Barb gives an indifferent shrug. "Just a friend with benefits. Known him since high school. He's a tattoo artist now. But we fuck often and it's good, so I miss it. Answer your question?"
"Completely," Jillian says, but she's still curious. "Are y'all … you know … exclusive?"
"No fucking way," Barb returns with what I can only call a horrified look. "I don't do relationships. It's just sex. A way to get off."
"Sounds lonely," Jillian murmurs.
Barb gives a sad smile back at her. "I've been lonely for most of my life. I don't know anything else, so I can't say the alternative is better."
"I'm sorry," Jillian says quietly. And it's not in a pitying way, but done to let Barb know that while she may not understand fully what Barb has been through and how she feels, she can completely understand being fucked in the head about it.
"Whatever," Barb mutters, but her eyes are soft as she stands from the cooler. "Well, I'm going to head to bed since we have to be up so early."
"Me too," Connor says as he pushes off his little folding chair.
My eyes dart over to Jillian, but she seems content to keep her seat. She looks from Barb to Connor and sweetly wishes them a good night. Connor heads into the large tent he shares with Jillian, while Barb walks over to my Suburban, opens the back door and crawls in, shutting it tightly behind her.
I feel Jillian's eyes on me, so I look across the fire at her. "Not tired?" I ask her.
She shakes her head. "Not really."
We're silent a moment, the only sound the crackling of the fire. Even though we're smack in the middle of summer, the temperature is in the high fifties tonight. I'm appreciating the heat right now, even though I have a heavy flannel shirt on along with a pair of jeans.
"Can I come over there and sit with you?" Jillian asks with a nod toward my sleeping bag.
"Sure," I say casually as I push up from my lying position to make room for her, but my heart starts racing over the fact she wants to come sit near me.
I plant my feet on the dirt and wrap my arms around my knees, the prosthetic joint on the right feeling vastly different than the skin and bone one on the left. Jillian plops down beside me and crosses her legs Indian style, staring into the fire. I want to say something … start a discussion … have discourse … but my mind is blank. It's like I don't even know what to do with a girl sitting beside me.
"Thank you for today," Jillian says quietly.
"For what?" I ask in confusion.
"For not giving me too much crap about keeping that stuff with my parents a secret," she says as she turns her head and looks at me. "I really wasn't thinking that it could have repercussions on you and Barb."
"Water under the bridge," I tell her in a low voice.
Because it is. Jillian opened herself up today and the best thing about it is that she became more human to me. It made me realize she's not as perfect as I thought and that makes her relatable. "But tell me something … this level of sunny optimism you have going on all the time … is that real or bullshit to make your parents and others feel better?"
Jillian chuckles. The firelight dances in her eyes, and I'm actually relieved when she says, "I hate to tell you this, Christopher, but it's very much real. It's just always the way I've been. My sister was that way too, and I always admired how she could make lemonade from lemons. I guess that rubbed off on me."
I'm relieved that Jillian is exactly as she seems. Sunny, bright, hopeful, and secure in her ability to be that way despite her circumstances. She's more real to me now that I know she has flaws, but I'd never want her to lose that light that attracts me to her. Knowing that's a part of who she truly is makes me feel almost secure in my life right now.
"You know, Christopher," Jillian says as she leans my way and playfully nudges my shoulder with her own, "you chastised me pretty hard today for keeping secrets, and yet … out of the four of us, you're the last one who really hasn't told us anything about your issues."
Normally, I'd shut down tight if someone tried to poke into my business, building the walls around me even thicker so nothing can penetrate. But I surprise myself by offering, "What do you want to know?"
Jillian holds my gaze for a moment, her eyes drilling into mine before she gently tugs on the material of my jeans near the shin rod of my prosthetic. "What happened to you?"
She doesn't look away. Not down at the fire, not down to my legs. She stares right at me. Although my gut is turning slightly at the thought of telling her what she asked, I forge straight ahead. For the first time, I tell someone who is not medical personnel or a shrink my story.
