Girl On the Edge

by CD Reiss

Caden flipped me to my stomach. I grunted in protest. I didn’t want to be passive. I didn’t want to be ridden. I wanted to ride.

  He was inside me before I could explain, so deep I thought he’d crack me.

  “Is this what you want?” he asked.

  “Deeper.”

  He got on his knees, pulling me up until I was crouched over him. We were both facing the same direction, and that seemed more right than anything before.

  Into. Forward. Through.

  He found an untouched depth. An arcane secret in my belly that I’d been holding for him and only him. When he discovered it, he hurt me and broke through.

  I shook. Or the earth quaked. Or reality trembled, threatening to break and spill its contents. It managed to hold together. For now.

  * * *

  He’d exhausted me so much that even when I slept, I was awake, and when I woke, I was still asleep. I spun down a tunnel that was focused and clear in the center but more and more chaotic at the edges.

  “No fever.” Caden’s voice, like the details of my world, was crisp and lucid as I heard it and fractured and shattered as it drew away, like a Doppler effect of cognizance. “Take this for the headache.”

  When I sat up to take the ibuprofen, the tunnel moved a little behind me, bending from inertia and snapping into place after a second.

  “Did I tell you I had a headache?”

  I was starting to doubt the words that came out of my mouth.

  “I know when your head hurts, sweetheart.”

  I handed him back the glass. “Thank you.”

  “You don’t look good,” he said. “Are you going to be okay?”

  I nodded, and the tunnel shook, waving lucidity before me like a red cape. When he kissed me, my consciousness shifted to where his lips touched my skin, and his voice was the focal point of my attention.

  He laid my head on the pillow and covered me, promising he’d return as soon as he could. I barely heard him. My temperature was normal, but I was in a fevered half dream. The dashing thoughts repeated over and over like a mantra, falling into dissonance, only to echo as if I’d lost control of my inner voice.

  At one point, between sleep and wakefulness, the bed seemed to drop from under me and the blankets hovered a few inches above.

  Not really. I checked by laying my hand on the mattress and pressing down. But once I closed my eyes again, I hovered in space.

  Not quite falling. Not quite flying. Stopped in time.

  Cool air hit my face and my flailing limbs. It drove itself between my panties and my skin, making me aware of the angle of my body and the fact that no matter how much I flapped my arms, I couldn’t will myself to fly.

  I could still feel where he’d touched me. Where he’d violated me with his finger as if my body was his. The curdled nerves inside my vaginal wall were disgusted and greedy for more. One side of my bra was hitched over a nipple, hard from the damp and cold, and my lips were wet from inexpert kisses.

  I’d escaped something but not what I’d always thought. Maybe rape but not rape. I’d escaped something I couldn’t define.

  Twisting, I could see the sky over the UCLA diving pool. The stars were cut out in the shape of Scott’s perfect body perched on the edge of the platform, his knees bent to propel himself after me. The crescent of the moon looked as if it was balanced on my big toe, as if I’d cut half a glowing nail and hadn’t ripped it away yet. The pool’s filter churned like a diesel engine, and the mating song of the crickets that lived under the bushes on the other side of the fence was louder than an electric guitar.

  Falls were survivable. Falls into a pool especially so. But doing it wrong hurt, and in my expanded airborne second and a half, I straightened as much as I could, watching the turquoise rectangle of the pool hurtle toward me. I closed my eyes. The wet touch of the surface hit my shoulder, and the cool air from it blew against my cheek for the shortest of split seconds in the elastic perception of time.

  When I held my breath, time snapped back. My ears filled with the whoosh of bubbles. Pain shot through my shoulder when I tried to swim up. With a second whoosh, Scott broke the surface like a spear and scooped me up, pulling me to the surface.

  I’d survived something.

  I didn’t know what, but I’d endured more than falling from the diving platform.

  When Scott got me to the edge of the pool and I tried to grab the lip with my bad arm, I cried, “Ow.”

  “What were you trying to do?” he asked, getting out in one move like he did a hundred times a day.

  His question was pure accusation, as if I’d done something crazy. He didn’t know my collarbone was broken. He didn’t know I was hurt, and I didn’t either. I couldn’t lift my arm, and I didn’t care. I could hold on with the other one.

  I was happy.

  So happy I couldn’t wipe the smile from my face.

  Scott stood over me with his hand out, scowling, his body covered in dripping diamonds.

  The happiness overtook me so hard I laughed in pure delight. Not because I was alive.

  No.

  I was overjoyed at the sight of the boy standing over me.

  For reasons I couldn’t explain in the halfway point between sleep and wakefulness, with my perceptions distorting at the edges, I was relieved that Scott was alive.

  “Why did you jump?” he asked, truly concerned. He’d put his hands where they didn’t go and scared me, but he wasn’t a bad person. He was salvageable, and so was I.

  My unreasonable joy grew like a water balloon stuck to a flowing hose. By jumping, I’d saved him.

  I didn’t know why I thought that, and I was afraid I was going to find out.

