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The cot was so small that she had to lie at my side with her body pressed against mine.
I don’t think she minded. I certainly didn’t.
“Hope I succeeded in keeping you awake for a while,” I said smiling as I lay there with my arm around her.
“Mmmmm… that was an incredibly nice way of passing the time before my flight,” she murmured.
Suddenly, a mortar shell exploded nearby – closer than the others we’d heard on the walk over, and close enough to rattle the building slightly.
BOOM.
Rachel’s head jerked up off the cot.
“It’s fine,” I said, taking her hand in mine and kissing it. “That was still pretty far out.”
“I don’t think I could have slept anyway with all that going on,” she muttered.
“Then all my efforts were wasted,” I joked.
“Mm. Definitely not wasted,” she said right before she kissed me.
A second mortar round made her flinch, though. She broke off our kiss and looked around, although there were no windows to see outside.
“How do you do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Keep so calm!”
“You get used to it.”
“But how do you sleep with those explosions?”
“I didn’t at first. I had a really bad week when I first got here – barely slept at all. And then I reached the point of exhaustion and decided that if my number was up, it was up, and there was nothing I could do about it but accept it. After that, I slept like a baby.”
“I don’t know if I could do that…”
“I’ve had a lot of experience accepting things I couldn’t change,” I said quietly.
She lifted her head again, not saying anything.
It took me a moment to realize she was listening for another explosion… but there wasn’t one.
“The shelling stopped,” she said.
“It comes and goes. Sort of like you.”
She frowned quizzically.
“You come… and then you go…?” I said, explaining the joke.
She rolled her eyes but still gave a tiny snort of a laugh. “Oh my god.”
“That’s what you said when you came. ‘Oh my god – ’”
She gave me a real laugh that time. “Well, you said ‘fuck’ an awful lot when you came.”
“Did I.”
