by Nicole Snow
He floors it. Dad and I are laughing like angry, emotional lunatics as the car rockets away, doing a hard loop around the clinic before heading back to the road.
The last glimpse I ever catch of Evie is the car's tires kicking water in her face, ruining her outfit. She stands there the whole time in full meltdown, soaking wet and stamping her feet, cursing us for ruining her life.
When the sheer adrenaline wears off, we're back in the city, tooling along the streets. We're stopped at a long light when I finally grab his hand and ask.
“Dad? Is that really you? What set you off?”
He smiles softly. “I knew I was going to drop one of my girls off for some serious help the whole way here. Evie made the choice very, very easy. I couldn't have gone through with you, honey, however angry I am about Chris. I'm just sorry it took me this long to see it.”
I nod and swallow, pushing down the bitter lump in my throat so I don't start blubbering all over again.
“You made the right choice, in case you wondered.”
“Damn right I did,” he says, punching the gas hard when the light goes green. “I'll take the woman who's in love with an asshole, my own flesh and blood, any day over the asshole pretending to be in love with me.”
It's going to be a long road home, an enormous journey to fix everything else in my life. But for the first time in forever, there's finally hope, and I realize there's more than one person left on earth who loves me.
XIV: Hearts That Bleed Together (Chris)
Delia, Delia, Delia!
I'm running toward her on the warm California beach, and I'm going to push her completely into the sand. It's been too long. I need to grab her, savor her, taste her, fuck her.
I want to kiss this woman with my entire body, the full force of my soul, all I can do to stay sane while the fire in my blood hits crescendo.
Our lips are so damned close. I've got my fist in her hair and I jerk her head back as she moans, opening her lips, ready for me to claim everything I've been missing all these.
Her nipples are so fucking hard my dick throbs in my pants. I need to rip our clothes off now, throw her in the sand, and dig into her, even if it causes us to sink into the earth.
I'm about to bring my mouth down on hers when we lock eyes. She gazes into my eyes, opening her soft, perfect lips.
Fuck me, Chris. I love you so much.
That's what I'm ready to hear.
Nothing prepares me for the harsh, cold, foreign gibberish that comes out.
My eyes snap open. The door to my cell slides open, and three skinny Korean People's Army soldiers step inside, an overseer in a suit with a flag and a shiny Dear Leader pin fixed to his lapel.
I tense up. My hand twitches from the last week, when the fucks took a hammer to it, threatening to smash every damned bone in my body if I didn't tell them everything I knew about the specs on the stealth chopper wreckage they've got stowed in some hanger.
It's been weeks, maybe months. I lost track of time long ago, shortly after my hell began. The beard growing on my face is the only thing that tells me I've been here for a long fucking time.
“What the hell do you want?” I look up and spit on the floor after I say it, showing my disgust like a good SEAL should. “You come to fry me with those jumper cables like you did with the commander last week? Or are you going to play chiropractor on my joints again?”
The man in the suit gives me an icy stare and starts speaking in that slow, jerky English he always uses. Everything is way underfunded in this hellhole, including whatever they spend on training their interpreters.
“It is a good day for you, Cleveland. We have a deal. Maybe the sun will feel you shine on her face again.”
I clench my jaw, feeling the pain from months ago, when they cracked my goddamned bone. I'm not getting my hopes up. These bastards are awfully crafty at their psy-ops, and chances are this is one more of them, communicated in broken English.
“I don't buy it, Kim.”
It doesn't help that his English sucks. The way he talks about the sun makes me think of Delia, but then everything does these days.
It's her on my mind when they're holding my head under water, making me suck cold, acrid water into my lungs. I remember our kisses when they've got me on the table underneath a blinding, hot lamp, punching me in the face over and over and over.
It's her I feel when they give me the shock treatment, when my heart's racing a thousand miles per hour, ready to explode because the fuckers shoot me up with too much of that truth serum that never works.
She's my sanctuary. My love. My life.
She's the reason I'm going to survive this. I'll come home alive and breathing, instead of ground up ash in a tiny metal canister Uncle Sam will get in fifty years, after this sick regime collapses.
Delia, Delia, sweet fucking Delia. Forgive me.
I'm the one getting brutalized, but I can't stop thinking about her. Knowing she's in pain, worrying about me, is a thousand times worse than anything these motherfuckers can do to me.
The Korean smiles – it's the same faceless, plaster smile he always gives me. The same thing I've seen before he tells his goons to take pliers to my toenails, before he has them push me into that rotten pit full of rats and lice, before I spit in his miserable face when he's leering over me, wondering if I'm finally broken and ready to talk.
The man I call Kim paces the small cell while the stone-faced guards look on. He spins around when he's behind me, putting his face next to mine, so fast and sudden any other man would flinch.
I never do. He doesn't scare me, and it pisses him off. Our dealings are about more than about pulling information from an 'imperialist enemy of the state.'
It's become a war of egos, a war between men. He can't stand the fact that I'll never let him dominate.
“A dog until the end,” he snaps, motioning to the guards. “Get him on the plane.”
