I grunted in amusement, in irritation.
“I didn’t leave, I was kicked out. The technical term is ‘administrative discharge’.”
She blinked at me, confusion in her beautiful eyes.
“But I don’t understand. Why would they do that? Your bomb disposal training took years and, well, you’re a hero!”
“I don’t know about that…”
“James, you are! Zada told me that you’re the hero of Times Square! You’re famous! Sort of! I mean, what you did is famous!”
I sighed. Thanks, Zada.
“Why do you hide it?”
I frowned.
“Because it was a shit day. Because Amira was…” I took a calming breath. “Because Clay lost his leg. I wasn’t fast enough. I didn’t do enough.”
“Surely, you don’t think that? I know Clay doesn’t, or Zada. The world thinks you’re a hero.”
“Then the world’s a sick and fucked up place.”
She was silent, then reached out to touch my arm.
“I’m sorry.”
I shrugged it off, but the truth hurt like a motherfucker.
“But I still don’t understand,” she said, “why the Army, um, kicked you out?”
“I went absent without leave. They don’t like people who do that.”
“Oh. So, why did you?”
I grimaced, wishing she’d drop the subject.
“I got a call from Amira’s parents. They were worried about her. They’d heard that the hospital she worked in had been bombed and she wasn’t answering her phone. They asked me to go and find her. In Syria.”
“Oh my God, I had no idea! But couldn’t you have asked for a few days off? A family crisis?”
I smiled at her naivety.
“I don’t have any family, remember? Besides, there’s no legal way to travel to Syria unless you have the correct visa; and it takes time and connections to organize that shit, and I needed to leave immediately. A … friend got me entry into the country, but it was all under the radar. The fewer people who knew, the better.”
“Zada told me that her sister was working in Raqqa,” she breathed, her voice a whisper. “Even I’ve heard about all the terrible things that were happening there. I didn’t know that you’d gone AWOL.”
“Yeah, I did, but by then it was too late anyway. She was already dying from her injuries.”
“James…”
We were silent for several minutes.
“The Army kicked you out for that?”
And they couldn’t do it fast enough.
“Like I said, it was called administrative discharge. I was fucked up in the head and no one wanted to work with me. I did three months in Colchester Military Corrective Training Centre—military prison.”
“I can’t believe they treated you like that!” she said, her voice angry. “That’s appalling! You were probably suffering from PTSD.”
No ‘probably’ about it.
“After all your years of service! All the amazing things you’ve done, and they couldn’t be bothered to help you when you needed it most. It’s just so wrong! Ooh, it makes me want to write to the Ministry of Defence. No! To the Prime Minister! If she knew the circumstances…”
“No, Bel.”
“But you can’t just leave it like that!”
“It’s done. Forget about it.”
“I’ll never forget!”
“Stop trying to save me, Bel,” I said, my voice low with warning.
She grumbled quietly and it made me smile. But I was telling her the truth—she couldn’t save me.
You can only save yourself.
If you want to.
“What about friends?” she asked cautiously. “Don’t you have any friends? Maybe Army friends?”
I shook my head.
“I cut myself off from everyone after I got out of Colchester. I didn’t even return Clay’s messages.”
“But he’s still your friend now?”
I smiled, thinking of Clay’s refusal to let me disappear.
“Yeah, but he was there when it all went down. He knew Amira. And by then he was with Zada, so…” I shook my head. “I just wanted to forget everything. I was planning to drink myself to death, if I didn’t have the balls to do it quicker.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” she said, gently stroking her fingers along my cheekbone.
I needed to change the subject.
“What about you, Lady Arabella? What’s your story?”
She gave a sad laugh.
“Oh, nothing special. Poor little rich girl who didn’t get enough attention, so became more and more outrageous hoping someone would notice her,” she said bitterly. “God, that sounds pathetic! It wasn’t all bad.”
But as I began to understand her a little better, I wondered if maybe she could understand me, too? We all have scars: some we can see, some we can’t.
“My life is frivolous and pointless. I know that,” she continued. “Nothing is wanted from me, nothing expected … except to marry well. I envy you in some ways. I mean not … what happened to you, obviously. God, I’m saying this all wrong, but you get to travel, you get to make a difference.”
Don’t envy me. It’s lonely.
But I didn’t say that. Instead, I asked something completely different. I wanted to see her smile.
“What were the good parts, good memories from your childhood? There must have been some.” I hoped.
“Good memories?” She sounded surprised. “Yes, I suppose so. I mean, growing up in a castle wasn’t bad. It was lonely, but I had a good imagination and 124 rooms to play in, as well as orchards and stables. Some of the staff were kind to me. One of the grooms used to let me help him with the horses, but then Daddy sold them.”
“Christ, 124 rooms! I was brought up in a one-bedroom Council flat, and then shared a room with three other kids in care until I joined the Army.”
“Yeah,” she chuckled sadly, flattening the joy in her eyes. “Like I said—poor little rich girl. Thoreau wrote that most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
I’d never heard of this Thoreau bloke but he could be on to something … although he sounded like a miserable bastard.
