“Don’t apologize, Chase. Enjoy your time. Paint the town red. Sometimes life just happens and you have to jump on the merry-go-round till it’s time to get off.”

I don’t know why tears come to my eyes but they do, and I blink them away. “How do you know when it’s time?” My voice is barely a whisper when I ask.

“Sometimes it’s never time. Sometimes you have to get used to that incredible dizzy feeling. It forces you to readjust the way you look at the world, because you realize you can’t live without it like you once did.”

I clear my throat and try to find the words to respond. “I don’t have that option, Dad.”

But his words stay with me all day.

As Gunner and I laughed and had an impromptu dance party while we barbequed burgers. As we had a mini make-out session on the couch—simply kissing, and nothing else. I can’t remember the last time in my adult life a man simply wanted to kiss me, to enjoy the act, without using it as a precursor to sex.

It was refreshing.

It was sexually frustrating.

And there was something special about it that simply owned my heart.

Yet, my dad’s talk about merry-go-rounds and being dizzy spun in my mind and now I can’t sleep. So I wander through the house. I look at pictures on a bookshelf. One of him and a woman who looks so much like him, I assume she’s his mom. One of four soldiers in addition to Gunner and wonder if this is the group he talks about often. The one he celebrates the birthdays of even though they’re no longer here.

I walk past Gunner where he has fallen asleep on the couch. Sleep comes so hard for him, even after a long day and closing down the bar, I’ve noticed he’s usually fitful in sleep. So much so that many nights I wake up to find the bed beside me cold and when I get up to look, he’s typically sitting on the couch or at his desk in the alcove off the kitchen. Anything to exhaust him to the point of no return so as he says, “the nightmares don’t come.”

But tonight, he fell asleep on the couch when he got home after closing FU-Bar. I laid a blanket on top of him and went to bed alone, not wanting to disturb him, but his sleep isn’t peaceful.

It was his struggling with someone in his sleep that woke me even from where I was asleep in the bedroom. I contemplated waking him up to pull him from the dream but by the time I got to the family room, he was settled.