Hidden

by Selena Laurence

  Chapter 10

  Lyndsey

  I woke up in a tangle of sheets and sweaty man. Nick had his leg thrown across mine, and his hand wedged in between my breasts. The sheets were a jumbled mess, and Jack was sprawled across the bottom of the bed, his head resting on one of Nick’s feet. I laid there for a moment committing it to memory. The warmth of his thigh across mine, the feel of the soft pillow underneath my head, and his hard arm around my torso. I could smell Jack’s dirty dog smell, and hear his light snoring. It was one of those perfect moments in life when you can feel love, really feel it, like a blanket you’re all cuddled up in.

  I’d only ever had that feeling one other time in my life, and that had been stained by the knowledge it couldn’t last. Now I was immersed in it and my greatest fear was that this, too, was doomed to end. I thought of going back to being alone after knowing what it felt like to be with Nick, and it was beyond painful. I knew I was selfish and undeserving of this kind of happiness, but I couldn’t bear to let it go. Not yet.

  “Quit thinking so hard,” his raspy early morning voice came from behind me.

  I laughed. “How do you know I’m thinking?”

  “I can hear the gears inside your head shifting. It’s really loud, woke me up and everything.”

  I felt something pressing against my backside. “I, uh, don’t think that’s what woke you up, actually.”

  “Oh, no?” He leaned up so he could see my face as I rolled onto my back. “What exactly do you think woke me up?” He started massaging my breast and then ran his hand down my front, heading toward the danger zone.

  “I’ll show you,” I whispered. “Come a little closer.”

  * * *

  After the morning round of really incredible sex, Nick took me to breakfast at this little diner near the beach. We brought Jack and got our burritos to go so we could sit on the boardwalk and eat while Jack chased birds. After we found a bench and got settled, Nick started talking.

  “So, are you going to go out with me again, Goldilocks?” He put his burrito in his mouth annihilating half of it in one bite.

  I tapped my chin with my index finger and looked up at the sky. “Hmmm. Let’s see . . . you picked me up, fed me a fancy dinner, listened to me talk the whole time, then brought me home and totally rocked my world not once, not twice, not three times . . .” He started laughing at that point.

  “Not that I was keeping track or anything, but I think it was six for you and four for me. I’m generous that way.” He teased.

  “You.” I ran a finger up his torso and then brought my face up to his. “Are sooo generous,” I whispered while I licked his lips.

  He moaned softly and licked me back. “I’m known for my generosity.”

  I leaned away from him. “Oh really? Am I going to be running into girls all over who’ve been the recipients of your generosity?” I lifted an eyebrow at him.

  He chuckled and pulled me back to him. “Shut up, Goldilocks, you know I’m only interested in being generous to you. Jesus I’ve been following you around like a sick puppy for two months. Gabe took my man card away weeks ago. He said I should just tattoo your name on my dick and get it over with.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Ewww. Leave it to Gabe to be completely gross. But, speaking of tattoos . . .”

  He stiffened a little. “Yeah?”

  “What’s yours mean? The one on your arm, Memento Mori?”

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “It’s um, it’s Latin for ‘remember you will die.’ Sort of a reminder that we’re all going there someday.”

  “Wow, that’s um, kind of depressing, isn’t it?”

  He stared out toward the ocean, then watched a couple race by on the trail next to us on their rollerblades. “I got it after Afghanistan . . . I guess it’s time to tell you what happened over there.”

  “You don’t have to, Nick, it’s okay, I understand.”

  He turned and looked directly at me. “Yeah, I do. I always want to be honest with you, Lyndsey. I can’t have a night like I did with you last night and not tell you everything. You deserve nothing but the whole truth.”

  I was scared now, imagining what he might tell me. I swallowed, my throat dry all of the sudden. “Okay. You can tell me anything. I want to hear it all, if you want to tell me.”

  He leaned back against the bench, turning his face up to the sun. I took his hand in mine and he squeezed it before relaxing his grip and gently rubbing my fingers with his thumb.