I wonder what vicious torture 'plane' is code for. I force the bastards to lift me off the bench and drag me outside my cell before I let my own two feet do some of the work.
They've made my life hell. I'm not making anything easy.
Soon, we're out the big steel door, the first time I've been outside since I got here. The wind is crisp, cool, savage like a North Korean winter should be. I don't see any snow, but maybe it's just a thaw.
I wonder if I've already missed Christmas. The thought makes me want to introduce these sick sonsofbitches to my face more than ever. I don't give a shit about repaying them for the torment – not that it wouldn't feel good to.
What really sends me into a blind rage is thinking about all the time they've stolen off my life, all the moments I would've had with Delia.
“Up! Up!” One guard bangs the door to a rickety military transport truck, and two more guards inside jerk me up. They sling me around and throw me on the ground, holding me down, next to the only other person I recognize who survived the chopper crash.
Commander Jones is inside, looking like he's lost fifty pounds. Fuck.
They've been starving me too, but nothing like my C.O. The raging, confident officer I knew on all my missions is gone. Some survival mechanism I don't understand has pulled him under, leaving me staring at this shattered robot, this man who only slurs his speech in faint whispers when they force him to.
I've overheard his interrogations. The walls are surprisingly thin and prone to echo at the prison camp, and the vents carry too.
The only time he makes noise is when he screams. It's usually so precise I can tell exactly what they're doing to him several walls away.
He doesn't even acknowledge me. I pinch my eyes shut and turn my head away, wondering if they're finally done with us. Is this the beginning of the end?
They've already violated the Geneva Convention and all the articles of war several times over. What's one more by taking us out to some rural pit and putting a bullet through our skulls?
Delia comes and goes in my imaginat
ion, ghostly and angelic. If I'm about to die, if they're about to make me break all the promises I made about coming back, then I'm going to go into the blackness thinking about her, her, and nothing else.
I don't think about Evie or Bruce or even my fucked up mission. I don't think about the dozens of women I picked up over the years, the ones who begged me for the honor of riding my cock.
I remember that night with Delia in Vegas, right before we came home, the way I jerked her body against mine.
Feral, hungry, insatiable. If there's a god, and he isn't ready to collect on my karma debt, then he'll bring me home.
He'll give me one more taste of her beautiful, perfect fucking lips before I die. He'll let me have her pussy, hard and aggressive. I'll fuck her like I own her, because I do, anchored in everything I want like nothing else, and always will.
I visualize it so damned hard I swear I hear her whimper in my ears.
Chris! The way she calls my name before she comes, sharp and staccato, is all I want to remember when I'm going to my grave.
Except I'd rather do it on my deathbed when I'm a dried up old fuck, instead of being shoved into a cold mountain pit with a hole in my head.
About twenty minutes later, the truck jerks to a stop, and the soldiers roll us out. The commander and I both topple onto the hard pavement.
There's a whirring noise. I look up, and I'm thrown into disbelief.
Christ, there really is a plane. It's an old transport flight, Chinese make and model by the looks of it.
We're going home. But the assholes aren't done with us yet.
There's a feeling like a heavy rock hitting my spine. They're screaming at us to get the fuck up and walk, jabbing their rifle barrels into our backs. I struggle to my feet while they force off the handcuffs, and help Jones up too.
We march toward the open stairway leading into the aircraft, and a few minutes later, we're airborne.
It's a short flight to some base in China. I can tell by the red flags with gold stars flapping overhead when I come out again that we're on neutral ground. There's a US military delegation on the other side with a Korean prisoner.
It's a goddamned exchange. They're giving us up for one of their own, probably some rat caught funneling nuclear secrets from the States, or working sabotage in South Korea.
Kim barks at the soldiers again, something in their language, and I feel the barrels in our spines. The commanding officer across the tarmac from the US frowns, but we all know it's par for the course with these insecure motherfuckers.
Let them rub our noses in it. I'm going home, and judging by the fact that this exchange is happening at all, World War Three hasn't broken out either.
I don't even care. I'm going home alive, I'm going to see Delia, and she's gonna be my wife.
That's all that matters.
A medic checks us over, and then some wiry guy who sounds like a military shrink. They pay a lot more attention to the commander because he's a fuck of a lot more screwed up than I am.
They tell us something about saving the rest for debriefing, and shuffle us onto the flight. The boys serve up some MREs, which tastes like five star barbecue after the slop the Norks fed us. I can barely eat through all the adrenaline, swirling with the urge to sleep.
I need to rest. I need to get ready for her.
I spend the long flight across the Pacific snoozing in short, sporadic fits. Every time, it's the same dream, the one that sustained me the entire time they tried to break me.
It's Delia. Sweet, naked, cock rocking Delia, everything I'll ever need, as soon as I get my lips on hers, where they belong.
I'm beat up, and I've probably melted twenty or thirty pounds away over the last few months. They've left me with a few traumas I'll only realize some dark nights, waking up in a cold sweat, ready to strangle the motherfuckers who treated me like an animal.
I don't give a fuck.
