the debt 6 by Unknown

Author:Unknown [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

***

They dragged their dirty wet clothes back to the cabin and the two of them rinsed their bodies off in the outdoor shower powered temporarily by the generator, shivering and laughing together as the cold spray of water covered them.

When they were done showering, Jake led Raven inside to the bed and covered both of them with the heavy blankets that smelled like mothballs. It didn’t matter how the blankets smelled, though, Raven thought as she shivered under them with Jake’s warm body encircling hers.

Her held her tightly, his lips nuzzling against the back of her neck. “I’m glad you didn’t run away,” he said, as her shivering subsided.

“I’m glad, too,” she murmured.

There was a comfortable silence, in which Raven could do nothing but smile.

Time seemed to spin out and they lay together, completely at ease. Raven found herself drifting, dozing almost, until he spoke.

“Afghanistan was hell,” Jake said, breaking the silence with this strange announcement.

Raven was startled, but then grabbed his hand and kissed it. “I can’t really imagine it,” she said, just happy he was talking about it, trusting her finally.

“I still can’t really make sense of it,” Jake told her. “You’d think I’d be able to. After all, they all tell me how I thrived there, in the fighting, in the sand and the desert and the madness. They put me in charge of the men because I wasn’t afraid—I was somehow able to think under immense pressure when other guys just pissed themselves. In the center of battle, I was the eye of the storm. That’s what my commanding officers told me, anyway.”

“Wasn’t it true?” she asked, afraid to upset him but wanting to know more. She couldn’t believe he was finally telling her this.

“I don’t know what was true about that time in my life,” Jake sighed. “Maybe the guys who pissed themselves were the brave ones.”

She didn’t understand why he would say that. “There’s nothing wrong with being brave,” she told him. “You shouldn’t feel bad about that, Jake.”

“Maybe I just don’t feel the way normal people do,” he told her.

“I don’t believe that,” she replied.

“I know that ever since I came home from Afghanistan, I’ve been a different person. If I once was normal, the war fixed that,” he said, chuckling with some bitterness. “I saw my best friends killed. People I’d laughed with, cried with, read their parents’ and girlfriends’ letters, and seconds later they were just gone. Wiped off the face of the planet.”

She swallowed and clutched his hand tighter. “It’s normal to feel sad about that,” she said.

“And I spent the better part of my time there wiping the other guys off the face of the planet, the one’s we said were the bad guys.”

“Weren’t they bad guys?”

“Sure, some of them. It wasn’t my job to decide who lived and died. I followed orders like everyone else.”

Raven turned and looked at him. His eyes were dark and pained. “Nobody could ever be the same after something like that,” she said, stroking his chest.

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