  “You know Gabe and I enlisted together? I think we were both looking for an adventure, and I know I had visions of being a hero. Jesus, I don’t know, we were eighteen and really stupid. Anyway, we’d been in Afghanistan for two years already when I met a local girl. Her name was Aubra, and she was from a really strict Islamic family in the village down the road from where we’d set up our operations in that sector.

  “I was walking through the village one day with Gabe and a couple of other guys from our unit. We were there mostly to give some sense of our presence. It helped keep the Al Qaeda recruiting to a minimum if we were always hanging around. We were walking through the market and I stopped to look at a little tapestry I thought my mom might like. That’s when I saw her. She had on the hijab. You know, the thing that covers up their hair?”

  I nodded.

  “But you could see her face, and her eyes, and they were, I don’t know, just pretty or whatever.”

  He seemed embarrassed to talk about this other girl with me. But, for whatever reason I wasn’t jealous. “It’s okay, you can say it. You thought she was pretty and you were interested in her, right?”

  He gave me a little bashful smile. “That’s the gist of it, yeah.” He sighed. “I tried to talk to her, but a guy who I assumed was her brother or her boyfriend appeared out of nowhere and made it pretty clear he wanted me to fuck off. We were under orders not to get into anything with the locals so I backed off fast and went to catch up with Gabe.

  “From then on, whenever I got assigned to patrol the village I’d make sure to go by her family’s booth at the market. She spoke a little English, so she’d answer some of my questions. It was all really innocent flirting for a long time. But, slowly, I found myself thinking about her more and more. I’d volunteer to go on all the forays to the village. Gabe warned me that I was playing with fire, but I wouldn’t let it go.

  “One evening as we were doing our last round through town, I saw her packing up all of her rugs and tapestries for the night. I looked around and didn’t see any men nearby, so I chanced walking over, and offered to help. She was so shy, I can still remember her looking around before she answered me. She nodded and I helped her pack and then I asked if I could walk her home. She got panicked over that and kept telling me that they would kill her if they saw me with her. I didn’t want to upset her, but I did convince her to go into a dark alley with me and I kissed her. I’m sure she’d never been kissed before.”

  I smiled. “Poor girl, I hope you made it good for her.”

  He tried to smile back, but his face was pale and his free hand that rested on his leg kept clenching and unclenching.

  “I don’t know what she thought of it. She was used to doing whatever men said, you know? When I’ve looked back on it I realize that I never knew what she thought of me. I don’t think she hated me, but I really don’t know if she liked me either, she never said. What she did say, that day and several other times, was that if anyone were to see us, her family would kill her. I never took that seriously. I was selfish, and naïve, and all I thought about was that I wanted her.”

  I felt nausea work its way through my system, landing in a big ball in the pit of my stomach. I noticed my hands were clammy and shaky. But, I laid my head on his shoulder and urged him to go on. “What happened next?”

  “I kept it up. The stolen kisses, the pestering her to sneak around and see me. Her family had a really tight watch on her, so it wasn’t often and it wasn’t much, but I kept it up.”

>   He dropped his head to his chest, and his voice got quieter. I leaned forward with him to hear better, and I continued to clutch his hand.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever figure out who saw us or when, but somebody did. It was a Friday afternoon, July 15, 2011. I was outside the perimeter of the camp doing a sweep for IEDs when this kid about ten-years-old came running up the road to me. You learn really fast over there that kids aren’t always what they seem, so it scared the crap out of me and I had my gun pointed at him by the time he got to me. He spoke just a few word of English, enough to say that I had to come with him. This was a common trick that the local crime lords played on U.S. soldiers, get some kid to lead us off somewhere and then they’d hold us for ransom.”

  A chill spread through me when I thought about Nick being in Afghanistan. He’d been in danger every day, and if things had gone a little differently I might have never met him.

  “I wasn’t about to go anywhere with this kid, but then he said, ‘Aubra . . . she need you.’ Well, that did it. I took off at a full sprint to the village, leaving my post without permission on a personal issue. I never looked back once.

