Free The Older Woman by Cheryl Reavis

sit up.

    “Wait!” she said. “Let me see if you’ve hurt yourself.”

    He stopped struggling and closed his eyes. He could feel her hands moving over him. When he opened his eyes again, he was still lying on the floor, and Meehan was kneeling beside him. Her hair was all wet.

    “Is it raining?” he asked crazily.

    “No. Mrs. Bee got me out of the shower.”
    “Mrs.
    Bee?”

    “Yes. She heard you—she was worried. Does anything hurt? More than usual, I mean.”

    “I…don’t understand,” he said, trying to sit up again. This time Meehan let him.
    “What happened?”

    “You were yelling.”

    “Yelling? What did I say?”

    “You thought you were on the Black Hawk,” she said quietly.

    He took a deep breath. The Black Hawk. The goddamn Black Hawk. He could hear it suddenly, smell it, feel the heat. He realized that his hands were shaking, and he clenched his fists so she wouldn’t see.

    “Then she heard you fall, but she couldn’t get the door open—so she came and got me.”

    “How the hell did you get in?” he asked, because he realized that he had been lying up against the door.

    She smiled. “I went out the window at the end of the hall and I came across the roof. You should have seen me. I was great.”

    He couldn’t help but smile in return. “I’ll bet.”

    The smile immediately faded, and he sat there with his head bowed.

    “Are you ready to get up?”
    “What?
    Yeah…yeah…”

    But he made no effort to do so. “Mrs. Bee came and got you?”

    “Yes. She’s very hard to say no to.”

    “Tell me about it,” he said. He gave a sudden sharp exhalation of breath. “They’re supposed to get better—the nightmares.”

    “They will,” she said. “When you forgive yourself.”

    “Forgive myself? For what? I wasn’t flying the damn thing.”

    “For surviving,” she said. Her voice was still quiet.
    Quiet.
    And
    so
    sure.

    “And you would know all about that, I guess,” he said.

    She didn’t answer him.

    “So what are you going to do now? Tell me everything happens for a reason?”

    “Maybe it does,” she said.

    He made a short derisive sound, but he was suddenly faced with a different, more pressing problem—the overwhelming urge to bawl. Like a little kid—only he never cried much when he was a kid. He’d just sucked it up and gone on his not-so-merry way.

    He didn’t dare look at her. He turned away and tried to get to his feet. Her hand came out to help him at just the right moment, efficient and nonintrusive. Something she’d no doubt learned from years of practice. She handed him his cane.

    “I’m okay now,” he said, struggling to walk to the bed. Meehan went with him, but she made no attempt to help. He sat down heavily on the edge of the mattress.

    He could feel her looking at him, assessing.

    “Then I’ll be going,” she said after a moment.

    “Hey,” he said when she was halfway across the room.

    She looked back at him.

    “Sorry I interrupted your shower.”
    “No
    problem.”

    “Hey,” he said again when she opened the door. “Maybe we could go get another steak and beer sometime. Or something.”

    She gave him a small, sad smile and shook her head. “No.”

    The no-frills, no-discussion, no-chance-of-misunderstanding answer.

    No.

    Chapter Five

    S he probably thought I wasn’t with it enough to know what I was asking.

    It wouldn’t be hard for her to make that mistake. He’d been asleep. He’d apparently been yelling, and he’d definitely been falling—he had the bruises to prove it. So what else would she think but that his brain had been temporarily scrambled?

    The only solution as far as he could see was to just do it again—when he was in better shape and she would know he was in better shape and not think he didn’t have a clue about what he was saying.

    Sounded like a plan.

    He went outside to the backyard when he thought Meehan would be getting home from work, taking up his post by the