“I’ll be checking in on you every week or so,” Yarvis said, “and of course you should be doing your physical therapy, but for now, you get to make like a tree.”
“Great!” Luke offered.
“It’ll still take a couple of days before we discharge you,” he said. “We’ll discuss your situation first, give you a chance to transition.”
“Got it,” Luke said, though his eyes looked glazed.
“I’ll leave ya to it and let the doctor know.”
When Yarvis had shut the door, Luke let go of my hand, putting his own to his forehead. “Shit,” he said.
My stomach was churning. “Yeah.”
“I could stay at my brother’s,” he suggested, but I shook my head. Both of us knew that would look too weird, unless I were to stay with him, and of course I couldn’t. I had to work in Austin.
“Plus not a good idea to live near your dad, considering he’s a former army police officer. When were you going to tell me that?”
I had overheard his father and Yarvis talking about Vietnam one day. Yarvis had asked what his dad’s role was. The CID were the very people who busted illegal activity within the military. Rights violations, protocol violations, you know, stuff like fake fucking marriages.
“I honestly forgot,” he said, shrugging.
I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. “What are we going to do?”
Luke put a fist to his palm. “We wait for my leg to heal, then I get an honorable discharge, then we make a plan to go our separate ways. We can get through this.”
For a minute, he felt more present. It felt like we were on the same planet. The same hostile, hurtling-through-space-toward-a-black-hole planet.
Then I remembered Toby. Sweet Toby, who spent hours in my apartment, taking baths, cooking bland spaghetti, and going through a serious early-nineties hip-hop phase.
“What?” Luke said, studying my face.
“So, while you were gone, I kind of started seeing someone.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “You have a boyfriend?”
“What are you, jealous?” I asked, instinctively. But for a second our last night together flashed in front of me. I felt my cheeks burn.
He didn’t respond, so I tried to make light of it, pushing him on the arm. The muscles there were rock hard.
He looked at the spot where my hand had been, and rolled his eyes. “No, I’m not jealous, but people see you have a boyfriend, then they see you have a husband, they start asking questions.”
“Yeah, I know.” I swallowed. “But it’s not like you and I are going to be out in the same places I’m out with Toby.”
“Toby?” Luke asked. “That sounds like a dog’s name.”
“Don’t be mean.”
He cleared his throat, sitting back. “So you guys are pretty serious.”
Yeah! I was about to say, but it sounded off. Like I was forcing it.
I went with, “Serious enough that I don’t want to break up with him because I’ve got a fake husband in my bed.”
Luke held up his hands. “Uh, I’ll sleep on the couch, thanks.”
I blushed. “No, I meant you can take the bed. With your leg and all.”
“We’ll flip for it.”
We flipped. Luke lost. I felt bad for a minute, then I remembered him comparing Toby to a dog. We sat, saying nothing, probably thinking about the same thing. Sharing a bathroom. Sharing a life. It would be different. This was real. This was sharing oxygen, and resources, and time I usually spent on my band, on my real boyfriend. And whatever it was that Luke would do all day. I didn’t know if I could handle it. If Luke kept acting like he did today, like he was someone I’d never even met, I definitely couldn’t.
Luke broke the quiet. “Are you going to tell him?”
Deep breath in, deep breath out. “Maybe when the time is right. We’ll just have to avoid my apartment for a while.”
“Damn, Cassie,” Luke said, reaching for his pills, his lips lifting into a half-smile. “What the hell are you going to say?”
Luke
The morning of my release, I sat with Cassie in the fluorescent cafeteria behind weak cups of coffee. We held each other’s sweaty hands, gazing at a quietly wheezing Yarvis, my surgeon, Dr. Rosen, and Fern, a young woman from the Quality of Life Foundation with glasses and black dreadlocks wrapped into a bun.
I had taken OxyContin this morning, and was resisting taking another one, though my leg was sore down to the bone from physical therapy and the doctor palpating it to check my progress. I wanted to be able to listen, to be present. The surgeon’s jargon was making that hard, words like distal third tibia and fibula and fractured patella washing over me in a dull blur.