by Reiss, CD
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 Greyson 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 Twenty
GREYSON
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 tongue 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.
“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 Twenty-One
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 Greyson.
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 Greyson, 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, Greyson 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.
Greyson 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 trying to not look at Greyson. 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 Greyson’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.
Greyson 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.
“You’re everything, Greyson. My life with you is all I have. But the only way to protect you is to let you go.”
“Wait.” She shook her head quickly, as if getting the bees out of her ears. “No.”
“They’ll chase me, and if they find me, they’ll find you. It’ll be ten times worse.”
“Let’s go!” someone shouted.
I took a big step backward, until my heel was on the two-foot-high ledge of the roof. She put her arms around me, clamping me in the cage of her body.
“No!” She looked up at me, pleading.
I wasn’t sure I could go through with this, yet I had to do it. I had to detach myself, cut her open, and watch her heart beat before it broke.
“I’m sorry!” I reached behind and pulled her hands away.
She did exactly what I’d expected, clinging harder, pushing into me, trying to wrap her legs around me. “Don’t you do it! Don’t you leave me!”
Our bodies twisted together in a push and pull. A locking of limbs and muscle. I took her by the wrists, fingers pressed to the scars inside them.
Over her shoulder, Ronin was jogging toward us.
Shit. Time to push.
I let her arms go.
“I have to,” I said coldly, calling on the surgeon and the sadist to do the speaking for me. “You have to go alone.”
“You promised.”
“I had to get you here.” I shrugged.
Her face darkened from desperation to rage. Betrayed. Abandoned. Lied to. With eyes afire and hair whipping around her, she was beautiful and terrifying. Pure power and splendor.
“Grey!” Ronin said, three steps from us.
She grabbed my arms, and I tried to pull her off, but she didn’t budge. The Humvees stopped at the street below, six stories down and one step backward.
“Good-bye, baby.”
I yanked my arms away, and she pushed me, trying to stay connected but also showing me her anger. She pushed too hard. I lost my balance, knees cut to bending by the ledge, and let her go so I wouldn’t pull her over the edge with me.
What I let go of, she grabbed for, catching my shirt, clamping onto it hard as if she had the strength to pull me back.
Which she didn’t.
My weight pulled her over.
We were in the air, the beating of the chopper blades snuffed out by the wind in my ears, grounded by neither earth nor the safety of a cable.
Free floating.
Subject to the single-minded will of gravity.
We spilled down.
A second lasted forever in frightening lucidity. The blue of the sky. The smell of sand and gas in the air.
She was next to me and a little above, hair flying back, one shoe lost to wind shear, fingers shaped into hooks as she reached for me.
What gravity pulled down, the wind pushed up. My hand reached for hers, and we touched, sliding our palms together in the split moment before impact.
Chapter Twenty-Two
greyson
Lucidity isn’t always sanity. Illusions can seem clear and reasonable.
That may be the definition of insanity. Not that a mind is muddled or confused, but that it’s too sharp when creating its alternate world. Insanity has its own tidy logic. Reality is messy.
Which is to say, everything got clear and disastrously confused on the way down. My life was a deck of cards being bent from the bottom and shuffled. I saw the face cards flipping by, each one an event in my life.
A person who touched me. Events, meaningless and otherw
ise. A thing I saw once.
Lia, who shows me how to make the Egyptian points on the corners of my eyes.
Jake, who yells when I break his Walkman.
July Fourth barbecue. The smell of chlorine and ketchup. Colin drinks a beer. He has Dad’s chin.
My sixth birthday. I’m at the head of the table. I pretend I am a queen.
The thup-thup of hundreds of helicopter rotors thrumming my temples.
In the backseat, the way the sun bursts over the line of the mountains while my brothers argue.
A clown on stilts hands out bananas.
My mother at the kitchen table, doing a crossword.
And Caden.
Half-seen in slow motion as we parted on the way down—I wouldn’t let him fall alone. Not this time.
Whose love woke me so slowly, I didn’t realize I’d been sleeping.
Whose body is the source of my deepest aching need.
Whose arms shake as he carried me to the CSH in Balad. The sun peeking from behind him, bursting as if he was my horizon line.
Who opens the mail with a rip and a blow.
Who never let me fall until I pushed him.
Whose eyes hold the promise and protection of the sky above.
Caden, suspended in the air next to me, his posture a scribble of unlikely angles, released from the constraint of gravity even as he was imprisoned by it.
My past and my present, without the pressure of a future.
He was reaching for me, and I didn’t have to abandon him.
I couldn’t save us, but I’d tried. I’d grabbed his shirt and tried to pull him back. Physics and inertia sent me over with him, but I wasn’t an observer of my foolishness.
I’d tried.
Time stretched. All was still. The pressure of the air under me was leverage enough to reach for him. Touch him. Hand to hand. Skin on skin. I had him.
I was so sorry. Wrecked with a regret I’d never have time to process.
But I’d tried.
Everything was clear.
And real.
Clicking into place—Forgiveness matched with responsibility. Sorrow with hope. Contentment with worry. Death with love. Acceptance with elation.