Can't Hold Back Read online

  Becca had been quiet that day, had let Alia jabber joyfully and discourse on baseball and the proper doctoring of hot dogs. He hadn’t, he realized, interacted with Becca much until he’d gotten her alone later, and then they hadn’t done much talking. And yet he’d had a blast that day. It had become a bright spot in his memory, one of those days his heart reached for when he thought about times he’d been happy. He’d always attributed his joy that day to baseball and Becca.

  But now he wondered.

  What if there had been more time? More conversations. More baseball games, more of that giddy joy on Alia’s face. What if he’d gotten a chance to witness her kindness and learn the workings of her mind? To admire the spattering of freckles across her nose, and the strength in her lean but curvy body?

  What if he’d known the letters were from her?

  On the other hand, maybe he was just suffering from long-term sexual deprivation—it had been nine months solid since he’d gotten laid, and what red-blooded American male wouldn’t appreciate some massage by that point?

  It was probably just stupid penis stuff. Pretty much any woman could get to him right now.

  Right?

  Chapter 7

  “Hey, baby sister.” Alia tucked the phone audio bud into her ear so she could jog the woods path while she talked to Becca.

  “Hey, big sister.”

  They always greeted each other that way. They’d been doing it forever. Alia couldn’t even remember anymore when it had started.

  “Don’t mind the heavy breathing. I’m talking to you while I run.”

  “I won’t take it personally.”

  “I heard a vicious rumor. Just calling to confirm it’s not true.”

  It was a typical morning near the Oregon coast, fog lying cool and low over the treetops. A mist, like the Seattle one Nate had written about, wrapped itself against her skin like an embrace.

  “Oh, yeah?” Alia kept her voice light.

  “I heard Nate Riordan is there.”

  They hadn’t talked about Nate, not once, since the breakup. Becca had mentioned his name, raised the topic, made it clear she was open to hearing the whole story—but Alia had always found a way to change the subject.

  “Mira emailed me from Hawaii. She wanted me to check on you and make sure you were okay.”

  Mira knew only the vague outlines of the story. That Alia had helped with the letters, that things had ended awkwardly. But it was so Mira to be worried about Alia’s well-being. She was everyone’s mom.

  “Is he your patient?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

  Becca laughed. “Well, if he is, that must be awkward.”

  If Alia had been able to talk about it to Becca—if it hadn’t been a) sealed in the virtual patient vault, and b) buried under layers of Alia’s own guilt—she would have said:

  Not awkward, exactly. Surprisingly not awkward.

  More…compelling.

  Addictive.

  Even in motion, her feet pounding the pine needle–covered path, her body heated up, thinking about how it felt. To stand over him, to have his body be hers to soothe. To give pleasure to.

  You’re not sublimating.

  Go to hell.

  “I still feel so bad about what I did to him.” Becca’s voice was soft.

  “What I did to him.”

  “Okay, fine—what we did. We were both responsible. God, I want to call him up sometimes and apologize like it’s going out of style.”

  Nate had made it sound yesterday like he was over it, but that was privileged info, too, having been conveyed on the table.

  “I still wish—” Becca hesitated. “I just wished I’d paid more attention. At the picnic. I wish I’d given him to you—”

  “Oh, sweetie,” Alia said. “Stop. Please. It’s ancient history. I’m fine.” The last thing she wanted was for Becca to still be beating herself up over it.

  “I wish I hadn’t asked you to write the letters. I wish I’d bucked up and had a little more confidence in myself. Because we hurt him. And because—because you were in love with him and we ruined any chan—”

  “Hush,” Alia said. “It’s fine. And honestly, I think he was more angry than hurt.” She responded to that part of what her sister had said so she didn’t have to address the other part.

  “Is he still?”

  “Not sure.” He’d sent her such mixed signals. His anger at the lake and then his dismissal of the topic as no big deal.

