The Soldier's Promise: A Military Romance

PT 1: Two Pink Lines

"Are you alright in there?"

A woman banged on the door, repeating her question. I didn't respond. I didn't move a muscle. I did nothing other than continue sitting there with my butt glued to the toilet seat like a moron frozen in time.

Had I really been in the bathroom for so long? On the one hand, it felt like forever, but on the other, the alarm on my phone was ticking unbearably slow.

One minute fifty-one seconds, one minute fifty-two...

The banging intensified, and I was forced to respond; my voice sounded like I hadn't spoken in ages. "I'm just pooping. I'm alright!"

I heard an unintelligible grunt on the other end of the door and a set of footsteps, leading me to believe that my tormentor had given up on harassing women who camped in single-stall restrooms.

One minute thirty-three, one minute thirty-two...

Goosebumps covered me from head to toe as I screwed my eyes shut, trying my hardest not to look at the pregnancy test I held in my hand. In my mind, I was on a warm beach like the summer John took me to Destin. It was a beautiful day, full of laughter and splashing each other, and a few too many margaritas. It was the kind you wanted to keep in a picture frame. And I did, gluing a couple of seashells to the photo and displaying it in our living room.

The following day, though, was pure torture, as we woke up with the worst headaches of our lives. Right now, I could feel that headache coming back to me, pressing on the soft spots above my eyebrows, needling into my skull.

The masochistic side of me wanted to peek, but deep in my heart, I knew what I was liable to find. All the symptoms that I had ignored only weeks ago stared accusingly back at me on a MayoClinic webpage. There were the vague ones: irritability, tiredness, difficulty sleeping, and loss of appetite. Those didn't cause me to worry. Maybe I had slept wrong or caught a bug. Something was always going around on the military base, so it wasn't out of the question. But it got harder to deny when the breast tenderness started and then the vomiting, rounding out with the metallic taste in my mouth. When a specific visitor failed to make her appearance, the proof became ironclad.

But how could I worry about her appearance when I was busy dealing with such a big disappearance?

Those final moments two weeks ago played in my mind on repeat, watching as he boarded the bus with his unit, weighed down by camo packs and drab green laundry bags. No one could beat out of me where he was going, half because I knew it was mission critical that I keep mum on everything until he arrived safely, and half because I didn't remember.

The mind can block out those details, ignoring what doesn't make sense. It's like that study where researchers asked participants to keep track of how many times a basketball was passed in a video. While the participants gave differing counts, all of them had one thing in common - they failed to notice the man in the gorilla suit who showed up halfway through the video.

It was like that with me. One moment, I was moving with the rhythm of day-to-day life, trying to set up a life for John and me. And the next, a big fat hairy gorilla is tearing my sweet fiance away from me and carrying him to God-knows-where to do God-knows-what for the U.S. government.

Instead of facing it head-on, I buried my head in the sand, ignoring the pain and uncertainty looming. Would John get hurt? Would this be the last moment I ever saw him? Why did the smell of every meal I cooked cause me to gag like I had never done before?

There was no way of knowing the answer to the first question. But in five, four, three, two... I would know the second.

Two bright pink lines stared back at me, mocking me in their cheeriness.