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  CADEN

  Even asymmetrical war has a pattern. Days of nothing led into a barrage of casualties that lasted days about one third of the time. The other two-thirds were one-off IEDs or suicide bombers in crowded markets. Not fun. Every soldier who came in shaken to their core was proof that the system was broken, and every single hurt civilian convinced me it had to end.

  But I had my detachment. I could still compartmentalize. Choosing it instead of having it thrust upon me brought a relieved kind of euphoria.

  “She’s going to kill me,” the corporal said as the nurse, a petite brunette with freckles, used a ring cutter to get his wedding band off his broken hand.

  “She’s going to be happy you’re alive. Look up.” I shined a light in his eye. The cornea had been scratched by a flying pebble.

  DeLeon poked her head in.

  “Dr. Eyes.” Recently, for reasons I couldn’t get to the bottom of, she’d stripped the Asshole off my name. “Got a guy here to see you.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “Well, then.” Her voice turned a little sultry. I looked around to see if she was directing it at me. “I’ll have to wait with him then.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Take your time,” she replied with a wink.

  * * *

  Ronin and DeLeon were chatting in one of the waiting areas when I came out. There was a match made in hell for sure.

  We shed my CO and went to a deserted corner of the chow hall patio.

  “Sorry to pull you into a corner,” he said.

  “No problem. I love the cloak-and-dagger shit.”

  “We need to talk about what Greysen did last night.”

  “Do we?” I got immense pleasure from giving him a hard time.

  “Did she tell you why she took the shot?”

  “No.” I blew on my coffee, considering the sanctity of marital privilege. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “She’s not in the office today, and she doesn’t answer the phone, her email, or the fucking door.”

  “I’m sure she’ll fill out a report or whatever you people do.”

  “I want to hear it from you.”

  “Really?” I sipped my coffee. I was taking it with less and less sugar these days. The sweetness seemed like a lie against th
e backdrop of ripped bone and flesh.

  “Did you tell her to take it?”

  The idea was so hilarious I nearly spit my coffee.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Have you met my wife?” Putting the cup down, I leaned back. “Can you imagine her doing anything I tell her just because I said so?”

  He shook his head and looked into his coffee. “She didn’t want to give it to you. She was afraid you’d react. She thought it might not be a placebo.”

  “Bad researcher,” I scolded. “You’re not supposed to tip your hand to the patient.”

  “Done is done. You’re out of the study. Which is too bad. You were good.”

  “It didn’t feel good.”

  “Trust me. You were great.” He leaned his elbows on the table, circling his cup with his palms. “I never saw anything like you in Fallujah.”

  My cup froze halfway to my lips.

  In Fallujah?

  I observed Ronin only to find he was observing my reaction just as carefully.

  I put down my coffee. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  “You should ask your wife.”

  He wasn’t sitting that far away. If I stood, I could reach across the table and grab the collar of his Blackthorne polo before I punched him in the face. The coffee would spill. I might get arrested if he didn’t beat the shit out of me first. A small price to pay for the implication that Greysen hid things from me.

  “Here’s the problem,” he said, lowering his voice. Good strategy. In order to hear him, I had to pay more attention, which drained my anger of its explosiveness. “I don’t know what was in the shot.”

  “How is that possible?” I growled.

  He was fucking with my wife now. He could take his soo-hoos and his benchmark tests and shove them. I didn’t care what he did with me. I’d volunteered for that shit. But Greysen? Fucking with her wasn’t okay. I must have looked like a wild animal because he went fake beta on me, averting his eyes and relaxing his shoulders as if he had no intention of attacking. Not physically.

  “It’s a big business,” he said. “Blackthorne. If you count overseas income streams, it’s bigger than AT&T.”

  “And?”

  “And that means there are a lot of people. You just see me. That’s by design. But my bosses have bosses, and there are parts of this program that are out of my control. We got those syringes sealed, with names and serial numbers already on them. We recommended a placebo as a control, but”—he shrugged—“I don’t know.”

  One, two, three deep breaths. I said nothing.

  “They’re motivated to get this process to work,” he continued. “As long as there’s no childhood trauma, the shot plus the breathing has a two-pronged effect. It improves combat performance and releases the burden of battle distress. It’s a win all around. But there’s an actuarial component to this. Sometimes things are going to go to shit. The wrong people are going to get it, or a mistake in dosage will have side effects. The bean counters need to know what that’s going to cost them.”

  “And the only way is to get it wrong and see what it costs.”

  “Right.”

  “What is that shit?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes.”

  He pushed his coffee away and put a napkin in front of him. After slipping a pen from his pocket, he clicked it and drew on the napkin. Lines. Letters. A chemical compound.

  “This is proprietary,” he said, connecting lines and tucking abbreviations into the corners. “I could get sued into the poorhouse.”

  The chain of elements went on and on.

  “I’m not a chemist,” I said.

  “I’m betting on that.”

  “I don’t need you to prove a point.”

  He kept scribbling his molecule, opening the napkin to make more room. “The circular breathing’s important. BiCam, the stuff we were working with in Fallujah? It was a breakthrough. But the army didn’t want to hear anything from me. Not after Abu Ghraib.” A short rip appeared where he pressed too hard. “I got busted down to Aberdeen piss boy after that.”

