The Edge Of Courage

by Elaine Levine

  “Why don’t you visit Dr. Crowley? For a shrink, he’s easy to talk to. I’ve met with him a time or two. Or talk to the sheriff. He served in the first Gulf War. He might remember some of things he faced coming back to the States.”

  “You went to Dr. Crowley?” Mandy asked, shocked that her friend had been to see the town psychologist.

  Ivy shrugged. “It hasn’t been easy moving back here. So many memories. So many shadows.”

  Mandy took her hand. “Do you regret coming back?”

  “No. Not at all. It was the right thing for Casey. And for me as well.”

  Casey was Ivy’s twelve-year-old daughter. Ivy’s and Kit’s. “I think Kit’ll be back soon. He’s worried about the construction problems I’ve been having. That’s why he sent Rocco over. They served together.”

  Ivy folded her arms. “That’s nice,” she said with a smile that held no joy. “So what happened that set you off today?”

  “I had to tell Rocco a secret to get him to eat.”

  “Did you?” Ivy grinned. “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him that I once had a crush on Ty.”

  Ivy’s jaw dropped. “Ty Bladen. You did not.”

  “I was twelve, Ivy. I had a crush on everyone.”

  Ivy held up her hands. “No. I think you have good taste. Ty’s gorgeous. He serves with Kit and your Rocco, doesn’t he?”

  “He’s not my Rocco. And he did serve with them. I think he’s getting out. Rocco said he was injured.”

  “Badly?”

  “Shot in the leg. I don’t know how severe his injury is.”

  “Wow. That’s awful. I hope, for his sake, it’s not too major.” Ivy handed Mandy her now-cold coffee. “But I know just what you need to do about your hired man.” Mandy eyed her warily. “We’re going shopping. Then Friday night, you’ll bring Mr. SexOnAStick to Winchester’s for some drinking and hip grinding. He’ll forget all about his troubles when he sees you in the outfit I have in mind.”

  * * *

  Rocco made the short walk from the bunkhouse to Mandy’s that evening. Hot dry winds had blown across the mountain all day, burning the new spring grass and sucking all the moisture from the ground. The air sat in place now, hot and unmoving, amplifying the growing sense of dread he felt in joining Mandy for supper.

  He wanted to see her. He’d thought of little else since breakfast when she divulged her darkest secret. Every time he remembered the way she’d set her chin, her eyes looking straight at his when she told him, his whole body tightened uncomfortably. He felt an unreasonable wash of jealousy as he thought of Blade and Mandy together. She said she’d been a kid at the time, but she wasn’t a kid now. She and Blade would be good for each other. Their lands backed to one another. They had something of a shared history having grown up in the same small town.

  So why did he want to plant a fist in his friend’s face? It made no sense. It’s not like Rocco would be starting something with her when he would be leaving soon. No, this was only a dinner, a condition of his employment. He’d eat and get the hell out of there.

  If he bungled the whole thing, she’d go back to bringing his suppers down on a tray so that she wouldn’t have to deal with him. It wouldn’t be the end of the world.

  He walked up the steps to Mandy’s porch. Taking advantage of the warm weather, she’d set a table on her front porch for their supper. Rocco felt his stomach clench at the explosion of color spread across it. The dishes were a noisy mixture of salmon, yellow, and green ceramic. The napkins were teal cotton. The tablecloth was a bright floral. The pitcher of iced tea was yet another color of blue. The salad bowl was a peach ceramic. The oversized salad servers were orange. He felt a cold sweat break out on his skin. He couldn’t do this. He would break, he knew it.

  The kitchen’s screen door closed as Mandy joined him on the porch. He tried to calm his breathing. Her movement through the still air brought him her scent. It was faint. And pleasant. Against the warning of his shouting nerves, he drew her fragrance into himself. Sunshine. She smelled like sunshine and fresh air and the barest hint of jasmine.

  It was dinner, he reminded himself. That’s all. Only dinner. Nothing was expected of him. There’d be no repercussions if his behavior wasn’t exactly normal.