  “I wish you’d told him that you had feelings for him,” Becca said quietly. “After everything came down.”

  Alia wanted her sister to let it go already. The pity in Becca’s voice made her cringe. “It wouldn’t have made any difference.”

  “Wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t think so.” Actually, she knew it wouldn’t have, because he had known about the care package and the IMs, enough to piece together the truth if it had been a welcome one. “He wanted someone who didn’t exist.”

  “I don’t think we gave him a chance to know what he wanted.”

  Alia’s heart skipped a beat, but she made herself be sensible. Nate had had plenty of time to think about what he wanted, and he’d given no sign of regret.

  I’m over it, he’d said.

  “Besides, it doesn’t matter. Even if it weren’t for that, he’s—” She cut herself off.

  “Your patient.”

  “I can neither—”

  “Got it,” Becca said with a laugh. There was a long silence. Then she said, “Say hi from me. And tell him I’m sorry. Or don’t, actually. That would be incredibly awkward and ironic, huh? If you apologized for me?”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  Alia stretched out her stride, her muscles warm now, the path underfoot soft with needles.

  “So…I have a little bit of crazy news myself.” Becca’s dreamy sigh brushed Alia’s eardrum. “I met someone.”

  “Someone—” Alia didn’t dare let herself hope Becca meant what it sounded like she meant. The One.

  “We’ve been out twice. I think Friday’s the big night.”

  “Are you sure? Just because it’s the third date doesn’t mean—”

  “Alia!”

  “Sorry!” The mothering habit died hard. And Becca—well, Becca had a knack for getting in her own way. Alia had heard this early excitement from her before, but somehow, things didn’t quite jell. “Just…make sure you’re ready.”

  “Sister, dearest, you need to worry more about getting yourself laid and less about me.”

  Touché. She sped up her pace a little.

  “I don’t think I’ll be getting laid anytime soon.”

  “Yeah, no nooky with any of the patients, huh?”

  “Nope.”

  “That’s a lot of off-limits soldier flesh.”

  A vivid picture of Nate, facedown on her table, flashed through her head before she could banish it. “Indeed. And quit stalling. Are you going to tell me about your first and second dates or what?”

  Becca’s sweet laugh cut through everything else and brought Alia back to herself, as it so often did.

  —

  “Heard a story the other day.” Nate regarded his shitty poker hand darkly, then folded. Griff and Chaucer were locked into some kind of pissing contest, big bets and lots of posturing. Tron sat back in his chair, looking amused. Probably it would turn out he had something worthwhile, and the other two guys were in it for the buzz.

  “Turk, you know him? Last deployment, he had this deal with a buddy. The buddy had a family, and Turk didn’t, so Turk would always take dangerous jobs, missions, trips, whatever, so the friend could get home safe. Turk kept dodging bullets, and then one day, Turk was, like, two minutes too late to board a Hawk for a recon mission and so his friend went instead—”

  “You don’t fucking make those kinds of promises.” Tron was bolt upright now, and angry.

  “Chopper crashed?” That was Griff.

  “Of cour
se it fucking crashed,” Tron said. “It crashed, right?”

  Nate nodded.

  “You make a promise you couldn’t keep?” Nate asked Tron quietly.

  “Way too fucking many of them, man.”

  All the men went silent. Probably thinking about promises, the ones they’d made in words—Baby, I’ll come home to you, safe and whole. I’ve got your back, man. Leave this up to me—and the unspoken ones, too. The promise you made when you said goodbye to family, that you’d try not to get yourself killed. The promise you made to the guy at your side by virtue of standing next to him. The promise you made to yourself that you’d get J.J. home to his family, somehow or other, and that if you couldn’t do that, you’d find some other way to take care of the people he’d left behind.

  Talking to the men here—it was dark. Dark, darker, darkest. Since he’d arrived, Nate had heard more heartbreaking stories than he had in all the rest of his active time put together. They were currency here—what you’d seen and done, what had happened to your friends over there and back home. And there were stories even when the men were shut down and silent, even the men who wouldn’t talk about war or who wouldn’t talk at all. You felt the stories.

