by CD Reiss
But somehow, in the anchor of his arms, I didn’t want the pain. I didn’t think I could stand it. If I could hide away in the darkness, maybe I could avoid it.
I didn’t want to tell him. I wanted to convince him it didn’t matter.
“Once I’m finished, something else will come.”
His face was buried in my neck, but the weight of his body gave him away, getting heavier at the shoulders as if they drooped in despair. “I’ll be with you if that happens.”
He wasn’t lying, but there was a touch of doubt in his voice.
Two quick knocks at the door interrupted.
“Don’t get it,” I said, afraid of losing the protection of his body over mine.
“I have to.” He freed my wrist and got off me, exposing me to the curse of freedom. I could move. I could get up and move forward even as my mind craved backward.
Neither. I wanted nothing to do with it.
Caden leaned down to the floor to get something.
I put my hand between my legs, pressing against the damp fabric. Caden grabbed my wrist again. His belt was in his other hand.
I must have projected fear, because he said, “I’m not going to hurt you. Turn over.”
Another knock.
“Wait downstairs!” he called, then pushed me a little.
I followed, getting on my stomach. He straddled me and put my hands over my head, through the bars of the headboard. I really thought he was going to fuck me away from all this.
Instead he put my inner wrists together.
“Who is it?”
“Time,” he said, looping the belt around my wrists. “I’m buying you some time.”
“It’s tight.”
“I know.” He got up. “I won’t be long.”
I had to twist painfully to look at him as he put on his shirt.
“How long?”
“Before you can work your way out and get yourself off.” He flung the sheet over me so I was covered. “Which you will not do.” His voice was a little lower. A little clearer. Stating a fact, not a request. “Or I’m going to fuck your ass raw.”
He stood over me for a second before walking to the door, then he turned with his hand on the knob, checking his work.
He opened the door partway, slipped through, and left me alone in my darkness.
Chapter Eighty-Three
caden
The storm had died a quiet death sometime in the night. The air was clear and still, as if it wanted to make up for the wrongs of the previous two days.
Ronin waved from the courtyard below.
If I never saw that asshole again, it would be too soon, but this wasn’t about what I wanted. Nothing was anymore. I needed him and his sorry, unaccountable ass.
I took the stairs down to him. The only thing keeping Respite from turning back into Greysen too soon was a belt that wouldn’t hold for long, but I couldn’t invite Ronin in. I didn’t want him to see her. Not in her underwear or fully clothed. I didn’t want him saying a word or making a promise. Respite might fall for anything he said, and I couldn’t physically restrain her in front of him.
“Doctor.” Ronin offered his hand. I took it. “I hear you’re AWOL?”
“You heard right.”
“May I ask why?”
“No.”
Ronin huffed a laugh and took a pack of Turkish cigarettes out of his breast pocket. He offered me one, and I declined.
“So,” he said after lighting up. “You’re going to make me beg you for the reason you called me at three in the morning? Or can I assume you finally decided to really help her?”
“Can you reverse it? Or is this just a pitch to take her to Saudi?”
He took a long drag of his cigarette and let out a shit-stinking ribbon of smoke. “There was never a need to reverse it. The breathing controls it for most people. For cases like you, who never should have gotten it? You showed us the cure.”
“A recreation of trauma.”
“You were the most successful subject we had until a building fell on you.”
“What about Greysen? People who took too much, too fast, and broke.”
“We’re working on it. We’re this close.” He didn’t bother holding up two fingers close together. He flicked an ash instead.
I thought I knew what was best for her. I assumed her cure started with us, together. But for a single moment, I couldn’t tell if I was being irresponsible.
Was my first plan of action correct, or did I need to change it?
I couldn’t decide, and that alone was uncomfortable.
“You have two people watching us across the balcony.” I changed the subject, pointing up at the veranda across the yard. While Respite was in her reverie, I’d noticed the café table outside the apartment door was occupied by two people playing cards at all times of day.
“Just making sure everything’s all right,” he said.
“And I thought you were in love with me.”
“Only a little. You showed us the outer limits of what we could do.”
“And Greysen?”
“She’s showing us the limits of what we should do. Listen. I didn’t want this for her or anyone. I want to fix it. Bring her in—”
“No.” The decision came from my heart, unfiltered by doubt.
“—you report for duty—”
“Not happening.”
“What do you want then?”
“I want food. Light food. Fruit. Yogurt.”
“You’re holing up?”
“And empty that apartment. I don’t want to see another one of your goons up there.”
“You’re worried about us? There are going to be MPs with a battering ram at your door if you don’t report for duty. DeLeon isn’t covering for you much longer.”
He was right. The clock was ticking. I was going from AWOL to desertion.
“Get me the food while you get me a car and a helicopter out of here.”
He plucked the cigarette from his mouth mid-drag. “You are out of your fucking mind.”
His gaze shifted suddenly, moving over my shoulder. I followed it.
Greysen was coming down the stairs.
