Ernie was quiet.
Logan took another shot, but missed miserably and he fell back onto a stool to watch Ernie clear the rest of the table. The guy sure didn’t pull his punches at the table just because you were paying him for his services.
“Dopey didn’t make it home with you?” Ernie’s question gutted Logan. Logan could still hear the sound of what seemed like a hundred tridents being pounded into Dopey’s casket as his fellow SEALs said goodbye to one of their own.
Logan shook his head. “Nah. Never made it. Carried his body out, carried him all the way back to the evac point, but—” He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t have to. Ernie got it. The pain of that moment when you realized there was no more you could do. No way to turn back the clock. A life was gone.
Ernie didn’t have some magic answer for that. They’d just kept playing pool and talked about little things after that. What his job was like at Sutton, who he thought would win in that weekend’s game, stuff like that.
But walking into work on Friday, Logan felt lighter somehow. Rather than head back to his office, he walked into Samantha’s office and shut the door. She had four windows open on her screen, fingers flying as she copied and pasted, and flipped from window to window.
She looked up, a startled expression on her face, like she hadn’t realized he was there until he shut the door. He felt his lips pull at the sides. If it wasn’t so dangerous for her, he’d laugh at the way she was so completely unaware of her surroundings. The computer sucked her in and she didn’t come up for air or food until someone came to pull her up.
Logan did just that now. He rounded her desk and hauled her up out of her chair, pulling her against him with one arm. His other hand found her hair and tangled in the mass of it, pulling her toward him as his mouth found hers. Hungry and greedy and not stopping to think about what he was doing any more.
“I’m doing something about it now,” he said when he’d dug up some sanity and pulled back from her.
She blinked at him. Once. Twice. Several more times, before she spoke. “Doing something about what?”
“About not being okay. I’m fixing it. I’m still not okay, but I’ll get there.”
“Oh. Okay.” She nodded.
“Will you be there when I get to okay?”
“When you get to okay?” she parroted back and he realized it didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but before he could say anything else, she nodded. She must have understood his rambling well enough.
“Yeah. I’ll be here.”
“Good,” he said and walked out, walking with a hell of a lot more purpose to his step as he made his way to his office. It felt really good to be starting to get to the other side of “not okay.”
Chapter 10
The flashback took him completely off guard. One minute he and Ernie were playing pinball, and suddenly the stench Logan would give anything to erase from his body’s memory overwhelmed him.
It was the smell of fire and char and acrid smoke—of death. It was a smell he would never try to explain to anyone because he would never want anyone who hadn’t experienced it to have to live with it.
And it engulfed him now as images flashed before him. An explosion, the bodies of three of his teammates going down. Irreparably injured.
Then, the noises. The screaming, his commands and the commands of his team as they worked to save lives slipping away faster than they could grab and hold them, coupled with an underlying silence. The silence of what nobody wanted to say.
The feel of Dopey’s body hanging limp over Logan’s shoulder. The weight of him as Logan carried him out of harm’s way only to find no more harm could come to him. He was beyond reach now.
“Logan, you with me, buddy?” came Ernie’s soft, steady voice. The low lilt of it soothed as Ernie drew him out of the flashback.
“I want you to focus on the room we’re in, Logan. Notice the desk and the papers. The chairs and pool table. The pool balls. The refrigerator. Can you take a look at those things for me? The carpet under your feet? The feel of the chair arms in your hands. Focus on it all.”
Logan looked around at all the things Ernie named, but he knew his gaze was frantic, almost panicked, as he tried to find the items Ernie listed.
There was a vise grip on his chest, his lungs. There wasn’t any air getting in. Panic rose up and swallowed him whole.
“Let’s take a few deep breaths now, Logan. Breathe with me—in through your nose, out through your mouth.”
As Ernie spoke to him, Logan felt himself coming out of it, his heart still racing, but the sense of being in another time and place, a place he couldn’t control, eased.
“That hasn’t happened in a while,” he said, his eyes meeting Ernie’s as frustration and anger swamped him in the wake of the emotional beating of the flashback.
“They should come with less frequency over time, but one of the most important things will be for you to learn to pull yourself out of them if there isn’t someone there to do it for you. You’ll need to coach yourself to do the things we’ve done together. Focus on your surroundings. Deep breathing. Some people find it helpful to do some tactile exercises, such as touching your thumb to each finger slowly, as you take a breath.”
Logan nodded, but his jaw clenched in frustration. Over the past three weeks, he’d felt like his sessions with Ernie were helping, like he was getting better. He started driving to work at times that were slightly closer to typical commute times. Not peak, but closer.
Hell, he’d even thought about asking Samantha to go on a real date with him. He thought maybe he was ready to take a chance on them. On them being together, finally.
They spent every lunch hour together and he’d even hung out at her house with her after work a few times, but he hadn’t kissed her again because he knew he needed to do better by her before he let that happen.
And now this.
Ernie handed him a fresh bottle of water and took a seat across from Logan on the couch.
“Tell me again about Dopey’s flag burning speech,” Ernie said, in the start to what Logan was recognizing as a repeated pattern.
Ernie asked Logan to repeat that discussion again and again over the past few weeks, even having him describe things like the smell of the room, who was sitting where, who wore what clothes, and so on. Every detail he could remember over and over again.
Logan launched into the recital now and realized, again, that it got easier in the retelling of it. The ache at again hearing Dopey’s words in his head lessened each time.
When he finished this time, though, Ernie went on to ask him to do something much harder. “Now tell me about the memory you just lost yourself in a minute ago.”
Logan looked up at him in horror. He couldn’t go back there. No freaking way.
Ernie acted like he wasn’t asking for anything difficult. “Tell me where you were.”
Logan looked at him a long time before he eked out an answer, his voice tight and stiff with tension. “Classified.”
And it was. He wasn’t just using that as a bullshit excuse.
“No problem. Just paint the picture for me. Not a country or province. Just the setting. The woods? A dirt road? Jungle? Sweltering heat or dead cold of winter?”