Page 27 of The Burning
“Shhh.” I pressed my finger over my lips.
“And,” she said, a mischievous smile growing as she spoke, “if my husband isn’t cheating on me and you two can figure your problems out, we will have double dates with the two of you and be couple friends and do couple stuff together!”
She moved her eyebrows. I covered my face with a pillow from the couch.
“Don’t count on it.”
“You guys will work it out,” Elodie said with certainty.
I groaned and pointed to the TV. “Look how beautiful!” I attempted to distract her with a huge white marble island being installed in a brand-new stark white kitchen. “Let’s watch other people live perfectly and enjoy it and stop talking about my nonexistent dating life.”
“Fine, but only because I’m tired.” Elodie yawned and leaned against me.
Chapter Thirteen
Kael
My place was freezing. I stepped into a familiar pitch-black darkness. The cold, dark nights in the desert sleeping on the ground were gone for now, but the reminders never stayed away long. I almost felt comforted by the chill.
Half of my life felt too good to be true; my freedom was right around the corner, supposedly. I knew the system better than that. To expect everything to go smoothly to the point that I could drive away from Fort Benning without consequences—shit never went down like that. But I was closer to freedom than I’d been in a while. Even if it wasn’t guaranteed to be real. The other half, though: the harshness that I had always been aware of, but lately had been consuming me, that I wasn’t a good person. I had done a lot of bad shit, but knowing that Karina knew it, that she was right all along to not trust me. I had my reasons, but she would see me as a bad person for the rest of her life, until she forgot me at least.
“It’s fucking cold in here,” Fischer bitched, his voice sending a shock through me as I flicked the lights on and saw him hugging his body. Sure enough, Fischer was on my couch wrapped in every blanket I owned.
“Why are you sitting here in the dark, you fucking weirdo?”
“I just got here and it’s too fucking cold to move from here.”
“Are you serious right now?” I could see my breath when I talked. “You’re never going to make it through basic if you can’t handle a little cold.”
He waved his middle finger at me and snuggled farther into the couch.
“How bad could it be? You made it through, and Lawson’s dumb ass did, too. Can’t bethathard.”
“No matter where they put you for basic training, your ass will get smoked for jokes like that,” I warned him. “You can’t just pop off at the mouth to anyone higher-ranking than you. Which would be me.”
“Right,” he said, laughing and saluting me.
Fischer thought it was funny now, but I had no fucking idea if he would be able to handle it. Smoking soldiers was no joke, and neither was running up and down hills until your lungs felt like they would explode and until your sergeant finally told you that you could stop, and barely being able to walk after. And basic training was just the start of it. Now that I’d been deployed, basic felt like a trip to the Bahamas in comparison. Not that I really knew what a vacation was like, but I watched enough TV to have an idea. Even if most of my impressions came from my ma watching theHousewives of Every Fucking Citygo on countless vacations with what seemed like endless money to blow.
I wanted to believe that Fischer would make it through and become a good soldier. Hell, even Lawson did, and I knew firsthand from basic how inept he could be. Fischer was tougher and more compassionate. From what I saw, he would actually make a pretty good soldier if he stayed with the right crowd and could get a handle on his addictions, which was way easier said than done. Problem was, in the Army, you had little control over your platoon, so the best you could hope for was just one person you could tolerate who wasn’t a bad influence.
“A little running won’t kill me,” Fischer said, and his voice stretched with his body as he sprawled out all over my couch.
“Yeah, you say that now. You could barely make it through the physical.”
I eyed the cold leather chair nearby. No way was I sitting on that. I needed more furniture, though maybe not since I was usually there alone, and I didn’t want to waste the money. I didn’t mind having Fischer’s company. I wanted to be left alone, but not be alone. Whatever that meant. My mandatory discharge therapist told me that my independence gave me a false sense of freedom, but that really, I thrived with company. I was used to living in a small barracks room with a roommate when I was home, then sleeping in groups in a modified shipping container while deployed. I wasn’t used to privacy or the concept of being physically alone.
