Always Here: A Jay Halstead fanfic

Chapter Fourteen

As soon as they got home, Harper went to her room and tidied up. She threw away all the beer bottles and tissues and gathered her photos. She just sat on the bed and looked at them for a while until she was interrupted by a knock on the door.

Jay. "Come in," Harper sighed. It wasn't fair to push Jay away, he had a right to know about her past. Jay opened the door sheepishly with a small collection of photos in his hand. Harper's breath caught in her throat. "Jay, you don't have to do that," Harper said. "It's only fair, Harper," he explained before sitting down on the bed next to her.

He handed her the photos. "Are you sure?" Harper asked him sincerely, not wanting him to feel like he had to reveal anything he wasn't comfortable with. He nodded at her and that was all she needed. She had always been so eager to find out where such an extraordinary person like Jay had come from.

The first photo was of Jay, Will, a beautiful woman had her arms around both of them and there was a man standing to the side. "That's my mom, you know what happened to her," he explained. Harper nodded knowing he lost his mom to cancer. He had his mother's beautiful blue eyes.

"My dad," Jay said pointing to the man in the corner who looked like he didn't want to be there. "He was..." Jay said, trying to think on it as his brows furrowed. Harper placed her hand over his and said, "It's okay." She was aware of their rocky relationship.

He nodded before moving to the next photo. Harper's breath caught in her throat and she bit her lip, it was Jay, Mouse and some other guys in their army uniforms. Jay looked hot, she thought to herself. No don't go there, you'll never be together.

Jay pointed to the first man, "The first guy died in an IED explosion, he was a good person, had a wife and a daughter...um when I told his wife he had died, she was really upset, she kept yelling at me and throwing stuff at me, she told me I should have been the one dead, and I..." Jay's voice cracked, Harper moved closer to him, rubbing his back soothingly "That's not true Jay" she said sincerely looking up at him as he nodded.

She knew why he didn't say names, it made things more real, it brought up more bad memories. "The second guy, he didn't deal with coming home so well, he would do drugs and drink, one day he overdosed, it's my fault actually, I knew how bad everything was but I didn't even check on him" Jay confessed guilty.

"Jay, don't do that, it's not fair, it's not your fault, you had your own stuff to deal with" Harper said truthfully. "The third and fourth guy, they're alive, thankfully, sometimes Mouse and I met with them" he said as Harper nodded looking at him intently. She was so grateful that he was talking a little about his past. "The next guy is Mouse, you know him, he saved my life more than once when we were down there".

"The fifth and sixth guy, they were kidnapped and they died before we could find them, what those people did to them was brutal, I always ask myself, how could a human do something like that?" Jay spoke disturbed. Harper didn't have an answer to that question but she knew just how horrible humans could be. She thought of her dad and the man she was supposed to gather intel on.

He turned to the second picture and he looked down as tears gathered in his eyes. He was not going to cry in front of Harper. It was his unit with a woman and a girl from Afghanistan. "I used to see them everyday," Jay said, referring to the pair. "Since no one wrote me letters, that was the highlight of my day, meeting her and her mom" he said softly. "We would watch out for them and then one day I heard they got killed in an explosion, the little girl was only three...I still see their faces... I still see the faces of the men we lost" he said, his voice cracking. Harper's heart sank, Jay had been through so much and that wasn't even half of it.