"I was driving a military Humvee and the right front tire ran over a roadside bomb," I say, and Jillian makes a sound of distress low her in throat as her eyes turn sad. "It completely obliterated my buddy sitting in the passenger seat."
To my surprise, Jillian scoots over closer to me and lays her head on my shoulder. She pushes her hand in between my ribs and my arm, curling her fingers over my bicep. It's a show of support. Solidarity. That she's settled in for the long haul of this story, and she wants to hear it all.
"It didn't blow my leg off," I tell her, and I can feel her body jerk slightly in surprise. Her fingers squeeze my bicep. "The fingers yes, the leg no. It just shattered and shredded it badly, but the doctors tried hard to save it."
"Obviously, they couldn't," she whispers the obvious.
"They tried for three months," I tell her, reaching down to grab my phone laying near my left hip. Jillian lifts her head up, watching as I pull up my pictures. I scroll backward, but it doesn't take long to find what I'm looking for because I don't take a lot of photos. I hold the phone out so she can see. "This was taken about a month after my injury."
Jillian makes a strangled sound as she looks at the photo of me in bed. My eyes are half open because I was bombed out on so many heavy-duty pain medications, and I have a grimace on my face. I vaguely remember this picture being taken, and I think it may have been by my brother, Hank, when he came to visit once during that first month. He came a few more times after that, and then he didn't.
Jillian's eyes roam over the photo. My leg is encased in the external fixator with several rods leading from the outside of the cage right into my skin, where it's drilled through and into the bone to hold the pieces together. The wounds on my leg are all open to the air, red and some of them dripping with puss and lined with blisters. I've got IVs in both arms and a PICC line in the right side of my neck to deliver the hordes of antibiotics and pain meds I needed to keep me alive and functioning. I took the maximum dosages they allowed me, preferring to try to be oblivious to what was happening. Yet, the pain was so great it just couldn't be fully erased.
Jillian turns her head to look at me, and I lay the phone back down. "How long were you like that?"
"Three months. But they couldn't get ahead of the infections, which were delaying the bones from knitting. I was in so much pain that I wanted them to amputate."
"You had to make that decision?" she whispers.
I nod. "Yup. I mean … the doctors were at the point they felt it was the right way to go, although they were willing to keep trying if I wanted. But I wanted it gone. I was tired of being in the hospital and being in so much pain. I just wanted it gone."
"Do you regret that decision?" she asks me bluntly, but with that still-sweet melody her voice makes. The question doesn't bother me, because even her hard questions sound lovely.
"Yes," I tell her without any shame. "I wonder what would have happened if I held on just a little bit longer. Not long after the leg came off, the pain receded and I became more lucid. Once I'd forgotten how bad the infections smelled, I regretted it."
"Three months is an awful long time to be in pain like that," she points out the obvious.
I shrug. "And the rest of my life is a long time to wonder ‘what if.'"
"There's more though," she guesses in a soft voice before laying her head back on my shoulder. "It's not just losing the leg that set you on a course of self-destruction."
I can't help the bitterness in my voice, because it speaks of weakness. I don't want Jillian to think I'm weak, but I tell her truthfully how I feel. "It's everything that leg represented to me. Without it, I wasn't fit enough to stay in the Marine Corps, so my career was taken away. Without it, I wasn't a whole man, so my girlfriend dumped me. My parents shunned me. Society looks at me as abnormal and pathetic. So you're wrong … losing that leg set me on a terrible course."
There are a few moments where I wait for Jillian to start spouting some Pollyanna shit to me about how I can take these lemons and sweeten them up, but she merely says, "I think you're a whole man."
"You're just saying that," I mumble, completely embarrassed at how much hope just welled up within me.
"I'm not," she says firmly, lifting her head up again. She looks me directly in the eye. "I think you are gorgeous and amazing. I've totally been waiting for you to kiss me again, but you haven't even made a move."