But I do want to talk. But I won’t ask him about us. Not only because I don’t want to see his wince, but because I’m terrified at the answer I might get. I’m not ready to hear that I’m just a fun fling that helped pull him back from the dark side.

“Tell me what happened,” I blurt out. “In Afghanistan.”

My mind goes blank for a second, as does his face, and I clap a hand over my mouth. “I’m sorry. I just . . . I don’t know why I threw that out there so tackily.”

Paul’s mouth quirks up, the lines from his scars moving too. “You asked because you want to know.”

I open my mouth to tell him it’s none of my business and that he’ll tell me when he’s ready. Then I remember what he said that day he found me Googling him. I remember why he was so upset. He said no one ever asked him, person to person, what had happened.

And I just did that, so . . . I hold my breath. Please let this be it.

He leans forward slightly, his palms sliding up my calves. We both watch the movement of his hands before he slowly raises his eyes to meet mine.

“I want to tell you. I want it to be you.”

His eyes hold nothing but trust, and my heart squeezes. In that moment, I know.

I love him.

It’s not the easy love I had for Ethan, or the warm, uncomplicated love I felt for Michael as a friend.

I love Paul, the person. I love his darkness and his shadows. I love his smile and the kindness he tries so hard to hide. I love the boyish quarterback beneath the war veteran, and I love the scarred right side of his face even more than the perfection of his left.

I love him.

And because I love him, I do one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I let him tell his story, even though I know the ugliness of what he has to say may very well rip me apart.

I start to pull my feet down so I can sit up straight, but his hands stop me, his fingers continuing to move absently up and down my calves as he turns his head to watch the fire.

“Tell me what you know,” he says quietly.

“Not much. That article—it mentioned that you and your team were taken . . . that you were tortured. But it didn’t say much.”

His head drops a little. “The lack of information makes it seem worse than it was, actually. As far as those things go, I was lucky.”

My eyes bug out. “Lucky? In no scenario should torture and lucky be uttered in the same sentence.”

“I—”

I lean forward, placing my hands over his, our fingers linking. “Start from the beginning. Say as little or as much as you want.”

He takes a deep breath. And then he talks.

He tells me about how he’d been in Afghanistan for only five months, but that odd as it sounds, things had become almost routine. Life on the base was monotonous but not awful.

He talked about how early on, his heart had hammered every time they’d had to leave base, but over time that too became routine.

“I think I knew,” he says then. “I think I somehow knew when I woke up that day that it was going to be different. My guys and I . . . we had this pact. No matter how bored we got, or how shitty the weather, or how much we missed life back home, or Oreos, or our girlfriend . . . we didn’t talk about the bad stuff. You know? It was like this unspoken power of positive thinking, or bullshit like that. If we didn’t talk about how much it sucked, then we didn’t think about it.”

I nod in understanding, even though I know nothing in my own life experience compares.

“But that day, Williams let it get to him. We were out on routine patrol, and he said something about it being hot. A harmless statement, really. But over there, nothing felt harmless, and like superstitious morons, we all jumped down his throat for jinxing us. We were still giving him shit about it when we stopped. There were . . . there were bodies on the side of the road. Two women and a child—”

He breaks off, and I swallow in dread.

“One of the women was dead. At least I think she was. We never had a chance to find out for sure. But the kid . . . it was this little boy, maybe six years old, and he was crying, pointing to the bodies of the women. One of the women lifted her head, barely, but enough for us to see that she was all bloody, and her hand was motioning feebly in the direction of the boy, as if she was begging us for help. Like, take him—help him. We were in the middle of goddamned nowhere, with nothing in every direction. The kid would have died . . . they all would have.”

He falls silent again, and I barely breathe, afraid that one wrong move will have him retreating inside himself again, where this story comes out only in the nightmares.

“It was a trap. I’d like to think they weren’t willing accomplices—the blood on that woman’s face was real, and the kid’s fear was plain in his eyes. He was scared. But the insurgents were on us before we could even get to him.”

I close my eyes.

“The thing that gets me the most is that I never knew what happened to them,” Paul says, almost absently. “From the military perspective, they were merely the catalyst for what happened next. But on a human level, they were, well, human.”

He gently sets my legs aside and goes to throw another log on the fire, even though it’s not needed. His hands find the mantle, his finger sliding along the wood, back and forth, back and forth, as though the gesture can help calm his mind.

“They came out of nowhere. I don’t know where they came from, because like I said . . . there was nothing around for miles that I could see. But they ambushed us. It happened so f**king fast, Olivia. One second we’re like, ‘Oh shit, this poor kid,’ and the next . . . Williams fell first. He was two steps in front of me and I think I saw him fall . . . saw his blood, before I even registered the sound of gunshots.”