He was vibrating beneath her hands. She kept her voice quiet and low, exactly as if speaking to a distressed animal. “It’s okay, Mike.”
He shook his head sharply. “No, it’s not okay. Not even close to being okay.” He drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “So . . . I’d go off with the woman, mostly to her house because I didn’t like anyone in my place. And we’d fuck. And fuck and fuck. I could keep it up for as long as I had to. Once, I heard we lost two guys I’d trained with. IED in Iraq. Went out, found myself three women and fucked for twenty-four hours straight. I was like in a daze. I’d had too much booze, yeah, but it wasn’t that. It was like—like if I drank enough, if I fucked hard enough, long enough, I wouldn’t—”
His throat clicked again. His entire body now was one huge stress signal. His eyes were red, breath wheezed in and out of that barrel chest.
“Die,” Chloe said, and he jerked.
“What?”
“If you fucked hard enough, long enough, you wouldn’t die.”
It was the classic addiction story. God knows, she’d heard enough of them when volunteering on the hotline and at the shelter in London. The means changed but the mechanism never did. Drugs, alcohol, sex. Those were the classics but there were others, too. Some had foot fetishes, some had to spend money until they were bankrupt and still kept on, some cut themselves . . . she’d seen it all and she’d heard it all.
The story was always the same, when you dug down deeply enough. Addictions were like a wall between you and the void. Until you discovered that the addiction was the void.
Chloe’s body couldn’t handle alcohol well. Otherwise, she wondered whether she would have become an alcoholic, simply to fill the massive emptiness at the heart of her life.
Mike’s case was so clear. He’d seen his family being slaughtered when he was just a young boy. They were dead and he was alive. He did what he could to keep from remembering that, every second of every day.
“No, of course not. That’s not it at all.” Agitated, Mike threw back the covers and stood up. Every muscle was tense. His veins stood out, as if his body was even now pumping blood to the extremities, readying himself for battle. “I fucked and drank so I wouldn’t die?” He made a sound of disgust deep in his throat. “That’s crazy. I’m not crazy.” He pointed a trembling finger at her, eyes wild. “I’m not crazy!”
“No, of course you’re not.” Chloe pulled her legs up to her chest and put her arms around her knees. She understood the reaction. She wasn’t afraid of Mike, not in any way, but instinctively, her body was curling itself up in the presence of a strong, agitated male. “I didn’t say that. You did.”
Mike paced the room, long, fast strides. He pushed his hands through his hair, which was already mussed from their lovemaking. It stuck up in sweaty spikes. He was even more aroused than before. It seemed his entire body was in agitated movement except for his penis, lying like a rock against his flat abdomen.
He was buzzing, agitation almost visible on his skin.
Chloe watched him pace back and forth, wishing she could help, knowing that she couldn’t. He had to work this out for himself. Everyone did. It was the one big lesson she’d taken away from her work in crisis centers and from her own therapy. You could be helped, but the real work—well, you had to do that yourself.
Mike was resisting.
“I wasn’t afraid I was going to die if I didn’t fuck. That’s crazy talk. But there was something there, something really dark and uncontrollable. This . . . thing would build up in me and I’d just explode if I couldn’t get it out. Except in battle. Dodging bullets took me right out of myself. In combat, I’m the Man. Cool as ice. Fucking Sniper-Man, with nerves of steel. I once hunkered down in a hide in my ghillie suit for three days to get a shot. I knew I’d have a window of about a minute in those three days, so I didn’t eat, drank very little, always kept on eye on the scope, and didn’t sleep. Didn’t budge an inch. My heart rate slowed down. Didn’t give my dick a thought. Came back Stateside and it went up and stayed up.”
“I’m really sorry about your family, Mike,” she said quietly, and he stopped with a jolt and swayed, as if shot in the heart.
Had she overstepped the bounds? For a second, she wondered. He looked like a wild man, with his hair sticking out all around his head, red eyes holding back tears, humming with tension.
“You know?” His voice was rough, hoarse.
She nodded.
Mike was frozen for a minute, two. Then he scrubbed his face briskly, as if just waking up. When he lifted his hands from his face, his cheeks were wet with tears.