  He tried to imagine telling these guys what he was thinking, about promises and about feeling stories, but he figured they’d either stare at him like he’d grown two heads or laugh. Not in a mean way, just in a WTF, dude? way. They might even think he was kidding.

  Alia, though. He could tell her. She’d get it.

  Huh.

  Griff won the hand and raked the chips into the growing heap in front of him. “I had a friend who came home and his wife didn’t meet him at the field and then when he got a ride home he discovered that the house was empty. Like empty empty. She’d moved herself and all her furniture out, and it was just him, sitting in this goddamn empty house. His buddies took turns doing suicide watch for weeks on him. He’s okay, though. I mean, you know, okay as it goes.”

  “Jesus,” said Nate. “That sucks.”

  “It hacks me off.” Griff sounded pissed now. Didn’t take much to light the fuse of most of the vets Nate knew. “It’s the same women who think they want a soldier. The ones who go soldier hunting in bars and get pregnant on purpose. They’re the worst. Then you come home and you’re not what they wanted at all. You’re all broke-ass and fucked up, and they’re like, ‘I just wanted a cute guy in a uniform,’ and you’re like, ‘Then why didn’t you bang a firefighter, sweetheart?’ ”

  His voice had grown tight, the words percussive.

  They all looked at him.

  Tron crossed his arms and stared Griff down. “That was you. You were the one with the empty house.”

  Griff looked away, but you could read it in the lines of his face. The whole goddamn story. If they’d been somewhere else, Nate would have bought the guy enough drinks to make him forget, maybe tried to get him laid, but they were here, and they had cards and stories and the comfort of knowing they’d all done the same stupid shit—made promises and believed promises made to them. So he said what they were all thinking: “That sucks.”

  Griff nodded. And Tron said, “You think the Seahawks are going to the Super Bowl again this year?”

  Because. Because you moved on, or you got stuck stewing in it.

  But Nate kept thinking about it, about Griff’s wife, and how she’d broken her promise. How she hadn’t been who he’d believed she was. And about Becca, and those crazy hybrid letters, which had made him lose his mind with longing. He’d come home on leave, feeling like he had to see her. Had to show her how much he’d come to care. Had to tell her he’d fallen in love with her.

  Her—Becca, that is.

  He’d ignored the dissonance that had been there from the very beginning. His vague discomfort, the unsettling sense that the letters didn’t match. He’d gone back to Afghanistan feeling fond. Affectionate. He’d had a good time with Becca, he’d found her good company, if not terribly lively. Drawing her out, getting her to tell him, for example, what she’d thought of a movie they’d seen together—it had been work. And not the most rewarding work, either. She was timid, unwilling to express too strong an opinion. She’d seemed a little afraid of him. Afraid of herself.

  Unlike the letter writer. So much gutsiness and strength in those letters, no fear of broaching any topic at all. No fear of him. Opinions aplenty. There’s no shame in bailing when your time’s up. You should be doing something you love.

  He’d somehow missed the echo of his conversation with Alia at the picnic. How could he have missed that?

  Does it help at all to know I think you’re a really good person, even if some days you wonder?

  Not words that would have come out of Becca’s mouth, or off the end of her pen. How could he have missed that?

  The letter writer wasn’t someone you could feel fond of. Not someone you could feel lukewarm toward. She was someone you could crave. She was someone who could make waiting a few days for a flight out feel like an eternity.

  And then there was the kissing.

  Kissing Becca had been—lukewarm, he’d have to say. Uninspired. Becca had been meek and self-conscious in his arms, willing but passive, but the woman on the other end of those letters had known exactly what she wanted.

  He’d told her. Becca. It was one of the first things he’d said to her when he got off the plane, after another of those surprisingly uninspired kisses, a huge disappointment after all the built-up anticipation.

