Can't Hold Back Page 5

  It was the third week of April now. He’d be home, if everything had gone smoothly, in a week.

  Falling for you.

  Falling for—

  Alia was struggling to assimilate all that she had learned in the last few minutes, and also struggling to figure out what it meant. Nate had said he was falling for her, meaning—

  Suddenly, with a stab of pain, she saw. Saw it all, with total clarity.

  Falling for someone, yes, but not Becca. And not her. Someone else. Someone who…didn’t exist.

  Lead sank in her gut. “Oh, shit.”

  “I thought it couldn’t do any harm,” Becca said slowly. “But I was wrong, wasn’t I? Everyone said to wait till he came home. Everyone said you can’t break up with someone who’s deployed, it’s too risky; if he’s really upset, it could mess with his head, and then—”

  The words coming out of Becca’s mouth took a moment to make sense to Alia. They weren’t the words she’d expected, the words about how the sisters had invented a woman and deceived a man, had deceived Nate, words about how angry he was going to be when he found out. They were different words.

  “Wait. I don’t understand. You want to break up with him?”

  “I have to tell him the truth,” Becca said. “I have to tell him that it’s not working for me, it’s not going to work for me—”

  How can Nate Riordan not work for you? He works overtime for me.

  And as she—finally—heard the words echoing inside her head, she realized: It was true.

  Even though she tried like hell not to think about him, tried to confine him to those moments when she was helping Becca. Even though she’d denied her feelings and buried herself in the composition of Becca’s letters, the composition of Becca, as if a girlfriend was something you could craft. All the while lying to herself about the depth of her feelings, until she’d seen those words from him.

  Falling for you.

  She was in love with her sister’s boyfriend.

  Oh, Nate. I’ve gone so far beyond falling. And—I’ve done a terrible thing.

  “I’ll tell him everything,” Becca was saying. “I’ll tell him you helped with the letters. I’ll show him the parts you helped with, and he’ll see that he isn’t really in love with me, and then maybe it will hurt less when I break up with him—”

  Alia made a faint distressed noise, but she was pretty sure Becca was too far inside her own thoughts to hear her.

  “I’m going to tell him you sent the care package, that you get him. Because you do. You always have. That’s why you’re so good with the letters.”

  And then Becca stopped. Held still, in a way that was deeper than Alia had ever seen anyone hold still. As if all the motion in all of the cells and vessels of her body had stopped, as if the whole world had stopped, as if she were listening to something far inside herself, and then her gaze sharpened on Alia’s face and the two of them were just standing there, staring into each other’s faces, and it was like looking in a fun-house mirror, distorted reflections stretching infinitely in both directions, Becca’s remorse—and Alia’s no-longer-buried longing.

  “Alia—”

  “Don’t.”

  “You’re in love with him.”

  “No. No.”

  “Did you—did you know you were?”

  “No. I swear. I swear. Until—”

  “God, I should have seen it! I can’t believe I didn’t see it! I’m an idiot. I understand why you couldn’t see it. You probably didn’t want to see it. But I should have! I would have—”

  “You would have what?” Alia asked quietly.

  They both stared at it, the futility of it.

  He’d never been Alia’s to give in the first place, and he wasn’t Becca’s to give “back.” You couldn’t just distribute a man like a gift. It had been a gross act of hubris, committed in the name of generosity.

  “I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him the whole truth. Everything. I’ll tell him how I feel, and how you—”

  “No. No, please don’t.”

  “Alia, why not? Maybe if he knows, then—”

  But Alia was shaking her head, and her heart was breaking, because she understood. That there were some things about the human heart that made no sense. That you sometimes did wrong while you were trying to do good.

  That it was too late.

  “We can’t just swap me in for you.” Alia’s voice sounded surprisingly calm to her own ears. “It doesn’t work that way. We invented a person, and we made him fall in love with her. And when we tell him the truth, we’re going to take that away from him. He—” She caught her breath. “He won’t forgive that.”

  “So—what do we do?” Becca whispered.

