A musing on Tim's Afghan experience and how it's stayed with him. Rachel learns, slowly, what he needs.
One day she learned that she shouldn't come up behind him. He was standing in her kitchen, back to her as she entered. He was making a sandwich. She remembers thinking that he'd gotten too thin, jeans sagging on his spare frame. Her bare feet made no sound and she reached her hand out and just laid it on his shoulder before he was whirling on her.
In an instant, his hands gripped her wrists painfully, eyes in some place, some time that was not that moment. She heard a utensil clatter to the floor, spinning, forgotten. As she stilled under his grip, eyes locked in his, a tiny piece of her frightened and angry at herself for being so, she watched him return from the desert in his past, back to Kentucky, back to the warm woman he trusted above all others. The fog in his eyes lifted. The anger set in. The humiliation burned through. Then she found herself alone in the room, alone in her home, the screen door softly banging behind him and her wrists aching.
All that week at work he'd spoken normally to her but wouldn't meet her eye. It was only late that Friday night, sitting on her on her three season porch, summer wind rustling the trees, that she suddenly was aware of his presence at the sliding door leading to the kitchen. He was leaning against the door jamb, hands stuffed into his pockets, just looking at her, at her bare feet and bare arms and old-fashioned nightgown that her mama gave her on her last birthday.
She didn't say anything to him. She respected him more than that. She simply shifted over on the loveseat to make room and made eye contact with him. A small smile, and she turned back to watch the trees.
After a moment she felt him move from the doorway. His body never landed next to her, but folded down onto the concrete at her feet. For a long breath, neither moved, and then she felt the backs of his fingers, long and far less sure than usual, softly, oh so softly, grazing the back of her ankle, moving reverently up her calf and behind her knee, under the worn cotton of her nightdress. She reached out, so gently, and placed her hand at the back of his neck, dipping cool fingertips under his collar.
His head went down on her knee, silently asking absolution, asking salvation, asking for a way out of the confusion and ugliness, asking for a respite just for a moment, just for a little time that he didn't have to burn himself at both ends. In the darkness she could see his hair and his collar and the weariness in his shoulders. They stayed that way for a while, the only sounds the trees and the occasional car on the road. When she knew his knees were beginning to hurt him she drew him up, drew him inside, up the stairs, into bed, there, together, until his shoulders relaxed into sleep. She stayed awake. She could take watch for a while.