years. But despite everything, I knew that I had to respond. Darren and I had once been so close, and even though my heart was crushed, I knew I had the strength in me to be there when he needed me, so I picked up a pen and started writing a letter back.

But I could only come up with two sentences.