“Come on, Stokes. Come on!”
He gurgled blood as his hand reached up for my cheek. “Doctor. I can’t—”
I grabbed his face and glared into his eyes. “You don’t stop ‘til I stop, you got that, Sergeant? You got that!?”
His eyes rolled into the back of his head and he started convulsing. In the middle of a fucking battlefield, with bullets flying everywhere, and I had a man convulsing on the ground in front of me. I needed my go-bag. I needed my medication. But instead, I had been sent on a “do-or-die” mission that I wasn’t nearly prepared to handle by myself.
Why the fuck did the Army do this to us?
“Doc—mmph—tor.”
I gripped his hand as the convulsing stopped. “You have to keep your eyes on me. I’m going to get you out of here. I need a van! Now!”
He shook his head side-to-side, as if to tell me no. But his lips ceased to move. His eyes grew big, as if he were seeing something above my head. And with a breath that was both laborious and tainted with blood he couldn’t swallow down, a smile crept across his face.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Stokes?” I asked.
Tears crested his eyes. “Mom. I haven’t seen you in—”
“Stokes! Don’t! The van’s right here!”
The medical Humvee pulled up behind us as his eyes went blank. People scurried around me as some random medical trainee started chest compressions. I watched as the life faded from his eyes. I listened as bullets whizzed by our heads like little points of passion threatening to breach the entire Geneva Convention just to take me out.
And as I watched them roll his dead body onto a gurney, bile rose up the back of my throat.
“Oh, fuck,” I choked out.
“No!” I exclaimed.
I sat bolt upright in bed, as if someone had shocked me back from a dead existence. A cold sweat dribbled down the nape of my neck, causing me to twitch as I swung my legs over the side of my bed. I raced for my bathroom, feeling that same haunting bile make its way to the back of my tongue.
And after throwing up my dinner into the sink, I splashed some water in my face.
“Jesus,” I whispered.
I heard Opie’s bell on his collar jingling as he raced up the steps. He blasted into my room and met me at the bathroom door just as I had gotten done cleaning myself up. He kept nudging the insides of my legs with his nose as I made my way toward my bed, and the second I collapsed onto the other side of it to avoid the sweaty outline of my body, he climbed between my legs.
Before curling up next to me with his soft, warm fur.
“Come here, boy. There’s a good boy,” I whispered.
His head nestled beneath my chin and I breathed in his scent. Nothing smelled or felt like home some days except the scent and smell of Opie. I wrapped my arms around him, and he nestled closer, licking softly at my jawline.
As if to give me kisses.
“I know, boy. You can start sleeping with me again,” I whispered.
He whimpered before he barked, and the sound made me smile. “None of that sarcastic shit now. Yes, you were right. You can sleep with me from now on, okay?”
He grumbled to himself before his eyes fell closed, and soon his chest rose and fell with his deep, even breaths. I drew in his scent one last time before I closed my own eyes, and soon I fell into a deep, dreamless slumber.
And when I awoke a few hours later, Opie was the first thing I saw.
“Hey there, buddy,” I said groggily.
He nuzzled my cheek with his cold, wet nose, and it made me smile as I rolled over onto my back.
“Come here,” I whispered as I patted my chest.
His head fell against my beating heart and I scratched behind his ear. As I stared up at the ceiling, I found myself thinking about Stokes. About his family, and how they were doing. I insisted on being with the team that went to inform his family about his death. He had been my first soldier that had ever died on the battlefield before I could get them on my operating table, and he still haunted me. Even now, eight years after I chose not to reenlist. I remembered dressing in clothes Stokes would never wear again. I remembered standing there while someone from the “Doom Squad”—as we so lovingly called them in my group of friends at the time—knocked on their door.
And when a beautiful woman with two children and one on the way answered, I almost screamed out to the heavens.
“She was days from delivery, Opie,” I murmured.
He nodded against my chest before his tongue darted out to lick my chin.
“Three babies, all under the age of four, and I was with her when they told her that her husband was never coming home.”
Opie whimpered as I brushed tears away from my eyes. “Such bullshit.”
I closed my eyes as the sun streamed hotly through the windows. That meant I needed to get moving, unless I wanted to spend my entire day grieving over a guy that died well over a decade ago. No one blamed me for his death, of course. The barrage of bullets that peppered that man’s torso was enough for anyone to declare time of death before the man died because we all knew it was coming.
And yet, I couldn’t get him out of my mind no matter what I did.
“Come on,” I groaned as I sat up. “Daddy needs a shower.”
Opie barked before he leapt off the bed, then he went over and nuzzled the bathroom door open. I chuckled as I stood to my feet, watching yet again as Opie grabbed my shower curtain with his teeth and pulled it back. He sat on my bathmat with his tongue hanging out of his face, watching as I made my way for him.