  “We figure out the nicest, kindest, most truthful way for you to break up with him. And then—then we never do anything like that again.”

  A promise that, in the end, she hadn’t kept.

  On the physical-therapy table, Nate stirred and stretched almost luxuriously under Alia’s hands, as if rising to meet her touch. She was jerked back to the present, her face reddening with remembered shame.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. It was pitiful and it was inadequate, but it was so, so true, and that somehow seemed like a good place to start. “I blame myself completely. I shouldn’t have helped her. I should have pushed her away and told her she needed to do it herself. I was enabling when I should have made her face her issues.”

  I should have faced mine, too. A hell of a lot sooner.

  “Well,” he said dryly. “I’m glad you can see that now.” And then, his voice muffled by the face cradle, “Hey. Don’t beat yourself up over it. I get why you did it. And I’m over it.”

  Oh, God, if that wasn’t the absolute worst. Because as much as she’d wanted his forgiveness—as much as she needed it—some part of her had secretly hoped he still mourned the lost connection. That he lay awake, maybe only on his worst nights, thinking of the woman who didn’t exist, the perfect woman, the woman who’d written the letters and assembled the care package.

  The woman who’d sent the instant messages.

  Because as misguided and unlikely as it was, there was still a part of her that hoped that maybe, just maybe, he’d wake up from his trance and realize she was right here, in this room with him, flawed, misguided, and unglamorous, but real.

  Chapter 6

  A few drops of drool had already dripped from his mouth, through the donut hole in the face cradle, and onto the floor of Alia’s office. That was about as undignified as it was possible to get. Also distinctly unsoldierly.

  But he’d never been a soldierly soldier. Not really. He’d done perfectly well acting the part of an alpha guy, but there had also been his love of writing, the journals he’d hidden, and his general sense that he thought more about things than most of the men he knew.

  Which was why he’d loved those letters so much. They’d gotten that aspect of him, the artsy, thinky part that he mostly either denied or hid. She hadn’t shied away from his doubts about whether he should have enlisted in the first place—whether it had been a mistake to think he could use the Army to pay off his debts without incurring brand-new, more emotionally weighty ones—or his feelings that just keeping his buddies alive didn’t fill the giant chasm of why.

  She.

  Not Becca. Alia?

  If it hadn’t been immobilized in the face cradle, he would have given his head a shake to clear it.

  He’d flat-out lied to her a minute ago, when he’d said it hadn’t been a big deal. It had been a very big deal, discovering that the woman you’d thought you were in love with was a work of fiction. He’d thought he’d found the woman of his dreams—beauty and sex appeal, brains and a soul—and it had turned out she didn’t exist. You didn’t recover from that easily, and Alia was part and parcel of that pain, even if she hadn’t been the only one to inflict the wound.

  And even if she was making up for it now. She had amazing hands. Large and warm and strong an
d skilled. They moved with total confidence and accuracy, like she was reading him, reading the pain, and the pleasure, too. Following the thread of his relief, extending it and sweetening it. Right now she was working his lower back, and as it relaxed, he wanted her to knead lower, where the muscles in his ass were knotted.

  Begging her to rub his butt would be even more undignified than drooling.

  “I think it’s really great. What you’re doing, with the kayaking trip.”

  He shrugged, and something in his back and shoulder spasmed. He cursed.

  “Easy. We don’t have to talk about it if it’s too hard.” And without asking him where it hurt, she moved her hands from his lower back up to behind his shoulder blade and began to tap. And slowly, incrementally, the pain crawled back to where it had come from. Maybe only temporarily, but, Jesus, the relief of having someone who could track it down and chase it to its den—

  It was easier than he would have thought to begin telling her the story.

  “I couldn’t keep sitting home, feeling sorry for myself, popping pills. And meanwhile, there’s all this pomp and circumstance around my coming home, you know the stuff, ‘Welcoming our heroes home!’ and all that. And I kept thinking, it’s so fu— so senseless. I mean, I lived and he died, and neither of those things was for a reason, and I wasn’t a hero, just the one of the two of us that didn’t die.”

