“Hey. I know this is scary—”
“I’m trying, I swear. I know I signed up for this. It’s not like I didn’t know what you were going to do, and I still chose you—choose you—but God, Josh. This…I can’t wrap my head around it.”
I pushed my chair out and reached for her, lifting her tiny, curved frame onto my lap. Her head tucked beneath my chin, and she curled into me, fitting right where she was always meant to be. My arms closed around her. “We have a month.”
“It’s not long enough.” Her fingers gripped my shirt like she could keep me here if she just held on tight enough. God, what I wouldn’t have given to stay with her.
“Forever isn’t long enough for us, December, but that’s what we’re going to have. You and I have never chosen the easy path. This is just another hurdle.” I rubbed my chin over her soft hair and tried to soak in every detail of holding her—the sweet way she smelled, the smooth texture of her skin beneath my hands.
She leaned back in my arms and cupped my face. “I can’t lose you.” Her voice broke, and tears pooled in her eyes.
I’d never hated myself more than I did in that moment. She’d made it through a nightmare no one should have to face, and I was about to ask her to chance that fire again. My breath hitched, barely passing the lump in my throat. “You won’t. It would take something a hell of a lot stronger than a war to keep me from you.”
I sealed that promise with a kiss, tasting her fear and desperation as she responded. She opened underneath me, and I fused my mouth to hers, surrendering to the heat between us to pull us through this moment. There was nothing hotter or sweeter in this world than kissing December, feeling her go soft and pliant.
We’d fought so fucking hard to get here, to be together. This wasn’t fair, and we both knew it. But we also both knew it didn’t matter. Fair wasn’t exactly in the U.S. Army vocabulary.
I retreated just enough to whisper against her lips, “I’ll come home. I swear it.”
Her chest trembled as she sucked in a stuttered breath. “Don’t make me a promise you can’t keep, Joshua Walker.”
“I’ll spend my life keeping it,” I vowed.
Her fingers skipped over my face, like she needed to memorize me. “You don’t get it,” she whispered. “That’s what I’m terrified of.”
I pulled her to me the second her tears slipped down her porcelain cheeks, and held her long past their end.
The week had passed too quickly. The days did that now, too, no matter how I tried to slow them down, to savor every second I had with her. It seemed daylight slipped through my fingers.
“I’d almost forgotten how much paperwork there was,” I muttered, flipping through the stack.
“God, I thought college applications were bad,” Jagger muttered next to me.
The SRP site was packed with orderly lines of soldiers picking up their papers and checking their immunizations, all preparing to deploy.
“What is this?” Jagger waved a paper at me.
I grabbed my own. The DD93 stared up at me, the most macabre piece of work I’d seen since the last time I did this shit. “It’s for your next of kin.”
“Well, until I marry Paisley, that’s probably you,” Jagger said, tapping his pen on the paper.
“I’m pretty sure I’d know if something happened to you before a notification could come down, but I get what you’re saying.”
“Oh.” The pen paused. “This is…”
“Yeah,” I answered. It was for notification purposes, determining which doors the army would knock at if we were KIA.
“Who are you putting?” Carter asked from the other side of me.
Shit. “Last time it was Mom, but she was alone when she found out I’d been hurt. I don’t want to put her through that again. But Ember…”
Jagger sighed. “That’s a tough fucking call.”
“Why?” Carter didn’t look up, filling his out with quick strokes of his pen.
“She’s already answered that knock once, and it nearly destroyed her,” I said quietly. His eyes shot up to mine, widening. “Her dad. He was the doc who fixed me up in Kandahar. He’s the reason I’m alive.”
“Damn. I had no clue.” He shook his head. “She’s so put together, you know?”