  He pushed the napkin toward me.

  “Like I told you,” I said, “I’m not a chemist. What does this have to do with Greysen?”

  He took the napkin and crunched it into a ball.

  “Dose and preparation.” He took a Zippo and a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and poked out a smoke. “It’s highly personalized.” He bit the cigarette out of the pack and lit it, keeping the lighter open. “Your dose was raised over time.”

  He set the napkin on fire.

  “The shots in New York weren’t vitamins.” I stated it as a fact because it was. I didn’t need confirmation.

  “Sure, they were. With more or less BiCam depending.” He dropped the flaming ball on the table. “We were making you into a god. The split was going to be managed with bioenergetic breathing once you had the sessions under control. But the army brought you here and cut me out. So, I hired Greysen because she’d watch you until I could get transferred.” A line of hot orange sped to the center of the napkin, and the black edges curled and flaked off. “Now she’s taken your dose.”

  “Which is higher because I’m acclimated. And you have no idea what effect it’s going to have on her.”

  “And here we are.”

  The last of the napkin turned to cold carbon. A ribbon of smoke curled between us and went dead.

  “I know you’re covered legally.” I flicked away the black ash. “I know what I signed. I can only imagine what my wife had to sign to come here. So, when I say this, I want you to take it personally. This isn’t about the law or military channels. This is about you and me. Nothing else. No one else. If she’s damaged in any way, I’m coming after you. You’re going to wish you were a piss boy.”

  He jammed his cigarette between his teeth and smiled around it as if relishing the challenge.

  “Until then,” he said around his smoke, “you need me.”

  * * *

  The apartment was so dark and still I thought she’d left. I turned on a lamp and shut the door. She was on the bed in the same position I’d left her, on her side, left foot poking from under the covers. When I took her hair off her face, her eyes were closed and she was smiling.

  “Hey, baby.”

  Her lids fluttered, and she refocused. “Hey.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “All right.”

  “You haven’t moved.”

  She got up on an elbow and looked around. The fruit from the night before had collected tiny flies, and her clothes were still on the floor. “I guess I haven’t.”

  I ran my fingers over her forehead, the worst way to check for fever, but I didn’t want to go full medical professional on her just yet. Her voice had a tenderness I didn’t want to disrupt.

  “Are you hungry?” I touched her lower lip. It was swollen from sleep, yielding and soft.

  “I don’t think so.”

  The sheet slid down her body, revealing the peaks of her breasts. I ran two fingers from her lip, down her chin, over the hardening nubs. She smiled again, looking down at my hand. Her dark lashes fanned out against her cheeks, fluttering as I moved the sheet below her waist.

  “What do you want?” I asked, feeling the depth of the crease between her thighs. She gave no more than what the force of my touch demanded.

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Open your legs.”

  She spread her knees apart. I ran my hand inside her thighs. She closed her eyes, releasing a gentle gasp. When I pushed her legs apart, she threw her head back, exposing the length of her throat.

  “I talked to Ronin today.” I slid my finger in her seam, teasing it open. “You told him you were having symptoms?”

  “It’s not that bad. I think it’ll go away.”

  “What symptoms?”

  “Feeling watched. But I know it’s not true, so I think I’ll get it under control.”

&n
bsp; She’d seen me break in two, yet she thought her symptoms would just go away because she knew the cause. Was it ego or confidence? I admired her stability and strength, but I wasn’t imprudent enough to depend on them. I knew what this shit did to a person. I’d been like this before Damon peeled away and became his own man. Confident. Cocky. Foolish.

  “I’m still pissed at Ronin,” she said.

  “He told me what they were trying to do.”

  She faced forward, looking at me but… not quite. Her gaze was slightly averted.

  “Make warriors?” she said with a question at the end. “I didn’t know. I still don’t really know.”

  “I need to know how you’re feeling. I need to know if it’s hurting you.”

  “I feel fine,” she said. “A little run-down. But fine.”

  I believed her. I trusted that she knew her own mind because I wanted to. I needed to tell myself she hadn’t destroyed herself to save me.

  I got three fingers deep inside her with no resistance, and she exposed her throat again.

  I controlled her with one hand. I didn’t need pain or bonds. She was hovering on the edge, and with every move, I halved the distance between her and her orgasm.

  “When did you know it was the shots?”

  “After you were stop-lossed. Then I saw the videos of you in the room. Saw your files. Ronin said… oh God. You should stop if you want me to talk.”

  “Breathe, baby. Just breathe. Tell me what he said.”

  Her chest heaved. “If they could cure PTSD, they could make better doctors and soldiers, but you had a childhood with… you didn’t tell the whole story. And it was… so hard. The serum opened doors, and you split to… handle… the… detachment…”

  “It was happening before I went to Blackthorne.”

  Her voice came back in soft groans. “Fallujah. It was the synthetic amphetamine in Fallu…”

  I leaned over her as her mouth opened wide in a soundless cry and tears streamed down the side of her face.

  I stretched my body parallel to hers. She was past words, breasts rising and falling quickly, eyes wide, expression drained. Exactly where I wanted her.