Ronin and I exchanged a look.
“Grey?” I said.
“Hey.” She had on sweatpants and a hoodie, and she was the sexiest woman alive. “Hi, Ronin.”
“Hi.” His voice cracked with youthful insecurity. He dropped his cigarette on the ground and stamped it out. “Hi, Grey.”
What the fuck? He seemed totally disarmed.
I put my arm around my wife. She jammed her hands in her pockets.
“What did you need?” I asked her.
“Just got lonely upstairs.”
The silence was so heavy and uncomfortable even the birds and crickets couldn’t make a sound.
“So,” Ronin finally said. “I’ll work on that thing we talked about?”
That thing?
He’d never looked so guileless. Something had happened to him in the flash of a second, because the Ronin I knew had guile. Plenty of it.
“The food,” I reminded him. “Light food.”
His eyes on my wife. I wanted to gouge them out and cut the optic nerves. I wanted to do violence I’d never wanted to do before. I’d known Ronin for four years and hadn’t seen him look at Greysen like that for three and a half. I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes, and he looked back at me.
“Was there something else?” he asked.
“You’ll figure it out.” I tightened my grip on Grey. I wasn’t leaving her for a second. Not for a court-martial or anything.
Ronin smiled ruefully. “Bye, Grey.”
“Bye, Ronin.”
He walked to the other side of the courtyard, hunched over like a kid.
“Go on upstairs,” I said. “I’ll be right up.”
“You all right?”
“Yeah.” I pecked her lips quickly. “Don’t touch anything you’re not supposed to, you hear?”
She didn’t answer. She just headed for the stairs. I ran to Ronin. He turned when he heard my footsteps behind him.
“What the fuck was that?” I asked.
“What are you talking about?”
We were the same height, so meeting his stare wasn’t a show of force. Not initially. Not until he looked away like a submissive puppy giving way to the pack alpha.
“I know you can fight,” I said. “I’m just a doctor. But I promise you… if you separate us, I will find a way to destroy you.”
“Yeah. Okay.” He tried to leave, but I grabbed his arm.
“Ronin.”
“What?”
I looked at his face critically. The light wasn’t great, but I could see everything I needed to. “You took the BiCam.”
He shrugged as if he didn’t want to admit guilt.
Ronin didn’t have guilt.
“Why?”
He jerked his arm out of my grip. “Just back off.”
“Seeing what it did to me wasn’t enough? What it’s doing to my wife?”
“He did it to prove it was safe.”
Talking about himself in the third person was jarring enough. The tone of petulant resentment overshadowed even that.
“That if all the prep hadn’t been done,” he continued, “the breathing, the graduated dosages… everything… it could still be effective. He thought Greysen must be hiding something or she had PTSD she wasn’t admitting. Or her dose was too big. So, he took it. He did a whole bunch of math, came up with just enough to crack him open, and took it because he was the only subject he trusted.”
I respected his ability to do to himself what he did to other people. I respected his thoroughness. At least, I respected the guy who gave himself the BiCam. This man standing in front of me could have been anyone.
“What’s your name?”
He smiled with that same rue. “My name is Abe Grey.”
For the sin of taking part of her name and making her a piece of his sickness, I almost punched him in the face right there, but he kept talking.
“She has a man’s name,” he said, looking at the top of the steps. “Isn’t that funny? Did you ever wonder why?”
“Her parents thought they were having a boy and kept the name.”
“She tried to tell him not to go to Abu Ghraib. Everything revolves around that moment, you know? When she said no to him and yes to you.”
“On the landing pad?” I asked. “In Balad?”
Years before, Greysen had been caught between my marriage proposal and Ronin’s offer to assist in Abu Ghraib. She’d chosen me, and after news of the torture in the prison had come out, she’d been horrified and relieved. I’d just been horrified. I knew she wouldn’t have had anything to do with it.
He nodded. “If she’d come… if she’d been there, she would have saved him. She would have raised alarms. It all hinged on her. But she wasn’t there, and he stayed in ABG. He tried to sort it out. Take the torture down a notch.”
I was torn between feeling sorry for the guy and wanting to surgically remove his nuts for shouldering my wife with his sanity.
I was the only one allowed to do that.
He looked up at her apartment on the other side of the courtyard, eyes wide with adolescent adoration. “She looks the same as when he met her in basic.”
They were about the same emotional age, these two, and that bothered me like a hot poker in the ass.
She was mine. At every stage of her life. Before she even knew she had a soul mate. Before she even desired one. Every facet of her personality and every spark of every neuron in her brain belonged to me. Birth to death.
Mine.
“Listen to me.” I snapped my fingers in front of his face. He looked away from the light in her window and back at me. “You get me what I asked for.”
“What did you ask for?”
What caused his flip? Not orgasms. Not the dark and the light. Was Ronin’s split triggered by the sight of my wife? I hoped not, because he wasn’t seeing her again. Not as Ronin or Abe Grey.
