I finally gave up and slipped through the hidden door into her place. She was lying in the bed. She sat up a little, watching me cross the room and go out into the living room.
“What are you doing?”
I pulled a carton of eggs out of the fridge. “I’m hungry. I thought I’d make us both an omelet.”
She didn’t argue. Instead, she followed me to the kitchen and pulled herself up on the counter, sitting there to watch in her T-shirt and boy shorts. I couldn’t help but steal a look at her perfect legs, so porcelain-smooth that they almost begged for a touch. I wanted to be the one who was allowed to touch whenever the idea crossed my mind, but I knew what that entailed. I couldn’t be that one.
I cracked a few eggs into a bowl, then gathered tomatoes and green onions and a bell pepper, setting them on the counter while I looked for the cutting board. It was under the sink, right where it had been since she’d entered this apartment.
“You don’t cook?”
“Not a lot.”
I nodded. I already knew that, of course, because I’d watched her warm up one frozen dinner after another since we’d been here.
“My mother taught me,” I offered. “She always said that a man should be able to care for himself even if he intended to get married. She said a wife would appreciate a man who was willing to help out in the kitchen.”
“I’m sure your mother was right about that.”
“What about yours? You don’t talk about her much.”
James leaned forward a little on the counter, swinging her legs as she stared down at the floor. “I didn’t know her.”
“How could you not know the woman who gave birth to you?”
“She died when I was little. Cancer brought on by the fertility drugs she took years before she finally got pregnant with me.”
I glanced at her as I chopped the vegetables. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged, her eyes meeting mine briefly. “Don’t be. I don’t have a single memory of her, so I don’t suppose I ever grieved her.”
“You must have grieved the lack of her.”
She was quiet for a minute. “I suppose. But my pops was an awesome father. I never really knew I was missing anything until I got to high school and all these other kids told me how awful their mothers were. Then I thought I’d escaped something.”
I shook my head, deseeding the green pepper with a quick motion of the knife. “My mom was the best. She always had time for me, always sat there waiting for me after school with a plate of cookies and a pitcher of milk.” I smiled at the memory. “I barely knew my father, but my mom was incredible.”
“Was your dad absent?”
“No. He simply didn’t take much interest in me. He adored my mom—at least when I was young and she was healthy—but he could take me or leave me. Didn’t matter to him.”
“I doubt that’s true.”
“It is. The moment she got sick, he made sure he had plenty to keep him out of the house. Never stopped to think of what it would do to his fifteen-year-old son, stuck at home caring for a very sick woman.”
There was anger in my voice and I was a little embarrassed by that. But I didn’t look at her, and I didn’t apologize.
“Maybe he was hurting.”
“So was she. He should have been there.”
“Some people just don’t know how to deal with grief. My pops, he told me all the time when I was a kid that he would have eaten his service pistol if it hadn’t been for me. He swears I saved his life just by the fact that I needed him.”
“That’s a heavy thing to tell a child.”
“It was the truth. We were always honest with each other.”
“Your father still alive?”
She didn’t answer right away, forcing me to turn and see the nod she offered as she continued to swing her legs there on the counter.
“He lives across town in an assisted-living place. He’s got Parkinson’s. Some days are good and you can hardly notice it. Others… he shakes on the left side. Doctors say it will spread to the other side in time.”
“That’s rough.”
“He was a cop for forty years. But the place he lives has a high number of former cops living there, so he’s surrounded by friends.”
“That must be a blessing for him.”
“For me too. I feel bad when I’m on assignments like this and I can’t go see him as often as I’d like.”
I set my knife down and pulled a whisk from a drawer and began to whisk the eggs as butter melted in a slowly warming skillet. I could see the guilt in her features when I glanced at her again. I couldn’t think of anything to say that might ease that guilt.
“My father lives across town, but I haven’t seen him in fourteen years. Not since the day they put my mother in the grave.”
“Why?”
“Because he abandoned her when she needed him most. Because he abandoned us both.”
She nodded, brushing a hand over the top of her head. “I understand that.”
I was surprised. Not many people I’d told my story to—and there were very few I had—saw it my way. I poured the eggs into the skillet and swirled them around to coat the entire surface of the pan, then sprinkled my chopped vegetables on top before adding some shredded cheese. We were quiet as I watched the eggs cook, carefully digging a spatula underneath to loosen the edges before I flipped it in half, watching the last of the raw egg run out the sides as it finished cooking. Then I cut it in half and slid it onto two plates, letting it rest while I made toast.
“That story you told Zaki last night, the one about your mother, it was based on something real, wasn’t it?” I asked as we settled at the small dining table.
She nodded, not looking me in the eye. “I lost several friends while I was in the army.”
“I’ve heard you had quite a distinguished career.”
“Yeah, well, that’s all that’s kept me out of the veterans’ hospital, I think.”
“What do you mean?”
She tucked into her eggs, lifting a hefty forkful to her lips. She slid it into her mouth, breathing heavily as the heat burned her delicate skin. But then she nodded, a little smile on her pretty lips.
“Delicious.”
