by CD Reiss
Soo-hoo. Soo-hoo.
And Damon returned from a deep, deep sleep with his basket of needs and insecurities.
The buzz turned on him.
Soo-hoo. Soo-hoo.
You’re weak.
You’re worthless.
You’re broken.
You are a blemish.
“Caden.” Her voice was the pin of gravity, the edges of the Universe, and the anchor holding me to the center of it.
But I couldn’t respond to her. It was too much. I was still breathing with a rhythm, even without her guidance, as Damon swirled into the same space as the anger.
I pitied him. I wanted to protect him. But he didn’t need my protection. He was ready to die.
“Caden,” she repeated without doubt or weakness. “Go into it. Don’t run away. Embrace it. This is you. They’re all you. I love you.”
She was here, in the darkness—
Soo-hoo. Soo-hoo.
—with every mistake I ever made and—
Soo-hoo. Soo-hoo.
—she still loved me.
All the doors opened. A single space in my mind where blame and guilt and cowardice lived next to honesty and bravery and love.
I became aware of my body again, and in one gulped breath, I was whole.
Part Three
Chapter Twenty
GREYSON
I had a concussion from a falling wooden beam. Boner confirmed the door had saved my leg. It had cracked and fallen on me first, then distributed the impact force of the concrete piece that fell on it. I had a “dead leg,” a quadricep contusion that looked as if I’d spilled black and red paint on my thigh just above the knee.
It hurt like hell, truth be told. The pain didn’t bother me because my mind was completely occupied with Caden.
Under the rubble of my apartment building, I’d talked him through something neither of us had understood at the time. At one point, he’d just rested his head on my chest, and I’d stroked his hair. We’d waited in silence until we heard the trucks outside, then we shouted for all we were worth. As the voices of rescuers got closer, our shouts were mixed with relieved laughter. When the first shaft of light shot through the debris, I saw him for the first time since I’d slammed the door in his face.
“Wow,” was all I could say. He was covered in a mask of gray dust, but the blue of his eyes reflected the morning light like windows to the sky, just like they always did, except for one thing.
The sky wasn’t frightening. It was clear and calm, a protective shield not just over me, but over him as well.
“You look stunning yourself,” he’d said from above me. “Not that you have a choice, but stay still.”
Then he’d looked at the rescue team as they moved another slab, getting between me and the pebbles falling from the sky.
If I’d still had my commission, they’d have sent me to Germany to recover, then decide if I had to go back to my unit or go home. But I was a contractor and part of the conversation about my own best interests. The military hospital kept me overnight to monitor the concussion.
In the dim light, surrounded by the soft hiss of machines, Caden leaned into my bed. “Dana and Trona are fine. Minor contusions. A few scrapes. They got sent home.”
A rectangle of bandage clung to his forehead where he’d been cut by falling glass.
“For scrapes?”
“Home, Baghdad home.”
“It’s a pile of rock.”
“Blackthorne owns a third of the Green Zone.” He sat next to the bed and stroked my cheek. He wasn’t the cold, detached man we’d fought to control, nor did he have the soft, insecure expression I’d come to know as Damon’s. He was neither and both. He was impossibly complete.
“What’s different about you?” I asked.
“Everything.” Even his voice was somehow more whole, like a puzzle with all the pieces in place. “It’s over.”
“It can’t be,” I said. “Nothing’s that easy.”
“You call that easy?”
“I don’t even know what it was.”
“It was all the stuff I never told you.” He slid his hand under mine and laid the other one on top. “I’m sorry, Greyson. I’m so sorry I lied to you. I thought if I relived it, I’d… I don’t know. Die, maybe, if I want to overstate it.” He brushed his thumb along the side of my hand with that perfect pressure I’d come to love. “Let me tell you what happened twice. No, two and a half times.”
He was quiet for a long time.
“I wasn’t afraid of the dark when I was a kid,” he said. “I wasn’t afraid of anything. I was like you.”
“I’m afraid of plenty.”
He shrugged as if I was splitting hairs. “If you say so.”
