Girl On the Edge

by CD Reiss

  I knew those orgasms.

  I loved them.

  I cherished every single one.

  When she cried over the one he took, she was my wife again, and that orgasm was mine.

  It was hers to give, but it was mine.

  What was stolen from me had been ripped from her first.

  I pulled her into my arms. My wife. She was vulnerable and weak. She was sensitive and broken. She had always been those things, but I hadn’t loved all of them. I hadn’t loved the vulnerability. I had only loved what was easy to love. Strength and tenacity. Bravery and power.

  Now she was sobbing against my chest. Not a young girl. Not a separate person I wanted to banish, but an indispensable part of the woman I loved.

  All of her.

  I loved all of her.

  “Respite…”

  “Call me Greysen. That’s my name.”

  “Are we at the end?”

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  RESPITE

  SAN DIEGO

  JULY - 1992

  The orgasm was still hot between my legs.

  The guy in the chambray shirt leaned heavy on my body with a look of surprised satisfaction. “You hot little slut.”

  Without thinking, I landed a hard clap on his face. “Get off me!”

  “That’s how you want it?” He slapped me.

  I touched my face in horror. That wasn’t how I wanted it. Not at all. But he thought so, and he pushed me down with one hand and reached for his dick with the other. In a moment of imbalance, I rolled and got out from under him, crawling away while he got on his feet.

  “No!” Swaying, blood dripping down my leg, I got my feet under me, feeling everything as if I’d been abandoned by the numbing of the eighth kamikaze.

  “Fuck you,” he growled. “You came. The least you can do is suck me off.”

  “If I suck your dick, I’m going to throw up.”

  That wasn’t an idle threat. My stomach was eager to expel what felt like half a gallon of vodka and triple sec. He must have known it. His tone changed back to the guy I’d kind of liked for a couple of hours.

  “Come on.” He came a step closer. I took half a step back. “Hand job. You already touched it. Don’t leave me hanging. It’s going to hurt like hell if you do.”

  “I’m sorry. I just… I’m not ready.”

  He held out a hand for me and saw the blood on his fingers. “Man, I busted your cherry?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Not a big deal.”

  “Fuck.” He was staring at his fingers.

  I walked toward him a little, thinking he felt guilt. I was foolish.

  “I bet you’re so tight.”

  Was that supposed to be a compliment? I couldn’t tell.

  “Listen,” he said as if he was the most reasonable guy on the planet, “it’s busted. You might as well. You came already.”

  His cajoling tone made me very, very angry. Rage filled me like a foul, sulfuric burn.

  “You mean like a hot little slut?”

  “That wasn’t an insult.”

  “Like fuck it wasn’t.” I stepped forward, and he took half a step back. “You put your fingers where I didn’t want them.”

  “You seemed to like it.” Defensive. Irritated.

  I should have been worried he’d come at me again, but his moment had passed. This was a guy who didn’t think of himself as a rapist even when he raped.

  “I. Said. No.”

  “But you came.” He put his dick back in his pants and zipped up. “If you don’t appreciate what I just did for you, then fuck you.”

  I hated my orgasm because it made me into a liar. It made me into a prude who—deep down—wanted it. It made me into a cocktease. It made him right.

  “I’m sorry.”

  What was I apologizing for?

  I’d said no, but I’d come right onto his hand.

  He offered a slice, and I’d taken the whole pie.

  I was too drunk, too young, too fragile to know I didn’t owe him an apology. But he was shrewd. If I was drunk, young, and fragile enough to apologize, maybe the night wasn’t over.

  “It’s all right,” he said, using his forgiveness to take a step closer. “Did it feel good?”

  He asked as if he was curious, not as if he wanted to weaponize the answer.

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. “Thank you.”

  He reached for me, and I let him move the fall of hair away from my eye. “You’re really pretty when you’re mad.”

  “Thanks. We should—”

  —go.

  I never got to finish the sentence. He was on me. Trying to push me down. He was going to take what he wanted no matter what I did.

  Once I was down, I was done. I knew that much.

  There wasn’t a middle ground. I had to resist all the way or not at all.

  My anger coalesced into a fine laser of energy, a force directed squarely at his chest, propelling me forward with all my weight. I pushed him not just away, but back so hard he stumbled with one leg crossing over the other, losing his balance until his calf hit the ledge and he disappeared over the edge.

  * * *

  In the middle space between the mind and the world outside it, I watched the shape of his body change as he fell over, the expression on his face. The second before I heard the hssp of a one-hundred-seventy-pound sack of bone and tissue hit the ground lasted a lifetime.

  In the hours/minutes/seconds between that sound and the sight of his body on the ground, bent like a swastika with his head in a pillow of black blood, I went cold. Everything emptied out of me. Every emotion, thought, personality trait spilled out as if a bucket had been shot full of holes.

  And while it all emptied out, another orgasm filled me. This one was real, given not taken, meant to heal instead of break.

  It would be my last.

  My last as me.

  The memory had been found. The dark place touched. I had no more secrets from myself.

