Rom-Com Collection. Kristan Higgins
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take a coffee, I guess,” the old lady said.
“Coming up, dear lady. Cream and sugar?” Mrs. Johnson asked. She really was a peach once you got over her Darth Vader type of omnipotence. Mrs. McPhales nodded, then seemed to recognize Faith.
“Faith! How are you? Aren’t you and that nice Jeremy getting married soon?”
“We’re not,” Faith said. “Sorry.”
“Oh! That’s right! He’s a confirmed bachelor, from what I hear.”
“I think so,” Faith said.
“You poor thing. Chin up, Faith, dear. You’re very brave.”
Faith thought she heard a snort. Right. Levi was still here. Brian, Mrs. McPhales’s son, came up and took his mom by the arm, smiling at Faith as he led her away.
At the moment, there was no one around except Levi. “Thanks for washing Blue,” she said, attempting to be friendly. “That was really nice of you. And unnecessary, but thank you.”
“Keep him leashed.” A five on the scale. “I’ll have to start fining you if he runs loose all the time.”
Sigh. “It was one time, Levi.”
“Make sure it’s only one.” He wasn’t even looking at her; casting about instead for someone more interesting to talk with.
Faith felt her jaw clenching. “Heard you got divorced, Chief.”
His eyes came back to her. An eight. “Yes.”
“How long were you married?” Colleen had passed on the details, of course, but why not torture him?
He waited before answering, his green eyes filled with disdain. “Three months,” he finally said.
“Really! Wow. What a short time.”
“Yes, Holland,” he said. “Three months is a short time.”
“Bet you wish someone had stopped your wedding.” She smiled sweetly. “Seems only fair, since you’re so good at doing that for others.”
Levi was crinkling his brow at her again. “When do you go back to San Francisco?”
“We’ll see.”
“Really? No job?”
“I’m very successful, actually. And I’m doing two projects here, one up at Blue Heron, another for the library, so I’ll be around for at least six weeks. Isn’t that great?” He didn’t answer. “There’s Julianne Kammer now. I should go and talk to her.”
“When are you going to see Jeremy?” he asked.
“Gosh. Is it really any of your business? Oh, wait, I forgot. You’re Jeremy’s guard dog.” She was going to see Jeremy; it wasn’t her fault he was in Boston for a conference.
Levi leaned in close, and she could smell his shampoo, feel the warmth from his cheek, and an odd tension coiled in her stomach. “Grow up, Faith,” he whispered.
The man. Was. Suchapainintheass.
Then she went to talk to Julianne about the library courtyard and tried not to feel Levi’s eyes on her back.
* * *
ON HIS FIRST TOUR, Levi found that war was all it promised to be, at times stupefyingly dull...days on end of doing nothing more interesting or challenging than cleaning your gun. Then you’d be coming back to camp and a kid who’d taken food from you the day before might throw a grenade at your Humvee. Once, a car loaded with explosives detonated just outside camp, killing three soldiers, including one who’d won fifty bucks off Levi the night before.
But there were good things, too. Levi liked the structure, liked his fellow soldiers, liked the feeling that as screwed up as war always was, maybe they were doing something important. His unit was the 10th Mountain from Fort Drum, and they were the guys who got shit done. Sometimes it was best not to think about what those things were, but he was a soldier, a link in the chain of command, and he did his job. After his tour ended, he signed up for another. Made sergeant, then staff sergeant. Re-upped again and sent the bonus home to his mom.
Then one day, while on patrol in some horrible little town where people lived in shacks and everyone seemed to stare at them with dead eyes, a bullet sang right past his head, shattering rock. Another crack, and before Levi could even turn around, Scotty Stokes, a private who’d just joined their unit, crumpled to the ground. Levi grabbed him by the back of his vest and dragged him to shallow cover. They were cut off from the rest of the patrol, and the kid was bleeding badly from the leg, maybe an artery. Levi tourniqueted the kid’s leg as best he could. Returned fire, killing one of the gunmen, then hefted the kid over his shoulder and made a run for it, praying that neither of them would be hit.
They made it. The medic thought Scotty would lose his leg, but some badass ortho with a great pair of hands managed to save it. Scotty would set off metal detectors for the rest of his life, but he’d walk on the legs God gave him. And Levi got a Silver Star, though to him, it seemed more like dumb luck than any real forethought or skill. Lots of training, maybe. His mom and Sarah were proud, though. The Lyons, too, acted as if he’d saved the world. They had Mom and Sarah up for dinner, and all four of them Skyped with him, and that was pretty great.
From the time Levi had left on that Greyhound until he came back to Manningsport, Jeremy stayed in touch. Sent him emails all the time, Skyped once in a while, always smiling, always able to tell him something funny. Stuff about college, football, dorm life. Those little glimpses were almost hard to picture—Levi had never been to Boston, couldn’t imagine playing in a stadium that huge. When Levi described the desert sand storms, Jeremy sent him really excellent ski goggles and six boxes of Visine. Elaine and Ted sent him candy and organic potato chips, and of course Mom and Sarah sent him stuff constantly. Sarah’s report cards, Mom’s long, worried letters.
Everyone emailed pictures, but Jeremy went a step further and had them developed. Levi tacked them up next to his bunk—a picture of Sarah at Christmas, since the Lyons had had them over for dinner; the dense clusters of grapes hanging from the vines in the fall; the hills covered in snow in December, the water of the lake black and deep.
Home.
And when a car came screaming up to your outpost or you braced for the IED to blow you into chunks, when bullets streaked through the night air, home was the only thing that kept your shit together. On the days when the temperature hit a hundred and thirty and his gun was so hot he had to wear gloves to hold it, when his water was the same temperature as McDonald’s coffee and his mouth felt like leather from being so dry, those pictures were little pieces of paradise.
Faith’s name, which had been mentioned fairly often at first, stopped appearing after Jeremy graduated and started med school (he’d turned down the NFL, for crying out loud). There was some mention of one of Jeremy’s fellow medical students, a guy named Steve, and Levi wondered if maybe there was something there. Honestly, though he didn’t give it much thought. If his friend had come out of the closet, Levi would hear about it when Jeremy wanted him to.
Finally, five years after he’d first gone to Afghanistan, Levi got a leave long enough to go back. He’d seen his mom and Sarah twice since shipping out, once on a long weekend in New York City, once when he surprised them with a trip to Disney World. But this time, he wanted to go home. He popped in on Sarah at school in one of those tear-soaked CNN moments, endured an impromptu assembly in which the principal told him how proud they were (despite having given him a record number of detentions not so long ago). His mom made his favorite dinner—meat loaf and mashed potatoes, then wept happily all the way through it.
And finally, Levi called Jeremy; it was October, and Jeremy was home for the weekend from Johns Hopkins. “Hey, bud, wanna grab a beer?” he asked, then grinned as his friend cussed him out for not giving him more notice.
A few hours later, Levi was slightly drunk from all the beers bought for him. Connor O’Rourke