“I’m sorry I interrupted. Go on.”
After a short pause, he began again. “I went in the bottle room when I was scared. I could hear everything from the floor above, but I felt safe. I told you this, but I didn’t tell you the last time I went down there. I was about eleven. I wasn’t a careful kid. I didn’t cross my Ts and or dot my Is generally, and composition wasn’t my strong subject. I’d gotten back a history essay with too many corrections. Commas. Fucking commas.”
I nodded. “Commas are sneaky.”
He smiled in the dim light. “I was in a gifted school, and there was a lot of homework. I was tired when I wrote the essay, and I didn’t check it over. He—my father—took it out on my mother. Sometimes I got mad at her for putting up with it, but I was always more mad at myself for not checking my work. Like she knew it, she always made sure to blame herself. The more I think about it, the more I think that was why I fell in love with you.” He looked at me and squeezed my hand. “You’d never put up with that from me.”
I held back a comment, but he read my mind.
“Except on your terms,” he said with half a grin. “That’s safe for me. Until it wasn’t. Then… you know what happened.”
“Damon.”
“I protected myself from hurting you. I was already fucked in the head with him pushing on me because he was my protector.”
“Did you feel split before then though?”
“No, I don’t know what opened that up.”
I had a feeling I knew what it was, but I wasn’t ready to admit my hand in his breakdown. Not to him and not to myself. But I knew.
“Here’s what I never told you.” He cleared his throat and looked away. “That time, with the commas, he put her in the bottle room with me and locked the door from the outside. He did that sometimes with just me but not for long. This time, after the history essay, it was different. Jesus, this is hard.”
I let it be hard. He hadn’t dealt with any of it. Hadn’t looked it in the face and taken control of it.
“I could hear her, but I couldn’t see her. She was crying. She didn’t cry in front of me. But she was across that little room, sobbing. And I was on the other side, feeling like it was all my fault but also resenting her for invading my safe place. Then she was groaning in pain. And I said, ‘Mom, are you all right?’ and she said, ‘It’s your sister.’”
He didn’t have a sister.
“And that…” he said with a deep breath from the bottom of his lungs. “That was when I smelled the blood.” His face scrunched into a knot, revealing every beautiful dimple. “It was sticky. So sticky and thick. The smell… and there was so much. Just on and on. A puddle. I thought she was dying. I thought…” Another deep breath he had trouble taking. “I thought I’d killed her.”
“She was miscarrying,” I whispered, and he nodded.
“I didn’t know that. I couldn’t see her, and she kept saying she was fine. I thought he’d stabbed her over commas. My commas.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
He pressed my hand to his lips and closed his eyes. “I didn’t know what to do.” His lips moved against my knuckles. “She just lay there and said it was okay. She said it wasn’t my fault. She forgave me.”
“D
o you forgive her?”
“Not really. When she stopped groaning from the cramps, I crawled over to her. I got blood all over my hands and knees. She didn’t move. I picked up her arm, and it was like a dead weight.” He rested his head on my belly, the bandage disappearing in the folds of the sheets, looking at me with sideways eyes. “I swore to her that when we got out, I’d never miss another thing. I’d pay attention to every detail no matter how tired I was. She said, ‘Okay.’ That was how I knew she wasn’t dead.”
I ran my fingers through his hair. I was mad at Caden’s father for being too dead to face justice, but I wasn’t mad at Caden for lying. Not anymore. All the boundaries between us were false walls.
“And then,” he continued. “The woman in the closet. The femoral artery. It was like I was eleven again. I asked her to forgive me, but she didn’t understand my shitty Arabic.”
“Because she was Kurdish.”
“I think that was when I first felt Damon, but he was so small.”
“And you were doing surgery all the time. The army too. So orderly it was safe to keep him in the background.”
His eyes were transparent in the cold light of the moon. “In the rubble, it was different. No Damon. Just a monster. I swear, if you hadn’t talked me through it, I don’t know what I’d be now. I can do anything with you. I’m still fucked in the head, but it feels normal. I’m a fucked-up person but a whole fucked-up person. All the doors opened, and it’s one room again.”