“Helicopter out. A Blackthorne bird. Don’t make a deal with the army. Call me on my cell when you have it. I’ll get you further instructions when I have them.”
He bit his lower lip.
“Do it,” I said. “Do it, or you’re never going to know how to get back to normal.”
Chapter Eighty-Four
RESPITE
I’d gotten out of the belt by twisting my hands. It had seemed impossible at first, but I stopped feeling the pain when the pressure to roll a memory got to be too much. The screen in my head was firing up. House lights down. Projector threaded. Curtain open.
The next part was going to hurt, and I didn’t want to hurt.
So I went outside to talk to Caden and Ronin.
I was Caden’s. I knew that. I knew we were married. I knew he was mine. But Ronin confused me. I’d met him in basic, and my memories started there before going backward. He was familiar in a way Caden wasn’t.
Dismissed from the courtyard, I paced the apartment, twisting one hand in the other, singing songs in my head and giving words to details so I didn’t have to think the things I didn’t want to think.
Ronin had taken my virginity, her virginity—our virginity—but not really.
That had happened before. But not really.
It had happened in the depth of drunkenness, when my brain had been too scrambled to make sense of anything. It had wired the memory all wrong, then blocked it off because it was fucked up. It was all so fucked up. It took the scramble and just said, “Forget it.”
And there, the crack appeared. Light shone through, blasting the screen white for a moment before it all started at the first moments of a very long memory.
* * *
SAN DIEGO
JULY - 1992
“I like the Plimsouls too,” he said, talking about the band, trying to be cool in front of the punk girl who was actually new wave.
I knew he had to have a name, but no matter how many times I replayed the scene, he never said it. Maybe our introduction had been the only utterance of it and it was before the roof. Maybe the music had been too loud to hear. In my mind, he was Bryan Adams. The furry blond hair he’d wrestled into some kind of conservative shape and the chambray shirt left my head playing “Summer of ‘69” on repeat.
“I meant the shoes,” I said, jerking my chin at his blaringly white leather high-tops. “Plimsolls go good with jeans. Even stonewashed.”
We were sitting on the edge of the Red Spot roof, legs dangling twenty feet in the air. The building had been a warehouse. Pretty tall for one story. He had little cuffs turned at the ends of his jeans. I hadn’t noticed that inside the club.
“I’ll try that.” He smiled. He had a nice smile for a regular sort of guy.
I knew the type. They came around because the Red Spot was the closest club, or the only one open, but they belonged at McSweeny’s or Bar None, where they played Huey Lewis and the News and served Heineken by the gallon.
“So, where’d you get that name?” he asked.
He’d asked my name, and I made something up because I didn’t want to be boring or explain mundane things.
“Trouble?” I said. At the bar when I’d made up that name, I’d picked a maraschino cherry out of the bartender’s tray, feeling quite satisfied with myself.
“Yeah. Where’s a girl get a name like that?”
“I was born trouble.”
* * *
“Grey,” a voice cut through the memories. A deep voice from another time. A voice that came after I did things. A voice from after that night. “What’s happening?”
“The cherry bursts on my tongue.”
“You were on the roof a minute ago.”
“It’s sweet, and the skin gives way under my teeth. I like how he watches me eat it. I feel sexy. Like a woman.”
His fingertips brushed my cheek to remove hair I hadn’t felt. “Where are you now?”
<
br /> “The roof of the Red Spot. He’s there.”
“Who?”
The projector stopped, and I snapped to attention.
Chapter Eighty-Five
CADEN
The morning after Ronin walked out of the courtyard as Abe Grey, a plan came together, but everything had to be right. A certain precision was required to get rid of this completely. When Damon retreated, I’d thought I was finished, but another Thing had come. A more dangerous, more destructive split. Only the perfect parallel situation had healed me, and I had to create that for her, or she might split again once Respite was done with her.
She was slouched in her chair, one foot braced on the table in front of her, stroking her lower lip even as she spoke, then suddenly, she snapped to attention, looking at me in a panic. “I can’t.”
I kneeled at her feet and cupped her face. She looked like a woman in unbearable pain.
“You can.”
“Make me her again.”
I couldn’t. The answers were close. Whatever they were, it felt as if the moments she was reliving were coming toward clarity. We didn’t have time to flip back to Greysen, who would resist everything about this process.
Four thirty in the morning. I was calculating my next move when there was a knock at the door. I was so wrapped up in our little world I thought it was Ronin with the food or news of a helicopter.
“Hang on!” I called, then stood before my wife. “Give me your hands.”
She gave them, trusting me like a foolish young girl. Like a prick, I took advantage of her trust and led her to the bed.
“Lie down.”
She did, but when she saw what I had in my hands, she started to get up. I lowered myself onto her, letting my weight hold her.
“No!”
“It’s for a minute.”
I’d cut the pull strings off the blinds and fashioned them into a knot I could fasten quickly. I got her arms around the leg of the bed and had her tied in one move.