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“What’s in Pecos?” he asks.

“A friend I haven’t seen in a while.”

“Hmm. A boyfriend?” He looks a bit taken aback as he clears his throat, seeming nervous for a response, which is ridiculous since he likely has a girlfriend.

“No.
She
is my childhood friend.”

His voice rises into a higher pitch, “Oh nice. That sounds like a good idea. We’ll be around that area at about six-thirtyish tomorrow night according to the GPS on my phone.” There is a large amount of pavement we have to hit before then. I better wait on giving her a time until we’re closer.

“Would you care if it had been a boyfriend?” Why did I just say that?

He pauses for a moment, obviously putting some thoughts
together. “It’s a free country,” he says with an impish grin.

He pulls off into a gas station to refill the tank and I jump out and head for the bathroom. When I return, he’s leaning up against the truck
as a faint smirk plays across his face as he reads something on his phone. I can guess who he’s talking to—although his expression
doesn’t change when he notices me coming closer.

As I reach for the door handle, he gently grabs me by the back of my arm and turns me around. “What’s the matter with you?” Hmm. You’ve been hitting on me for the past week and I just found out you have a girlfriend.

“Absolutely nothing. I just didn’t want to interrupt your conversation with whoever you were talking to.”

“I wasn’t talking to anyone. I was reading something funny on Twitter.”

“Mmhm,” I say. “Can I just climb into the truck, please?” He
backs up and lets me by.

I whip the door open and slam it after I’m in. “Hey, easy on the door,” he says through the cracked opening of the window. “These
mood swings of yours are kind of giving me a headache. Did I do something to piss you off?” he asks.

“Let me just make something clear, Tango: I’m not a home
wrecker.
So whatever this is, was—” I point back and forth between us. “It
needs to stop.”

He looks bemused by my comment, but I try to avoid his face altogether. The flirting games are just games with him. I might look tough from the outside, but my insides are weaker than tissue paper. It wouldn’t take much to tear me in half.

I feel the truck shake around as he screws the gas cap back on the tank. He rips the receipt from the pump and hops into the truck. He slides his key into the ignition but doesn’t turn it. Instead, he
turns to
look at me. “I understand if I’ve come on too strong, and I apologize from the bottom of my heart if I’ve acted inappropriately in any way with you. But, I’m not sure what your home wrecker comment meant?”

Oh fuck. I shouldn’t have said anything. Now we can sit
awkwardly and uncomfortable for the next however many hours we have to be
caged together like this. “I’m sure you have a girlfriend or
something, so I don’t understand why you’re saying nice things and acting all friendly to me.”

He doesn’t respond, he just faces forward and turns the key. We
slowly pull out of the gas station and back onto the country road that leads to the highway, and it doesn’t take long before the silence
becomes
overwhelming. This is my fault. I should have just kept my mouth shut. I reach my hand out to turn up the volume on the radio and he
places his fingers over mine. The feeling is electrifying and cruel. It’s warm but cold. It makes my heart swell, and it makes my heart hurt. I have feelings for him, but I hate that he’s made me feel anything at all.

“If you saw my text message last night, you should have just
asked me about it,” he says.

So now this is my fault? If I had confronted him sooner, I
wouldn’t have to admit that he’s the same as every other asshole in this world.
Like everyone else, it seems he thinks it’s okay to hurt people.
Maybe
he didn’t kill my sister, but he made me feel something, and I
haven’t felt a goddamn thing in so long—so fuck him.

I lean over and pull my headphones out of my bag and shove the adapter into my phone. I search for the loudest and heaviest music I can find and press play. The sound consumes me. It vibrates
through my body and it makes my head numb inside. It’s too loud to think, and it’s too loud to feel anything other than the bass.