In the container, my bunk was under the wall-mounted AC unit that only worked half the time. Before the heat got too bad, I got one of the guys to help me rig it with the random tools around our camp. It would be weeks waiting for a replacement,ifwe actually managed to get someone to order one. We made do with what we had most of the time while over there. When a lot of my meals came from MREs, the gross little packets of food, it was fucking Christmas every time someone in the platoon would get a care package from home.
Care packages helped a lot. Most of the dudes in my platoon weren’t married, so if there were packages, they usually came from their moms. Like mine sending me Gummy Bears and Snickers bars. My ma couldn’t send much, but when she did, it meant the damn world. When a box of the good shit came it was rare, but it gave us something to do while trying not to die. Lawson’s wife would sneak vodka, moonshine, or a joint inside of a cereal box. Occasionally, letters from schoolkids would come, and most of the older guys would get fucked up over the Crayola-streaked reminders of their own kids back at Benning, who were living their lives without them. It was part of the sacrifice for their country, and we all knew that well—but it didn’t mean it felt as good as the intention behind them or that a hand-drawn Memorial Day card couldn’t bring a two-hundred-pound man to his knees.
While my mind was in the past, my eyes traveled around my living room. It was bigger than most quarters or barracks I’d had for the nearly three years I’d been in the Army. I was so fucking happy when I got promoted to sergeant just so I could move out of the barracks. I liked the convenience of walking across a lawn and being at work, but I couldn’t stand having a roommate, especially in such a tiny room. I’d always been more of a lone wolf. I didn’t like sharing space with people; I didn’t like people touching my shit and sharing a bathroom and hearing when Phillips would bring home a girl from the bar and fuck her not even ten feet away from my bed.
There was no such thing as privacy in the Army, and Fischer being there didn’t feel any different than being with one of my battle buddies, except now we were in my own space where I could take a piss in peace without having a half naked girl knock on the door, whining that she had to pee. At least with Fischer, he was the lowest-maintenance roommate I’d ever had. He was mostly on his phone or playing video games and didn’t need to fill the quiet spaces in conversations. He didn’t talk as much as his sister, although funny enough, he once told me once that Karina was quiet. It confused the hell out of me because it seemed like she never stopped talking whenever I was around. Though, she did apologize pretty much every time she rambled, which made me wonder who in her life had made her feel like what she had to say wasn’t worth hearing. Subsequently, it made me want to fuck them up. Maybe it was her choice to shut herself off from the world? I would probably never know, but I did like the thought of Karina Fischer opening up only for me.
Having the brother of the only girl I’d ever loved living here was the worst scenario of all. There were times when his mannerisms reminded me of his twin, like the way he talked with his hands, huffed, and rolled his eyes—an ungodly number of times just like his sister. They were people who used their eyes, facial expressions, and hands to express themselves very clearly. Karina didn’t look like her twin brother in a way that I would immediately think they were twins, but it was obvious that they were related. Good genes. Karina especially. Fuck, she was just one of those women who didn’t need to try to stand out, but she did, and once you looked at her, you just couldn’t fucking quit. And once she began to speak, her mind an endless ocean of intellect, it was impossible to stop listening.
The entire platoon noticed her when she began coming around more, and, with Elodie becoming friends with everyone through the FRG, Karina quickly became a constant topic of conversation. During PT every morning, between giving me shit about sitting out because of my leg, the guys would make comments about her—Elodie, too—but Karina was the single one, and no one wanted to fuck with crazy-ass Phillips’s wife. The first time Lawson brought up hitting on Karina outside of PT, Fischer was there and made it clear as fucking day that she didn’t date soldiers and never would. He said specifically that she didn’t dateanyone. He was pretty unfazed when a group of rowdy boys were talking about the way his sister’s body was made to be fucked, though. When Lawson went on about her body, I looked at him, wondering if Karina would even like him if he was single. I knew her enough to know she wasn’t into married dudes, and I knew her enough to know she would probably cuss him out at minimum and knock his teeth down his throat at maximum.