“What happened to your mum?”
Bel sighed.
“She died ten months after I was born. I like to think that it would have been better if she’d lived, but I really don’t know. She couldn’t have been all that wonderful if she’d agreed to marry Dad.”
“He sounds like a bit of a bastard.”
“Oh, he definitely is! But he’s also brilliant in business, completely ruthless, of course. I’ve been quite useful being his escort to balls and events in the last eight or nine years. He says it keeps the gold-diggers away.”
“Nice,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm.
“Hardly,” she laughed.
“Why did he bring you to Nagorno?”
“Oh,” she grimaced. “That’s rather embarrassing. It was either go with him or go back to rehab. Well, sending me to Nagorno was definitely cheaper than rehab, and I’d been twice anyway and it hadn’t taken.” She shrugged. “Why be sober when life is so shit?” She paused. “I probably shouldn’t say that to you.”
“You’re not saying anything I haven’t said to myself a thousand times.”
“Yes, well, you had good reason. You lost your fiancée.”
I stilled.
“Amira wasn’t my fiancée.”
Bel turned her head to look at me.
“But I thought … you told me that you’d asked her to marry you?”
“I did ask her, but she said no. She chose to go to Syria to work as an ER nurse instead, at the hospital where her brother died. She wanted to do good, that’s what she said. Instead, she died there.”
“James! Oh my God!”
I heard her soft sobs and felt like an utter shit.
“Don’t cry for me, Bel. It’s the way it is.”
And if Amira had lived, we
might have had a chance, but there was no guarantee.
That was the truth that I hid from myself. I’d loved Amira with everything in me, and I think she cared about me, too. But whether we could have created a life together?
I’d never know.
“I’m so sorry,” whispered Bel, wiping her eyes.
There was nothing else to say, so we lay in silence for several minutes, but I didn’t think either of us had any chance of sleeping.
I wasn’t sure why I’d trusted Bel to tell her that. Zada and Clay had always assumed that there’d been something more between me and Amira, and I’d been too messed up to say anything different. By the time I was in Nagorno, it was too late and there was no point.
As a rule, I didn’t trust people. They all left sooner or later: family, friends, lovers. They all left.
Amira. I’d carried the weight of her loss for so long, I didn’t know I’d been staggering from the burden. Maybe I’ve been holding on too tight?
The moment I thought that, I felt a looseness, a lightness, a breath of possibilities.
Finally, Bel spoke again.
“Thank you for trusting me enough to tell me. I won’t say anything, I wouldn’t dream of it. But I do appreciate you telling me.” She took a deep breath. “You don’t need anyone’s permission to smile again, James.”
And she placed a soft kiss on my lips before lying back on her pillow, her words spinning around inside my brain.
“Clay and Zada are great, aren’t they?” she said, longing in her voice. “What they have together—I get so jealous. But I hope they get their baby. They’d be great parents, don’t you think?”
You can’t miss what you’ve never had. Yeah, and I was calling bullshit on that one. Because when I looked at Bel, I felt the pull of an intense longing that scared the fuck out of me.
“I wouldn’t know what great parents look like.”
“Me neither, but I think they’d be great.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
And it occurred to me that if Clay was half as good a father as he was a friend, their kid would be alright.
He was the one person who hadn’t left me, even when I’d tried to shake him off. Him and Smith.
Bel squirmed about a bit, brushing her peachy arse against my crotch.
I was hard in seconds, but even I knew that sex wasn’t what she needed right now. I did have some morals. Well, maybe one.
“Why did you let your old man bring you to Nagorno?” I asked, genuinely curious and needing a distraction. “You could have said no.”
“Yikes! No one says no to my father,” she said, shuddering.
“Did you try?”
“Eh, not really. He took all my credit cards, cut off my allowance, and said I’d shamed the family. Besides, he won’t let me work and I’m not good at anything…”
My eyebrows shot up.
“He won’t let you work?”
“I know, it’s all so Victorian. He’s just waiting to marry me off to someone who can advance his business affairs. A marriage of convenience.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Only half joking. But he keeps me totally reliant on him, so sometimes I feel like I have no choice. You haven’t met my father—he’s not someone you stand up to.”
“Jesus, Bel! He doesn’t own you! And what do you mean you’re not good at anything? Clay has been singing your praises since the day you arrived.”
“Aw, really? Well, Clay’s a sweetie.”
“Clay’s a former Marine—he doesn’t put up with time-wasters or tossers.”
“Oh, well,” she paused. “Thank you.”
A deep dislike of the over-privileged twat who called himself Bel’s father began to build inside me. She was bright and beautiful and kind, and her self-esteem was in the toilet.
“You’re worth a lot more than you give yourself credit for,” I said gruffly with certainty in my voice.
I felt her smile against my chest.
“This is nice, us talking. I mean, I really enjoyed the sex, too—I know every part of your body, your tattoos, that cute little mole on your neck, your beautiful dick, even your scars, but this—talking—it’s almost more intimate. Does that make sense?”
