“I’m fine, Trip. Just worried about all the crap around here that keeps falling apart. I’ve got fifteen new vacationers coming in this afternoon and I’d like them to be able to use their sinks.”
His brown eyes narrow as he looks me up and down. “Fine, my ass. When was the last time you ate? Get out of here and go up to the Lobster Bucket and tell Carl to make you a lobster roll. Scratch that, make it two and put it on my tab. Don’t come back until your belly is full. I’ll have your sinks working by then and I’ll keep an eye out if anyone stops by.”
I start to argue, thinking about the laundry that isn’t going to wash itself, but quickly realize there’s no sense in going to battle with Trip Fisher. It’s not like I can do the laundry with a busted machine that won’t drain, anyway. It’s not very often that I get a chance to get away from the inn and take some time for myself, so I grab the offer and run with it. With another kiss to Trip’s cheek, I grab my purse from behind the counter and make a quick call to my best friend, Ellie. I need to forget about the man who forced me out of our home and his life over a year ago and concentrate on my date tonight. I’m fine, I’m happy and I’ve moved on. Ellie will help me keep my mind off of the past and focus my future. Or, she’ll just get me drunk. Either way, I refuse to spend the rest of the day worrying about running into Fisher.
Chapter 3
Lucy
February 25, 2014
Pulling the pan of lasagna out of the oven, I turn to walk it over to the counter and stop in the middle of the room. The pan slips from my hands and crashes to the floor as my eyes cloud with tears while I stare at the open kitchen door.
“You’re home,” I choke through my tears.
He was gone for sixteen months, five days and twelve hours this time. He was able to call every couple of weeks, but sometimes hearing his voice made things harder, driving home the fact that I would have to go to bed alone and wake up without him beside me.
Fisher doesn’t move from the doorway. He’s still wearing his Marine BDU’s and his camouflage backpack is slung over one shoulder. I’m not used to seeing him like this. He never lets me see him off, always saying good-bye the night before in civilian clothes and stopping at a hotel halfway home to change, clean up and shave before he sees me again. He jokes that he likes to get the “stink of war” off of him before he touches me again, even though I’ve assured him that I don’t care about any of that, just as long as he comes home.
I take in every inch of his six-foot-four frame, from the new muscles he seemed to have developed while he was gone to the beard that covers his cheeks and chin. Between the letters that I write to him when he’s away and the news about the war I have to constantly see on TV, not a day goes by that I’m not reminded of the fact that I’m a military wife and my man is a Marine. I’m so very proud to call myself his, but fear and worry are my constant companions. Every time the phone rings or I hear a knock at the door, there’s that niggle of uncertainty, but nothing hits home harder than seeing Fisher standing here in front of me, fresh from a flight from Kuwait with desert sand still clinging to his black hiking boots. The sight of the man I love looking like he just stepped off of the battlefield in the middle of this bright, cheery, yellow kitchen makes me want to drop to my knees and sob, knowing that I could have lost him. This could have been the time that military personnel stood in my kitchen doorway instead of him.
I need to touch him and reassure myself that he’s real, he’s here and he made it back to me in one piece. As my feet start to move in his direction, he drops his pack from his shoulder and charges across the room to me. He steps over the lasagna mess, wraps his hands around my upper arms and walks me backwards until my ass hits the wall next to the fridge. I try to shake my arms out of his grasp so I can run my hands over his face, slide my fingers through his hair and kiss the lips I’ve missed for far too long, but he quickly spins me around, pressing his body against my back and pushing me more firmly into the cold wall.
I should be afraid of the manic look I saw in his eyes when he charged across the room or worried that he hasn’t spoken a single word. Something about this is extremely different than all of his other homecomings, and I should probably be a little wary of this man who’s not behaving at all like my Fisher.
But I’m not.
“I missed you so much,” I whisper as his hands roughly yank my yoga pants and underwear down my thighs.