“Mom was a good teacher.”
We ate in silence for a few minutes, then she set down her fork and went into the kitchen to pour us both a glass of milk. When she returned, she curled up in her chair, her legs tucked under her buttocks. She didn’t pick up her fork right away. Instead, she ran her nail around the edge of the plate as though lost in thought.
“People die in conflicts like the one they sent us into in Afghanistan. I knew that when I signed up. And the first time someone I knew died… it was hard, but I reasoned it away, telling myself that we all knew what we were getting into when we signed up. But then another guy I knew had his foot blown off by an IUD. And then there was the guy who’d just gotten engaged and some kid walks up to him, asking for candy, strapped with a crude device that went off sooner than anticipated. Killed my friend, but it went off before they walked into the camp and took out more soldiers with them.”
She picked at the plate. “I was angry then. Frustrated that this so-called war on terror had been waning for years, according to the politicians over here, when in reality, soldiers were still being maimed and murdered every day as we fought a non-existent war. Yet I still went back.”
I nodded. I knew exactly what she was talking about because I’d been her just a few years ago. I’d lost friends and companions, too. I knew a boy who was barely out of high school, still had pimples on his face and talked about prom night like it was the highlight of his life. He’d died when a sniper shot him through the head while he told me about his mother’s apple pie.
War sucked. There was no argument about that. And it changed a person, changed their entire outlook on life. You couldn’t see what we’d seen over there and not be changed.
“Every time one of my unit died, I promi
sed him I would keep fighting until I couldn’t fight anymore. One day, during my last tour of duty, I met this guy. He was…” She smiled, a little giggle slipping from between her lips. “He was a doofus! I mean, seriously, he was straight off the farm, even talked with a heavy southern drawl going on. And the way he walked…” She giggled again. “I thought he was a joke the first time I met him, that everything he did was an act to get attention. But that was Aaron. That was the way he really was.
“He heard about this promise I’d made to my fallen brothers, and he asked me about it one day while we were on patrol together. I told him to mind his own business, but Aaron was one of those people you can’t ignore for long. When he wants something, he gets it. I finally told him about it, explaining why I did it. He looked me dead serious in the eye and told me that the only promise I should be making is a promise to be true to myself and to be true to my moral beliefs. He made me promise that I would always do the right thing and that I would always fight for the innocent. I laughed him off.”
She grew quiet.
“He died.”
“Two days later.” She brushed a hand over her cheek, wiping away a tear that had escaped the corner of her eye. “It wasn’t even war-related. He was moving a jeep from one end of the compound to the other—a distance of maybe a mile—and he was blaring the radio, which was against the rules, and dancing to the tune that’d come on while he drove. Just being the same doofus he always had been. The jeep hit a rock he hadn’t seen, and he wasn’t secured in. He was so skinny, he just flew out from behind the wheel and the damn thing ran over his throat as it kept going. Stupid accident.”
“That’s rough.”
“Yeah. He had a mom and dad and four sisters. He was the only boy. And they were all devastated, needless to say. I went to see them when I returned, and they were so sweet to me, telling me how he wrote home about me, that he looked up to me, and it was just… too much. It was all too much.”
“He was just a kid.”
“Yeah. Just this sweet, innocent kid who got under my skin even though I’d sworn I wouldn’t get close to anyone else over there, that I wouldn’t let myself get so attached that another death would hurt like the last had done. But he did.”
I nodded, my gaze moving slowly over the dark cloud that rested over her. It was almost like she was telling my own story. The details were different, but the story was the same.
“I fell apart when I came home after that deployment, but the promise he forced me to make to him, that kept me from complete self-destruction. That and Ox and my pops.”
“Ox?”
“He gave me a job when no one else would.”
“That’s a story I’ve heard a few times.”
She tilted her head to look at me. “You too?”
I shook my head, sticking out my bottom lip as I denied it. “He wasn’t my last option, but he was the one who gave me hope that I could actually keep doing what I liked doing after the marines told me my knee was too messed up for me to be the career soldier I always thought I’d be.”
“Yeah?”
“He visits the veterans’ hospital a couple of times a year. I happened to be around when he made one of his speeches about private security and combat options. I hadn’t yet made a decision about what I’d do when my knee healed, but listening to him opened up a whole new category of choices I hadn’t considered. And he was the second to offer me a job.”
“I heard you had a bum knee, but I wasn’t sure whether it was truth or gossip.”
I slapped the top of my left thigh. “Tore the cartilage all out while in-country. I spent a couple of weeks in Germany, then a month here at Brooke Army.”
“You would have stayed for life?”
“At least twenty years. Long enough to get all the benefits.”
She nodded, running her hand over the top of her head again before lifting her fork and digging into her food once more. I finished my own food and carried the plate to the sink before settling back down beside her to drink my milk with a little more leisure.
“How did we not know these things about each other?” she asked after a bit. “We’ve worked together for, what, three years?”
“Nearly.”
She studied me for a second, those lovely eyes moving slowly over my face. “I guess we were just too busy torturing each other.”
“I always thought of that as a sort of flirting.”
