My eyes glanced down to the scar I knew ran through his leg. “You don’t regret losing the one thing you love? God! You were shot! Wounded! Nearly killed, and you just stay in? Do you have some kind of fucking hero complex, or something? Let me tell you, Josh. Heroes die!” My voice caught, and I sucked in a strangled breath. “They die.”
The muscle in his jaw flexed. “I haven’t lost the one thing I love, Ember. You’re still standing in front of me, and I’m fighting like hell.”
“Don’t. I’m not going to stand by and watch you die like my father. I don’t care if you’re almost done with college, nothing is worth that wait, that pain.”
“Your dad believed in his mission. He saved a lot of lives. I knew him, Ember. He was proud of what he was doing. He was proud of me!”
Jealousy stabbed deep. Josh had been friends with my dad because of Gus. He’d talked to him about things I never could, about why he chose the path he did. Josh knew my dad intimately in a way I never would, because I had been too scared, too angry with Dad’s choices to understand.
“Look what he got for it. A doctor in a hospital, not a soldier on the front, and he’s dead! Don’t try to rationalize war.”
Silence enveloped us, and I noticed the crowd gawking as they passed by at the same time Josh did. He pulled my messenger bag by the strap, gently guiding me under the nearby tree so we stopped entertaining the masses.
“Please fight for this, Ember. We are worth the fight. I love you, and that’s something I’ve never said to any girl. I love you more than hockey, or the air I breathe. You love me, too!”
That felt like a giant slap to the face. “My love? You want to use my love in this?” The tears burst free, streaking my face. “I never would have gotten close to you if I knew! I hate what you do. I hate that you lied to me. But mostly, I hate that you let me fall in love with you when you knew! I hate that I love you, so you don’t get to use that.” The tears drained my anger into a pit of misery.
Pain radiated from his eyes. “I love you enough for the both of us. I can’t regret anything that brought us together.”
His eyes, his words, they all started to melt through my resolve. “You should have said something.”
He took a tentative step, reaching out to run the backs of his fingers down my face. “I should have given you the choice and told you, but I couldn’t. You are this miracle, something I never thought I was worthy of touching, let alone calling you mine. I’ve wanted you since I was eighteen, but I was never good enough, not for someone like you.”
“Because I had a doctor daddy?” I threw his words back in his face, trying to hang on to the last vestiges of my anger. Anger would keep me alive when Josh had the power to break me.
“Because you were kind, and smart, and seemingly unimpressed with me. Oh, you’d watch; believe it, I noticed, but you had way more self-esteem than to throw yourself at anyone. I had too much respect for you to pursue you. I would have wrecked you back then.”
“You’re wrecking me now.” The confession was soft. I’d known from the picture that he’d noticed me at fifteen, but hearing him say it, the longing in his voice, brought me another notch closer to insanity. I had to be crazy to even entertain the idea of staying with him.
“I love you. You are everything, and I’m not going to let you walk away over a uniform.” He pulled on my waist, bringing me flush against his body. My traitorous nerves misfired, remembering all too well how it felt to be in his arms. “Just let me love you, December, because I can’t stop anyways. I’ve been at your mercy since I was eighteen.”
The fight bled out of me as I melted against him. His brown eyes shone in the patchy sunlight. It didn’t matter in the long run really. He only had a few months left until graduation. I did my math. “You enlisted for the typical three years, and those are up soon right?”
His jaw flexed. “Technically.”
My eyes narrowed. “There’s no technically. Don’t you dare hide anything else from me.”
He glanced around for a moment, like he was searching for his answers in the trees, the buildings around us. “I’ll be done with my enlistment the day I graduate.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Three months. I can do three months.”
His grip tightened on my waist, a little desperate. “My enlistment is up on graduation day because I’ll be discharged from service. A few minutes later, I’ll be sworn in and commissioned as an officer. I’ve been in ROTC since I was wounded. It paid my scholarship, and the guard paid my rent.”
Where was the numbness, the icy feeling that kept me distant? Instead, raw pain, gaping and ugly, clawed its way up and seized hold of me. “You’re commissioning. You’re going career.” Twenty years. The best years of his life given in service, risk.
His eyes said that he wanted to lie, but he didn’t. “Yes. That’s my plan.”
I nodded and smiled, swallowing the lump growing in my throat. Before he could say anything else, I reached up on tiptoes, wound my arms around his neck, and melded my mouth to his. I kissed him with abandon, pouring all of my love, my sorrow, my desperation into him.
As he responded, I found the tree at my back, his tongue moving with mine. His hands left my waist and held my face like I was something delicate, as he kissed me with obvious relief. Everything in my body called out for him and I gave in, angling to get closer to him, reveling that I could be so swept up in someone else.