  He could get through this.

  He looked at Mandy. She seemed made of shimmering light, backlit by the setting sun as she was. Unreal. He looked beyond her, down the rolling hills to the town several miles away. Maybe he wasn’t really here. Maybe this was a dream.

  A rare, good dream.

  He set his hat on the porch railing, sending a glance toward the pasture he’d worked earlier. If this were a dream, he should be able to conjure up his Zaviyar, running toward him on short, toddling legs, squealing with the joy of seeing his father, his arms outstretched as he reached to be picked up.

  The boy was precocious as hell. By the time he was two years old, he could speak in full sentences. Rocco wondered what more he’d learned in the time they’d been apart. God, he missed him. He blinked, then saw only the bare field. The space was silent and still. And empty.

  A nightmare then.

  Rocco sighed as the vision of his son evaporated. This was not a dream, but what had become his life. He sat woodenly in his chair when Mandy took her seat. She was talking, but he still didn’t hear her. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. He couldn’t handle sympathy or questions or concern or anger or any fucking thing.

  He had to go back to Afghanistan. Soon. He couldn’t tackle the trip in the state he was in. He focused on his plate. He had to get better, get free of the cloud infecting his mind. If he didn’t, he’d get himself and Zavi killed.

  “Your boy’s dead, Rocco. He died in the explosion,” his doctor had told him at the field hospital where they’d taken him after the hit on the cave. “You’ve got to accept that. He’s gone.” Rocco couldn’t accept it. He still felt him.

  Mandy filled his salad bowl, then served him a wedge of lasagna and offered him the breadbasket. He looked at the basket but didn’t take a roll. She set one on his plate, then filled their tea glasses before serving herself similar portions. She began to eat. He thought she was still making conversation, but he didn’t look at her. His skin felt uncomfortable, like he’d put it on backward. There was no place about the table that he could rest his gaze, no place that it wouldn’t get tangled in the loud, crazy colors.

  Silence settled about them. He wasn’t certain if it was the unnatural silence that clogged his mind, or if the grasshoppers had really stopped snapping about, the birds had stopped chattering, and Mandy had stopped talking.

  He looked across the table. She’d set her silverware on her plate and was simply watching her hands in her lap, her shoulders a little slumped.

  He sighed. This was such a mistake. He shouldn’t have let her force him into this. She’d made a feast for him, and it would all be wasted. He sat as still and silently as she did, waiting for what would come next.

  “What’s going on, Rocco?” she asked after a moment.

  He pushed his chair back and stood up. His napkin was in his hand. When had he put it in his lap? He didn’t look at her. “I can’t eat. I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  He took a step away from the table, but she was faster as she moved to block him from the stairs. “Why, Rocco?”

  “Mandy, don’t do this.” He did look at her then, into her fresh, emerald gaze.

  “You have to eat. Not much, but something.”

  “I ate this morning. I ate a lot.”

  “That was this morning. You jogged-what, six miles? And put in a long, hard day. Now it’s this evening and you need to eat again.”

  “I can’t.”

  She held her ground, waiting for an explanation. “Help me to understand.”

  “I need my hunger.”

  Mandy frowned. “Why?”

  Rocco looked beyond her to the wide, circular parking area. He looked at the fields to his right and the town in
the far distance to his left, looked anywhere but at her and her silent demand for the truth. Shit. She was going to make him say it.

  He shoved a hand through his hair and faced her. “It’s the only way I know I’m not hallucinating. It’s the only thing I know is real.”

  She blinked, obviously expecting him to say just about anything but that. “If your mind is in a place where the real is unreal and the unreal is real, can’t you conjure up hunger, too? How can you trust that your hunger is real?”

  “Jesus, don’t start fucking with my head. It’s mangled enough.”

  “I know.” She nodded. “So let’s do this differently.” She studied him. “I need you to trust me.”

  Trust her. What did that mean? He’d seen that same look in her eyes when she worked with Kitano, always calm, steady as a rock. Relief leaked in through the cracks in his wall, soothing the ragged parts of him. He wanted to trust her, trust someone, because God knew he couldn’t trust himself.