She snorted. “I don’t flirt with coworkers.”
“No? But you don’t mind telling them to fuck off.”
She smiled. “Only you.”
“Well, I’m honored.”
“You should be.”
I liked this side of her. I wanted it to last a while longer, but she was already growing a little somber. She carried her dishes to the sink, as I’d done, then curled into the chair again, her milk glass between both hands.
“Last night, I didn’t think—”
“Last night I thought you were going to be forced into a white panel van with a group of perverts. Excuse me for worrying about you.”
She tilted her head slightly, regarding me for a moment. “I know. I’m sorry.”
My eyebrows rose. That hadn’t been what she’d said when I’d confronted her here at the apartment. I’d demanded to know what she’d been thinking, going into that abandoned office with Ahsan alone. She’d basically told me that she knew what she was doing and I didn’t have a right to question her.
“This case is complicated for me,” she said slowly, swirling her glass so that the milk created a little bit of a cyclone inside. “I grew up with a boy’s name, wearing boys’ clothing, learning hobbies that I shared with my cop of a father. I don’t do well with all this girly stuff going on, and having all that alcohol at my fingertips—not to mention the drugs and that little stunt with the GHB—it’s taken me about as far out of my comfort zone as a woman can get.” She looked over at me, offering a halfhearted smile. “I’m sorry I’m not in the best of moods when you offer me criticism.”
“Apology accepted.”
She drank her milk then set the glass on the table with a resounding thud. “Thank you for breakfast. Now go away so that I can shower and dress.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I popped a salute and waited for her to return it. She laughed when she did.
Back in my apartment, the sound of the music from her laughter still in my ears, I followed suit, dressing quickly for the day. I sat at the computer to check my email, to see what Cheryl and her crew had sent to add to my file on these traffickers, but was surprised by the flicker of movement on one of the camera feeds coming from James’s apartment. She normally stayed in the bathroom while she showered and dressed because it was the only room in the whole place that didn’t have a camera installed. But, for reasons I couldn’t begin to figure out, she’d chosen to dress in the bedroom.
She kept herself covered by the oversized towel she’d dried off with, but she made something of a show in the way she rubbed lotion into her exposed flesh, the way she shifted the towel to expose parts of herself in a way that continued to hide her body from the camera, but offered a suggestion of eroticism that made my temperature soar. And then came the clothes, her panties sliding gently up the length of her thighs, her bra barely covering her full breasts before she dropped the towel to the floor.
I knew I shouldn’t watch. It wasn’t right. But I just… I couldn’t take my eyes from the screen.
She was slow about pulling on the narrow skirt and blouse she’d chosen for the day. It seemed it was important to move around the room, gathering the wet towel and a few other items, placing them where they belonged, before she finally slid that skirt up to her waist, those perfect legs still on display. And then the blouse, which she didn’t button up for quite a while, once again taking her time to make the bed and straighten the pillows before she finally looked up at the camera hidden in a crook of the ceiling and slowly slid those buttons into place.
&nb
sp; My God! I’d never seen anything more delicious in all my life. Not even the stash of Playboy magazines I found under my dad’s workbench when I was twelve was as good as this.
What was that woman trying to do to me?
Chapter 14
James
I was bored. I was so bored that I didn’t mind washing up the dishes from breakfast! I tried reading, but couldn’t sit still long enough to understand a word I’d read. I stood at the window and watched the traffic down below, but there was nothing interesting in that. There was television, but I was a Netflix binger, and there was no Netflix on these televisions. Cable. Who used cable anymore?
I wanted Max to come back to my apartment and talk to me, but I think I might have scared him off. I hadn’t heard a peep out of his apartment since I’d chased him away before my shower. I wondered if he’d gone to sleep. Had he seen… if he had, he would have been quick to say something. He must be asleep.
I tried napping myself, but every time I closed my eyes I saw Ahsan. Then I saw Max. When I pushed Max away, I saw Ox and then Aaron. Every time I thought of Aaron these days, I saw him looking at me with that judgy expression he always wore when he didn’t approve of something I’d done or said.
Was it really Aaron who didn’t approve of what I was doing? Or was it me?
I paced, needing something to do. I thought about Ox coming here last night, ignoring the obvious tension that had existed between me and Max. What had he thought was going on? Did he think we’d become lovers? Or was he assuming it was the same sort of thing that was always going on between me and Max?
Why would I wonder if he thought Max and I were lovers? We weren’t. We probably wouldn’t ever be. Why would that thought even cross my mind?
I’d had lovers. Long ago. A boy in high school who was frightened off when his friends accused him of sleeping with the school’s only dyke. Then in the army. His name was Josh and he was a member of my unit the first time I deployed to Afghanistan. We’d gotten stranded together in this little village we’d been clearing, caught between rescue and a band of rebels. We spent two nights alone scared that it would be our last two nights on earth. One thing led to another and we said things to each other that I’d thought were sincere, that I’d believed were true. Turned out he was engaged. Told me a week before we were due to return stateside. Said he’d appreciate if I pretended the last eight months had never happened.
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