TANGO

A GIRLFRIEND?
A wife? I laugh silently at the thought. I had a
feeling
she looked at my phone last night. That would explain her bipolar mood a little more. If I had a girlfriend, I would have been laid at
some point over the past four years. Being in the desert for so long makes you realize how lucky you are to experience those moments with a woman. Before I left for my first tour, I’d sleep with any chick who approached me, which was a lot. But I’m over that. I just want to feel something that lasts for more than a few minutes, and she makes me feel something when I’m not even touching her. It also doesn’t help that she’s so beautiful when she’s mad.

However, if she wants to play this silence game, I can play it too. She’s waiting for me to admit something that she made up in her head, so I’m putting the ball in her court, because her assumptions
couldn’t be further from the truth. She has to break at some point.

CALI

We drove straight through lunch, and I know it’s because he’s waiting for me to say something to him. But I refuse to say anything. I can skip a meal if he’s waiting for me to tell him I’m hungry.
Besides, silence is a brutal force. That and it’s my only tactic right now. I know muteness can drive a sane person crazy, although I do feel the slightest twinge of guilt for playing this game with a sick man.

Another hour has passed, and it’s nearly four. I think the silence is finally getting to him. An exaggerated sigh escapes from the
corner of his mouth. He’s definitely breaking. I feel the truck shift and turn as
he pulls off to the side of the flat and barren highway. Dirt sprays along the outside of the truck as we come to a complete stop, and he
throws the shifter into park while slamming his head back against the seat.
He takes a breath and his lips part slightly. He releases a loud
painful
sounding cough and opens his window. Sweat beads up on his forehead and he wrings his hand around the back of his neck. I can
feel a struggle
within his movements and guilt is hitting me with full force. I
consider
breaking the silence, but his eyes close and then so do his lips. He
blows his pent up air out of his nose and looks over at me. His eyes widen,
giving me a look like he wants me to say something. But even if I were to talk, I don’t think I have anything to say. “This silence is
killing me. There, I lose. You win. Now what?”

I shrug my shoulders, which makes him angrier. I want to make this better, but I don’t know how. He was lying to me and I can’t just
forget that because he’s sick. He knew how much trouble I have
trusting anyone, and he played me like a fool. He doesn’t push for me to say
anything, though. Instead, he shifts the truck into drive and shoots
us back onto the highway.

TANGO

I consider telling her. It would break through this uncomfortable
silence.
I haven’t quite felt ready to tell anyone why I don’t have a family right now. The vivid memories I seem to relive way too often are
enough to
kill me. But my time’s running out, and if she doesn’t already hate
me after assuming I have a girlfriend, she’ll probably hate me when she finds out what I put my family through.

And with that thought, maybe I should hold off a little longer. I can’t stand the thought of making this any worse.

CALI

We have gone almost an entire day and a half without speaking
much.
We checked ourselves into separate hotel rooms last night, but they adjoined of course, since I need to be babysat and all. We’ve been
living off of gas station junk food, but I’m not weakening. I can keep going like this. It’ll make it easier anyway, not talking, not growing more
attracted to him—definitely not hearing his voice or another
compliment come out of those perfect lips.

The only thing I am thankful for is that we just passed a sign that says forty-five miles to Pecos. I pull out my phone to send Sasha a text:

Where do you want to meet?

-Cali

 Churro grill, which is off the highway, hidden from non-
locals. Should be a safe zone.

-Sasha

 We’ll be there around seven, seven-thirty.

-Cali

Now I have to figure out how to communicate this without speaking. There still appears to be steam spouting from Tango’s ears
and I can’t
quite understand what he has to be mad about. He’s the one who caused this awkwardness. I never came onto him. I didn’t comment on his good looks. And although I haven’t admitted my deepest
thoughts
to him, I think he’s the most attractive man I’ve ever laid eyes on, and I would do anything to touch him. But that’s not a possibility. I
will not
be a home wrecker. Sick or not, he’s an asshole if the thought even
crossed his mind.

The road we’re on is leading up a steep mountainous landscape overlooking hundreds of miles of farm and greenery. Nothing else.
Wherever we are seems so peaceful and subdued, and it reminds me of a home I once knew when I was a child and had nothing to do but run around and be free. I would do anything to have a piece of that
back.