“Oh God.” He sat down abruptly on the side of the bed next to her. The mattress dipped with his weight. He pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I see it. Almost every night. I see it, over and over again. Sometimes I just hate the thought of trying to sleep, because then I’ll see it in my nightmares, you know?”
“Yes,” Chloe whispered. “I know.” Her hand lingered over his naked shoulder, then landed, lightly. She could feel him quivering under her hand, as if his very flesh couldn’t stand to contain his thoughts. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Mike stared at the ground for so long she decided to get up, give him some space. His hand caught hers. “Don’t go.”
She settled back down, waited.
They sat there like that, Mike staring at the ground, for almost an hour. Chloe didn’t mind. She was used to waiting. Sometimes it seemed that her entire life had been waiting. And, in a way, it had. She’d been waiting for this.
She could wait for as long as it took.
Finally, the tension left his body in an enormous sigh. “I never talk about it. Never. Sam and Harry just know the bare bones. When we first got together at Old Man Hughes’, I was a wild child. I’d been kicked out of four foster homes. I couldn’t talk about it at all. Just didn’t have the words. And even if I wanted to, Sam and Harry wouldn’t have understood, not really. Sam’s mom threw him away in a Dumpster when he was just a baby. Harry’s mom? She was an addict with a thing for druggie scumbags.”
He stopped suddenly, looking at her. Realizing. “Oh God, it was your mom, too, honey. I’m so sorry.”
Chloe nodded. However unpalatable, it was the truth. What she knew of her biological mother was that she was a druggie with a thing for other druggies. Preferably violent ones.
“What could I say to them?” Mike shuddered. “The thing was, both of them grew up in squalor, completely unloved. How could I talk about my family? The family I’d lost? My dad and my mom, they were . . . they were the greatest. Just great parents. I didn’t know that as a kid, of course. What do kids know? They think their world is the only world there is. So in my world, every husband loved his wife and every wife loved her husband. And they both loved their kids. Dad was an engineer with a company that designed avionics for Boeing. Mom taught high school. There were five of us. I had two brothers, both older than I was. Eddie and Jeff. Twelve and fourteen. I was the youngest, the runt. I was small for my age. Got teased a lot, but no one outside the family ever messed with me because Eddie and Jeff had my back, always. If I ever got picked on, Eddie and Jeff made sure it never happened again. The Keillors. Don’t mess with them because you’re gonna regret it.” He gave a half laugh and shook his head. “I thought we were just this average family but we weren’t. We were something rare and special. Five people who loved one another. That doesn’t often happen in this world.”
It didn’t. Chloe tried to imagine it, imagine being in the loving embrace of a tight-knit family. She’d had a taste of it, albeit on the margins, these past six months and it was wonderful. But to have had this as a child, to know nothing else, and then have it taken away. That would mess with anyone’s head.
Mike went back to staring at the ground.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?”
Her words seemed to shake him out of a reverie. He looked at her, just a quick sideways flash, like a blue bolt of lightning. Chloe kept her f
ace blank, as she knew how to do. But it was hard not to react to the raw pain on his face.
“Okay. I’ll tell you. I’ve never really told anyone the whole story.” He blew out a shaky breath, stared at his knees. “March twelfth. I was ten. It’s Saturday, and we’re headed for the beach. Dad stops at a gas station. You know one of those places with a little mart attached?”
She nodded, though he wasn’t looking at her.
“Mom forgot the volleyball at home. It was old anyway, she said. Might as well buy a new one. So we went in, bought the volleyball, bought a cheap beach Ping-Pong set and five Cokes. I wanted some Snickers bars but mom drew the line at that. She’d packed sandwiches and didn’t like us eating junk food. I looked up at Eddie and Jeff, expecting them to make signs that they’d buy them without Mom knowing and sneak them to me afterwards. But nada. No Snickers bar for me. I threw a fit and stomped off while she was paying. I was the baby of the family and pretty spoiled. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I was thinking of shoplifting the Snickers, putting them in the pocket of my cutoffs, because I was a budding juvie. Whatever. I don’t remember. Mom and Dad and my brothers were waiting for me. Mom called out, said it was time to go. I was at the other end of the store, eyeing the Snickers, when they—they came in.”
