by CD Reiss
Breath again.
Cough.
Burn.
Darkness.
Cold.
Heave.
I got on my hands and knees, gulping air. Rolled to sitting. Shook out my bad wrist. No pain.
The lamp was still on, but the light in the sky was completely out. His clothes were all over the room—shirt on the coffee table, jacket over the fireplace grate—as if he’d stripped on fire.
If anything between Caden and I had ever been bad or dangerous, it didn’t come close to what had just happened on the couch.
Was it the Blackthorne treatments? Were they stretching the time between episodes but making them more severe?
I got my coat on and clutched it closed against a coldness it couldn’t protect me from. A chill from inside me. My feet were frigid against the wood. The front door was still locked. Between my legs, soreness and overuse hung like a weight. That had been the most intense sex I’d ever had. I didn’t know if I’d live through it again.
“Caden?”
I flicked on the kitchen light. Empty.
Up the stairs. Lights still out. No sound.
“Caden!”
Office empty. Spare bedroom empty. Our room. Nothing.
I went back downstairs, continuing to the hall between my office and the back door.
Locked from the inside.
My eye caught the basement door. It wasn’t closed all the way. I opened it, and a waft of cold air hit me. I thought of running for shoes but decided to bear the cold, creaky steps.
Halfway down, shrouded in blackness, feeling the stone walls for the conduit to the light switch, I knew he was there. I couldn’t see or hear him, but I knew.
“Caden?”
No answer, but I found the switch and clacked on the light. It flickered and steadied to a flat blue with a constant buzz.
Down to the dirt floor I crept, moving the false wall to the speakeasy and turning on the lights to illuminate the crumbling boxes and mosaic floor. I didn’t waste time calling his name or looking in the corners. I knew where he was. The wall with the false vase was already half open. I made my way to the safe and opened it, turning on lights as I went.
The light right outside the safe was off. I flipped it on and opened the false wall in the back, crouching to get into the concrete room.
Caden was in the bottle room, huddled in the corner, naked and shivering. His beautiful body was rendered sexless in distress.
I rushed to him, dropping to my knees.
He didn’t look at me.
Putting my hand on his cold skin, I squeezed his arm. “Hey.”
His eyes were open and he was breathing evenly, but he didn’t reply.
“Captain,” I whispered, “it’s cold.”
He turned to face me. His eyes were the clear blue sky, his lips were full and soft, and his jaw was strong and square.
I knew that face, but I didn’t.
But I did.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I knew that face in the moments before his release, in the sorrow of the man who’d wept in my arms after holding death and pain in his hands for eight straight days. This was the face I’d loved on my wedding day and in the broken hours of night.
I put my hands on that face and said his name.
“Damon.”
Part Three
BACKSTORY
Chapter Twenty-Three
GREYSEN
NOVEMBER, 2004
THE AIR OVER FALLUJAH, IRAQ
18 HOURS TO OPERATION PHANTOM FURY
* * *
Not jumping.
I chanted two words to myself over and over.
Not jumping.
The Phrog’s dual rotors buzzed like a swarm of bees. My knuckles were striated in white and pink, and my palm already ached in the center. I kept my eyes on my boots and focused on the pain, feeling it in three dimensions as the shooting ache ran from my right wrist to my shoulder. That helped. Focusing on pain always did.
“How you doing, Major?”
I barely heard Ronin over the angry swarm and the shouts of the paratroopers, but I couldn’t ignore him. That was as good as an admission of the terror I felt. He’d use my fear as a weapon for good-natured but annoying mockery. Any woman with thirteen years in the military could take a ribbing, but none of us had to like it.
He was on the other side of the cargo bay, right next to the rear dock. I looked at him and released my hand long enough to give him a thumbs-up, but I couldn’t do that without seeing the open bay door the paratroopers were jumping from.
My stomach twisted when I saw the rectangle of clear-blue desert sky and watched the marine sergeant smack a soldier on the helmet before she jumped and disappeared.
Ronin laughed. He was a loaner from Intelligence, temporarily attached to my unit in the First Medical Brigade. He was an ass, a friend, and an occasional bunk buddy since we’d met in basic.
“One day you’re gonna have to jump,” he shouted.
I kept my hand up long enough to give him the finger, then I clutched the edge of my seat again.
“Cork it!” Lieutenant Jackson shouted to him, her eyes intent under her thick, black glasses. Jenn was a nurse practitioner and my best friend in the unit.
Ronin smiled at her. She had a silver bar to his butterbar. He couldn’t do shit.
The sergeant smacked himself on the helmet and jumped out.
Next stop: Combat Support Hospital—Balad Base.
The door was closed, and the helicopter whipped around, pressing my back against the fuselage.
* * *
We arrived at the CSH, combat support hospital, in the brightest part of the day. Sweat had a way of burning right off you between noon and two in July in Iraq, and what didn’t burn off, the wind took away. But in November, the dusty landscape of the airbase sat in contrast to the temperate air. I was on my third deployment, and I’d seen every season in the Middle East. Fall was my favorite.
“They have eighteen surgeons.” Our CO, Colonel Brogue, briefed us in the truck to base. “Six are army. Two are Aussie. Ten are air force.”