The truck swerves off the road once again into another cloud of dust. We’re stopped on the side of a lookout point at the edge of the
cliff, and for some reason, I’m thinking he hasn’t stopped to check out the view. Maybe he’ll finally admit to having this girlfriend of his.
Maybe the guilt finally broke him.

Before I have another second to think, my door swings open and
he reaches over me and unclips my seatbelt. I’m pulled from the
truck, and I don’t fight him. I’m too tired to keep this game up.

He lets me down on the small patch of grass near the ledge. His hands find my shoulders and he bends over a bit, lowering his head
to my level. His eyes are steady on mine. I won’t blink. I won’t let him think he’s getting in my head, even though he has taken over
almost
every one of my thoughts during the past week and a half. It’s been less than two weeks and this asshole has mind-fucked me. Clearly, he is my match, because normally, I’m the one causing the mind-
fuck.

One of his hands releases from my shoulder and he reaches down into my back pocket. He pulls my phone out and throws it
through the truck’s open passenger window.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I grunt.

“No phones. No nothing. Just us. You and me.”

“Just do whatever you’re about to fucking do. Throw me over the ledge if that’s what you want. Don’t drag this out. I’ve had enough.”

He takes his phone out of his pocket and throws it into the truck too. “The text message you saw last night was from my sister, Chelsea.”

“You said you
had
a sister, not have.” What the hell? “So, when were you lying, then or now?”

“Neither.” He turns away from me, sucking in every bit of fresh mountain air his disintegrating lungs can consume. His hands grip
into
his hips, and he turns back to face me. “We’ve all seen our fair
amount
of shit, Carolina. I’ve seen so much of it and somehow survived it. So
you want my fucked up story? Here it is: I was discharged from the Marines—the only thing I’ve ever been good at. I was given two
months-
ish to live, as I told you. Rather than returning home to large celebrations, only to die two months later, I decided to have my
family notified that I
had died in the field. It was a really shitty decision. But it’s not
something I can undo. If they found out I was lying, I could land a lot of people in trouble. Luckily, I’m assuming it won’t be an issue in a few weeks.
I will be dead, and they won’t know the difference. I wanted them to think I died a hero, rather than as a sick man. But I don’t feel like a fucking hero. I just feel like a sick man. Everything I may have done overseas doesn’t matter now.”

I feel like I should be surprised by this, but it makes total sense to me. “This is why you’re a mercenary?” I confirm for my own benefit.

“It’s the only job I was allowed to have. I didn’t want to sit around waiting to die. You know?” A crazed look swims through his eyes and he places his hands behind his neck. “Anyway, my family
buried an empty coffin. I watched fifty people cry harder than I’ve ever thought possible. I watched my father shovel dirt and pour it over the coffin he thought my body was in. I watched my sister pass out from hyperventilating while standing over a six-foot-hole. I
watched as my mother had to be held up by two people just so she could say her final good-byes to me. I watched this from a car in the shadow of my supposed death.” He swallows hard. He’s swallowing his pain. And
I’m swallowing his pain with him. He sighs heavily up toward the sky. “The only thing that was in that coffin was my identity. I’m not allowed to go back to Michigan or any of the surrounding states for
the rest of
my life.” Michigan? He said he was from Missouri. I guess that isn’t important. “The only good thing that came out of that was hearing the words spoken in front of my gravesite. I was loved, Carolina. God dammit, I was loved so fucking much. I was able to hear those
words. I
know what I meant to my family. And I can die knowing my life wasn’t in vain. Whether I died in a hospital bed from cancer or an IED blew me to smithereens, I was their hero. I was their fucking
hero. But I was
selfish for claiming to have died in Afghanistan, especially when I watched so many of my brothers die in action. It was a stupid decision that I made two days after finding out I was dying, and ironically, now I have to live with it until I actually do die. So if that’s the reason you want to give me the silent treatment—that, I can live with. That I deserve. But thinking I was trying to make you a home wrecker—
that, I can’t live with.”