When I wake up, we're laying in the same bed: clothes, boots, everything. For the life of me, I can't remember how or when we got there.

Your lashes flutter and open. I search those pretty chocolate eyes for the burden that I'm so used to seeing, and find only the barest traces of it, like a dust imprint left by something on a shelf.

"Hey," you croak. Even your voice sounds lighter.

"Hey," I reply.

You crack a small but real, true, honest-to-God smile. It disrupts the salt tracks left on your cheeks. Your're laying on half my chest, and I'm incredibly warm from the living blanket. Your breasts are a firm comfort where they're nestled against me, but I'm too drowsy to care. So this is what it's like to wake up next to a woman. In my experience they never stay long enough to...I immediately start to lose heat when you raise up, get off the bed, and walk towards the bathroom.

Like nothing, yet somehow everything, has happened.

This can't be real, that's my manatra the entire morning. I stir together Top Ramen numbly, as it's past noon. This can't be real. You remind me that we left all the laundry, every stitch of it except what we're wearing, back at Lou's due to our hasty retreat. The mattress we laid on all night was bare. This can't be real.

I know the signs of shellshock, and I have every one of them. Somewhere between washing down breakfast/lunch with yesterday's stale coffee and cranking the truck to life, I figure out why. I never really believed you'd reach your lowest point, the precursor to bouncing off rock bottom, because I'd lost sight of the goal. I knew you needed to break. That much was clear. But I never knew if you were going to be capable of pulling the trigger: to tip yourself into that howling abyss and shatter against the bottom like glass. And because I couldn't make that choice for you, I'd started to douubt.

I glance at you out of the corner of my eye, watching the countryside flow by the window. You don't look like fractured glass.

"I know what you're thinking," you say suddenly. "No, I'm not fine. I doubt I ever will be." Despite that weighty statement, when our eyes meet, the levity in them rattles me again. "But I'm better. I want to keep getting better." With that, you peel the cast off your nose and throw it out the window, leaving only a thin line of a bruise to hint it was ever there.

Lou kept our stuff behind the counter, bless him, including the drugstore hairbrush. We retrieve it all and say hello to his new service dog Misty, who is a day early. You wave at the black grandma with the hellacious kids, back for round two of laundry. She recognizes me first because I'm an ugly son of a gun, then her eyes widen when she recognizes you. Maybe she sees what I'm seeing and writes it off as the absence of the nose cast.

I decide today's the day you discover Walmart. Judging by your face, it might as well be Candyland that we walk into. We drop off your prescription at the pharmacy hub. The wait is three hours, but we've got time to kill.

We walk, literally, every aisle. Homegoods with their cheap pillows and curtains, crafts with yarn and girly crap, office supplies, the works. I pace outside the women's underwear section, though. You're on your own. I've walked into bomb-wired houses, ambushes, enemy firestorms, and several versions of hell itself, but I will not. Go. There.

It starts to hit me. This is real. I'm not following around some ghost of Meera: you're starting to get tangible. You aren't hazing at the slightest breeze like the smoke from my cigars. It's like you've been holding the two sparking wires apart, but now, your body and soul have completed the circut for the first time in a long time. I find myself back at square one: just like from the beginning of our relationship in that dim hut, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'll figure it out as I go.

I shake myself out of my daze, and find myself in the sporting goods section. You have on a pair of shades with mirrored lenses. They look a hell of a lot like my pair of aviators.

"Nice," I say. I find that I mean it in many ways.

People look at us curiously, and it strikes me that we make an odd sort of couple. Me: tall, white, muscled, scarred, mean, tatted up. You: short, mix-skinned, baggy clothes, combat boots a size too big, fading bruises, huge brown eyes and sharp cheeks. If we did comedy, it would be the ideal setup. You would rag on the ugly American, and I would tease and get shot down by the back-jungle, oblivious Nepali. I would run circles around you with obscure pop culture references and expressions, and you would punch me in the arm with a string of rapid-fire native tongue.

I think I've figured out my retirement plan.

"Carry the Pen with you everywhere," cautions the pharmacy associate when we return, peering at you over his thick glasses and countertop.

"Don't worry," you tell him, the paper bag crinkling in your hands. "I am not going through that again."

We get home when the moon is rising and eat an MRE apiece. You eventually get annoyed by the number of times you catch me staring at you, looking for cracks in your facade, and shut me off with a look. Huh, so that's what that feels like.

"You don't have to treat me like an armed nuke," you say. It's the first time I've heard you use slang. Hell, it's a whole day of firsts for you.

