She glanced up. Her eyes went round when her nose nearly touched his. The gap widened as she edged back, but he saw her dark gaze race across his face in quick perusal. His mouth went dry. “I’m not,” she claimed and looked away.
“Mmm-hmm,” he said, unconvinced.
Underneath the point of his chin, Mavis’s shoulder hiked in a shrug. “It’s history, right? I like history. Especially the kind I can hold in my hands.”
Like those giant genealogical tomes back at Zelda’s.
A smile crammed, foreign, in the ball of his jaw joint. It felt out of place, but it hung there, like a lazy, back-sliding moon in its crescent. He was aware of it, just as he was aware of Mavis and aware of all the places inside him that didn’t feel dark when she coaxed it out of him.
He should move away. It was too hot to be this close. The contents of the box were too intimate. Ward and the first Olivia’s messages weren’t for him.
But Mavis smelled like earth and life and threw all the shady parts of him into stark contrast when he breathed in and filled up with her scent.
The heel of his shoe caught the lip of a hole and he nearly tripped into it. Stumbling only slightly as he straightened, he looked down to keep from twisting his ankle in any of the rest of them.
They were spread out under the dead eaves of the tree, the grass-covered glade broken up by ruts and dirt tossed haphazardly. A minefield.
No. He blinked. The battlefield couldn’t intrude here.
But he had intruded, and the battlefield was always with him. Damned if he’d ever be rid of it, anymore than the stench of the loner—the outsider.
His mind began to grind into the sick death spiral of anxiety. He braced his palm against his brow. It was covered in clay. Red clay. Even the cloying scent couldn’t stop the visceral flash-bang of memory.
“He’s down! Benji’s down!” he all but wailed into his comms over the sound of cover fire. “Bring the Bradley! Bring that bitch around!”
“It’s four minutes out,” Pettelier said.
Benji was bleeding out against the underside of Gavin’s palm. “Get inside my pack. Get me the gauze.”
Benji struggled to talk through a taut grimace. Gavin couldn’t hear him over the sound of M60s going haywire. He leaned down.
“...in the gut.”
Gavin shook his head automatically. “Nah. The ribs. We’ll stop the bleed. You’ll be a’right.”
“No bullshit,” Benji muttered. “Don’t...b-bullshit me.”
Gavin knew where the bullet had gone through. He knew what gutshot meant as much as the next soldier in line out here in no-man’s-land. And he denied it. “Bradley’s comin’. Gonna be fine.”
Benji coughed.
Don’t do that, Gavin shouted from the walls of his head. “Pete! Where’s the fucking gauze, man?”
“Got it right here,” Pettelier grunted.
Another team guy shouted from behind, “We’re covered up!”
From comms, he heard, “Bradley, five minutes out!”
“Slow son of a...” Gavin pressed his teeth together. They stayed clenched. If they weren’t clenched, damn it, they’d be chattering. He moved his hand to plug the wound.
Blood rushed at him. Benji shuddered. Spasmed.
Gavin pressed his hand against the flow. He wasn’t a goddamn surgeon. He needed a surgeon!
“Harm.”
The name had Gavin riveted to Benji’s pained expression. The light hung there, but it was hard and forced and it caught Gavin like the last blind scream of sunlight off the bay at the end of a winter’s day.
Gavin shook his head. “Shut up, you’re fine.”
“I got somethin’ to say.”
I’m not a surgeon! “We’re not doin’ this!” Gavin said out loud.
The ground shook, the world coming apart with noise. Gavin threw himself on Benji as dust and mortar fell.
“The hell...we’re not,” Benji said. And he coughed again.
“I’m gonna save you,” Gavin persisted. He ground it from the marrow. “I’ll get you to a surgeon. This ain’t but a flea bite on a dog’s ass and you’re going home, you son of a bitch.”
The faint flicker of humor eclipsed pain momentarily. Benji’s mouth fumbled. “A s-s-sheepdog’s ass.”
“Right.” And thinking of his sister, Benji’s wife, thinking of Kyle and his father, Cole, the inn and the bay and everything about life there that was growing harder and harder to retrace in his mind, Gavin placed his hand over Benji’s brow and stroked. “You’re damn right, brother.”
The rest came at him in a rush. The squad hadn’t been able to hold their ground. The Bradley was eight blocks away. Running retreat was all they had. Benji had gone out on Gavin’s shoulder.
He died in the stupid Bradley, less than halfway back to base where even the surgeons couldn’t do a damn thing for him. He’d wanted Gavin to tell her—Harmony. Benji had wanted it to be him.
Gavin had failed there just the same. He hadn’t made it back stateside before Kyle had raced off to Wisconsin where Harmony was flying aerobatics to deliver the news.
She and Benji had been married less than a year. She had only just found out she was pregnant with Bea.
And Gavin hadn’t been there. Because even if he had made it back to the States before Kyle had gotten to her...he wasn’t sure he could’ve told her he was the one who couldn’t save Benji.
It was the anger that came swinging through the flashback, crashing through it like a ram. Gavin grabbed it by the horns, rode it bucking and thrashing—
A hand closed around his elbow. He threw it off to dislodge the hold, poised for attack.
Mavis’s features struck him, freckles dark, eyes round.
He let the fight go out of him when the shock painted her. He stepped away, seeing the others casting looks in their direction.
She shook her head and spoke first. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?” He shot it off like a curse. He forced his feet into backward motion, winding away from her and the rest.
“Are you okay?” She reached out.
“Fine,” he said, still verbally swinging. She needed to go. He needed to get away from her before she found out how cold and vast the dark side of the moon really was. He moved in the direction of the house...or what he hoped was the right direction.
She came after him. “Gavin...”
He pointed at her. “Stay. I mean it,” he added in resignation before lengthening his stride.
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