I stripped my clothes and bent down to give him kisses before I hopped into the hottest shower I could stand.
“Oh, yeah. That’s the spot,” I growled.
Opie stayed on that bath mat until I got out, and he never left my side as I dried off and got ready for the day. He always did that after I had an attack or some sort of nightmare that woke me up. And as I put my clothes on, I looked over at my leather jacket before making the decision to have a day to myself where I took no phone calls unless they were from Brooks himself.
Because after everything going on with the club, I needed a little sense of normalcy.
“You wanna go to the park, Opie?”
“Woof!”
I grabbed his leash. “You wanna go run around before we go get snackies?”
“Woof, woof!”
I slipped into my boots. “Maybe after the park and snackies, we could come back and have a movie marathon. How’s that sound?”
He walked up and nuzzled my cheek with his nose before he barked right in my damn ear. And even though it was ringing, I still smiled.
“I thought you’d like that idea. Come on, boy. Come!”
Out the door we went, and I got a chance to ride around in my fixer-upper convertible I had bought off someone a few years back. It was an old 1974 Chevrolet Corvette I bought off some poor, snotty bastard that had bought it behind his wife’s back. So, I got it at a rock-bottom price along with some useful tools and parts he had already gathered that he’d never get a chance to switch out on it.
It was my little pet project that kept my mind occupied on the nights I couldn’t sleep.
We pulled into the parking lot of the dog park and I put Opie on a leash. We got out of the car and the wind picked up, and it made me thankful that I grabbed my leather jacket at the last second to slip it on. I whistled for Opie to come stand by my side and he quickly pressed himself against my knee, panting and barking and ready to walk through that gate so he could run around and get some playtime in.
But just as I opened the gate, I watched a small scene unfold.
Right there, in the middle of the dog park, there was a bench. And that bench housed a border collie that chewed and wiggled around on a leash that had been attached to the leg of the bench. I furrowed my brow, wondering if the dog had been left behind, or if the owner really was that lazy of a sack of shit.
And it didn’t shock me one bit when the dog got free and booked it toward me.
“Oh, no you don’t,” I murmured.
I stayed there in the middle of the small door frame, fencing in the border collie from the outside world that would crush it the second the dog made it to the highway. Opie started barking, almost as if yelling at the dog to stop, but I had to step on its leash to keep it from scrambling away.
“Whoa-ho-ho there, buddy! Where do you think you’re going?” I asked.
Someone clapped and yelled in the distance, but I wasn’t sure what they were saying. I bent down and became eye-level with the beautiful dog that had a shimmering, trimmed coat of fur and scratched the top of his head. The border collie seemed to almost smile as his ears went down. And the longer I scratched, the more the dog settled onto the ground before me.
Which made me smile. “Oh, I know, that feels good doesn’t it? Yes, it does. My Opie likes to have that spot scratched, too. Yes, he does. Yes, yes, yes he does.”
It didn’t even occur to me that someone had been chasing after the dog until their shadow fell upon me. And when I looked up to see who the completely irresponsible owner was, I found myself at a loss for words.
Mostly, because the woman standing above me had the most striking green eyes I’d ever seen in my life.
For a moment, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak, breathe, or even move my lips. It wasn’t until Opie licked my cheek that I heard the beautiful redheaded angel standing above me giggle.
And the sound washed through my veins the very essence of relief.
“She must be yours,” I said as I stood to my feet.
Her eyes blinked rapidly before she cleared her throat. “Uh, he. It’s a—well, he’s a…he.”
I grinned. “Does ‘he’s a he’ have a name?”
She snickered. “Max.”
I motioned down to Opie. “This is Opie.”
She didn’t even look down at him. “He’s beautiful.”
My grin turned into a smirk. “He likes to think that, too.”
She giggled again and her cheeks blushed with a tint that seemed to suit her all too well. The sun beating down against us highlighted the auburn red highlights in her hair that seemed to backdrop the fiery red waves that framed her face wonderfully. She had a sprinkle of freckles across her nose and her cheeks, and as her skin deepened its flush, the colors of her freckles popped even more.
And when she spoke to me again, her voice sent shivers up and down my body.
“Thank you so much for catching Max, by the way. I’m here with a couple of kids, and they were fighting and I swear I only turned my back for a moment and—”
I shook my head. “It’s really not an issue. Kids can always complicate the smallest of things.”
She giggled once more. “Don’t I know it.”
The more she smiled, the more I smiled. The more she giggle, the more I chuckled. And pretty soon, the two of us were smiling and laughing with each other over absolutely nothing.
And for a brief moment, I wondered if this was what Porter had with Astrid. Or Archer with Josie. Or Brooks with—damn it, I never could remember that girl’s name.
Either way, though, I wondered if this was how they felt when they were with their ladies.