“I think we stumbled on something,” I said. “The breathing, plus the opportunity to face fear and get control. Maybe. I don’t know. All I know is you look like the man I fell in love with before all this. You’re the fucked-up, brave, honorable, strong asshole I love.”
“I’m going to be everything you need from now on.”
I believed him. I wasn’t sure the world would let us be happy, but I was sure that if happiness was to be found, it was with him. All of him.
He sat up straight and got something from his pocket. He held it close before showing me.
Grady’s sonogram.
“I understand why you didn’t tell me,” he said.
I laughed. He looked wounded.
“It’s not mine.”
“You lost it. I know.” He took my hand as if I needed comfort, but he was the one who needed his hand held.
“No. No, no, no. It’s from a soldier in Balad. He died, and I keep it for… I don’t know why. Luck or respect.”
He laughed once, softly, and the last of his tension fell off in a single breath. “Like a rabbit’s foot.” He plucked it off the bed.
“I would have told you,” I said.
“I found it when we were fighting, so everything was upside down.”
“Keep it for good luck or respect.”
He slid it into his pocket and tilted his head right, then left to stretch his neck. “I have to get to work. I’ll be in the next room if you need me.”
“I need you. Trust me.”
He bent to kiss my cheek, letting his lips linger on my skin. I turned, laying my mouth against his. Slowly, we entered into a kiss, savoring the taste and touch as if it were the first. His tongue gently met mine, and I melted into a pool of desire. With a leisurely pace, he opened his mouth, and I made my shape match his until we were bound by breaths and moans.
We jerked apart with a rustling of paper and the scrape of a chair behind him.
“I should go.” He drew his thumb along my cheek. The corner of the bandage on his forehead had curled a little from laying his head on my chest, and I was struck again by the wholeness I’d taken for granted when we met and that I hadn’t seen in a long time.
The Universe, assuming it even existed with a capital U, had a way of demanding Caden’s attention. If there was any other explanation for his being repeatedly in dark rooms with bleeding women, I couldn’t come up with it.
“We’re very lucky,” I said.
“There’s someone up there watching out for us.”
He was more prone to name divine causation than I ever thought possible.
You never really know a person.
Chapter Twenty-One
GREYSON
They let me out of the hospital the next day. I bought a set of crutches and got a lift to my new apartment. The building was much bigger. Thirty units opening onto shared balconies around a barren courtyard. All Blackthorne personnel. Fortified with a thick wall and barbed wire that wouldn’t keep out a bomb any better than the last place.
I was in a single-room studio on the second floor.
“I’m on three,” Dana said, unpacking the stuff she’d managed to retrieve from the rubble. “It’s a longer walk up the stairs, but it’s so great.”
I was sure it would be “so great” no matter where she was.
Ronin was at my desk like he owned the place. He had a stack of files at one elbow and a cup of coffee at the other.
“Make yourself at home,” I said, putting my crutches by the door. I didn’t need them to walk but to keep the pressure off a leg working to heal.
“Thanks. I got you coffee.” He flipped his hand to a cup by the guest chair. “Black, right?”
I picked it up. “You didn’t say you were coming.”
“Last minute.” He flipped a page.
“What are you looking at?”
“Leslie Yarrow.”
“How’s she doing?”
“No clue.” He closed the file and tossed it across the desk in my direction. “Do you have something useful to add to this fucking shitshow?” He leaned back with his hands linked over his diaphragm. “Because it wasn’t supposed to turn out that way. I mean, maybe she’s fine now, but that’s not an excuse.”
I flipped through the file. My report was on top. “I think you need to hold off on this program until you know.”
He got pensive on me instead of addressing my suggestion. “Every treatment addressing PTSD focuses on reducing the trauma’s impact by serving the trauma back with a sense of control. Facing fears. Defusing memories.”
Behind my report was her circular breathing treatment schedule, the BiCam145 dosages, and her questionnaires.