  “When I got there the kid directed me to one of the smaller squares outside the village center. It was surrounded by houses and only accessible from these little alleyways. I was walking along one of them when I heard the commotion. I reached the end of the alley and saw a group of local men standing around a post in the middle of the square. I couldn’t see more than the top of the post sticking up, but the men all had semi-automatic guns and were prodding at it with the barrels and shouting. God, they shouted and shouted. The anger in their voices wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard before. It was like they were fucking possessed.”

  I remembered how Chris used to sound when he was hitting me, telling me I was worthless and a slut and a cunt. I shivered. I thought I knew the kind of anger Nick was talking about.

  He took a big shaky breath.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “You’re almost there, right?”

  “Yeah. Almost there. I was processing all of this when the kid started pointing and whispering to me. I couldn’t understand at first, there was so much coming at me. I think I knew what was happening though; I mean how could I not have understood? But I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. Finally, I realized the kid was telling me Aubra was in the middle of that mob. The thing against the post that they were screaming at and jabbing with their guns was this girl who probably wasn’t even nineteen-years-old yet.

  “I had no idea what the hell I was going to do to help her, but I couldn’t worry about it, I charged into the square, shouting in my best soldier voice, telling them they had to disperse or some stupid shit like that. All these really pissed off guys turned and looked at me like I was an annoying kid. A couple of them turned their guns on me, and I raised mine right back.

  “Until that moment I hadn’t really been in a heavy situation. Trained for them, but not lived them. It’s like everything slowed down to quarter-speed. The sun was blinding, and there was dust in the air. I remember it made my eyes water. The sound of their boots on the dirt was magnified like a hundred times, and I swear I heard the magazines click when they cocked their guns.

  “When they turned to aim at me they shifted enough that I could see her finally. They’d stripped her naked, Lyndsey. And they’d taken off her hijab. She was tied to the post, and her face was bleeding. Her head hung so low that at first I thought they’d knocked her unconscious, but then she looked up at me, and . . . fuck . . . fuck . . .”

  At this point, Nick’s whole body shook and I watched as he struggled to get himself under control. It physically hurt to watch him in this much pain, but I knew he had to finish this or he’d never be free of it.

  He cleared his throat and started up again. “She, um, she looked up at me, and her eyes were so desperate. She might as well have been screaming for me to help her. I pointed at her and asked the men what the hell they were doing to this girl. One of them spoke English, he was a well-known Taliban official in the area, and he said she had dishonored her family with a man and she had to be punished. He said it was a private, family thing and I should go away. They obviously didn’t know I was the guy, or didn’t care.

  “Finally, they were yelling at me and the one who spoke English kept saying, ‘You want to die?’ Everything was spiraling out of control, and Aubra was slumped against that post like a little broken doll. One of the guys took out a big old knife, like a hunting blade, and he reached over and grabbed . . .”

  At this point, Nick stopped again, squeezing his eyes shut against the memories. My heart burned inside my chest, but I held onto his hand and waited.

  “He grabbed her breast, and he took the knife . . . when he cut her I lost it. I charged at them, forgetting I even had a gun. I heard shots but it was like I couldn’t see anything except her blood and that bastard cutting her, then I heard Gabe’s voice.”

  I jerked out of his story. “Gabe? I thought you went there alone?”

  “I did, but Gabe saw me take off. He had been coming down to relieve me on IED duty. He watched the kid approach me and then saw me take off running, so he told our commander about it, and they figured I’d been duped by some drug lord and came after me.

  “Gabe got to me right as all hell broke loose. I ran toward Aubra, the local guys started shooting, and in turn Gabe started shooting, which brought the rest of our guys with him, running, guns blazing. I saw the moment when the locals realized they were outgunned, literally. One of them said something to another one and then they started yelling to the rest. They all ran to the houses, but before the last one left, he turned and looked right at me. It was the guy I’d seen that very first day with Aubra in the market. Her brother.