I’m not afraid, I’m turned on, more than I ever have been in my entire life. Aside from the sixteen months without sex, there’s something about this that excites me and makes me wet. I want whatever he’s going to give me and I want it now.
I hear the rustle of his pants being pushed down and I know I should try to speak again, try to make my voice louder so he’ll hear me, slow down, let me touch him and calm whatever storm I feel is brewing in this kitchen right now, but I don’t want to. I want the thunder and lightning, I want the crash of the storm and I want whatever destruction it will leave behind.
I don’t have time to prepare or even think of something else to say before the shock of him slamming inside of me steals the breath from my lungs. He clutches onto my hips and I brace my hands against the wall as he pounds into me without a word or a sound. I was wet for him as soon as he stalked across the room to me, but I still feel a sting of pain after having gone so long without him inside of me. It’s delicious and perfect. The pain reminds me that he’s here, he’s alive and he’s home. He’s inside of me where I’ve needed him for sixteen long months and I never want him to stop.
He thrusts into me roughly and his hips slam against my ass each time. My body smacks into the wall with each hard drive of his cock inside of me, and I can already feel bruises forming on my hips from how hard he’s holding onto me so he can move faster, go deeper, fill me completely.
His hot breath against the back of my neck is something I’ve dreamt about for sixteen months, something as familiar to me as my own reflection. Fisher feels the same and smells the same, but nothing about what is happening right now is anything like him. He’s different every time he comes back from the war, but this is like nothing he’s ever done before. He always talks to me when he gets home, says my name over and over, tells me how much he loves me and how much he missed me. He holds me and touches me lovingly and I always feel cherished. This time, I feel wanted. I feel craved and I feel needed. He’s taking me like an animal and I want more. I want it harder, I want it faster, I want to know without a shadow of a doubt that he’s been dreaming about this, dreaming about me while he’s been gone and needing me as much as I need him.
I arch my back and tilt my hips to meet each of his thrusts and pull him in deeper. I remove one of my hands from the wall and push it between my legs, sliding my fingers around where we’re joined and bringing the wetness up to circle around my clit. Bracing my feet against the floor so I don’t fall to the ground with the force of him fucking me, I rub my clit with the tips of my fingers. I want to moan and scream at how good it feels, but my breath gets caught in my throat each time he slams into me. I wish I could turn around and see him. He must look like a wild beast rutting against me, and as crude as that sounds, that knowledge makes my sex throb and causes my orgasm to explode out of me in a rush of heat and pleasure. I come against my fingers with my face pressed against the wall while Fisher fucks the hell out of me. It’s not even fucking at this point, it’s taking. He’s taking me, he’s owning me and he’s punishing me with his body and his cock. I want the punishment. I want the pain. I want to hurt for all the months I forced myself to shut down and turn off my emotions so I wouldn’t go crazy with worry for him. I want to wake up tomorrow with pain between my thighs reminding me with every step I take that he kept his promise and he found his way back to me.
He’s unrelenting as he fucks me, never slowing down, never easing up. He’s racing to the finish line and I can feel the sweat dripping down his face and onto my shoulder. He slams into me roughly one last time before h
olding himself still while he comes inside of me.
We’ve barely spoken two words to each other in a month. I look at my husband across the dinner table and I feel like I’m looking at a stranger. This is my husband, my love, my Fisher. He’s the man who leaves me every once in a while, but always, always comes home to me. He loves me, he takes care of me and he does everything in his power to make me smile.
Except lately.
The last four weeks have been filled with one-word answers and grunts when I ask him a question. We’ve haven’t had sex since that night in the kitchen and every time I’ve tried to touch him, he gets up and leaves the room. I feel like I did something wrong, but I have no idea what it could be. I need to hear his voice, I need to know he’s still the same man who named all of my freckles, even though I hated it, and sings Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds in a loud, off key voice whenever he says my name. I won’t pretend to know what kind of demons he’s trying to chase away, and I won’t pretend to understand what’s going on in his mind. All I can do is let him know that I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.