  As the pleasure opened, I collapsed into the same shape I’d been in when I was released. I’d snap back into Greysen the way I had before but aware of how I was folded and how I fit.

  When I came, she came, and when I went back into my place, something else cracked inside her.

  Us.

  Me.

  The thing on the other side of the crack was cold, calculating, deadly.

  It took my place in the darkness. It was only a matter of time before it got out.

  And then, with nowhere else to go, I went home.

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  GREYSEN

  Pleasure held hands with pain as a soul-emptying orgasm ripped through me. I felt as if I didn’t have a body at all except for the place where his tongue met my clit and his hand twisted the soft skin of my thigh.

  When I opened my eyes to the ceiling of my studio in the Green Zone, I felt reborn. My husband’s gentle mouth left my body, and I loosened my grip on his hair.

  “Grey?” he said from below. “Baby?”

  “I remember.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Caden.” When I said his name, I felt that part of me that had cracked off and shaken loose. It rattled like a car part that would need replacing. It would drop out of the chassis in the driveway or going eighty on the freeway.

  He crawled up until his body was a bridge over mine, eyes flicking over my face as if gathering data. “Are you whole? That’s what I’m really asking. Is it over?”

  His eyes were the blue of the Iraqi sky, with all its promise of comfort and spectacle of power. I ran my fingers over his jaw and neck as if for the first time. I didn’t want to disappoint him, but I didn’t want to lie either. “No.”

  He bowed his head, cutting me off from him and his protection.

  “I’m so sorry for what I did,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “I killed him.”

  “It was self-defense.” He kissed my cheek as if that made it any better.
<
br />   “And then I sent my brother to clean off his fingers. That wasn’t self-defense. That was a crime.”

  “That was his choice.”

  “Caden, I wanted to turn myself in but…”

  “But Jake. You did the right thing. Your brother protected you, and you protected him.”

  He was right, but he was wrong. Where law met order, he was dead wrong, but where the burden was shared, he was right. God damn him, and God damn me. I didn’t know how to live with this.

  “It was wrong,” I said. “He was somebody’s son, and it was wrong.”

  “We can dissect this later,” he said, sitting up. “They’re coming for you soon.”

  “Who?” I got up on my elbows.

  “Blackthorne. They’re working on a treatment for this in Saudi.” He got up. When the mattress went flat, I felt the abandonment of his weight. “They want you to go.”

  “What treatment? What is it? Behavioral? Occupational? Clinical? What are we dealing with here?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know a damned thing. I didn’t know which questions to ask, and I still don’t. I don’t trust him or the company he works for, but there’s no one else and nothing else unless we’re going to recreate you killing someone and making a different decision. Or gaining control of it. Or whatever it’s going to take. I’m not willing to do that.”

  He looked lost. I didn’t often see him in the space between knowing who he was and making a decision, where the variables weren’t organized and the choices led to unknown ends. It was from this crack that Damon had gathered his traits.

  “What if I don’t want to go?”

  “Then you don’t go.”

  I got off the bed. “Then I’m not going. There. Done.” I stepped into my clothes. “We stay together and figure it out together.”

  “There’s a problem.”

  “We’ll figure it out.” I buttoned my pants as if I was punctuating a sentence.

  “I’m AWOL. We’re not going to be together much longer.”

  My loose, cracked-off part rattled. It spoke to me by freezing and hardening my decision into a solid mass, breaking it off until it wasn’t a decision anymore. It was an old thing that didn’t work. I was left with a cold calculation from a dangerous piece of myself...

  Let him go.

  … and a hot need directed outward, at him…

  He cannot go.

  “How long?” I asked, hoping to settle the tug-of-war inside me.

  “Too long. Way too long.”

  “Jesus Christ on a ladder, Caden. What were you thinking? Have you talked to anyone? Have they issued a warrant? Are the MPs coming?”

  He didn’t have to answer. All he had to do was look away, and I knew.

  Let him go.

  He cannot go.

  I cracked again. His forgiveness and unconditional love were the only things gluing me together. I cracked harder than he had after Damon slipped away.

  “Grey.” He was near me, on me, holding me up as my legs lost the ability to keep me standing. “Grey. It’s going to be all right.”

  Let him go.

  He cannot go.

  The decision wasn’t rhetorical. Coldly, I didn’t care if we separated, but if we separated, I was sure I’d die. If I chose, I’d be rent in two again. It took all my concentration to exist between the two choices, leaning in both directions and neither.

  Let him go.

  He cannot go.

  Once I chose, I’d split, and one side would show herself while the other got locked in a bag. I knew this like I knew I had two feet and ten fingers, because I was sane and that sane part of myself could see it all happening but was helpless to do anything about it.

  Let him go.

  He cannot go.

  “Baby, listen.” He was on his knees with me, crouched between the erect and the supine, keeping me from complete surrender. “I’ll go with you. Both of us to Saudi. They won’t separate us. Come back. Come back to me.”

  He turned my face to his. He was so strong. He’d decide. All I had to do was follow, and I’d hold together.

  “I can’t take this anymore,” I said. “I can’t live like this.”