All I know for sure is I'm alive, and that means I'm going to fuck her harder than I've ever done it in my life. I'm going to marry her. I'm going to start working on our family the second she graduates and launches her career – hell, maybe before.
I wake up when the plane touches down at a base in Washington with a raging hard-on. It's only going to be a few more hours to San Francisco. One more briefing before I've got her in my arms, squeezing her tight, pulling the hot breath from her lungs 'til she gives me the sexy whine that's been keeping me alive.
I use the computer on the plane during the short flight to quickly scan the news. There's a bunch of shit about the mission going bad, a close-as-nails brush with war, and then the agreement we were just part of, ending the infamous Korean Crisis this year.
I look at the date. It's only early December, thank fuck.
There's still time to get my ring on her finger by Christmas. And once I finally collect the hazard pay I've been owed for months, I'm gonna get her a rock that'll make her rich daddy blush.
Shit, speaking of rich daddy...
Our last disastrous night with Evie hurling a grenade into our relationship hits me.
I know how to deal with my bitch mom. She won't last with Bruce, if she hasn't gotten herself the boot already. But I can't expect Delia's family to fragment over me.
I need to win him over, so he doesn't end up hating me and shaming his own daughter. I get on the machine when there's just a couple hours left to go on the flight, and begin typing out two emails.
One goes to Delia. When she gets it, and sees I'm coming back, she's going to lose her mind.
The other goes to Bruce. I tell him everything, how much this woman means to me, how I've already decided to claim her sweet ass forever, and I'd like him to accept it instead of eyeing me like I'm some kinda wolf who swept up his beautiful, blushing, perfect virgin daughter.
Truth be told, maybe I am. I'm going to take her like an animal the minute I get her alone, get my mouth on hers, push my fingers between her creamy thighs.
Fuck. I have to convince her daddy first. I have to convince him what I've already realized – this is about more than her body.
I love her with everything I've got. Before Evie crashed our party, I was dead set on showing the whole damned world exactly what we were, what we're destined to be.
Rotting in that Korean shithole took me off course for several months. Now, I'm back with a vengeance, and if I can get Bruce on board before I shove my ring on her finger, then there's nothing on earth that'll ever hold us down.
“Chris? Chris! Oh my God!” she runs toward me screaming.
I've just gotten off the plane, and I see her standing with the officers, right next to Commander Jones' wife and ten year old daughter.
My legs still hurt like hell from the cramped, hellish living conditions in that prison. I'm sure I'm deficient in about a dozen vitamins too. Damn if it stops me from running full steam ahead when I see her coming.
We collide so hard I have to grab her to keep from knocking her onto the pavement. My hands wrap around her back and pull her into me with the raw, vicious hunger I've had building all these months.
She's crying as my tongue finds hers and pumps in and out of her mouth. I've missed this so goddamned bad, and I can't stop myself from tasting her right here, in front of family, officers, and a few political dignitaries who've come to grandstand.
“How the hell do you do it?” I growl, when I finally let her off me for air. “You taste even better than I remember. Are you trying to make me rip off your clothes and fuck you right here?”
She wipes her face and breaks into a laugh. Then she rears back a little and swings her fist into my arm, giving me the playful punch I've been missing just as much as her laugh.
“Jerk. I see they haven't changed you one bit. I was worried about that...”
“You kidding? It takes more than a few months of beatings to break this dick. Especially when it's up close and personal with you.”
I can't resist. I pull her in for another long, wet round of kiss
ing. I pick her up and smash her tits on my chest, feeling my cock throb, hands on her ass while I spin her around.
Feeling her is like having some crazy drug injected into my system. My heart keeps roaring like a jet engine, and pure adrenaline shoots into my blood. Tasting her over and over and over is the only thing that stops me from doing everything I've threatened.
Guess the threat of the military psychologists hauling me off in a straitjacket helps too. They'd be on my ass checking for signs that I've totally cracked if I start fucking her out here.
“Come on. Let's get out of this place.” I take her hand and we walk out, though the airport and straight for her car.
I'm supposed to be back at base in the morning for a formal debriefing. Hell if I care about any of that just now.
I've got the woman who kept me alive through hell at my side. She's wearing a smile on her face, confirming all the love I stirred up before is still there.
No, fuck, it's grown. She can barely keep her eyes on the road. I reach over, tuck my hand on her thigh, and squeeze, all I can do to verify this isn't some fucked up fever dream I'm having in that dank, dark cell.
“You finished your thesis, right? Don't tell me all this bullshit delayed your graduation?”
“I'm getting my grades back next week. I know the professor loved it. I couldn't have done it without you, Chris. I put a lot of you into my SEAL psychology, and probably some of me too.”
“Just some? You didn't write it from the perspective of the chick who's fallen head over heels for her cocky SEAL stepbrother?” I grin, and goddamn it feels good.
She sticks her tongue out. “It was a research paper. Maybe there's a dash of passion in there somewhere.”
“Yeah, whatever, babe. I'm gonna read it.”
She instantly flushes and jerks the steering wheel. “No way! That's for my prof's eyes only, and the university's archives.”