by Julia Kent
He laughed. “You deserve the whole story.” The smile faded from his face.
“I deserve more than that.”
“Yes,” he said softly. “You do. And this time, I’ll be honorable. Ask away.”
“I just did. Why did you leave?”
The struggle played out on his face. He opened his mouth to answer.
The server appeared with tortilla chips and salsa.
“Saved,” he joked.
She gave him a hard stare. Every molecule of her body was on fire. She felt all the feelings all at once, as if time folded into every emotion across every second in this scene. Pushing her hair off her shoulders, she watched him. A sense of redemption filled her.
Did he feel a glimmer of atonement? That kiss last night said more than I’m sorry.
What would he actually say?
“Why did you leave?” she persisted.
“Because I was out of my mind.”
She picked up her purse and started to stand. He lunged, his hand gripping her wrist in a vise.
“Don’t go.”
“Then don’t lie.”
“Not lying. Starting to explain. Give me a chance here, Suz. This isn’t easy.”
“You think it is for me?” Her heart relocated to her wrist.
“No.” He let go, his eyes desperate, animal-like in the way they worked the room. Alighting on her, he stared at her with so much heat and lust she almost burst into flames. “But now that you’re here, in front of me, and that line’s been crossed, I can’t go back. That doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing.”
“The Gerald Wright I knew ten years ago always knew what he was doing.”
“I’m not that man anymore. Probably never was.”
She sat down, gravity dragging her, the shock of his words leaving her boneless.
“I don’t believe that.”
“Believe whatever you want. Maybe after I explain, you’ll see it my way.” He took a sip of water. The skin at the hollow of his neck was bright red, a telltale sign of stress in him.
“Okay.” She reached for a tortilla chip just to do something with her hands. “Explain.”
“After the suicide bomber, I couldn’t think.” No need for clarity on this topic; Suzanne knew exactly who and what he was talking about. Three months before he dumped her, Gerald’s team had come across a suicide bomber, a guy wearing a vest of explosives. The team of five American soldiers had found him standing in the market. A sharp-eyed kid from Indiana, just off the plane, spotted the guy.
Carrying his toddler son in his arms, screaming about glory.
Split second decisions come with costs.
Gerald’s team had tried to find a way to disarm the guy and separate the child from him. The vest had detonated just as another child of about five or so had flung himself in the bomber’s arms.
It had ended badly.
“You did everything—”
Gerald’s palm shot up.
“This isn’t about that. It’s about what happened after.”
“I remember.”
“You don’t, Suz. You really don’t.”
Her throat tightened, a lump poking her, making tears push against her eyelids. “Then tell me. Please.”
“I am.” He paused. “It takes time.”
“We’ve had ten years.”
“Might not be long enough.” The stark look he gave her was heartbreaking.
“I won’t push.”
He smiled halfway. “You are constitutionally incapable of not pushing.”
“Is that why you broke up with me the way you did? Because you knew I’d push.”
Slowly, achingly, he looked up from the table, meeting her eyes.
“Yes.”
“Damn it.”
“I knew if I saw you I couldn’t leave. That I’d drag you down.”
“Why? Why did you leave?”
“Because I was out of my mind, Suz. I ended up in long-term therapy back home. Took two years for the nightmares to stop.”
“I would have been there with you, through it all.”
“I know you would have. That’s why I had to let you go.”
“Don’t play this macho bullshit with me, Gerald. You’re better than this. And I damn well know I am. Don’t feed me lines like this.”
“I’m not. I’m telling the truth.”
“The whole truth?”
His face flickered with admiration and disgust, a strange combination that Suzanne found oddly titillating.
“It must suck to live life with that perfect bullshit detector. What a curse.”
He might as well have slapped her and caressed her at the same time. This was what she missed the most. A man who could slip into shorthand with her, who understood her at a fundamentally different level than the rest of the world. The rarity of that kind of connection made her watch him, breathing through a decade of scar tissue, and realize that the past didn’t matter.
Truly.
How much longer was she going to deprive herself of being this well understood? Her anger was a shield against the injustice of what Gerald had done to her, but it was also a shell she used to justify hiding from the world. Three years of law school, seven years of hundred-hour weeks left her with virtually nothing to give to any sector of her life.
Least of all her heart.
She liked it that way.
Until now.
“It’s a gift.”
He snorted. “It’s a gift when it helps you. I don’t think it’s helping you right now.”
Damn it.
He did it again.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Know me so well? Even after all these years you just...do.”
“It’s a gift.” He didn’t smirk as he threw her own words back at her.
“It really is.”
She started to breathe as slowly as possible as her heart crawled into her throat, her stomach curling inward, her thighs tightening. He could just look at her and make this happen. He could give her a raw, unafraid appraisal and rip out the deep roots of discontent that had grown there in his absence.
