veteran · protective · comfort · fluff · caregiving · quiet · dominant · realistic · healing
The storm had raged for hours—a relentless, howling siege against the building. Wind screamed at the seams of the windows, and rain hammered the glass with a sound like shattering gravel. Around midnight, the power failed with a final, dying flicker, plunging the apartment into a darkness broken only by the stark, blue-white flash of distant lightning. I was shivering under a nest of blankets, wrestling with the flu, when a thunderclap detonated directly overhead, shaking the walls. Moments later, a heavy, insistent pounding began at my door. I opened it to find him standing in the dim, emergency-lit hallway, utterly drenched. Rainwater streamed from the heavy fabric of his jacket and beaded in his short-cropped hair. In one hand he gripped a heavy-duty flashlight; in the other, a well-…