We were a team of sixteen medical officers: Two general surgeons. Two doctors. Eleven nurses. And me, a psychiatrist. Brogue had gone ahead of us and come back. He’d been a medic in Bosnia and Kosovo and now ran our medical unit. We’d all been reassigned to Balad ahead of a push into Fallujah, because nothing creates an unmanageable number of casualties like a push into battle.
“Do they have their own psych team?” I asked.
“Not at present.” Brogue was in his sixties with tight, white hair and a chest built from a cinderblock wall. Old school. He thought real men didn’t need mental health specialists but could probably have used one himself. “It’s all you, and we’re headed into a major offensive. We need you focused on keeping the surgeons sharp.”
Not healthy. Sharp. Welcome to the army in wartime.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I saw Ronin in my peripheral vision, nodding. I wondered what he was doing here, but he’d never say until he had to.
We blew by corrugated metal trailers used for housing and more permanent plywood structures that had been there when the base was run by the Iraqi Air Force.
As everyone got off the truck, I said to Brogue privately, “I’d like to meet the surgeons first. I’d like to have an idea of how they handle stress before the choppers start landing. Can we set up intakes?”
“Army guys, sure. Air force has to go through their command.”
“Got it.”
I got out of the back of the truck. We were in front of a tin hangar with tents being erected on each side. The gravity of the situation became clear with the sight of those tented areas. The hospital wasn’t big enough for what was coming.
The sky was crystalline blue, heavy and thick, the only pure thing in a messy world. It connected all of us equally under its sapphire bowl.
Its presence disconcerted me, and yet there was hope under it.
* * *
My desk was two sawhorses with a slab of plywood laid across. I had a small, barely private office separated from triage by white canvas walls.
Ronin didn’t have a desk. He stood at mine and handed me a metal box. “You should hang on to this.”
“What is it?” I opened the box to find vials of clear liquid.
“Synthetic amphetamine.”
“We have plenty of the generic.” I went over the contraindications. To be used after rest, no food required, eight-hour spread.
Ronin shrugged. “Works faster and stays effective longer. One shot holds twenty-four hours.”
I folded up the sheet and stuck it back in the box. “What are you doing here anyway?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny I’m even in Fallujah.”
“I won’t tell then.”
He smiled and left to do whatever it was he did.
Fifty-nine minutes after I left post-op, Caden St. John poked his head around the canvas flap of my office. He was fully covered in camo, thank God, and he’d shaved.
“Major,” he said with a smirk, as if he found my title arousing.
“Greysen’s fine.” I indicated the chair in front of my makeshift desk.
He sat in it, slipping off his cap, which told me volumes. A gentleman by training. Strict, traditional upbringing.
“In an emergency,” I said, taking out the five-page mental evaluation questionnaire, “we may have to administer psychotropic medications before we can evaluate their safety for you. So, we do this assessment before we need to.”
I pushed the questionnaire toward him. He put his elbows on my desk and flipped through it.
“What exactly do you mean here?” He tapped the pen on a question. “Forty-seven. Part B. Does jerking off count?”
Why was my neck going prickly? I talked about deviant sex acts with attractive patients all the time. Many transferred sexual feelings onto me, and I was trained to deal with it. This guy had disarmed me completely.
“Sexual activity is with a partner. Masturbation is covered in question forty-nine.”
“Ah.” He put the paper down and, on question 47b, ticked the box for “infrequently.”
One. He hadn’t fucked the entire camp, male and/or female.
Two. He’d made sure I saw which box he ticked.
I watched him move over the last page, his answers marked with Xs that went from corner to corner without overshooting the boundaries. His hand was wide across the knuckles with long fingers and had a way of moving that was like a lucid, articulate speech pattern. Every stroke counted.
Cool air came into contact with the sweat breaking out on my neck. I pretended to reread medication labeling while he finished, but I kept his hand in view over the edge of the page.
He put down the pen and pushed the papers toward me.
“Thank you, Caden.”
“My pleasure.”
I stood, then he stood. “I’ll let you know if I have any follow-up questions.”
He transferred his cap from his right to his left and held out his right hand. “Nice to meet you.”
* * *
DAY ONE - 14:39:00
Enforcing rest and nutrition was hard, especially with the surgeons. One in particular.
“I’m not changing out, eating a bag of chips, and scrubbing back in.” Caden plucked a bit of shrapnel out of a pink gut and dropped it in a plastic tray. A nurse held up the X-ray against the light. He peered at it. “Let’s get the one in the ilium.”
The nurse repeated the order, and hands moved over the table.
“All you have to do is stand still for a second,” I said. I’d scrubbed in to work with him and Dr. Indira, the other surgeon. She was generally easier to talk to.
“Really?” He squinted around the body, looking for a piece of something that shouldn’t have been there.
“Really.”
“Give me a little room here,” he said to the nurse. “I think I got it.”
“You’re not afraid of a shot, are you?”
He glanced up from the wounded soldier, just a set of blue eyes over the gray rectangle of his surgical mask. “Where?”
“Dorsogluteal.”