She grabbed a tortilla chip and shoveled it in her mouth, the crunching a welcome static, breaking up the silence in her mind.
Gerald did that.
He quieted her, the internal voice silenced, the eerie echo leaving room for true emotion to seep in.
For him to walk back in.
“That’s it? You had PTSD like every other soldier—including me—and you left because of that?”
“Basically.”
“Basically doesn’t cut it.”
“I came home and spent nearly two months in a psych ward, Suz. That email was a gesture of mercy. Took me two years to get out of my own head and start living again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t need your pity.”
“I’m not offering it. The fact that you don’t know the difference between pity and empathy is really sad.”
He gagged on his water.
“Your walking out on me was the single worst thing that ever happened to me, Gerald. Ever.”
Eyes watering, he tried to recover and speak, his throat in spasms. “I’m sure that’s not true, Suz. You saw some roadside bombings that—”
“Don’t you dare—you, of all people—try to tell me my own internal state, Gerald. You don’t get to invalidate me. You don’t get to rank my emotional devastation.” Her voice was deadly calm. “You never had permission to do so, and you certainly don’t have it now.”
Pain flashed in his eyes. “You’re right. Forgive me.”
Forgive me.
Could she? Could she ever? As the waiter delivered a platter of enchiladas and quesadillas and they busied themselves, grateful for the break, she wondered. Could she ever forgive him? Or herself? Because if the answer was no, she was wasting time.
Hers and his.
“I’ve imagined this moment so many times
,” she confessed. Why not? What did she have to lose. Worst case, her anger. It might be nice to set down that burden for good and stop letting it weight her down. “And not once did I think that when I explained how hurt I was by your leaving, you’d compare it to a roadside bombing and say that having the love of my life break my heart by email and then disappear wasn’t as bad.”
He closed his eyes and winced.
“And yet, every part of me wants to throw myself at you and be kissed like last night. I want to pour out my heart and pick that fine mind of yours. I want to watch you sculpt, observe how you move through the world with your body, taking in parts of life I only see at surface depth. So here I am, hating you and left with the echo of loving you so deeply, and for so long, that I think I held on to the anger because it was all I had left of you.”
With that, she grabbed a triangle of quesadilla, dipped it in sour cream, and took a bite.
Gerald’s eyes tightened, narrowing so much she could barely see the pupils. He leaned forward, his cuff brushing the tips of the chips in the basket, and whispered, “The biggest mistake of my life was not knowing how to trust you.”
She felt the words as they traveled from her brain to her heart, triggering biochemical systems designed to unite emotion with stimulus, biology with communication.
“And sitting here, across this table, watching you tell me how much I hurt you, and yet you still want what we once had, blows my mind. You always did that, Suzanne. And you still do that. Only you.”
A part of her knew he was holding back. There was more. Much more.
But another self inside her, one she’d shushed a thousand times, wanted to walk into his arms and be held.
“How have you been?” she asked softly. “How did you heal?”
“How do you know I have?”
“You said you’re a different man.”
He reached across the table and slid his hand into hers. Didn’t ask.
Didn’t need to.
“That’s really the story? You came home ahead of me, got put in psych, emailed me to break up, and by the time I was stateside, no one knew where you were. What were you doing? What was your life like?”
“I spent two years roaming.”
“Homeless?”
“No. Roaming. Walked the Appalachian Trail. The California Coastal Trail. Buckeye Trail. Went all over North America.”
“You camped?”
“Sometimes. It’s—it’s not all clear. There was a gradual unfolding over those years. Peace came in layers. I can’t give you a coherent narrative.”
She squeezed his hand. “But you were safe.”
“Yeah. Mostly, people were afraid of me.”
She took him in. If you never saw him smile, and didn’t know how he was under the surface, Gerald was a scary-looking wall of muscle.
“And then I came to Boston. Did some work in a gym. Met my friend, Vince. He kicked my ass and told me to use my background for good. Got in with a security agency and the McCormicks hired me.”
“You like it?”
“I’m good at it.”
“That’s not the question I asked.”
“Yeah. I do. I don’t think about it much. It’s easier to keep moving and not think. That’s how I spend most of my time.”
“You still like to touch everything?”
“Is your name ‘everything’?”
They both laughed.
“Sorry,” he said, having the decency to look sheepish. “I think Andrew McCormick’s rubbed off on me.”
“Is that a work duty?”
“What?”
“Letting him rub—”
He groaned.
She reached for a quesadilla with her free hand, dipped it in sour cream, and watched him do the same.
They never let go of each other’s hands.
“Tell me the story about the relic,” she blurted out, needing clarity.
He groaned and rolled his eyes. “It’s such a stupid story.”
The look she gave him said he had no choice but to talk.
Sighing, he conceded and said, “One of those freak moments in the field. A bombed out cave. We were checking for survivors and my hand brushed against this broken wooden box. Kulli saw it, too.”