  Far, far away, there was a knock on the door.

  “You can, and you will. Do you hear me?”

  The way he ignored the knocking and focused on me and me alone gave me the strength to hold the pieces of myself together. “I hear you.”

  He helped me up after another, more urgent, knock. “Are you ready?”

  “Stay with me.”

  “I’m with you, baby. I’m always with you.”

  He reached out to answer the door. I grabbed his arm.

  “What if it’s the MPs?”

  He paused, arm around me, close enough to feel his heart beat.

  “I love you,” he said, and while still holding me, he opened the door and sunlight flooded in.

  Chapter Ninety

  caden

  The Suburban’s windows were tinted so black they were nearly opaque, dimming the Middle Eastern morning into a dull twilight. Thank God, because a Humvee with MP spray-painted on the side passed in the opposite direction, engine roaring.

  Ronin wasn’t in the car. He was meeting us at the landing pad. The driver was a bald white guy built like a bookcase. In the passenger seat sat a Latina with her hair twisted into a biscuit at the base of her neck. They wore charcoal-colored Kevlar and had spiral wires looped from their back collars to buds tucked in their ears.

  “You all right back there?” the white guy asked, making eye contact in the rearview.

  “Yeah.” I had my arm around Greysen.

  She was looking straight ahead. The look wasn’t like Respite’s middle-distance stare, which was a passive gaze inward. This was a look of deep, scalpel-sharp concentration.

  “Should be eight minutes to the chopper,” the Latina said. “Hopefully you’ll be in the air before they catch up.”

  And if not?

  If we got held up at a checkpoint? Blackthorne might intervene for Greysen, but I’d be hauled off for a well-earned court-martial. Our separation would break my wife’s heart, and like a virus of despair, mine would follow.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered to her. “It’s all okay. I have this. I have your back.”

  We hit a pothole, and her head bounced a little. It could have been a nod, or I could have been losing her second by second.

  * * *

  In front of a six-story Blackthorne building not far from my wife’s old office, I held my hand out, wondering if I’d have to carry her, but she took it and slid down to the pavement.

  “Can you walk?” I asked quietly.

  “Hold my hand.”

  She didn’t have to ask. I had no intention of letting her go.

  A phalanx of Kevlar vests and curly earpieces surrounded us. Six of them, armed to the teeth, led us into the building, through the marble-and-brass lobby built to show the opulence of an oil-rich country. We were hustled into a plexiglass elevator. Even though they surrounded us so we couldn’t be seen from the street, Greysen squeezed my hand hard enough to hurt. Heights. Her least favorite thing. Maybe because of her fall from a diving platform, but maybe because of the boy at the Red Spot. Falling and dying had been a buried reality for her for a long time, manifesting as the most rational of irrational terrors.

  The walls of the top floor rattled, and when one of the guards slapped open the door to the roof, I heard the reason for the shakiness in the thup-thup-thup of a chopper.

  Greysen and I climbed together, side by side, my arm tightly around her to let her know I was there. I wasn’t leaving. I would hold her up until the world forced us apart. Until there were no more options. Until they took me away kicking and screaming. Until death did us part.

  Ronin stood by the open door of the helicopter with his head turned away from us. His profile was somehow so deliberate I had to question it for a moment, then when he waved without turning, I knew. He was tryin
g to not look at Greysen. He knew she made him change.

  The noise of whooping air beat my ears, but as we crossed the roof, the sound of sirens cut through. The ledge around the roof was low enough to let me recognize the Humvees by their speed and the MPs spray-painted on the roofs. They raced away from Greysen’s part of the Green Zone right toward us.

  We were going to make it, yet I was frozen in place.

  I knew how long it took a chopper to get off the ground. I recognized the building I was on. I knew its placement in the Zone. We were going to make it before the cars got to us. She and I would go to a Blackthorne site where a cure might wait. We’d be together.

  It was all going to work out.

  Ronin stood by the open door, hands in his pockets, gaze averted, wind whipping his hair into a nest.

  I’d be a fugitive, and my wife would be in an institution in Saudi Arabia.

  But we’d be together.

  Right?

  She started for the chopper, slipping from under my arm. I grabbed her hand, and she snapped out of the controlled mental effort she’d been making. She looked at me without asking the questions I saw all over her face.

  We’d pushed this as far as it was going to go. We’d arrived at a destination. The end of the line. We were at the boundary of our ability to control our fate.

  And yet, looking over the edge of the roof to the street below, I had a chance to push harder. I didn’t want to, but I had to.

  Greysen would have, and she deserved someone at least as resolute as she was.

  “Come on!” Ronin called, looking directly at us for the first time.

  My wife never accepted a boundary. She’d have pushed a mountain across the desert for me. She wouldn’t give up when she saw a wall. She’d break it down, dig under it, climb over it, and conquer whatever was on the other side.

  “I love you,” I said, the roar of the Humvees getting closer. “I’d marry you again.”

  “Okay?”

  The question at the end of a statement. Respite. The part of her personality that looked to the past for answers wanted to know why I had to tell her I’d marry her again.