“It matters that you were hurt, but no…”
“Then do me the courtesy of believing me when I say that you’re beautiful.”
He stared at me, his eyebrows pinched together, frustration reflected in his gaze.
“Oh!” I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”
He held my hand and kissed my fingers.
“Don’t be sorry, Amira. I care about you. I thought I’d never see you again. I didn’t even know if I could trust you but I still cared—how crazy is that?”
“You really thought I could be that devious? Some sort of double agent?”
He shrugged and gave me a half smile.
“I have trust issues.”
We both laughed miserably. What a mess.
I traced my hand along the line of his jaw and made a decision.
“No regrets,” I whispered. “Make love to me, James.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, and I heard the note of desperation in his voice. “We don’t have to. I mean, I want to, but…”
“Ssh,” I pressed my finger against his lips. “I trust you, James. And I need this.”
He nodded slowly.
“Tell me what you need, Amira. Show me.”
James let me make love to him.
He let me pull his t-shirt over his head, and he let me trace the hard planes of chest with my tongue. He let me unbuckle his belt and slide it from the loops, and he lifted his hips so I could tug his jeans from his body. He let me run my hands along the thick length of his shaft, his breaths faster and shallower, and he let me take him in my mouth.
His hands hovered over my pajamas and over my waist, then gently rubbing my arms.
He let me make the choices and he let me set the pace.
He let me place his hands on my breasts, squeezing gently, and then he kissed my chest, my throat, my cheeks and mouth, whispering that I was strong and beautiful and desirable. His strained voice told me how sexy I was, how hot I made him, and that he wasn’t going to last much longer.
And when he stroked the insides of my thighs, he was so gentle, his touch so knowing, that it felt right, and it felt safe.
He pulled a condom from his jeans and handed it to me, holding his breath as I rolled it down his shaft.
Then I sank onto him slowly, uncertain and afraid, as we rocked steadily together. Bad memories battered at the borders of our love-making, but his quiet words, his touch, the sweat that broke out across my body, pushed the darkness away.
It was completely different from the first time we were in bed together. That had been about fear and need and desperation.
This, now, I needed it. I was so afraid that the last memory of being with a man would be one of pain and violence. I needed to try and wash it away. There was no one else I could ask, no one else I would ask, but James.
This was softer, quieter, just us, hot, but more loving, more knowing, understanding, about friendship, about love, about repair, about rebirth—not hatred, not horror.
A blistering heat roared up inside me, consuming me. My skin fizzed with electric shocks shooting up and down my body. I was hot, cold, wired, tired, a knot of jarring emotions and sensations.
It was shocking and wonderful, and it was healing.
His head tilted backwards as he came, but his eyes were fixed on mine. My mouth opened and a long sob of desire poured out of me in a wordless river of sound.
And when we lay together, our bodies cooling and calming, he held me against his body as if nothing could ever harm me again. The greyhound grace of his body was beautiful and I sighed at the thought of letting him go.
I WOKE ABRUPTLY, panic shooting through me.
James yelled out, making me jump and wriggle away from him. But I realized that his skin was slick with sweat, and he was fast asleep, caught in a nightmare’s web.
I slid out of bed, still naked, and reached out to touch his shoulder.
He jerked and lashed out, making me squeal and fall backwards, landing on the carpet with a thud.
His eyes flew open as he sat up, the sheet falling to his waist.
Swearing softly, he jumped out of bed and reached for me, flinching as I pulled away.
“Did I hurt you?”
“No,” I said nervously. “Just … startled.”
“You’re shaking! God, I’m so sorry.”
I let him help me up, then he strode wordlessly to the bathroom and I heard him splashing water on his face.
Eventually, he came back into the room, standing at the side of the bed, eyeing his pile of clothes as if he was about to bolt.
I patted his side of the bed, already cold. Reluctantly, he sat on the edge, facing away from me.
I hesitated to ask. Whatever he’d been dreaming about wasn’t anything happy. I knew what that was like. Talking helped a little—rationalizing the fear by understanding your body’s responses … I couldn’t explain why, but it took away some of the power from those memories. Maybe I could give that gift to James. If he’d let me. He’d helped me so much, more than he’d ever know, slaying the dragons that stalked through my subconsciousness—and now I wanted to help him, because that’s what friends did.
“Can you tell me what it was about?” I asked tentatively.
His shoulders hunched and his head dropped into his hands.
“Bad shit,” he said tersely.
I stroked the warm silky skin of his back, my fingers trailing over the tattoo that spread across his shoulders.
I hesitated, choosing my next words carefully.
“Then that makes two of us—we’ve both been through bad times. And we’ve both survived.”
He turned immediately, wrapping his arms around me as if that alone could protect us from the world.
“I’m so sorry,” he breathed against my flushed skin. “I wish I could have stopped them and…”
“James, that’s not why I mentioned it. I have bad times, terrible nightmares, so I understand … if you want to tell me.”
