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I lean my cheek against his chest, where I can hear the fast boom of his heartbeat.
“So you can die, or you can kill a kid. The worst times, one of your guys already got hit. Maybe you’re in front of them. So you can kill the kid or they can…” He swallows. I look up at him. “Would you let the kid blow up your buddy?” I can feel his chest start pumping faster. I wrap my arms around him again, hoping the sensation will center him.
“I dream about them on the ground,” he murmur into my hair. “The way someone looks on the ground. I didn’t see it very often through my scope…from far away. You’d make the kill and go. But in Ramadi. Syria… In other places. All the places with close quarters fighting. You would just walk away…and they wouldn’t. Everyone I know, I see them lying on the ground.” His voice cracks. “You know…cause you’re human. You kind of—some part of you wants to pick them up. Not at that moment. They just tried to kill you. But you walk away and—sometimes you know them. Maybe it’s a terp—interpreter—or…sometimes you can’t get them out. Right then.” He puts a hand over his eyes. “I always try to get them. And sometimes I’m taking fire. But usually I’m not. I see everybody I know and I’m just standing there. I walk up on them, don’t know how they got there. I just stand there.”
I can feel him shaking just a little now. I realize belatedly he’s talking about his nightmares.
“Taking out a target, it’s a fucked-up job. But that’s not what I see when I’m asleep. I just see people on the floor.”
I notice he said floor, not ground.
“People who weren’t over there with you?”
He nods, his face still covered by his hand.
“Are you here in the U.S.?”
He swallows. Through the barrier of his fingers, I can see his blue eyes glimmer.
“Last night, I kept seeing this rug.”
I look down. “Oh.” This one.
He folds his arm over my back, pressing me
to him. It doesn’t calm the shaking.
I lock my arms around his waist and swallow against the aching lump in my throat. “Was someone on it—in your dream?” I whisper.
“You are.” His arms around me loosen, and he leans away, so he can lock his hard eyes onto mine. “You’re on the floor, Gwenna. It’s you. So you see now? Why I think you should go?”
Despite the firmness of his voice, he bows his head and shuts his eyes again, as if he can’t stand to see my reaction.
I chew on my lip. “I have an idea,” I say slowly. “You can say no.”
His eyes blink open. They’re red around the rims, making his blue-gray irises look bright green.
“We want to change what you see, right?” I swallow, steadying my voice. “Just make it slightly different. This is one of the tenants of getting rid of PTSD nightmares. You want to control the way it goes. So you’ve dreamed of me, dead on your floor.”
He doesn’t move, but I can feel the weight of all his awful grief.
“What if I lay down now—and maybe you can lay down after that. With me. We could steer your dream this way.”
His eyes squeeze shut.
“We don’t have to.”
He lifts a hand to his face, then he speaks through his fingers. “Do.”
With one last glance at him, I get onto the floor and stretch out on my side. My side, because when he lays down, I want to wrap my arms around him.
This is also how I landed, though. How I was found. I lie there and my heart pounds thinking of myself alone, and all the blood and all the snow. I try to remember. I try to remember the smell of gardenias, the scent of road salt. Creaks and beeps and tires crunching on snow.
Funny how our nightmares are the inverse of each other’s.
You’re okay, I tell myself. I’ve been dreaming, too, but I know I’m okay.
Barrett grabs me so fast it startles me. I don’t even feel him kneel down by me before his arms go around me and he locks me up against his chest. He squeezes so hard I can barely breathe. His face presses into my neck. I feel his hard back shaking. I wrap my leg over his.