  I feel like you’re really different from your letters. I feel like we’re really different from how we were in those letters.

  She’d gotten this look on her face. And he’d started to backpedal, not wanting her to feel like it was a criticism, when all he was trying to say was, I wish you’d let her come out, that woman you are on paper. I wish you’d be more that way in person. I know you have it in you. Maybe if we work together, we can close the gap.

  Then, slowly, haltingly, awkwardly, so apologetically, she’d told him the truth.

  It had taken the breath out of his chest. He understood the cliché crushed for the first time.

  But he should have known.

  “Nater?”

  He wasn’t sure where that nickname had come from. He’d always been straight-up Nate with his squadmates, even though a lot of the other guys had nicknames.

  “Just thinking.”

  “One more hand?”

  “Sure, what the fuck.”

  He suddenly remembered something he’d made himself forget. Made himself block out, because it had been so much part and parcel of his disappointment.

  That last instant message exchange, with MenInUni242. God! How could he have forgotten those?

  I want your tongue all over me.

  I want you to pin me down.

  I want your cock in my mouth. As much as I can hold.

  He’d been shocked by her boldness. Because of the contrast with how she—Becca—had been in his arms.

  And so when Becca had told him the truth, that had been one of the first things he’d thought of—Ohhh. Right.

  Not Becca’s words. Made-up words. Fictional words.

  But now he saw it differently.

  Alia’s words.

  Holy shit.

  This probably wasn’t going to help him much with the wood-on-the-PT-table problem.

  Chapter 8

  At lunchtime most days, Alia took a break and swam across the lake and back. It took her about half an hour at an easy pace, so she estimated it was probably a quarter-mile in each direction. It was part exercise and part meditation, the sameness of the strokes, her fingers cutting through water, the quiet under the surface, only the bubbling of her exhalations audible. She could think under there, or, rather, not think, which was the point. To empty her brain, which lately had been jumping around like a monkey on her.

  Maybe I should tell Nate the truth.

  The truth being the fact that she had, once upon a time, loved him. That
the letters had held so much of her, that the care package and the IMs had been all her, and only her. No fictional amalgam.

  He’d told her so much the other day, the way it had felt to hit bottom, why the kayaking mattered to him, the exact shape of his survivor’s guilt. I didn’t do anything to make him die or to make myself live. It was just what happened. And then—offhand, as if it weren’t the thing he thought about most: He was such a nice guy, the kind of guy everyone loved.

  She knew what he was really saying was, If it had to be one of us, it should have been me.

  Of course, there was nothing fair, not from a human perspective, about who lived and who died—not on or off the battlefield. But that wasn’t what he needed to hear.

  She’d almost said it. You’re that kind of guy, Nate. The kind of guy everyone loves. And I know, because I—

  “Wait up.” A shout loud enough to cut through the water in her ears.

  Murphy’s Law of Empty Lakes, she thought. The guy you’re thinking about is the one gaining a length per second on you.

  He reached her and they treaded water. “You look great,” she said.

  Jake was due back in three days. Nate had grown stronger; the dark shadows had faded from under his eyes, and his skin had bronzed—but that wasn’t what she meant. She meant that he moved more easily, as if pain were no longer his constant companion.

  She’d given him a regimen of stretching and strengthening, cardio to keep inflammation low and endorphins high, and loads of water to drink. But she’d also done everything she could to keep him off her table and out of her quiet office. If pain surfaced when he was working with her in the open, central physical therapy area, she gave him more stretches, encouraged him to tap with a tennis ball on the tense spot, or sent him to the hot tub (without her). She told herself she was building his confidence, his independence, but the truth was, she was scared of him. Or, really, she was scared of herself. Of how badly she wanted to cross the line, slide a hand under his T-shirt, under the waistband of his jeans, between his thigh and the table, over his flat abs, up, down—everywhere.