  “He looked at me, and then he turned and aimed his gun at her and he fired. Over and over, until his clip was emptied. Even after our guys started filling him with holes he kept filling her with them.

  “I got to him as he finally fell, but it was too late. He was dead so I couldn’t kill him like I wanted to, and Aubra. God, Lyndsey, she was torn up from head to toe. Those bullets at that range, I’ve never seen anything like it. She died naked and broken, a few feet from her own front door, riddled with bullets her own brother put in her.”

  He stopped talking, and the sound of the waves crashing and people laughing and talking along the boardwalk seemed suddenly wrong, out of place and time somehow. The sun was too bright, the air too clean. We both sat, silent for a long time. He clutched my hand like he was afraid I’d pull it away from him.

  After a few minutes I turned to him, I wrapped my arms around his neck, I kissed his face, and I held him while he mourned.

  Chapter 11

  Nick

  I was lying in my favorite place in the world—Lyndsey’s bed—my lips on her stomach, her hands smoothing along my shoulders and back.

  “Nick, we’ve really got to get up and go to class.”

  “Huh uh,” I muttered, while I shook my head on her belly, tickling her at the same time.

  “Yes!” She shrieked when I blew a giant raspberry on her silky skin.

  “Fine.” I hopped up and reached down to grab her around the waist. She screamed again as I tossed her over my shoulder and headed for the shower. “Let’s get you clean, wench,” I growled.

  An hour later we pulled up in D Lot at campus and tumbled out of my truck, ready to make the sprint to class before we got one of Professor Jacobs’s dreaded absences that dropped your grade by a tenth of a point for the semester. I had slung Lyndsey’s book bag over one shoulder and mine over the other, and I grabbed her hand and started running. She was laughing and hollering that if I’d let go of her hand she’d outrun me, when I heard a screeching of tires, and the roar of a car engine. I slowed for a couple of steps and looked behind me to see a dark older American sedan heading right at us full throttle.

  Lyndsey tripped as I yanked her against me hard. I locked my arm around
her waist and swung her around, crushing her between my body and a parked car. The speeding car went roaring by, so close that I felt the heat coming off of it on my bare legs. I turned to look over my shoulder right as it brushed past us, and saw a guy driving: blond hair, dark glasses, and the cruelest, twisted smile on his lips I’d ever seen. Almost as fast as I turned to look, he was gone, leaving the scent of burning rubber and motor oil behind.

  As the engine noise receded into the distance, I pulled back from Lyndsey. “Holy shit! Are you all right?” I asked, looking at her face, running my hands over her shoulders and arms, feeling for any signs of damage to this woman who was quickly becoming the most precious thing in the world to me.

  She was breathless and speechless for a minute before she got out, “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  I pulled her in again, giving her a bruising hug. “What the hell happened?” she asked, getting her voice and her temper back.

  “I don’t know, I think that asshole must have been drunk, but it was like he was trying to hit us.”

  “Did you get a look at him, or get his license plate number?”

  “A really quick look, and I didn’t think to check the plates, I was so worried you’d gotten hurt when I slammed you against that car.”

  She put her arms around my neck and planted a sweet kiss on my lips. “I’m perfect, because you saved me.”

  I felt my heart swell about ten sizes and my cheeks begin to heat up. “Come on,” I told her, my voice kind of gruff. “We’re late to class for sure now.”

  When we came out of class later and made our way back to my truck, I could have sworn I saw the same dark sedan parked a few rows up from us, but Lyndsey was hungry, and I wasn’t going to let some niggling little feeling keep me from feeding my girl.

  Lyndsey

  Since our first date, two weeks before, Nick had basically moved in to my apartment. His shoes were under my couch, his T-shirts hung from the hook on the back of my bathroom door, his razor lay beside my sink, and he slept in my bed every single night. It was like a dream come true, and yet, I held on to a deep fear that it couldn’t last. I knew I’d heard all his story, and he seemed satisfied with the bit of mine I’d given him, but the piece that was left, the part I kept avoiding telling him, was what would poison this gorgeous thing we were nurturing.