"Sorry," I reply. It might only be my third word today. "It's just...this feels like a dream." Gay as that sounds, I'm in no position to mince words.

You reach out and pinch my arm hard.

"What was that for?"

"There, see? Not dreaming."

I laugh, and it feels amazing, like crawling out of a foxhole at the 'all clear.'

"I'm not 100 percent, yet," you confide warningly, gathering your cup and our utensils and putting them in the sink. "But I feel like the worst has passed. Like I'm not tied up anymore."

I nod. I know exactly what you mean. Even if it feels undeniably odd to hear you string so many words together, much less about what you're feeling, I am secretly grateful for yet another sign that you've turned a corner. "So, where do you want to go from here?'" I sound like a damn shrink, but I may as well take advantage of the new, talkative Meera.

You pick up my empty beer bottle and consider it. "I don't know." You rinse the bottle out and shelve it with the others, to be used for Malatov cocktails or shooting practice. The not knowing seems to deflate you a bit.

"One day at a time, lady," I say comfortingly. "That's how we take it."

When you help me put away the laundry, you bury your face in every piece when you think I'm not looking, intoxicated by the scent of chemical cleanliness.

We take turns at the shower, first me, then you. Although it's a ritual now that you see me walk by in a towel, I get a strange flip in my stomach when your eyes skim me over the top of U.S. Army Survival Manual FM 21-76. Now that you're fleshing out again, bit by tiny bit, are you really seeing me for the first time?

I'm flipping channels when I hear the water cut off, and the sound of cardboard tearing off the back of the hairbrush. Silence.

I don't think much of it as I turn down the place for the night, but as I turn around from angling the last fan, you're standing behind me.

"Shit," I let slip before I can stop myself. I give you a longsuffering look while my heart stutters back into gear. "Make a noise or something, Meera. People get hurt that way."

You look properly chagrinned. "Sorry." You turn around, and the hairbrush is tangled up in your hair like a rat's nest. "It's stuck, and it won't come out," you say with frustration.

I have to laugh at that.

You turn back around and scowl, hiding your pleasure at my reaction. "Have you got cutters?"

"You mean scissors? Yeah, somewhere."

We end up standing on the tarmac in front of the hangar, me with a pair of scissors and not believing what I'm hearing.

"Take off this much," you insist, your fingers drawing a line at the base of your neck. It's blustery with an impending storm, and you fold your arms against the gusts of warm, wet wind.

I hesitate. Isn't long hair, I don't know, sacred to women?

"Please?" you implore.

I sigh. "Okay."

I remove the chunk with the entangled hairbrush first, and pass it over your shoulder for you to start picking at. In the cold light of the halogens on poles, I take the scissors to the rest of your dark waves, still wet from the shower, and try not to get distracted by the smell of you. We use the same army-issued soap and shampoo, but somehow it comes out to smell better on you.

I take off six inches of the eighteen hanging down your back, just in case you change your mind. When you show no signs of turning back, I go to work on the rest. The scissors aren't the ideal tool for the job, but they manage. The end product is certainly not salon quality: the edges uneven amonst locks but basically a straight line. "Done."

You run your fingers through it wonderingly. We both look down at the pile of hair at my feet. "That's a lot," you comment. "My head feels less heavy." When you meet my eyes, I can see something else that's less heavy, too. "Thank you, Barney."

The wind catches the strands of hair and sweeps them off like tumbleweeds, down the tarmac and out of sight.

You get your own boots off after a little finagling, and lay down with a "Goodnight" I can hardly believe came from your lips. Further astonishing, for the first time, just shy of four weeks after we met, you don't cry yourself to sleep.

Hale Ceasar calls my cell late in the evening the next day. "Yo, man, whassup?"

I know Ceasar: he's black and proud, but not a 'yo, whassup' type of dude. His next words confirm what I'm thinking. "It'sss half price draft tonight!" Yep, drunk. "That's real nice Ceasar," I say dryly, waving you back to your book and stepping outside.

"You bet it'sss nicccce. The girlsss here, man. Whooo-we! Tell 'im, Toll."

There's a scraping over the line, and Toll Road sounds extremely amused. It's the same tone he takes after giving a wall and new window. "You missed him singing 'Stairway to Heaven' earlier."

I snicker. "I would've killed to see that."

"Coming from you, Barney, that's like saying you'd breathe to see that. Hang on, Yin Yang wants to talk to ya."

