Page 91 of Point of Contact

Wallowing there on his back, unable to help but grin in exhilaration, Jesse looked up and noticed Trevor standing over him, looking down at him.

“Hi, handsome,” he said. “Brought you a towel.”

Jesse sat up to see that Trevor had spread two towels out not far away. He was wearing a pair of loose khaki shorts and a faded T-shirt, his feet bare, sand caking the lower half of his legs as if he’d been wading in the water.

His smile made the corners of his eyes crinkle, and he was so fucking beautiful that Jesse felt like all the air had been knocked from his lungs.

“Hi,” he managed, getting to his feet and lunging after his boogie board, which threatened to be washed back out into the ocean by an outgoing wave. By the time he retrieved it, Trevor was sitting on one of the towels, his knees drawn up, arms casually draped across them.

Jesse dropped down next to him, gratefully taking the cold bottle of water Trevor handed over, murmuring his thanks.

The silence that fell was awkward, until Jesse asked, “Where did you go?”

He winced at how abrupt he sounded, but Trevor didn’t react except to say mildly, “For a walk. Needed to think.”

“About what?”

About what a mistake you made last night?

Trevor waved his hand helplessly. “Just, you know, stuff.”

“About what happened last night?” Jesse knew he was grilling him but he couldn’t stop.

“Partly, yeah. But mostly—”

“Mostly what, Trevor?” His voice rose as he waited for Trevor to tell him he’d made a mistake, that this was just a vacation fling, that it could never happen again.

“Mostly about how I wish we could stay here forever.”

Well, that answer was completely unexpected. “Oh.”

“Yeah. Because it’s back home to reality tomorrow and wow, that sucks. Back to the decisions I need to make, some hard decisions I’ve been dreading.”

“Like what? Whether to sell your house or not?” Jesse fought to keep his expression neutral.

“That’s one of them. Since Carl and I broke up, I’ve also been mulling over moving to Virginia so I can be closer to Riley.”

Jesse went cold, but before he could say anything, Trevor went on, “I want to do something with Riley’s money, something to give back to veterans and their families, but I don’t know what. The thought of doing research and vetting charities exhausts me, Jess. Plus, what am I gonna do with the remnants of my own business? So many fucking decisions to make, and here in paradise I can forget they all exist.”

He sounded so tired and sad that Jesse couldn’t help but move a little closer to him. “That’s what vacations are for, Trev,” he said gently.

“But here’s the thing. I’m not going back to a war zone. I’m not leaving paradise and flying back into a fucked-up situation, not knowing what might happen to me. Thinking about it this morning, it hit me: when Riley left here, he only had a couple of weeks left to live. He had to leave this beautiful place and fly back into ugliness, into horror.”

Trevor’s voice trailed away until Jesse almost had to strain to hear it. “I was lying there feeling sorry for myself, but I couldn’t stop thinking how hard that must’ve been for both of you, Jess. It hurts to imagine you leaving here kicking and screaming.”

“But you’re wrong.” Jesse waited until Trevor looked at him. “We weren’t kicking and screaming. We couldn’t wait to go back.”

Trevor’s eyes widened. “What? Why?”

“Because our brothers were still in the shit,” Jesse said simply. “And here we were stuffing our faces, lying on the beach, sleeping in soft beds, no fuckin’ clue what was going on with them. If something happened over there, the fact is, we weren’t there to help them. When we got on that plane, Trev, we wanted it to fly faster. Get us the fuck back to our brothers.”

Jesse could see Trevor swallowing over and over, blinking hard as he processed that.

“Riley wasn’t dreading it. He wasn’t afraid. He wanted to go do his job, which was to get every single one of those men out of that place and back home where they belonged. We couldn’t do that job if we were sitting on a beach drinking goddamn mai tais.”

He put a tentative hand on Trevor’s nape. “I made memories here with him that I will always cherish. We had a wonderful time, and we needed to rest, to recharge. But don’t torture yourself with thoughts that Riley dreaded going back, or that he was scared. He wasn’t.” Jesse squeezed the back of his neck. “Let go of those kinds of thoughts, Trev. I promise you, he wasn’t scared.”

With a ragged sigh, Trevor dropped his head to his knees.