“It’s got to be done with a teaspoon,” I said. “Not a shovel.”
“Is that why you didn’t give St. John his syringe?”
Calling my husband by his last name was a way to detach himself and me from the decision. A cute way to remind me that I was a clinician.
“No signs of trauma. He looked better on the way out than the way in.”
“Unlike Linderman,” he said.
“Unlike Yarrow.”
“I feel bad.” He drew out the last word as if remorse was a foreign concept.
“Like I said, I think you should suspend the program.” I got to her application to enter the treatment. Scanned it. “Unless you like feeling bad.”
“The upside’s bigger than my feelings. Speaking of, how do you feel? Heard you were trapped for hours.”
“It sucked. However—” I was going to tell him about Caden and facing fears. Defusing memory. Giving control. I was deciding what was Ronin’s business, what would be helpful to the program and thus everyone, and what was too private to share. But I got to the last part of Yarrow’s file and stopped on a card paper-clipped to a report copied from Stars and Stripes. I’d seen her file before but missed this. Leslie Yarrow’s unit had been on the front lines in the second battle of Fallujah.
“However, being stuck with Caden St. John was tedious?” he said, trying to get under my skin and failing.
I read while Ronin jabbed me about my husband.
Yarrow’s unit had been under sniper fire for three days. Surrounded. Trapped in an abandoned orphanage. They were getting picked off one by one until they rallied and made a heroic escape.
“Are you okay?” Ronin asked.
A single orange card was clipped to the sheet. A form filled in with stubby pencil. A date in 2003, a dosage, and all her basic info sc
rawled as if in a hurry.
“When you were with Intelligence,” I asked, “did they have people embedded on the front lines?”
He shrugged. “Defense? Sure. Are you supposed to be standing with that leg?”
“I have two legs.” I handed him the sheet and leaned on my good leg. “This is before you came to Balad.”
“Yeah.” He scanned the pages and handed them back to me.
“When we were at Balad, I had two jobs, more or less—evaluate soldiers for PTSD and keep the surgeons on their feet. I came with caffeine shots, vitamins, and amphetamine.”
He leaned back again, pushing away from the desk. “You saved lives with those shots.”
“You came with a synthetic amphetamine.”
“I’ll repeat—those shots saved lives.”
“And according to this”—I held up the orange card—“Leslie Yarrow got it, probably with the rest of her unit. Helped with knowing if you were being watched, right? It heightens sensory cues, which wakes up the mind for a surgeon. But if you’re being watched by, say, a sniper? You’d know where they were and when they saw you. It was a cure for scopaesthesia. Unless your paranoid fantasies are real.”
“And thanks to it, they found a way out of an impossible situation. The same way it kept Caden and two other surgeons working in Balad.”
I sat. Leaned forward. Folded my hands together on the desk. “I don’t believe you.”
Mirroring me, he leaned forward and folded his hands together on the desk. “I don’t care.”
“How many others who got that shot are presenting with dissociative disorder?”
“None who told the truth.”
Well. There you had it. He knew. Maybe too late, but he knew. I should have been surprised, but I wasn’t. I was, in a way, relieved.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were looking at the questionnaires?”
“You weren’t supposed to know. You would have asked questions, and I didn’t want to answer questions.” He sighed and put his hands flat on the blotter, looking out the window. “My whole career is defined by what I can and can’t say to whomever I’m talking to. There are a lot of things I’ve wanted to tell you. That was why I wanted to bring you into intelligence. One of the reasons. There were more. And don’t look at me like that. This isn’t about you or friendship. It’s not about our past together. It’s about keeping our eyes on the prize. Those dumbasses in Abu Ghraib threw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity out the window. They went from making Iraqi prisoners uncomfortable, which was the idea—you know, just have a woman look them in the eye or tell them what to do—and they went right to torture. Right to forcing them to suck each other off. It was disgusting. We could have won this war in half the time with half the deaths, but no. They didn’t stay in the lines, and now here we are with a private company picking up where the US government had to stop.”