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So what else did I have to lose at this point?
BARING YOUR SOUL IS EASY
CONNOR
I sat down on the small sofa in Dr. Hoffman’s spacious office. He sat in a chair opposite me and rested his chin in his hand. I pulled at the thighs of my jeans, then rubbed my hands along the seams on the sides, the friction grounding me as I waited for him to say or do something. Eventually his silent watching was too much.
“Aren’t you supposed to ask me questions or some shit?”
He smiled, the right side of his mouth pulling up slightly. “Or some shit.”
I blinked. What the hell did that mean? I looked at the door and then back at him. “I don’t know how to do this. The army therapist just asked me a bunch of questions.”
He nodded. “They tend to stick to the basics so they can check off that they did their due diligence when they only did the bare minimum. You’re a soldier. You know how to answer a question sufficiently, but if that’s what you really needed you wouldn’t be in my office. So what brought you here today?”
I had a decision to make. Did I tell this guy the truth and rip the words out from where I’d buried them deep, or did I clam up, waste the hour, and tell Hurley I’d tried? I didn’t like the idea of failure, but more than that, I couldn’t stop replaying that last night with Jenna and then the look in her eyes when she ended it.
She was hurt. By me.
I’d made a lot of poor decisions in my life, but hurting her was the worst. So when it came to therapy, there was really no decision to make.
“I couldn’t talk to my…girlfriend about my tour overseas, or anything else significant for that matter.”
“And why do you think you couldn’t open up to her?”
I scrubbed my hands over my face and then looked at him. “I don’t know. She wouldn’t understand what it was like. I don’t want her to worry about me or think I’m crazy. I don’t want to look at her and wonder if she’s thinking that I’m about to snap or something. She doesn’t need to carry my burdens.”
He nodded like he understood. “You mentioned your time overseas first. Is that the thing that keeps you from telling her anything else?”
“Yeah.”
He arched a brow. “Care to elaborate?”
I clenched my jaw. “Um…” A cold sweat beaded on the back of my neck. My pulse skyrocketed, and my chest felt tight like someone was sitting on it.
His discerning gaze felt like it was burrowing inside my soul searching for the truth, and it took everything in me not to shift in my seat.
“What happened over there?”
My gut clenched. I closed my eyes, searching for strength to finally cough up the words I’d been holding on to, and Jenna’s eyes were the first thing I saw. Then her face as she’d laugh. I pictured it so clearly my heart ached.
Fuck, I missed her. If ripping myself open meant I could repair things with her, it’d be worth it, right?
“Our convoy got caught in a complex ambush.” After so long being trapped, the words came out surprisingly smooth. The panic was still bubbling under the surface, and it was hard to breathe, but they’d come out.
“Okay,” he said, dragging the word out in a way that told me he expected me to give him more.
The words felt like broken glass moving up my throat. “It was a really bad day.”
He frowned. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
I swallowed and rubbed my hands on my jeans. When did they get so sweaty? I closed my eyes again, thinking maybe that would make it easier to tell him, but instead, I immediately pictured that day. I had flashbacks every so often—nightmares too, but those had been less frequent since I started sleeping with Jenna. Hell, they’d been practically nonexistent as long as I slept with her in my arms until that one night that changed everything for us.
“We’d been at a local village meeting with the elders to see what we could do to help since we were planning to set up a presence there. We knew they’d be open to it because of a trusted source. Talks went well. Really well. We stayed later than we originally planned, and I was kicking a ball around with some of the village kids when our section commander told us we needed to wrap things up and get back to the forward operating base. At that point, I was the only one goofing off.” I remembered that clearly. Laughing with the kids. I’d replayed that afternoon in my head so many times, wondering if things would’ve turned out differently if I hadn’t been playing with them—if we’d pulled out of there earlier.
“We left and took the main road back to base. Things were going exactly to plan until the truck behind me exploded.”
I leaned forward and put my head in my hands, the memories rushing back feeling like they were suffocating me now that I’d opened the box I’d buried them in. I’d been through a thousand trainings, but never realized how it would kick in when everything became utter chaos. We hadn’t known that hit was coming, but once the truck exploded, the whole convoy stopped. The guys in my truck all looked at each other because we knew—we thought we knew—that more was coming.