I smile, and somehow feel homesick despite leaning against my own front door. I can picture them all at the bar, laughing and drinking and bullshitting each other. I miss my friends, and it hasn't hit me until now.

"Hey, Barney," clips the Asian, his words as crisp as his punches and kicks. "It's not the same bar without you, man."

"I know, I know. I've been - "

"And I take full credit for getting Ceasar up on that stage - "

"Give me da phone!" I hear Gunnar yell. Yin Yang protests the tall sniper's rudeness, but Gunnar overrides him. "When're you gonna come out of the foxhole, Barney? I need a wingman!"

I shake my head, because he's three sheets, too, and reply, "Soon, I hope. I'm making progress."

"HE SAYS HE'S MAKING PROGRESS!" Gunnar yells stupidly. I hear the approving uproar from my team and laugh. Christmas must have updated them from our conversation a couple of weeks ago, and hypothesized the rest amongst themselves. Really, though, I wonder what they think of me, holed up with a damaged Nepali girl. They don't even know you speak English, or are getting better, or that we've bonded.

I've got some 'splaining to do, once I see them all again.

"Sit down, you moron. Give me that damn - Barney, you there?" It's Christmas, sounding only a little tipped. "Hang on, lemme get some space between me and the jackasses." The sounds from the jukebox and nightcrowd of regulars fade somewhat, and I hear the recognizable creak of the men's room door. "There. Christ, Barney, you'd think they miss you or something."

"I know. There's only so much I can do. We're at a delicate stage."

"Delicate like your knickers? Come on, Barney, surely you can leave her alone for a few hours. It's not like she could get into any trouble."

I think about the sheer number of incindiary devices, exposed wires, loaded guns, and sharp things I have laying around, and my eye twitches involuntarily. Hell, there's a live grenade for a paperweight on my electronics bench. "That's not it. I just don't want to..."

"Hurt her feelings," finishes Christmas for me. "I get that and all. Really, man, I do. But you've gotta cut the apron strings at some point. Or at least one of them! Give the girl a chance to find her own stride."

Even half drunk, Christmas is a wiser soul than me.

"A man needs his buds."

"I don't deny it."

"That said," continues the knife aficianado. "I think it's time the party came to you." And then he either drops the phone into a toilet, or hangs up.

I stare at the dead line in my hand and pray that he doesn't mean the party I just heard.

It's the middle of the morning late in the fourth week when Christmas drops by unannounced. While I'm fiddling with the tuning crystal for a set of walkies, I hear a rumble of a motorcycle echoing in the hangar. I know that bike: it's rider is trouble. I leap from the electronics bench to my feet when I hear his bike rumble into the hangar and make a dash for it. You're in the bathroom, so I waylay him outside the front door.

"What do you think you're doing?" I ask him gruffly, cracking the door behind me.

"Visiting," he replies innocently, removing his helmet. "And you?"

I grind my teeth in response. "Now's not the best time."

Dammit. Christmas cocks his head and sees through me. "What happened?"

"She had a breakthrough, emphasis on 'break' - "

"That's good, right?"

" - and now she's on the upswing."

"Definitely good."

"So I say again: this is not the best time."

"You're scared," he observes, though not accusatorily. "Why?"

I pace two steps off, unnaturally edgy, and whirl to stalk back. "It's a soft deal right now. You might rock the boat."

Christmas scoffs. "You are kidding, right? Lou called me up and told me you were at the dry cleaner's with a strange woman. I know you're taking her around people. So why not me?" He gives me a winning smile, to which I respond with a balefully dubious scowl.

"Last time she saw you," I growl. "She was barely alive. It might bring back some bad memories."

"Barney?" you call from inside. "Maaar-cooo!" Your boots thump closer.

I fling a death glare at Christmas because I have no choice now and mutter, "You're a dead man if you mess this up."

He grins with cheeky victory. Asshole.

You poke your head out the door, short hair swinging, and notice our guest. The surprise lingers on your face a split second longer than I like. "Oh! Hello," you say, recovering somewhat. I notice your fingers tighten on the jamb. "I think we've met before." You manage to look gracefully embarassed, as though he accidently saw you in a towel and not post-rape and covered in blood.

"Yeah, in passing," says Christmas, rubbing the back of his head. He thinks better of extending a hand. "Lee Christmas."

"Meera," you reply in something that can only be described as politely distant. You open the door wider. "Need another minute, Barney?"

I give Christmas my best Look, the one known to freeze animals in place, and reply, "Nah. I'm good."