Free Twilight by Kristen Heitzmann

appreciate it, even when it involved him. Except tonight.
    “If your face was any longer, you’d polish your boots with your chin.” Reggie settled down at the small walnut table in Cal’s kitchen.
    Cal leaned against the counter. “Reg, do you ever wonder what’s the use?”
    Reggie’s spirit quickened. “Don’t have to wonder. I know what’s the use. To all things under heaven there is a time and a purpose.”
    Cal rubbed a hand through his hair. He looked shaky.
    Reggie’s instincts kicked in. “You clean, bro?”
    “Yeah, I’m clean. But I’m thinking hard about changing that.”
    “Rough week, huh?” Reggie eyed him. Something had brought him low since he’d seen him last Friday, but it wasn’t fear, and it wasn’t guilt. If he were to guess, he’d name the demon despair. “Don’t let those thoughts in. You don’t need that stuff.”
    “It’s not a question of need.” Cal closed his hand and cupped it into the other. Both were shaking. “I just want to bury it all in a long, deep stupor.”
    Reggie hunched over the table. “Bondage of the mind and spirit can be as debilitating as any physical addiction.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    “What’s causing it?”
    Cal turned a chair and straddled it. “I saw an old flame.”
    Reggie guessed he meant the female sort, though with Cal it could be literal. “It happens.” He’d run into one or two himself.
    Cal chewed his lower lip. “Yeah, it happens, but it doesn’t always burn you.”
    “How’d it burn you, bro?”
    Cal straightened, dropping his wrists over the chair back before him. “I had her and her kids over Saturday and gave a performance.” He raised an eyebrow. “She looked at me as though I’d lost my mind.” He clenched and released his hands. “Which of course I had … again.”
    Reggie had seen the performance Cal meant. PTSD, shell shock, whatever you wanted to call it. People wouldn’t necessarily understand, especially a woman who’d known him before. “God has a time and a purpose for everything. I know that’s not fair for me to say when I have Suanne to snuggle with each night.”
    Cal’s eyes took on a hollow intensity. “Do you think there’s one right person, one woman for every man?”
    Reggie considered that. He believed God ordained marriage between one man and one woman. He couldn’t imagine any other woman besides Suanne. But did that mean there was no other woman he could have loved, built a marriage with? “I take it this one was special.”
    Cal dropped his chin with an exhaled breath. “How does the ‘love of my life’ sound?”
    “Overdramatic.”
    Cal laughed, but Reggie could tell it was forced.
    “I’m not kidding, Reg. It’s like she’s the flame and I’m the moth. But here”—he tapped his right temple—“I know what fire does to me. And I don’t want to crash and burn.”
    “Then you gotta hang tough. God created the laws of nature and the heart. Just like gravity, things gotta work a certain way. You can’t mess with the order.”
    “Yeah? Wish I’d known that before we …” Cal closed his lips and clasped his fingers together. “Before it went so far.”
    Reggie blew the breath between his lips. “There’s not one of us doesn’t have things we regret. But God’s bigger than that. He hung our sin on a cross, and we just gotta believe He’ll take it and make us new.”
    He watched Cal struggling with that, knew the battle raged, forces neither of them could see and only Reggie knew were real. Cal wasn’t a wicked man. In fact, he was a good man, better than many. But it didn’t matter, because in the end he couldn’t do it himself. Cal’s eyes came up to him, hollow and tense, and Reggie knew before he spoke which side had won this time.
    “I wish I could, Reg. But then I see a little girl with pigtails going up in flames.” His voice got raw, and he wore the haunted look that Reggie had seen before. “I hear her screams.” His throat worked.
    Reggie