Just Remember to Breathe (Thompson Sisters)

look better without it, I guess. Roadside bomb.”
    She sighed. “I’m sorry.”
    “It’s not so bad. I got to go to the hospital, and lived. That makes me lucky.” What I didn’t say: unlike Roberts, who left that roadside in a bag.
    At the coffee shop, she said, “You grab a seat. I’ll get us coffee. You still take yours loaded?”
    I nodded, and muttered, “Thank you,” then eased myself into a seat next to the sidewalk.
    While I waited for her, I took out my phone and scanned through my email. Junk. More junk. Email from Mom. I’d answer that one later. She was naturally worried about me. Some things would never change. For the longest time I’d been angry with my mom over kicking me out when I quit school. Nowadays, I was grateful for it. It gave me a chance to get some hard knocks early. It gave me a chance to get my head on straight and figure out my priorities when I was young enough the damage wouldn’t be permanent. Tough love, they call it in the program. She was a believer. I’d have never guessed she’d have five years clean and sober, so something was working there.
    When Alex returned to the table, bearing two gigantic cups of coffee, I put the phone away.
    “Thank you,” I said. I sipped the coffee. Oh, that was good.
    She smiled, met my eyes, then looked away very quickly. The brief eye contact, which remarkably wasn’t a glare, twisted at my stomach and made me look at the ground.
    “Okay,” I said. “Ground rules.”
    “Yes,” she said.
    We were silent. What, did she expect me to come up with them?
    I shook my head, then said, “Okay, you start. It was your idea.”
    “Fair enough.” She looked at me thoughtfully, then said, “All right. The first rule. We never, ever talk about Israel.”
    I closed my eyes, and nodded. Talking about it would hurt way too much. “Agreed,” I muttered.
    She looked relieved, which somehow broke my heart all over again.
    I spoke. “We don’t talk about what happened after, either. Not when I visited you in San Francisco. Or the year between. Or the year after.”
    “Especially not the year after,” she said. Her eyes were glistening as she looked at the table.
    We were silent again. This was just a barrel of laughs. I felt like I was attending a funeral.
    “I don’t know if I can do this,” I said.
    “Why not?” she replied.
    “Because … because, well, sometimes it hurts, Alex. A little. A lot. Jesus Christ.”
    She looked away, and damn if her eyes weren’t beautiful. Her lashes were like a mile long.
    “If we’re going to get through this year, I think we have to move past that,” she said.
    “Yeah.”
    “It’ll be like we’re strangers.”
    I shrugged. “Okay.” Like that could happen.
    “We start over. We just met. You’re some guy who just got out of the Army, and I’m a girl from San Francisco going to college here. We’ve got nothing in common. No connection. Not friends. Certainly not… what we were.”
    Not friends. Of course not. How in hell could we be friends, after what we’d been through?
    I nodded, feeling miserable. Shit, it’s not like I had any friends anyway, not anymore. I’d lost touch with the ones from Atlanta, who couldn’t deal with what I’d become. And the ones in Afghanistan… except for Sherman and Roberts, I’d never gotten close to any of them. Roberts was dead, and Sherman was still out in the boonies.
    “I don’t know what we were, anyway. None of it ever made any sense.”
    She shrugged, and then hugged her arms across her chest, and I felt like crap for what I’d said.
    “I’m sorry,” I said.
    “Why?” she asked, looking away from me, out at the street.
    Her lower lip was trembling, and I wanted to hit myself in the head with a sharp pointy object.
    “It’s true, isn’t it? We never did make any sense?”
    “Oh, God. Let’s not do this. Please.”
    “Okay.”
    Her face was twitching, and it was obvious she was holding back a tear.
    “Look,” I said. “This sucks. But we’ll be okay, all right? It’s only a few hours a week, anyway. What we had… it was another world. We were in a foreign country, being exposed to all kinds of amazing stuff. We weren’t ourselves, our real selves. It was… it was fantasy. A beautiful fantasy, but fiction all the same, okay?”
    She nodded, quickly, then wiped her eye with a fist, smearing her mascara.
    “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
    “We’re already breaking the rules,” she said.
    “No. We’re not.