Navy Seal's Match

“He’s big,” she provided. “Black. Goes by the name Prometheus.”

“You’re kidding.” When she didn’t answer, his lips parted. “Right?”

Familiar sarcasm flooded Mavis’s voice. “Well, I thought Killer was overdone.”

“Prometheus.” Gavin shook his head. “Because that’s not over the top.”

“Have you seen him?” Mavis asked pointedly.

“Was he carrying a torch and running really fast?”

“Gavin.”

“No,” he answered. “I haven’t seen a dog or a Titan.”

Her arm rose to her head as if to shield her eyes from the sun. “Damn it,” she muttered. “It must’ve been herons. He always chases the herons.”

Gavin scratched his unshaven chin. “Is, uh, this by chance your dog?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

“How’d you lose him?”

“He wanders,” she said by way of excuse.

“You’ve heard of leash laws,” he guessed.

“He’s called Prometheus and he weighs nearly as much as I do. You think a leash is going to make a difference?”

“He sounds like a legitimate beast,” Gavin mused. “At least you got the name right.”

Her arms crossed and her weight shifted. “You used to have a dog. Boots. Wasn’t that his name?”

Gavin’s hands folded. He clenched them against his thighs. “He wasn’t my dog.”

“What do you mean? During your visit two years ago, Harmony said you couldn’t shut up about him.”

“Boots belonged to the US government,” Gavin said. “Not me.”

“Oh.” She said nothing more. Because, again, Mavis sensed things. Like the fact that Boots had been shot outside a checkpoint in Kabul. Almost exactly like Benji had years before.

Don’t go to that place again, Gavin told himself. Once more, he focused on what was present. He picked Mavis as his focal point. A dark beacon. The kick-ass combat boots were followed up her slender ranks by black pants, or leggings. The heat index today was 102, which meant she either hadn’t checked today’s highs before leaving her bat cave or she was crazy.

Crazy, he thought. Let’s go with crazy.

There were white slashes in the fabric for venting at least. They went well with the punk look she’d owned since the tender age of sixteen. Or was it fourteen? By that point, he’d been in BUD/S, fighting to fulfill his dream of joining the SEAL teams.

“What are you doing out here?” she wondered out loud.

He spread his empty hands. “Reading the newspaper?”

She answered with knowing silence, making him more aware of the tremor in his knees. Mavis probably also knew by now about that vase he’d broken in the hall upstairs at Hanna’s and the semi-argument he’d had with his father as a result.

This isn’t working, he had told Cole as he stood by like a chump listening to the man and his wife clean up his mess. His third, in as many weeks.

We’ll move things around, Cole had replied.

Briar was quick to jump on the bandwagon. Sure, she’d said in her feather-soft voice. It’s my fault, really, for leaving the vase in your way.

The fact that they’d worked their butts off to accommodate him did little to temper the hot-burning coals inside him. The coals had been there since the surgeons informed him that he would be legally blind for the rest of his life, effectively shutting down his military career—the only calling he’d ever known.

It wasn’t fair to resent Cole or Briar. Yet with every valuable Briar had to sweep broken off the floor, those coals smoldered.

“When was the last time you slept more than an hour at a time?”

Gavin frowned at Mavis’s inquiry. Yeah, no. Not going down that road.

“There are people,” she suggested.

“People?” he chimed.

“That you can talk to.”

“I don’t want to talk to them,” he said quickly. He’d seen enough doctors. They were all in agreement that he was a head case who needed to be on the antianxiety meds that made him spin out of turn.

He’d take his chances with the flashbacks.

Gavin pushed himself up from the hammock, finally feeling steady enough. He crossed his arms and lowered his head, hiding the pink scars raked across his face by the winter’s RPG blast. He’d forgotten to use sunblock again, as instructed. What did it matter? The scars wouldn’t fade any more than the blindness. He started to walk away, then heard her drawn-out breath and stopped. “What would you know about it?” he ventured. “Ever had a flashback, Freckles? Night sweats? Hypertension brought on by stress?”

“No,” she answered plainly.

He gave a nod and began to walk toward the inn again.

“But I know someone who has,” she said at his back.

“I’m sure,” he replied, and kept walking.

“Which is your good side?” she asked, following. “Your right or your left?”

Why was she following? He’d never been one for glossing things over. Would he have to bite her head off to get her to stop chasing him with the same good intentions as everyone else? “I don’t have a good side,” he replied. When she only continued to follow, he elaborated, “The left’s worse. Why?”

She didn’t answer, but he found her in his right periphery. A shadow. With a quick glance semi-close, he was better able to pick up on her dark hair, cut raggedly, longer in the front where it tickled her fine-arrowed chin and shorter in the back where it rode just above her hairline. He could see she was wearing a flowy sleeveless top, feminine even if it was black as brimstone. A hint of skin underneath turned him on to the dark cut of her bra.

When in God’s name had Mavis started wearing flowy, see-through blouses? She was in her late twenties, but when Gavin could see twenty-twenty, he’d never known her hips to swing quite like they seemed to now.

Gavin studiously turned his attention to other features, ones he knew. The freckles. They marked her for the distinct thing she was. They reminded him of the quiet girl he’d known—the freckled Wednesday Addams. The sarcastic teenager he’d never thought of as womanly.

Her sharp-cut jaw still looked too much like her older brother’s.