He pulled a face.
“Why would you want more nasty shit in your head? I don’t want you to have more.”
I smiled sadly. Still the protector.
“Because maybe it will help you to talk about it?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Have you tried?”
He shrugged.
“Yeah. With guys who were there, who saw it happen. But you have to lock that nasty shit down—it’s the only way to deal with it.”
I thought about that.
“Yes, it’s one way, but talking about it has helped me.”
He frowned, narrowing his eyes.
“You really want to know?”
“Yes, because I think it will help you.”
He sighed in defeat.
“I made a mistake and people died.” He cleared his throat. “Children.”
My hand flew to my mouth, shock and sympathy surging through me.
“Oh … I didn’t know…”
He looked at me with desperation.
“I tried to stop them,” he said, his tone pleading.
Children. Oh no.
He reached out. I swallowed and looked at his hand gripping mine, letting my eyes rove upwards, taking in the shower of white scars on his forearm.
“Is that when this happened?”
He nodded and I touched his eyebrow, the pale scar at the edge.
“And this?”
Another nod.
“And when you lost most of the sight in your right eye?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me.”
He stared unseeing, dredging the memory from the past into the present.
“One of my jobs as an Ammo Tech is to destroy captured explosives and ammo, render it safe and unusable.”
“Okay?”
He looked away, his gaze lost in the past.
“I was in working with the Afghan National Army in Gereshk. It’s a town in the south of Afghanistan about 120 kilometres from Kand
ahar. The ANA had found a Taliban arms dump, so they called me in as the nearest operator.”
He grimaced.
“There were two burns pits—that’s two deep pits where the explosives are put so I can detonate them but keep the blast radius contained. I had a ton and a half of HMEs, and the other pit was small arms ammo—for handguns and rifles.
“My job required laying a long fuze from the pits to a firing point, far enough so that the pits are unsighted—that’s for safety. The sentries are further away but can see the pits. I’d already initiated the dems—the demolition—and was retreating from the firing point when one of the sentries saw a bunch of kids sneaking into the small ammo pit, probably to rob it.
“The sentry yelled at them, but he was even further away than me. My LCpl was with me and I told him to get clear. If I could get to the firing point and stop the fuze … but the soft bastard turned around and started running with me—because he’s got kids of his own, you know? So I was trying to get to the fuze, and we were both yelling at the kids to get out.
“I sprinted to the firing point but when I got there, I knew we were too late, we weren’t going to make it, and Rob was too close. He’d run right past me, shooting his rifle into the air to scare the kids away and yelling his head off. I started chasing after him, telling him to get down, but he ran closer and closer to the pits. They kids started scrambling out of the pit with whatever they’d scrounged, and it looked like they’d make it … and then … it was too late.”
He stopped and grimaced.
“I was 50 metres away, so I escaped the over-pressure effects, but I was hit by frag.” His voice had become a monotone. “The frag I was hit by was Rob. I still have pieces of his bone under my skin.”
“Oh, James…”
“I remember lying on the ground trying to breathe, trying to get air into my lungs. I knew Rob was gone … I saw him…”
He took a deep breath as his eyes closed.
“I remember seeing some of the kids picking themselves up and running off.”
“Oh … so … the children … they lived? Some of them?”
He shook his head.
“No, even though they’d survived the initial explosion, the blast over-pressure damage would have collapsed their lungs in the next day or so, and without some serious medical help they’d have died anyway.”
He opened his eyes, his gaze fixed on the glow of the streetlights through the window.
“The ANA went door to door in the area, trying to find out who the kids were so they could get them medical help, but no one was going to admit to sending their kid to steal ammo. So the kids never got the help they needed—they all died.
“Humans can withstand 0.5 bar pressure without serious injury because we are squishy, but at one bar, you start to damage buildings, and people get injured more from being thrown against them.”
I licked my lips as his words dried.
“James, that wasn’t your fault. It was a terrible, terrible accident, but it wasn’t your fault.”
His voice was bleak.
“We were there to help, Amira, to make the country safer. Win hearts and minds. How much did I help that day?”
“More than you think by the sound of it,” I said quietly. “A lot of munitions were taken out of the equation.”
He angled a wry glance at me.
“You sound like Smith.”
I shook my head.
“Really? Huh, well, he’s a bad influence.”
I was trying to lighten the mood, but James didn’t smile.
“On a good day, I’ll tell myself that. I was doing it by the book. Maybe if the sentries had seen the kids in time; maybe if the pits had been in a different place … I don’t know. Maybe those kids wouldn’t have died. But I know they did. And I lit the fuze.” He turned his face away. “I copped the blame anyway—I was running the dems, so ultimately it was my fault.” He shrugged. “The top brass weren’t saying it, but I got shuffled to a backroom job for a while after that. You can rationalize it all you want, Amira. Those kids are dead because of me.”