His family’s murderers. Chloe gripped his shoulder.
“There were two of them. I had a good view between the aisles. I stared because I’d never seen anyone like them before. Two guys, one tall, one short, both rail-thin. Dreadlocks, pants down to their crotches, unlaced sneakers. Back then, it was a new look, this was before it went mainstream and every kid tries to look like a convict. They were like aliens to me, red-faced, snot running from their noses. They giggled crazily, barely made sense when they talked. Eyes rolling around in their heads like ponies’ eyes. Stoked to the gills. Couple of years ago, when I was still in SWAT, I accessed the files of the case. Perps were higher than a kite on coke. And both had BALs of more than 1.02 percent. It is entirely possible they had no idea what they were doing, operating purely on animal instinct.”
He sat there on the side of the bed, knees open, hands clasped between them, head hung low. Watching the tragic past unfold.
“I read the transcript of the trial. One of the lawyers advanced the argument that Scumbag One was so mentally impaired by the drugs and alcohol he had no concept of what he was doing and was only following what Scumbag Two told him to do.”
“Did it fly?” Chloe’s heart already ached.
“No, thank God. Judge had a lot of sense. Put them away for forty years. Threw the book at them.”
“Good,” she said, and he gave a faint smile. “So these two delinquents walk into the mart. And?”
“And demand that the cashier open up the cash register. I figured this out later. Personally, I wrote them off as weirdos and went back to staring at the candy counter at the other end of the shop.” His voice was dark, bitter. He spat the words out one by one as if they were made of poison. “My family was under threat and I was contemplating shoplifting two Snickers bars.”
Chloe took a chance and rubbed between his shoulder blades. The tension felt bone-deep. It came off him in waves. “You were a young boy,” she said gently. “And it wasn’t your world.”
Mike shook his head as if ridding it of dark thoughts. “The cashier was no dope. He emptied the register. There was $137.32. The price of my family. Not even a hundred forty bucks. About twenty-eight bucks a head for their lives, including the cashier. When they saw the amount, the scumbags went wild, started screaming. The tall one pulled out a pistol. The guy behind the cash register—a kid, really, nineteen years old. He looked twelve on the tape. This kid at the register is shaking, pulls out what’s in his pockets. Not even ten bucks. Both scumbags scream even harder. By this time I figure something is up and I walk up the aisle toward where all the commotion is. My dad sees me and shakes his head, motions me away. The fuckhead—sorry.” This with a narrow-eyed glance at her.
Chloe nodded. Fuckhead sounded about right.
“Scumbag with the gun is waving it in the air, partially covering my family. Dad’s in front, arms out, Mom and Eddie and Jeff behind him.”
Mike stopped, breathing heavily. Chloe continued to rest her hand against the deep, solid dip between his shoulder blades and waited.
“At the time it seemed to stretch out forever, everything in slow motion, but the clock on the security camera says the whole thing clocked in at two minutes forty seconds.”
Two minutes forty seconds that changed his world forever. Mike didn’t have to say it.
“The clerk reached under the counter to push the police call button and the scumbag with the gun—who was probably seeing double at the time—just opened fire. Blew his head apart. Again, my dad motioned me to stay put. It wasn’t necessary. I couldn’t have moved an inch. I was in a state of shock. Dad was trying to edge toward the door when the guy turned and started shooting. It was a semiautomatic and I remember watching the brass casings twirl in the light. He just . . . opened fire. Gunned them down like animals. They were left in a heap, Dad on top, arms still outstretched, still trying to protect them. The other scumbag slipped on the blood and fell, laughing like a loon.”
Chloe could see it so clearly in her mind’s eye—the felled family, the blood, the crazed gunman, the horrified little boy.