  “Survivor guilt.” Her hands had stopped momentarily, and she’d rested them, of all places, in his hair, her fingers moving slightly, restlessly, there.

  “Yeah, yeah. That’s what everyone says.”

  It was the feel of her fingers in his hair, maybe. Or how still she was, like she was waiting. Something made it possible to tell her the rest.

  “I’d gotten to feel safe. We were on one of the more remote FOBs—forward operating bases—relatively little threat. Not like the other bases, where you’d hear about car bombings, insurgents shooting stuff out of tubes from the back of vehicles you couldn’t even believe someone could still drive. And it wasn’t like we were out on patrol. I’d done that, and that was fu— you never felt safe. But this—yeah, I knew we were in a war zone, but I didn’t think— Anyway, stupid. You’re never safe.”

  She inhaled sharply. But it was true. A fact of war.

  “J.J. and I were doing guard duty. We were in the north tower, but nothing ever happened. We kidded around a lot. Told dirty jokes, talked about how much sex we’d have when we got home. They were eight-hour shifts, so it was inevitable that eventually one of us would head downstairs and outside to use the shi— latrine. In this case, he got up to go and I was like, Dude, no, me first, I have to piss like a racehorse, and he says, Best of three, so we shoot for it and I win. So that’s what I was doing, dropping my helmet and my body armor at the base of the tower before I went into the latrine, because it was crazy hot and cramped in the Porta Potti. And then—”

  Searing through his eardrums. His bones turned to metal and set to vibrate on a resonance that would shake him to bits. And the world rearranged.

  As if she could read the pain as it ebbed and flowed, her hands moved over his scalp, his temples, the tender spots behind his ears, the place where his jaw was knotted tight.

  “So you were downstairs when—” Softly.

  “It was a rocket-propelled grenade. Yeah.”

  “And you feel like—”

  “Like it should have been me. Maybe. Yeah. Sometimes. Even though I know I didn’t do anything to make him die or to make myself live. It was just what happened. Just bad luck, you know? Best of three. But he had people he was responsible for. He was going to go home and help his dad run the hardware store, and eventually take over the business. He had Braden, and they’d planned this kayaking trip. It’s like—”

  He’d sat there one night, bottle of pills in his hand, and thought, It was my turn to die. Not J.J.’s.

  “He was such a nice guy. The kind of guy everyone loved. And it was like I stole what was his, you know? I stole his luck. I felt too lucky. And I had to do something. There had to be some…some point to why I was the one alive. So I called Braden’s grandparents—Braden’s mom is out of the picture, wasn’t ever in his life. They’re great people. So strong. They’re, like, so proud of J.J., and you know they’re hurting, but they want everything good for Braden. I told them I wanted to do the trip with Braden and come work in the hardware store. I told them the situation, but promised I was getting clean. I swore to Braden’s grandmother I’d get my act together and be a good role model, and she agreed to let me do the trip if I cleaned it up. She said to come see her in a couple weeks and we’d decide for sure. And so I quit the meds and then I came here. Because I figured if anyone could whup my ass into shape it was Jake.”

  “Only he’s not here.”

  “You’re doing an okay job.”

  She gave a short, surprised bark of a laugh. He liked making her laugh. She’d laughed a lot, the few times he’d hung out with her and Becca. Sometimes she’d seemed more alive and engaged than Becca had, but he’d told himself Becca was more the strong, silent type. Hidden depths. And the letters had borne that out. He’d thought.

  “I didn’t say this, but I was thinking—” He’d meant to stop talking, but words kept spilling out, like she’d loosened something in his head, too, not just all those muscles she was working. “Maybe I could do what J.J. had planned to do. Take over the hardware store eventually. Help provide for Braden if—I mean, his grandparents are young, like only late fifties, but I was thinking—”

  J.J. had loved to brag about Braden. What a smart kid he was. How good at sports. On that one night when J.J. had been so talkative, he’d said, All the clichés are true, you know. About kids. You just don’t know. Until you have one. What love is.

