A beat passes. Mal slides his hand around my hip, coming to rest at the base of my spine. Then he sighs. “All of it. And I don’t know if it’s PTSD. I’m not having nightmares and shit.”
“What about when you’re awake?”
“I zone out sometimes, and I’m not as alert as I’m used to being. Fucking Whitlock snuck up on me the other day, on his bike. I didn’t hear a thing.”
Whitlock.
Folk.
Before he came looking for Mal, I hadn’t seen him since I went with Oscar and Aras to watch him get married.
I lean into Mal’s touch. I don’t mean to, it just happens, and he responds by pulling me closer until I’m all but lying on him.
It’s a wicked distraction. His arms are sun-warmed and he smells good, and his mouth is right there.
Don’t.
I kiss him anyway, and he kisses me back, but it’s slow and sweet. Hypnotic, almost. I’m not sure how long it lasts, just that it does. And that I stay where I am when it’s over, tucking a lock of Mal’s hair behind his ear. “You feel jumpy at all? Like your body is still at war without you?”
Mal thinks about it, our legs tangled, bare feet entwined. “I don’t know. I feel something brewing inside me sometimes—like some distant fucking rage bearing down on me, but it’s hard to tell what’s in my head and what’s going on in here.”
He taps his chest, the first time he’s acknowledged what the pills in my bag are for. Then he lets his hand drop and I replace it with mine, my palm against the steady beat beneath his warm skin.
Steady for now.
I know it skips sometimes, I felt it when he was asleep on the sofa beside me a few weeks ago. I felt it again the night we first kissed and it’s bothered me since.
It bothers me still. “What’s your diagnosis?”
Mal cracks his eyes open. “You don’t already know?”
“You’ve asked me that before.”
“Not about this.”
No. About Sol. But if he thinks I ask intrusive questions for a good time, I don’t know what to fucking say. “I know you hadsuspected atrial fibrillation when you got hurt overseas. Jack asked me what it was.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“Nothing. He talked to the soldiers who came here alone—they said he had to.”
Mal rolls us, so he’s on top of me. Then he hides his face in my neck, and it’s as close as we’ve ever been. But it’s not sexual this time. It’s a different need and I let it happen. I thread my fingers into his still damp hair and rub the base of his skull, closing my eyes to his answering groan.
We stay like that for long minutes, and I accept he’s probably done talking about a moment in his life that took more from him than I likely know about. I accept the fear snaking around my heart at how easy it is to be so intimate with him and shift us a little, so he can lean on me harder.
Mal takes a slow breath. Then he raises his head so we’re face-to-face again. “I don’t like thinking about Jack living through that. I know how it felt when it happened to me.”
“He was okay once he knew you were awake and talking.”
“I wasn’t for a while. I don’t remember being extracted…someone carried me onto the chopper and I woke up in Germany.”
“That’s where you were when they came to find Jack. He would’ve got on a plane if they’d have let Sol or me come with him.”
Mal seems to realise how entangled we are. How his weight pins me to the ground. He adjusts us, propping himself up on his elbow, messing with my hair with his other hand. “I’m glad we didn’t meet like that.”
Right. Because how we did meet was so much better?
Was for him.