“I was really good at baseball, really good. Until this—this happened, I wanted to be a professional ballplayer when I grew up. I had a good, strong pitching hand. I grabbed cans of fruit salad and tomato sauce and threw them as hard as I could at the gunman first, then the guy howling with laughter on the floor. Nailed the shooter on the first throw, knocked him unconscious, nailed the other guy, too. I didn’t stop at one, I hurled can after can at them, even when they were on the ground, head shots every one. Their heads were bloody, I broke their jawbones, cheekbones. I was screaming, hysterical. I only stopped when this big guy in a blue uniform gently took my arms and stopped me.”
“The police,” Chloe said.
He gave a short sharp nod. “Cops, yeah. I really don’t remember the next part at all. They looked for relatives, but both my parents were only children, all four grandparents were dead. I was assigned a social worker who ‘managed’ my family’s estate and ended up destroying it. I was put into a series of foster homes. I quickly got a rep as a troublemaker. Fought like hell at every one. Went down the list of acceptable homes until I landed on the last of the list, the only home that would accept me, as a ‘problem’ child, because the state paid more. The household was run by a sadistic monster named Hughes. But Sam and Harry were there and we had one another’s back. Joined the Marines as soon as it was legally possible.”
“I’m so sorry, Mike,” Chloe said quietly. The words meant nothing but they came from the bottom of her heart. Because he’d just told the story of a little boy whose world was shattered on a single afternoon.
“It didn’t have to happen,” he said hoarsely.
“What?”
“Didn’t have to happen. None of it. We could have been on our way to the beach when those scumbags came into the mart if I hadn’t been a spoiled brat. My whole family was gunned down like dogs because I wanted a fucking—” He stopped talking and the clicks came again as his throat muscles worked. “Snickers bar. My mother and my father and my two brothers, dead because of me.”
Chloe sucked in a breath, appalled.
“Oh no, Mike.” She leaned forward to see his face, to try to look into his eyes. He wouldn’t lift his head. She could see the tendons in his neck stand out, the grooves in his cheeks deep and drawn. “It wasn’t your fault! Nothing in any of it was your fault. You can’t possibly think that you could have stopped two drug addicts, one of whom was armed.”
“We would have been out of there, on the road, if it wasn’t for me.”
“That’s magical thinking. And you yourself said that everything happened very fast. Probably all five of you woul
d have still been there and you would be dead, too.”
He shuddered under her hand and Chloe had a startling flash of insight. He wished he’d died, too, together with his family. The fact that he’d survived wasn’t a consolation, not for him. It was a curse. He still grieved for his lost family, still felt guilty. He had an iron mantle of guilt around his shoulders, weighing him down every minute of every day.
Chloe understood him profoundly. All through her childhood and until very recently, she blamed herself because her parents couldn’t—wouldn’t love her. They had never tried to express even a false kind of affection. And she’d blamed herself, every day. Wondered, every day, what she’d done to alienate them. Tried to be quiet and obedient on the rare occasions when her mother visited. She saw her father about once a year, and each year she did her very best to win him over, to have him show some emotion toward her. It never worked. Nothing she did worked. Ever.
How she’d scout her mother’s face for some sign of . . . something. Something she could do to stir some warm feelings, something she could say, something she could be. It was this huge puzzle she never managed to figure out, and she kept circling back to the only thing that made sense. There was a fatal flaw that made her unlovable. There was something deeply wrong with her. It was all her fault.
Chloe understood down to her bones the acid drip of guilt dribbling like a corrosive in the bloodstream. Understood a child bearing a load too great for small, young shoulders.
Her heart ached for Mike. For having known a family’s love and having lost it, and on top of that bearing this terrible burden of guilt almost all his life.
Those massive shoulders were shaking, his head was turned away, but she could still see the red eyes, damp cheeks.
A wave of tenderness rose up in her, so vast she was surprised the earth didn’t shake with it.
“Mike,” she whispered, pushing at his shoulders to turn him around. He was so massively strong. She couldn’t force him to turn to her, but he did. Her heart cracked open a little at the sight of his face, strength warring with suffering, and she leaned forward, pressing her cheek to his. The tears were cool but the skin underneath was burning hot. “Lay your burden down, darling. You’ve carried it for so long. Let it go. It’s not yours to carry.”
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