  “But what about—”

  For the first time since he’d seen her on the lake, she sounded a little uncertain.

  “In the letters. You said—”

  The letters. No wonder she was so halting. Because she wasn’t supposed to have read the letters. She wasn’t supposed to know everything she did about him.

  For the first time, he didn’t hate the thought of her having read them. Didn’t hate the thought of her knowing things she wasn’t supposed to know.

  “You said when you were out of the Army, you wanted to work with troubled teenagers. Because you almost weren’t going to go to college at all, because of the money, and then that teacher—”

  James Harvey, science teacher and basketball coach, who had refused to let Nate give up on a college education. Nate had thought of the guy every day in college. Every time he’d aced a test, passed a class, loved some piece of weird-ass philosophy he’d never have stumbled over if he’d decided to stop at a high school diploma. Every time he applied for a scholarship, a loan. When he’d signed on the dotted line with the Army, turned over the debt that otherwise would have crushed him, when he collected the checks that drew the debt down to a manageable level.

  “I’d be helping Braden.”

  She got quiet then.

  Her hands resumed work, this time at his feet. She was finding spots on his feet and ankles that were reservoirs of stored anguish, then using what felt like a single knuckle to prod the pain out. The way you’d take a fingertip and grind a spark into ash. He’d never liked having his feet touched before. It always tickled. But what she was doing didn’t tickle. It woke up the nerve endings, all right, but a different set.

  “How’s the pain?”

  It had been flaring and subsiding as they talked and she worked, and there was relief in that, the way it could rise up and she could vanquish it again, a process that he could trust in. And then there was the way she listened, part and parcel with the gentleness of her hands and the sensitivity with which she ferreted out the places that held his suffering.

  The way she touched him made connections between the corners and edges of him. Like she was mapping his whole body out, the outermost reaches, unexplored territo
ries, and making them known.

  He realized, with surprise and some alarm, that he was hard as a rock. His cock was partially tangled in his briefs, at a less-than-optimal angle, and flush, mad, rioting with blood. Okay, that was ridiculously inconvenient, and borderline embarrassing.

  On the other hand, it wasn’t totally shocking, right? There was a young, attractive woman with her hands all over him—in fact, now working her way up his legs in disturbing proximity to the unwanted action in his jeans.

  Having the pain stop had been like that old saying about how good it feels to stop banging your head against the wall. Having someone touch him tenderly, listen to him patiently—those were bonuses.

  Did his reaction mean he was hot for Alia?

  Had he been, before?

  He’d met her at Jake and Mira’s picnic, found himself spilling his guts in their first two minutes of acquaintance. Then she’d fled the scene, leaving him to chat with Becca.

  But when he thought back on the picnic, when he really let himself think—

  It was like twisting the knob on a microscope, memory coming back into focus. The way Alia had listened, not just with ears but eyes, too, her gaze under those long lashes. The contained energy of her, like she was holding something back. And he remembered, suddenly, wondering just what she was holding back, and how he could get her to unleash it.

  The truth was, he’d been totally sucked into that conversation with her, had felt a speck of irritation, even, when Becca had interrupted them.

  If she hadn’t pushed her sister on him, what would have happened? Given five more minutes in her company, time to admire her smile, her eyes, her intelligence, her spark, five more minutes to wonder what lay buried beneath—what would have happened?

  And there was the baseball game—

  She and Becca had a third ticket to a Mariners game and had invited him to drive up from the base to attend with them. Becca had sat between them, and he’d spent a lot of time trying to restrain himself from PDAs, mostly involving the tantalizing gap between her dress and lace-clad breast. But when his mind hadn’t been on groping Becca, he’d chatted with Alia. She was scoring the baseball game, which was a thing he’d always wanted to do but never known how to, and she explained the process, all eager and bright with excitement over the intricacies. She bought them beer and hot dogs: two each, drowned in mustard, ketchup, and relish, which—she explained happily—was how they were meant to be eaten.