  He nodded.

  “Okay. Sit here on the step.” She sent him a look. “Please.”

  He did as she requested. She went to the table and picked up his salad bowl, plate, and glass, then sat next to him on the porch.

  “I’m going to feed you. I want you to take as much as you can.”

  Rocco lurched to his feet, powered by the anger that flashed through him. “I’m not a goddamned baby.”

  She looked up at him from where she sat on the weathered, whitewashed boards. “I’m well aware that you’re a man.” A blush crept from her chest to her neck as she spoke. He watched the color blossom across her skin, feeling a corresponding heat in his body-but moving in an opposite direction. He gazed at her, wondering how to interpret what he was seeing, what he was feeling.

  Curious, he sat back down. She cut a small bite of lasagna and fed it to him. He chewed it as he watched her. When he swallowed, she gave him another bite. She smiled at him. “Do you like it?”

  He liked the way she was looking at him. “Yes.”

  She gave him a bite of the salad. “Does it taste okay?”

  “It tastes cold.”

  She fed him a forkful of lasagna. “And this? How does it taste? It was my grandmother’s recipe.”

  “Warm.”

  “Those are temperatures, not flavors.”

  “Mandy,” he sighed, “food doesn’t taste like anything to me right now. Just temperatures and textures.”

  “Oh.” She looked at the plate she held. “I suppose that’s part of your not having an appetite.” She served him another bite.

  He took the fork from her. Cutting a small bite, he fed it to her, watching as her lips closed over the tines. He slowly drew the fork from her mouth, feeling the pull of her lips against the thin strips of stainless steel. Again, the warm flush spread across her skin. He swallowed, anticipating the next bite she would feed him. He suddenly realized he’d sit here and eat the whole goddamned lasagna with her if she’d keep looking at him as she was.

  Mandy took the fork back and used the side of it to cut another bite. Instead of lifting it to him, she pushed it around on the plate as if she were preoccupied with a thought. He waited, knowing she would broach the topic that was bothering her once she found the right words.

  “Rocco, what did you do in the war?” she finally asked.

  “I was a linguist.”

  She lifted the bite of lasagna to him. “What does a linguist do?”

  He watched her as he chewed. How would she judge him if he were to tell her how he’d spent the last decade. Three years in training, then seven in the field? “They do different things. Translate stuff.”

  She paused in feeding him another bite. “You were Special Forces, like Kit, weren’t you? A linguist in the Green Berets doesn’t just translate, does he?”

  “I wasn’t in the Special Forces.” Nor was Kit, but she didn’t have a need to know that. He considered how to explain to her what he’d been. There wasn’t even a classification for it.

  “How long were you over there?”

  Rocco met her look. Her questions were making him uncomfortable. “A long time.”

  She smiled and lowered her gaze to the lasagna as she cut another piece and fed it to him. “Is it easy for you to learn another language? What did you speak over there?”

  “Pashto, Dari, Arabic, Farsi, among others.”

  Her eyes widened. “You can speak all of those languages?”

  “Fluently. And read and write them.” And know the differences in hundreds of regional variations of each. He sighed. “Kit says I’m a linguistic savant.”

  “You’re a Rosetta Stone. Was it always like that for you?”

  “I think so. There were only two languages spoken on our ranch when I was a kid-English and Spanish. I grew up bilingual. In high school, I mastered French and German as well.” He looked at her. “Both in my freshman year. That’s when I knew I was different.”

  She gasped. “How do you do that?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I was surprised to learn that most people can’t do that. Language to me is simply vocalization of emotions. We all have the same emotions, the same need to communicate. We speak because we desire something or we’re sad or angry or scared. We just use different sounds.”

  They’d finished his lasagna by then. She gave him the last bite of salad, then retrieved her meal from the table and sat next to him again, her hip against his thigh. It seemed to him that she sat closer, which he didn’t mind. He took the loaded fork from her and carried it to her mouth. She was so wrapped up in feeding him that she wasn’t eating any herself.

