“Yeah, well, no bike here. Just us.”

“Can I shower first?”

The image of water dripping down her tight little body took over every brain cell.

“Josh?”

I blinked. “Yeah, shower. All good.” A week without touching December and I was ready to combust. How the hell had I survived three months of deployment?

She hadn’t been standing in front of you.

I waited forty-five minutes while she showered, dried her hair, and dressed. I didn’t go after her, touch her, hell, even so much as peek. It was an incredibly long forty-five minutes.

“Ready,” she said, coming from the hallway in a baby blue sundress. Her hair was up in some kind of messy knot, with soft tendrils that caressed her cheeks. I clenched the arm of the couch to keep from sending my hands up her skirt. If sex had been my drug of choice, I was sure as hell going through withdrawals.

“You look…edible,” I said, getting to my feet.

“As do you,” she said with a smile, gesturing to my khaki shorts and short-sleeve button-down. Luckily it was green, so we weren’t too matchy-matchy.

“Shall we?” I offered my hand, and she took it. A ten-minute drive in my rental car, and we pulled up to the ski lifts in Breckenridge.

“What are we doing?”

I simply smiled and held open her door. “Trust me.”

She arched her eyebrow, knowing full well that I’d just used her own words against her. We walked, hand in hand, to the gondola station, waited our turn, and after I slipped the attendant a fifty, had a private ride to Peak Eight.

“This is beautiful,” she said, her nose pressed against the glass as we took to the sky over Breckenridge.

“Yeah, it is,” I said softly.

She smiled at me over her shoulder. “I love it here.”

“Me, too. This whole town makes me think of possibilities, reminds me that the things you want most, sometimes you can actually have.”

She turned to me and curled up on the seat just under my arm. “Like us.”

“Like us,” I said, then kissed her lightly, lingering just a moment to savor the way her soft lips clung to mine.

“I miss you when you’re gone.”

“You’re never far from my thoughts. I keep a picture of you on my kneeboard.” Which currently is spattered with my blood.

“Really?” Her eyes lit up. Had I never told her? Never let her know that she was with me on every mission?

“When we go into a situation where the landing zone isn’t clear, where it’s hot, there’s a moment when we all make sure that we’re in. Everyone agrees, and then we go to extract the wounded.”

“Because you know what could happen.” She didn’t flinch, just spoke as a matter of fact, and it gave me the courage to keep going.

“Yes. I always say yes.”

“I would expect nothing less of you.”

“Even if it means I don’t come home to you?”

She took a deep breath and then laid her legs across mine. “I have faith that you’ll come home. It’s all that gets me through each day that you’re gone. I can’t live thinking you won’t. That kind of fear is paralyzing, crippling. So I choose to believe that every choice you make will bring you home to me, and save others.”

“I always look at your picture before I say yes. I know what I’m choosing in that moment—the possibility of you holding a folded flag—and I do it anyway. I chose to go after Jagger, and I could have left you holding a folded flag. I chose the possibility of saving him over the certainty of coming home to you. How can you love someone who doesn’t choose you?”

“How could I not love someone who risks his own life to save others? Josh, you didn’t choose Jagger over me. I wasn’t lying wounded and bleeding on the ground in Afghanistan. I was hanging out with Paisley in our home. I was never in danger. Stop blaming yourself. You made the right choice. I know the debt you feel you have to pay. I see the war raging just under your skin.”

“What else do you see?”

“Besides the man I love?”

“Yes.”

She sat up enough to look at me comfortably. “I see the struggle, the way you watch the news, the look you get when you’re trolling the internet for what’s happening over there. Mostly…” She searched my eyes for a long moment and let out a stuttered breath. “Mostly, I see the moments when you’re not here. Your body is here, but your mind…it’s there. And those moments scare me the most, because I’m terrified that I won’t ever truly have you home again. Not one hundred percent. Does that make sense?”

“More than you know.” I grazed my thumb over the diamond on her hand as we passed through the first station on our way up. “Do you want the ugliest truth?”

“Yes. I want everything.” She forced a half smile. “And maybe if you tell me the worst, the rest will be easier.”

“I feel like I left pieces of myself there, and I don’t just mean the physical ones.” I looped my arm over her thighs, resting my palm on her bare skin, trying to ground myself in her warmth, her light. “Our unit is still there, filling in the gaps from me, Trivette…Carter. I’m not sure I’ll really be myself until they’re all home, everyone we left there. I feel like I’m split between home and Afghanistan, like I don’t really belong here.”

“Okay,” she said in simple acceptance that meant more than she could ever know.