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“Wayne would like that, too.” Juliet sank into the soft sand and drew up her knees to wrap her arms around them. “He’d want to be part of where people are living and laughing and enjoying nature. That works, I think.”
Noah joined her and they sat in a silence almost as companionable as they had once been. Before he’d kissed her.
A better man would regret that too-brief embrace. But a childhood when hunger gnawed at his belly more often than not had trained him to snatch the goodies whenever he could. A breeze kicked up and caught Juliet’s hair, its ends flying against his face.
He let them tickle his skin. He let them tickle his libido to life, too, as he imagined himself twisting his fingers in her hair and bringing that soft mouth toward his so he might kiss the sadness from her face. He’d kiss her, hold her, run his hands over all that smooth skin and those slender curves until she didn’t remember anything, anyone but him.
Everything but the two of them would be taken out to sea on the waves of what he wanted from her—what he had wanted for years but had made do instead with other kisses, other curves, other faces and skin. He’d wallowed in other perfumes to cover his desire for the only one that called to him.
She wanted touch and he wanted to touch. Couldn’t it be as simple as that? For as short as it lasted?
“Tell me about Iraq.”
The sound of her voice jerked him from his thoughts. “What?”
She held her hair back with her hand and gazed at him with that unbalancing combination of blue and green. “Death letters. Cemeteries. I feel bad. I’ve never asked you about your experiences as a soldier.”
“You were dealing with your husband’s situation,” Noah responded. “That was enough.”
“But not now. Not anymore.”
Now she needed more?
Contact. Touch. Skin.
“Juliet…”
“Tell me, Noah.”
He didn’t tell anyone. There hadn’t been anyone to tell. His mother never left forwarding addresses and his correspondence to the old man had started and ended with that stupid-ass missive he’d written but which never had to be mailed.
Except she didn’t look as if she was ready to let it go. So what the hell? “It was boring most of the time,” he said. “It was scary as shit some of the time. I was never so glad in my life as when we got on the bus that would take us out of Iraq to the airport in Kuwait. To be honest, I was scared as shit then, too, because there were a hundred stories around the sandbox of guys who bought it with leave orders in their pocket or who were blown up the day before they were due to depart the theater for good.”
So there it was. He hadn’t been any big war hero like the general. For four years—the last one a tour in Iraq—he’d been an everyday grunt with a job he’d signed on for without thinking much about what it entailed. An ordinary grunt who’d learned right quick that there wasn’t the whiff of a death wish in his body, despite the adrenaline that flooded him during dozens of night missions. Despite the many times they rode out on the Strykers with “Get some!” still hoarse in their throats and the beat of apocalyptic heavy metal music still ringing in their ears.
He thought of his buddy Dean’s reckless grin and the angry red shrapnel scars on his sergeant’s neck. He remembered Tim, “Tiny Tim,” the kid from Tacoma and his roommate at the FOB, whose scars now cut across his forehead and ran behind his skull and who couldn’t grin at all anymore.
Juliet’s eyes scanned his face. “You weren’t hurt?”
“No,” he murmured, his gaze on the Pacific, but his mind back at the hospital and the way Tim’s hands—the ones Noah’d seen grasping an iPod, a Gatorade, a girlie magazine—were now curled tightly toward his wrists like the seashells an uninjured, lucky SOB like Noah might come across on a beautiful California beach.
Juliet touched his arm, her fingers cold, her voice insistent. “You’re sure you weren’t hurt?”
“Of course not. I’m here, aren’t I?” He smiled down at her, at that perfect oval of her face, her caramel hair, her leaf-and-sky eyes. Nothing should touch that, he thought with sudden conviction, damning himself for telling her anything about war. He doubted the general ever had, and like him, Noah didn’t want anything unpleasant to touch her.
“Noah?” she questioned again.
But despite what he wanted, he felt his smile die and he heard himself start talking, as if she’d ripped off a scab with just his name on her lips, with just that sensation of her fingertips against his arm. He found himself telling her that while he was unhurt, that his friend Tim—his brother in arms—would never walk or talk or see again. He told her that an IED had taken away everything but Tim’s capacity to breathe, so he lay in a hospital bed, a husk of the man he’d been. Noah spilled about army hospital and the guys he’d seen in the hallways when he’d gone to visit Tim—men with prosthetic arms or prosthetic legs or men with prosthetic arms and legs.
