Page 27 of Some Like It Hot
“I’m their older sister. I should be taking care ofthem.”
“Anyone looking at you knows you can handle yourself.”
“Yeah, well.” She took a breath.
She couldn’t tell him it was all a game. That inside she mostly felt like she would shatter into a thousand pieces.
“I lost my mom when I was eight. She died of cancer and was the strongest person I knew. But she turned into a shell right before my eyes. It terrified me. And the grief took me apart. My brothers had each other, and well, I felt so alone. I spent a lot of time at my grandma’s place—my cabin. When she died, I realized I had to take that fear and grief and push it into a hard ball. I forced myself to join the military, did a tour in Afghanistan.”
She whirled around. “I can fly a plane, a helicopter, remodel my own house, and birth a freakin’ baby. I can even patch up guys who have their legs and arms blown off, long enough to get them to a hospital. I don’t flinch, I don’t run away, and I don’t fall apart!”
She did, however, apparently yell.
He hadn’t flinched, hadn’t taken his gaze off hers. And clearly he possessed the ability to see right through her, because, “Except you can’t sleep and you went looking for a guy who could help you forget your wounds, didn’t you? Which tells me that maybe you aren’t as unbreakable as you say.”
Her breath shucked out. “How did you know I can’t sleep?”
“You told me about the sleeping part. I figured out the rest.”
Her face reddened. “That was a mistake.”
He drew in a breath. Then, “Everyone is breakable, Larke. You just have to let yourself admit it.”
“Really? Canyouadmit it? Because I remember a guy saying, ‘I’m indestructible.’”
He seemed to be debating something quippy, likeI am. Instead, “Naw. I’m a total wreck.”
Silence, a beat, and he looked over at her, something sad in his expression. “And now you know. I did warn you. I’m no hero.”
Whatever.
She found herself walking over then, sitting on the chair by his bed.
“I was broken long before my dad died, if you’re thinking it’s about him. I mean—yeah. He was bigger than life to me. A superhero. Master Chief McCord. We lived in Chicago at the end, but only because he’d taken a job training the pre-SEAL candidates at Great Lakes naval base. And then they needed him overseas and called him to Afghanistan.” He turned his hand over and looked at the ink inside his wrist.If.She’d seen a flash of it that night in the bar but hadn’t asked him about it.
“‘I am that man. I will not fail,’” he said softly. “‘If knocked down, I will get back up, every time. I will draw on every remaining ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission. I am never out of the fight.’” He drew in a breath, then looked up at her.
“SEAL creed, shortened. My Dad had this sense of honor—not just from being a SEAL, but…he had this poem he lived by. It was by Rudyard Kipling, all about being a man. ‘If… If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs… If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone…’ Anyway, it’s a long poem, and my dad made me and my older brother learn it until we could say it in our sleep. His way of instilling in us a code, maybe. Even if we weren’t going to be soldiers.”
“But you were going to be a marine.”
“I was. I told my dad I would enlist before he left. It’s the one thing I did that made him proud.” He gave a little laugh, no humor in it. “And then, of course, I broke that promise.”
She frowned. “Of course?”
He glanced at her. “Two sons, one golden, one the screwup. While my brother got A’s, I was the one who got in fights at school, took chances, broke bones. I just couldn’t sit still… I always had to see, do, explore. School was boring and hard and…in more than one school, I had my own desk in the principal’s office.”
“You sound like a normal boy.”
“When I was ten, we lived in Oahu, Hawaii, and I heard about these giant sea turtles that would come on shore at night, about fifteen miles north of where we lived. So I hitchhiked up the shore and camped out for two days until they showed up. It was amazing…huge beasts, they crawled up on the sand and just lay there, big eyes watching me. I stayed there all night. The next morning, I went home, and my dad was there. He’d been on a training op, I think. But they flew him home because they thought I’d been kidnapped.”
“Oh. Wow.”
“It was bad. My dad called me reckless and stupid, and I think I was grounded for the rest of my life—”
“You were ten.”
“Still. He was right. My mother was a mess. She did everything she could think of to corral me—from church to camp to sports clubs. I was finally diagnosed with ADHD, but by then Dad had sent me to military school and I learned how to behave.”