“What?”
“Right. I palmed the relic and shoved it in my pocket before he could see it. He grabbed the broken box and found some other, smaller artifact in there. Went on about how much he could make on the black market. I kept my mouth shut.”
“Wise of you.”
“And then he went on for the next few weeks about some damn curse.”
“Curse?” Norm Phelps had mentioned a curse when he’d met with her about the case. Norm was about as rational as any human being could be.
So was Gerald.
A creeping sensation took over the back of her neck.
Gerald shook his head, finishing a mouthful of food, then taking a swallow of water. “Yeah, curse. I thought he was full of shit at the time, but now...” A haunted look met her inquiring gaze. “Now I wonder.”
“You think you’re cursed?”
He shrugged.
She smirked.
“And you got the relic into the United States and into Harold Hopewell’s private collection...how?”
“The smuggling was easy.”
“I can’t believe you’re throwing these words around so easily. Smuggling an ancient artifact, Gerald! You! You wouldn’t jaywalk when I knew you,” she joked.
“Kulli would have sold it off. I knew the relic had to be – well, anyhow. I covered the relic in modeling clay, made it look like one of my own pieces, and brought it home during a trip home when my mother was sick.”
“And that’s that? How did Hopewell get it?”
“I have no idea. I found one of my old art teachers, who knew someone at an art and antiquities dealer, and they promised it would go to someone who would preserve it and appreciate it.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. I had no idea it went to Hopewell. None.”
She let it all sink in.
Kulli and the black market. Gerald violating so many laws. A cursed relic. Harold Hopewell.
And Gerald, holding her hand, looking at her like she was the most precious object in the world.
“Thank you,” he said after some time, both of them having abandoned their half-eaten plates, a shot of tequila for him, a pineapple cosmo mostly drained in front of her. They’d let go of each other’s hands and sat now, contemplating the past few hours, finding them wanting.
“For what?”
“For being willing to see me. To come to this late lunch.”
“I didn’t have a choice. You’re my client.”
“You always have a choice.” He reached for her again, and this time, the implication was clear.
Choose him.
Choose now.
“What am I choosing, Gerald? What is this? Because I’m not going to sleep with you and go back to pretending this didn’t happen.”
“I’m not asking that of you.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
“You really have changed. Cocky Gerald would never admit to his inadequacies.”
“I said nothing about being inadequate. I said I didn’t know. Big difference.”
“True. What don’t you know?”
“Where I stand. I left you.” He shrugged.
Suzanne fought the urge to pull her hand away.
“I dumped you. I wasn’t thinking rationally. The sad part is that I was so sure that my logic was impeccable. Leaving you meant I would make you avoid the pain of being with me. Forcing you not to be around me made sense. If you weren’t near me, you couldn’t be in my sphere of influence. I was rescuing you from me.” His eyes turned down at the corners.
“Do you ever grow out your hair?” The question poured out of her, subconscious obviously fixated on his head.
He peered at her. �
�What an odd question.”
“I know. I know it is.”
“Sometimes. Not in a long while. I grew it out for those first two years home, though.”
“Why?”
“I needed to be anyone but me.”
“You’re you no matter what your hair looks like.”
He gave a self-effacing shrug that was so vulnerable she almost cried.
“It’s easier to manage when I shave it.”
“Would you grow it out for me?”
“Why?”
“So I can see the you I wasn’t there to see?”
“I’m not that guy anymore.”
“You are, though, Gerald.” She leaned into him, her arm pressing against his, the scent of his soap so familiar. When they’d had rare civilian time together, he’d used a soap-aftershave combo that was distinctive. She’d smelled it for years after coming home, bracing herself for disappointment when the odor turned out not to be real.
She’d been chasing something that wasn’t there.
Someone.
“Have you had a serious relationship?” he asked, giving her a look that said if she could ask unexpected questions about his appearance, he could up the ante. “Been married?” His voice went gruff on that one.
“Yes and no.”
He winced. “Right.” She felt his hand go dead in hers.
“Hey. You asked.”
“I did. And I’m glad to hear it.”
“Glad?”
“Glad you moved on.”
“I never really did, though. I just thought I did.”
“What are we doing, Suz? Catching up on old times?”
“I don’t know. We’re talking in circles.”
He stood, pulled out his wallet, and put money on the table. “Let’s walk in circles, then. I have to get out of here.”
She stood, following him out, waving at the server.
His arm went around her waist nice and easy, as if it belonged there, as if a decade hadn’t passed.
“You really haven’t aged.”
“Three years of law school and seven years to make partner took years off my life, Gerald. I have under-eye circles that could double as football player smudges.”
“No. You’re radiant. You’re sharper than ever and you carry yourself with more confidence. It’s like you became more of the Suzanne I knew.” When he smiled, his whole face changed. Melting into that grin would be so easy.
She patted her hip. “A little more.”