Just Remember to Breathe (Thompson Sisters)

to stare out the window. He could think what he wanted, it didn’t make any difference to me.
    The abuse continued for a little while, but I tuned it out, concentrating instead on the growing bloom of pain in my right hand.
    The problem was simple.
    I was no good for Alex. I wasn’t even any good for myself. Yeah, I’d protected her. But what about next time? What if the next person who pissed me off and I lost control was Alex?
    Hopefully, after tonight, she recognized that. But what if she didn’t? What if she had some misguided belief that she could somehow heal me? There wasn’t any healing. What happened in Afghanistan was part of who I was now, and if I thought about it honestly, something like tonight was bound to happen again.
    I’d kill myself before I ever laid a hand on her. But I’d seen what happened to couples over the long term. I’m sure, once upon a time, my parents had had that bloom of love and happiness. But too much alcohol, and too much stress and anger and hate finally turned them into a perfect caricature of the abusive couple. It wasn’t until my Mom got clean—and kicked his ass out—before she finally got her life together.
    No way in hell was I going to put Alex through that. And it would happen. It would happen sure as the sun was going to rise in the morning.
    I blinked back tears. Because I was going to have to figure out a way to let her down easy, to say goodbye, and disappear into my own world, this time permanently. Like I should have done in February, when the bomb meant for me killed my best friend instead.
    At the jailhouse, they booked me in, which took forever. Fingerprints. Search. It was humiliating.
    That was the point where my escort, the cop from the car, finally muttered something when he got a look at the mess of my leg.
    “What the fuck happened to you?”
    “Got blown up in Afghanistan,” I answered.
    He grunted. I guess that was all the apology I was going to get.
    They confiscated my wallet and everything else, and into the jail cell I went. Right where I belonged.
    The holding cell was packed, and then some, with about ten guys in a tiny little space. I took up a station near the door, and eased into a sitting position. No one looked at me or said anything and that was fine with me.
    The cell itself was small, maybe ten feet long, with long benches down each side which might have once served as beds of a sort, but now each seated four or five guys, most of them slumped over trying to approximate sleep.
    Closest to me was someone who stood out: a man in a suit and coat, though his tie and shoelaces were missing. He looked more like a banker than a hardened criminal. He also looked terrified, and huddled on the end of the bench as if his life depended on holding onto it. It was dark, the only light coming in through a narrow grate in the door, and the floor was damp. At the opposite end of the cell from the door was a toilet with no seat. It stank of piss and shit and unwashed bodies.
    This hole wouldn’t have looked out of place in Afghanistan. In fact, some of the accommodations we provided prisoners over there looked considerably more humane than this.
    Where was Alex? I wondered if they’d taken her to the hospital for an examination, or had the police questioned her? I didn’t want her to have to go through any more trauma than she’d already had to deal with tonight.
    Except, I thought, I was going to be the one to deal the final blow.
    For a moment, I had second thoughts. We loved each other. There was no doubt. Could that survive all of this? Could we overcome whatever challenges we had? Could love heal the fucked up state of my heart and mind and soul?
    Yeah, right. Not likely.
    Hopefully I wouldn’t be in here long. Crazy as it sounds, I had about thirty thousand dollars left in the bank. A year of tax-free hazardous duty pay, plus my infantry-signing bonus, all my paychecks for a year, had been sitting in the bank, pretty much untouched. I didn’t need anything in Afghanistan, didn’t need anything in the hospital. When I moved home, my mother insisted I hold on to the money, not spend it on anything at all, though I’d been sorely tempted to buy a car. Not that I could use one here anyway. So the money sat and earned interest, and now I was going to end up using it to bail myself out of jail. If they let me make bail. If there was any way for me to access the money.
    The sad thing was, if they ever gave me the phone call rumor said I