“I can’t believe you just called my junk beautiful! Magnificent, enormous, yeah, but beautiful?”
She laughed happily, and that sound—that was beautiful.
“Well, you are magnificent and enormous, but also beautiful. And not just your dick. It’s ridiculous how long your eyelashes are, and you have such pretty blue eyes. Your body should be on the cover of Men’s Fitness and your face—my God! You could be an Armani model!” She laughed lightly. “You’re totally yummy—I’m sure all the girls tell you that.”
“Nah, there aren’t any.”
She seemed surprised.
“None? No one at all?”
I scratched my chin, a little uncomfortable.
“There was one hookup when I was drunk. I probably didn’t even manage to get it up. Some tart who picked me up at the pub.”
I didn’t tell her I’d ended up with crabs from that brief encounter. And I was taking that truth to the grave.
She chewed her lip again.
“So, you’ve only … once … since, since you left the Army?”
“Yep. Until you.”
“Oh!”
Her voice was surprised, shocked even, but then she cuddled up against me.
“That’s sweet,” she said. “I think you must have been making up for lost time! Anyway, tell me about your first girlfriend, your first time—when you lost your virginity.”
“What? Why?”
“Go on, please! I’m interested.”
Bloody hell! The things this woman asked!
“Fine, I was 15, her name was Rose Hogg and she was 16½…”
“Ah, the experienced older woman.”
“Yeah, something like that. It lasted about 20 seconds and she never spoke to me again.”
“Ooh, harsh.”
“Can’t blame her—totally shit for her. What about you? There must have been a load of blokes drooling over you.”
She gave a lazy smile.
“Yes, lots of ‘blokes’. But none were memorable—until now.”
We talked the rest of the night about everything and nothing. I told her about life as a kid in care, the loneliness, the fear, the camaraderie with the other kids, the bullies; the nice carers, the shitty carers, and the carers that you avoided being left alone with. I told her about joining the Army, and the struggle and years of studying to become an ATO. I told her about some of the missions I’d been on, and when I told her about the friends who’d died, the on-going nightmares that my hands had been blown off, she held me and kissed my fingers one by one.
In turn, she told me about the emptiness of her life growing up, despite the money and houses, the skiing holidays to Klosters and Davos, the summer trips to the Seychelles, places I hadn’t heard of when I was a kid.
She came from money and I came from the gutter, but that emptiness we’d both experienced, it meant we had a lot in common.
We talked about everything except Yad’s attack.
If talking was a distraction from her nightmares, then I’d talk until my tongue fell out.
I couldn’t fool myself any longer. I cared about Bel. And that was a major fucking problem.
Finally, as the darkness began to fade and the first grey light of dawn appeared in the east, we fell into a light sleep.
Which was why I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined it or not when she said,
“I love you.”
Shit.
Arabella
I WOKE SUDDENLY, an ugly dream tugging at my consciousness.
“Bel, are you okay?”
James’s voice was drugged and slurred with sleep, but also warm with concern, and I felt the smallest of smiles lift my lips upwards. I turned to look at him, his features brushed with the softness of sleep but alrea
dy hardening into the emotional armour he wore each day.
“I will be. Thank you for staying with me.”
His eyes were wary, but he smiled back.
“Didn’t have anywhere else to be.”
Not an undying declaration of love, but almost as good, coming from a man who spoke less than most people, but who meant more when he did.
“You don’t smile much. I like it when you do.”
“What? I do. Don’t I?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
And then he kissed me, gently at first, testing the waters, so to speak. But finding me ready and wanting, he took it further.
His strong hands tracked down my body and within seconds those clever, work-roughened fingers brought me to orgasm. And when he made love to me, he took his time, showing a gentleness and care that I had hardly known he was capable of.
We still didn’t have any condoms, but we’d become used to that by now.
And afterwards, we lay entwined, limbs tangled, and I felt loved.
It was a dangerous sensation, loving a man who was as untamed and wild as the wind. At any second, I could turn my head and he’d be gone, invisible, leaving only the memory behind.
But he was here for now.
I’d long ago learned to accept less than I wanted; to do without. To brutally deaden any hopes for the future.
We showered together, enjoying the extraordinary, excessive, luxurious pleasure of standing for twenty minutes in plentiful, hot water, soapy hands sliding over heated skin.
He’d shaved again. He knew that I loved the feel of his smooth skin over his strong jaw when we kissed. He hadn’t shaved his head yet, although I guessed he would soon, but I l enjoyed touching the soft, fine pelt of hair covering his head.
I brushed my fingers over his lips.
His rare smile still had the power to knock the breath from my lungs, but I was slowly becoming used to it.
We’d missed breakfast by several hours, but walked down to an early lunch, hand in hand, finding Clay and Zada sitting in the hotel’s bar drinking mint tea.
Zada’s eyes widened when she saw us holding hands but tactfully said nothing. Clay, on the other hand…
“Dude! You’ve finally pulled your head out of your ass! Nice one, bro! Harry, you could do better, but he’s a work in progress. There might even be potential…”
Bombshell - Jane Harvey-Berrick Page 16