I don’t say anything when I see him grab a beer from the fridge or pour a glass of whiskey from the cabinet above the dishes. It’s been happening more frequently during the day, but who am I to say something to him about it? He goes off to war, fights for our country and then he comes home to me and works his ass off around the inn. I can’t pick a fight with him just to get a reaction out of him, even though I want to. I want to see something spark behind his eyes instead of the cold, dead stare he seems to always have lately. I want to smack him across the face, push him so hard in the chest he stumbles. Something, ANYTHING to get some kind of emotion out of him. I want the man back who took me in the kitchen the night he came home. The man who needed me so much he couldn’t even say one word before he buried himself inside of me.
His nightmares have been getting worse lately. Almost every night, he wakes up covered in sweat and screaming. He’s always had bad dreams when he gets home from a tour and he’s always let me hold him, run my hands through his hair and do whatever I could to calm him until he was able to go back to sleep, telling me I was the only thing that could make it all go away. Now, he jumps out of bed and goes to the spare bedroom, slamming and locking the door behind him. I’ve never felt so alone, even when he was halfway across the world. I’m living in this house with my husband and I get to see him every day, but it feels like I’m living with a ghost. He’s been honorably discharged due to permanent nerve damage from some shrapnel he took to the shoulder during this last deployment, an injury I didn’t find out about until after he came home. I’ll never forget the fear that clawed at my throat seeing those scars on his back, realizing how very close I’d come to losing him. Even then, when I’d broken down in tears and raged at my husband for refusing to allow his commanding officer to contact me when he’d been injured, Fisher showed absolutely no reaction. The man who couldn’t stand to see me cry was totally and completely blank, walking calmly out of our home as I sobbed.
It was after a military doctor declared the damage to his nerves too severe to resume his duties that Fisher’s drinking started to escalate. I want to be happy that he’ll never be taken from me again and he’ll never voluntarily leave me for a year, but it’s obvious he’s not happy about never going back to combat again. He watches the news every hour of the day, waiting for information on the war and the friends he left behind and curses his shoulder for messing up his chance of going back and helping them. Doesn’t he understand that his life and his mental health aren’t worth it? Leaving our life together isn’t worth it? Every time I get the nerve to tell him that I’m happy he’ll never leave again, I stop myself at the last minute. Being a Marine was his life, this war was something he believed in and protecting this country was what he’d wanted to do from the first time I met him. I can’t be happy about him losing something that is such a huge part of him. I just want him to talk to me, to let me take away some of his demons, but I don’t know how anymore. I don’t know how because he won’t let me in. Every time he moves into the spare bedroom and slams the door, I feel like he’s slamming a door to his heart and I no longer have a key that opens it anymore.
Chapter 4
Fisher
Present Day
“I don’t care if you don’t drink anymore, man, you still have to come up to Barney’s and say hi to everyone,” Bobby argues as he watches me run a piece of sand paper over the arm of a rocking chair I started working on this morning. My shoulder is killing me, but working with wood is one of the few things in my life right now that brings me pleasure. Since the shrapnel from an IED damaged the nerves in my shoulder on my last deployment, I’ve had to limit the time I spend in my makeshift workshop. If I work for more than a few hours at a time, the pinch in my shoulder either travels down my arm and hurts like a bitch or makes me lose all feeling in my hand. Numbness plus power tools is never a good equation.
Tossing down the sandpaper, I roll my shoulder and rub the kinks out, cursing myself for not taking a break earlier. As I continue to stretch out the tight muscles, I head up the stairs of Trip’s house and Bobby follows. When I decided it was time to come home, I naturally assumed I’d just go back to the house Lucy and I shared that’s been sitting empty for over a year. A small, yellow cottage with white trim in a quiet part of the island that overlooked the ocean and provided us with our own, small private beach, I surprised Lucy with it when I came home from my second tour, right before we got married. Surrounded by trees and flowers in the front to provide privacy and nothing but a view of the ocean and a boardwalk leading down to our beach in the back, it was the perfect home for the two of us to start our lives.