His eyebrows, which seemed darker and more curved without the distraction of his mouth, went up a fraction of an inch. “Go for it.”
I got behind him and put my tray on a stand.
“Take your time,” he said. “Can you clean that up for me?” he said in a completely different tone.
“I have six other surgeons with depleted blood sugar,” I said, pulling his pants away from the smallest patch of skin possible. “I don’t need to waste time on your ass.”
I wished I could because as I estimated the midpoint between his side and the crack of his ass, quickly feeling for the curve of his bone, I decided it was the only worthy ass I’d ever touched. After swiping an alcohol wipe over the site, I stretched the skin and gave him his shot.
“All done.” I covered him.
“What did you give me?”
“Glucose and B vitamins.”
“Boring.” Another piece of shrapnel clicked in the tray.
“We’re saving the good stuff.”
“I’ll be here.”
* * *
DAY THREE - 13:43:00
Caden St. John was a machine. The morning of the second day, we’d moved from vitamins and glucose to a cocktail of shots that included caffeine and an over-the-counter stimulant. He didn’t stop. His joints were swollen. He denied any pain in his shoulders. He was lying.
They kept coming and coming.
As long as he wasn’t shaking or losing motor skills, he was to stay in the OR.
And they kept coming. By truck and chopper, with flesh wounds and worse, they came. The smell of blood was now so hooked in my nostrils I didn’t even notice it. The cloy of alcohol smelled clean instead of sharp, and when I went outside, the cold air seemed so hollow it jabbed my sinuses.
I shot him up every eight hours with vitamins and stimulants, and on day three, I went to the next level.
“Amphetamine?” he asked as he turned on the faucet to scrub in.
I held up the syringe in my latex-coated hand. “It’s that or go to bed.”
He looked me up and down with red-rimmed eyes. “Since both involve you taking my pants down, I’ll pick… eenie, meenie, miney…”
“The speed,” I said, getting behind him. “You’ll take the speed or a nap with your pants on.”
“Crank it up.”
We were alone. Not that it mattered for him. It mattered for me. I didn’t want to enjoy touching his bottom, but if I did and it showed, I didn’t want anyone to see.
After exposing a patch of skin, I ripped open an alcohol wipe. “What’s driving you?”
“The guys on the table.”
“Don’t lie to me.” I jabbed him with the needle.
“Wow, tired, Doctor? You’re a little punchy.”
I wiped blood off. “I’ve spent two days looking at your ass. I think I deserve an honest answer. You jumped into the military after 9/11. Okay, fine. You’re not the first. But you’ve got more defense mechanisms than the Pentagon, and you do this job like you’re digging out of a hole someone’s shoveling dirt into.”
When he looked over his shoulder, I realized I was still wiping his bottom with the swab. I cleared my throat and pulled up his pants.
He turned with his hands pointed up at the elbows. “Gown.”
I got a gown off the shelf and ripped open the package, careful not to touch the outside of the sterile garment.
“You’re not winning,” I said, holding up the sterile garment. “No one wins this.”
He slid his hands through the armholes, and I draped it over his shoulders. When my arms met behind his neck, I identified his scent. Fresh coffee grounds and the cut grass of a suburban Saturday morning.
“My parents were in the North Tower,” he said softly, as if his words n
eeded to be padded with seduction. “Hundred and first floor. They fell for about ten seconds, reaching a velocity of almost one hundred thirteen miles per hour. Fully conscious the whole way down. And when they hit, the force transferred all the energy they’d accumulated over those ten seconds outward. They never identified which grease spots were theirs. But they did find one of my mother’s shoes.”
I opened my mouth to give condolences, but his lips stopped me. He didn’t kiss me but put them against mine, transferring his words into my throat.
“My father wasn’t a good person.” I felt the scrape of his chapped lower lip as it moved. “He was a sadistic monster, and none of these kids are going to die for his sake.”
“And your mother?”
We kept our eyes open as he brushed his lips against mine, running their circumference, and with every turn, my body hungered for more. A true kiss. The taste of his tongue. The flutter of his eyelids when they closed. A murmur of desire in his throat.
But he didn’t offer that, nor did he attribute any of his motivations to his mother.
“Close it please,” he whispered.
My face went hot with shame. I shut my mouth and tied the loops at the back of his neck. He turned, hands still above his waist, so I could close him up in the back. My heart was still pounding, and the space between my legs had gone swollen and heavy.
“You owe me a story,” he said.
“Once upon a time, there was a handsome prince. He wanted to woo the fair lady, but he was a jerk, and she had no time for it. So, he moved on to someone else. The end.” I patted him, done with the last tie.
He turned. “Your story.”
“That is my story.”
“It’s not finished.” He pulled on a glove as a new shift burst in to scrub.
The room exploded into activity, but he and I were in our own little world.
“How do you know?” I got a mask ready for him.
“It ended with what he did, not what she did.” As he snapped on the second glove, the pah-pah of chopper blades rose in the distance. “No pressure.” He bowed his head. I looped the mask around his neck, and he stood straight. “None of us know how our story ends. Shit, we don’t even know how this mess all ends, or when.”