A SEAL's Heart Read Free

understood a lot about Zuly, but this wasn’t something she’d get.
              “All right,” Zuly’s sibling drawled. “Tell me why you suddenly look like a Disney woodland creature that’s lost its mom.”
              With a resounding click, Zuly closed the door to her home and leaned against the hardwood, shrugging. “Not feeling too great today.”
    Understatement. Zuly hadn’t felt great for a long, long time and the reason for that was somewhere up the mountain, wallowing in misery and drinking himself to death. God, just the thought of him up there in that cabin all alone made her chest ache. How was anyone supposed to help him when he’d suddenly decided to go all Phantom of the Opera?
    Hands clenching at her sides, Zuly stepped away from the door, resisting the urge to run out and get into her truck, just to drive miles up the mountainside and have a door slammed in her face yet again. The fuck was that about, anyway? She’d seen Fitzgerald Carrigan drunk enough to almost piss himself, had watched him clear his stomach of a week’s worth of food and was there to wash his hair after that one awful incident at the carnival. So why was he acting as though she’d recoil in horror at the sight of one injury?
    Then again, maybe his injuries weren’t just physical. How many soldiers had come home completely different from the way they left, hearts and heads bruised from seeing the pits of hell over and over again?
    If that were the case, if that was what was hurting her frogman, why wouldn’t he just say it? Why wouldn’t he simply open his mouth and tell her he needed her, needed anyone?
    “You’re thinking about him again,” Kamilah noted, following Zuly as she walked from the front door to the living room and into the kitchen, determined to keep her hands busy by making something.
    Zuly paused at her spice cabinet. “Don’t.” She didn’t want to talk about Fitz--didn’t want to think about him anymore. Didn’t want to wonder if he were eating properly or staying off his knee. Didn’t want to leave him another container of food just to drive by and find it had been ravaged by the small game near his cabin instead of eaten by him.
    There was only so much rejection a person could take. And yet, if he showed up on her doorstep now with that crooked-toothed smile and messy hair, she’d let him in without hesitation. She missed her friend; missed the person who seemingly understood her better than she understood herself. Zuly had a gaping hole of loneliness forming without him around but stubborn pride wouldn’t let her admit that something felt off without him.
    If he wants to be alone. I’ll fucking let him. She snatched down a box of cake mix harder than necessary and continued to her fridge, able to feel her sister’s gaze following her. Kamilah had been coming up to Zuly’s more and more often lately. She briefly wondered if her family had her on suicide watch. Did they really think she was that pathetic? That she couldn’t survive without Fitz?
    Zuly chewed the inside of her lip. Maybe she was pathetic. They’d been joined at the hip from the moment he rescued her from the clutches of a wolf spider. The second he’d smashed it on the playground and she finally calmed down enough to stop screaming, their eyes met and she’d been lost. When eight-year-old Fitz had puffed out his thin chest and said with all the pride in the world what his full name was, Zuly’s face had scrunched up as she repeated it.
    Instead of making fun of her lisp he’d grinned like her voice was the greatest thing in the world and nodded, hair flopping into his face. There was something about that movement that caught her attention, made her feel an instant kinship to someone who apparently had no more control over his locks than she had over her own at the time.
    From that day on he was always rescuing her from something. Whether it was boring family functions or idiotic classmates, Fitz was