I walked into the place last night when I arrived on the last ferry to the island, nearly losing my dinner as I looked around at the empty shell of a home that had been wiped clean of every trace of her. I knew Bobby had cleaned out the house, putting my furniture and extra clothes in storage, but I wasn’t prepared to walk in and see our house devoid of my Lucy. Everything that made this place a home and every memory of the life we’d built together was no longer there. It was like she never even existed, like the eight years we spent living under that roof never happened and I couldn’t stand being in that place for one more second. I backed out of the house, locked the door behind me and went running to my grandfather’s house like a fucking pussy. He told me I could stay for however long I needed, as long as I helped him out with odd jobs around the island when I had time.
I wipe my hands on my jeans and turn to face my best friend once we get up to the kitchen. It’s kind of surprising that we’re still friends after all these years and all the shit that’s happened in between. I practically ditched him for Lucy in high school and I was so caught up in her and my life with the Marines that it didn’t leave much room for anything or anyone else, but Bobby was always here, on the island, waiting for me whenever I needed him. He was the best man in my wedding, kept an eye on my grandfather and Lucy whenever I was out of the country and he knocked me on my ass last year when I lost my shit all over the town, dragging my passed-out body two blocks to the ferry and then right up to the front doors of the VA’s rehab facility.
“Look, we’re just going up there to throw some darts and unwind. It’s Friday night during peak season, man. Do you have any idea how many hot, barely legal chicks will be walking around town looking for a couple of locals to show them a good time?” Bobby asks with a laugh. “It will be like shooting fish in a barrel.”
“You know that’s not why I came back here,” I argue, wanting nothing more than to go back downstairs and continue with the piece I was working on. My woodworking started off as a hobby when I was young and my grandfather first taught me how to whittle, carving intricate designs out of spare pieces he had lying around. When I mastered that skill, he taught me how to use a table saw and measure and cut wood. While he was busy working on window frames or crown molding and I got bored with whitt
ling, I would take those spare pieces of wood and start hammering them together. Pretty soon, I’d built my first rocking chair. It was a rickety piece of shit that probably wouldn’t hold a kitten without falling apart, but it made me feel good to create something from scratch. After that, I checked out every book in the library I could find on building wood furniture and taught myself how to do it right. It wasn’t too long before people on the island saw my designs and started asking me to make things for them. I made everything out of old pieces of wood, adding my own artistic designs and carvings to all of them. People ordered everything from kitchen tables and rocking chairs to king sized beds and bookcases. It turned into a pretty lucrative business and kept me plenty busy when I was back on the island in between deployments.
“I know, I know, you came back to get your woman and all that shit. At least be my wingman. Can you do that for me?” Bobby begs.
“Fine. One game of darts and them I’m out of there. I don’t think I can handle that much staring and finger pointing from all the fucking townies,” I tell him as I wash the wood dust off of my hands at the sink.
Bobby sighs as he tosses me a towel. “They’re a bunch of busybody fucks who have nothing better to do with their time. Give it a few days and everything will go back to normal. It’s kind of a big deal, you being back here and all. You didn’t exactly leave the island quietly, you know.”
He doesn’t have to remind me. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of those drunks who could do stupid shit and then pass out and forget it all. I could remember with perfect clarity every word I screamed as I walked through the town, every local I’d picked a fight with and every window I’d thrown a rock or a chair through. I knew it was wrong when I was doing it, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. I was so lost in my own mind, not able to tell if I was walking down Main Street or walking into the middle of an ambush in Afghanistan, that everyone looked like the enemy to me. Every terrifying thing I’d ever seen or done flashed through my mind and I didn’t care about anything but lashing out at anyone who came in contact with me. I hated myself, I hated my life and I hated what I’d become and I wanted everyone to suffer that agony right along with me.