  She chewed and swallowed. He cut a piece of lasagna. He figured he could keep her questions to a minimum if he kept her mouth full. It didn’t quite work as planned.

  “So you’re a genius.”

  A breeze started up, tousling her hair, pulling a wide strand of it against her cheek. What he would give to be able to brush it away, run his fingers across her skin. Instead, he could only watch as she did it.

  “More like an idiot. An idiot savant.” He fed her the forkful and cut another.

  “But you can read and write those languages, too. That’s amazing. You are a genius. I wish I could do that.”

  Rocco closed his eyes as he considered how to explain it to her. “I think it’s just that I don’t tell myself I can’t.” He looked at her. “When I hear a new language or a new dialect, it first registers that whoever’s speaking is communicating as any of us does. I don’t hear them as being different. I hear the sounds of their emotions, and then I can speak those sounds. And once I can speak a language, deciphering its symbology is simple.”

  “I think you’re amazing.” He fed her another bite. She chewed and swallowed quickly.

  “Do you?” What would she think if she knew what he’d done with his God-given talent, the enemies he’d killed and camps he’d infiltrated? She might see his work in the light of how many lives he’d saved-innocent civilians spared a death in crossfire and coalition troops spared from IEDs and gun battles. Then again, to her it might be merely a count of bodies.

  A few minutes later as she gave Rocco the last bight of lasagna, a big drop of sauce landed on his thigh. She jumped, spilling a bit more. Rocco laughed, unable to stop himself when he caught her bemused expression. He took the fork that was still perilously suspended above his leg and finished off the bite on it.

  “Oh! Sorry!” She wiped at the first spot with her napkin. She had to draw the material of his jeans taut to get at the second one. Did she notice the growing bulge only a few inches from her hand? The more she wiped, the harder he got.

  His fingers dug into the edge of the old floorboards. He couldn’t believe that she was touching him-even in so innocent a way as to dab at a stain-and it wasn’t triggering the usual terrible reaction. Perhaps it was because she touched him through fabric.

  And then, it wasn’t just the stain she was touching.

  She spread her fingers open on t
his thigh, looked at her hand on his leg, then slowly dragged her fingers down to his knee. Blood raced to his groin. God, he’d not had a reaction to a woman like this in years.

  She rubbed her palm over his big knee, then stroked upward again, over the stain, to the top of his thigh. She moved to kneel next to him without lifting her hand from his body. He remembered seeing her touch Kitano, her hands slowly stroking over him like this. He closed his eyes, feeling like an idiot for thinking there was anything sexual in her leisurely exploration of him. When he opened them again, she was looking at him, waiting. The pink flush had returned to her skin, painting her cheeks.

  Jesus. If merely touching him colored her skin, what would she look like when he was in her, thrusting, bringing her to a climax?

  She ran her hand up over his hip, over his jeans pocket, to his waist. He could feel the heat of her skin through his shirt. He held her gaze now, daring her to stop, daring her to continue.

  She edged closer to him as she ran her hand up his ribs, over his pec, to his collarbone. Her hand moved from his open collar to his neck, now skin to skin. He sucked in a breath, waiting for the smell of the ghost flesh, waiting to feel it sticking to him, drying, moving to her.

  But it never happened.

  He felt only the soft tips of her fingers on his throat, felt them stop at his jaw. She watched the path her fingers made along his jaw line before pushing them upward, over his chin, to his lips. She flattened three of her fingers and stroked from one side of his mouth to the other.

  She was so close to him that he could feel the soft puffs of her breath on his neck. All too soon, far sooner than he wished, she drew her fingers across his cheek, down his neck, across his shoulder, and down his arm. When her hand cleared the cuff of his sleeve and touched his hand, he hesitated only a moment before pulling away.

  “Don’t.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I don’t like being touched.”

  “Liar.”

  He stood up, severing their contact, ending the moment. He’d been wrong. She never touched Kitano the way she touched him.