Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

for anything else. Captain’s orders, he said. I encouraged him to desert.
    So when someone came knocking on my door after dark that night, it wasn’t him.
    One of the old rich locals who frequented the hotel, a doctor, apparently, had instantly developed an unwholesome fixation on me, always finding me if I was in the extensive restaurant-balcony-lobby—and, it seemed now, anywhere else on the grounds. The night before, when I’d returned from work, he’d arrived at my table with a bottle of baby oil in a plastic bag and an offer to give me a massage. All The Doctor wanted to talk about was that there were lots of reasons I should have sex with him, chief among them that he was a gentleman, in that he lost his erection if a woman started to fight him off. I accepted his invitation to join him at the bar now, in the interest of keeping him away from my room, and had one drink before retiring quickly.
    When there was another knock at my door hours later, I was already in bed. A flush of panic and weariness went through me. Unsure of what else to do, I got up and crept to the entry.
    “Who is it?” I asked.
    No answer.
    I looked through the curtain of my window, my heart racing unpleasantly.
    And there, there was Nico, leaning his head in front of the glass so I could see his wide-smiling face.
    *   *   *
    To describe how he’d come to arrive, Nico seemed to have looked up the word “cunning.” Somehow he had stolen a military vehicle and escaped the camp that served as the French UN troops’ base, but we didn’t share enough of the same language to discuss the process.
    No matter.
    When I opened the door, he kissed me immediately. I wasn’t dressed, and I hadn’t got dressed when I saw who it was, clutching a bedsheet to my front. When Nico realized this, he reached down for the trailing fabric and gingerly pulled it up to cover my backside. His fingers landed only so delicately on my skin, as if it were precious, or forbidden.
    Something was wrong, though. I couldn’t make sense of it, but when he climbed on top of me, he felt weightless, a feather, closing me in with biceps I couldn’t feel.
    “I wahnt to make love weez you,” he had whispered the other night, that first night we’d kissed.
    I’d laughed. “I bet!” I said. The response was a reflex; honestly, I was surprised. For some reason he didn’t strike me, based on our extremely limited interaction, as the type to have sex with people he’d just met. In any case, I wasn’t. But now that I had Nico with me again, two days later, it seemed like I’d been waiting for him for months, and even if I couldn’t feel my limbs, or gravity, or the weight of him on top of me, I could feel that.
    *   *   *
    We lay next to each other for some time afterward, working our way through bits of conversation. Nico rolled over on top of me. “It’s not possible,” he said, shaking his buzzed head and struggling with both language and, now, sentiment. “But … I feel.…” he touched his forehead near my lips, talking into my neck. “I am a leet-tle bit … love. Why I feel that?”
    I smiled at him.
    Because you’re traumatized , I thought.
    Nico had been in Haiti for more than a month. The day I met him, he and Jimmy told me that that day they’d broken up a fight among children in camp who tried to break into an aid tent to steal food, like the gangs of rapists that sliced through the sides of tents to steal a woman, easy as pie. I couldn’t really think of anything more dispiriting to do for a living than hold back a bunch of starving homeless kids desperate enough to break into an aid tent in the aftermath of one of the deadliest earthquakes in recent history. Also, as part of MINUSTAH, the United Nations’ force of more than 10,000 peacekeepers, Nico was hated in most places he went. Haitians complained that the troops’ orders seemed to be to drive around in fancy trucks pointing guns at people rather than to protect them. When