became friends the moment we met. He was a couple of years younger, new to the Rangers, and since he was under my command, I was tasked with showing him the ropes. Brooklyn, we called him, because he had a heavy New York accent. Pretty sure he played it up, but that was Alex. Always the clown, making jokes at the most inappropriate times to relieve the tension.”
I can’t help but smile as the memories flood me. We shared so many laughs, the two of us in stitches like teenagers over the crazy stunts he pulled.
“Underneath, he was a damn good soldier. Fearless. And when everyone else was asleep, I saw his other side… We’d talk about him growing up with a single mom and five siblings. How he learned to cope with dyslexia in school. And the Yankees. God, he was a die-hard Yankees fan…”
“That’s why you wear a Yankees cap…” Julian says.
“Yeah. It was his. His mother sent it to me, at his request.”
Julian frowned. “How could he have requested that ahead of time?”
Sweet summer child. “We’re soldiers, baby.” The word falls from my lips as if I’ve said it a million times before. “The Army requires us to have our affairs in order before we ship out. After our first tour together, he made some changes to his last wishes, and one of them was that he asked his mom to send me some of his personal effects.”
“Did she know?”
“I didn’t even know. I knew he was gay, and so did his mom. He’d told me he’d come out in high school, and obviously, I was fine with it, but he didn’t shout it from the rooftops. The Army has changed, but being gay can still cause a backlash, especially in a special unit like the Rangers. But I didn’t know…” My voice breaks. “I didn’t know he was in love with me.”
My throat is tight now, and every word hurts. “And I didn’t know I was in love with him. Not until… Not until it was too late…”
Julian clenches my fingers, tears shimmering in his eyes. I love him all the more for it. Lesser men would’ve been jealous of a previous love, but not him.
“My unit was on a mission, and we walked straight into a trap. One moment, everything was fine, and the next he was dead. He got hit by a sniper. The bullet came out of nowhere. Clean shot. I’ll always be grateful for that, that it was instant. But as I held him in my arms, I knew I had lost the man I loved…”
Julian doesn’t say anything, and that means everything. No clichés can ever comfort me, but that he’s with me in my pain and grief is enough. Just knowing I’m not alone.
I take a few minutes to compose myself. “At first, I stayed, but my CO quickly realized I was in no condition to serve, so he sent me home. It was supposed to be temporary, but after four months, I received an honorable discharge with the official diagnosis of PTSD. The Army shrink said that the unexpectedness of the attack was what messed me up. I’d had everything under control, and then he was ripped away from me, and that fucked up my sense of safety. That’s why I have a hard time dealing with sudden, unexpected moves…”
Julian’s face lights up with understanding. “That’s what happened the first time you had an episode with me.”
“Yeah. You went down all of a sudden, and my brain decided that you had been shot, even though I knew it wasn’t true. It happened too fast to override that reaction.”
“That makes total sense.”
“I thought it was stupid. My whole life I had trained for the unexpected, and yet when it happened, I was unable to deal with it.”
“Yeah, but it was much more than that. You lost the man you were in love with before you had the chance to tell him or even realize you loved him. That’s not something you can train for.”
I slowly nod, pushing out a deep sigh. “So I’ve finally come to accept. It’s not so much the ambush that fucked with my head. It was the guilt afterward, all these bottled-up emotions I couldn’t tell anyone. And that got even worse when I received his letter. His mom shipped it to me with the things he wanted me to have. All I could feel was this deep regret that I had never known, that we’d