“I’m not trying to rationalize it—I’m saying it was a terrible accident. There are so many ifs and maybes in life. Maybe if I hadn’t been a nurse, Karam wouldn’t have thought about going to med school. Maybe if he’d trained to be an accountant, he’d never have volunteered to go to Syria. You see? Do I think I’m to blame for Karam’s death? No, but sometimes it feels like I am. On a bad day.”
His eyes widened with understanding, and he pulled me against him.
“Thank you,” he said softly.
James
I’D NEVER BEEN to Arlington National Cemetery before.
I’d seen plenty of photographs, but nothing prepared me for the miles of rolling hills filled with row upon row of immaculate white headstones stretching into the distance, each one representing a soldier who had fallen, a family who had lost someone.
Not all had died from violence, but all had seen it—every one of those hundreds of thousands of white headstones.
Would there ever be a time when men like me weren’t needed? It seemed unlikely.
I helped Amira out of the car that Smith had sent for us. I still wasn’t used to seeing her in ordinary clothes. Today, she was wearing a grey knee-length dress and a black coat. Her long, silky hair swung over her scarred cheek, and I knew that was deliberate. It was painful to see how self-conscious it made her.
Then she glanced up and gave me a sad smile.
Since our op had been denied at the highest level, I hadn’t planned to come in my uniform, just thinking I’d wear something reasonably tidy, but Smith had arranged for my dress uniform to be brought over from the UK. I had no idea how he’d done it, but I’d given up wondering how he managed to do half the stuff he did—many fingers in many pies.
It might seem like a lot of effort, but wearing a uniform to the funeral of someone engaged in a denied op was making a statement—a fuck you to whoever had signed off on this in the first place, whoever refused to acknowledge his life … or his death.
Amira’s eyes had grown huge when I knocked on her hotel door—she hadn’t seen me in my Number 2s before.
“Wow, you have a lot of medals,” she whispered, her gaze sliding over my chest.
“Yeah,” I breathed out as I took in the grey figure-hugging dress she was wearing. “Seen a lot of bad shit. The more shit you see, the more medals you get.”
But on a denied op, there’d be no medals for me, or for Clay or Amira.
I didn’t care for myself, but she deserved some recognition for what she’d gone through and what she’d achieved. The intel she and Clay had gathered meant that the police and secret services had been able to contain a significant threat level.
Resentment ate at me. The whole Times Square incident had been filmed live, and we were TV and YouTube stars, not that you could see our faces clearly enough to ID, but Press speculation had gone crazy and a lot of whackos were claiming that they’d been there. Seventeen million hits and rising was a big incentive to someone who was a fame whore.
They were welcome to it—I was very happy being anonymous, and I hoped it stayed that way for all of us. But I also hoped the Powers That Be were going to look after Amira and her family, keeping them safe from the whackos. I thought Smith would be on the case, but even with the strings he could pull, he was just one man.
If Amira asked me to stay, I would. But since that night in her hotel room, I felt her pulling away from me, inch by inch, and I didn’t know what to do about it. We were running out of time—we were always running out of time.
I adjusted my Forrest Cap as the wind whipped through the cemetery scattering dead leaves over the smooth green grass. Amira slid her arm through mine as she shivered.
“My parents didn’t want me to go to Karam’s funeral. In their culture, women stay at home to mourn.”
“Is it okay that you’re here?”
Her lips tightened as she nodded.
/>
“Larson died trying to save me. I had to come.”
“Not such a tosser after all?”
She laughed softly as her eyes became glassy with emotion.
“No, he turned out not to be a tosser after all.”
It sounded strange, hearing her say the word ‘tosser’. Weirdly, it made me smile.
I turned to look behind me when I heard the sound of a motorcade making its way up the incline. There were also four Marines on horseback carrying the Stars and Stripes, and Larson’s Regimental Colours. Six more Marines followed on foot, drumming out the slow march, and in between them was a black hearse.
I hated those cars. I’d been to too many funerals of friends.
Not that I’d really known Larson, but he’d been on our side and died tried to save Amira. That made him a damn hero as far as I was concerned.
I looked around at the rows of grave markers—too many dead heroes.
The hearse stopped when it reached us, and four of the Marines slid the coffin from the back and raised it to their shoulders.
It was all done very smoothly. They probably carried out the same ritual three or four times a day, every day, for as long as this was their current deployment. What a messed up job.
Smith stepped up next to us, and Amira gave a little jump.
“There’s a reason he’s called a ‘spook’,” I said.
She gave a shaky laugh.
“Hi, Smith.”
He leaned down to kiss her cheek, then shook my hand, a forced smile on his face.
“Nice uniform, James. Glad it arrived in time. Clay says hi. He wanted to be here but the doc wouldn’t sign him out. He was spitting mad.”
“I bet,” I said absently, looking around me. “Where’s Larson’s family?”
Smith’s face went blank.
“You’re looking at it. The Marines were the only real family he ever had. He was a tough bastard.” He paused. “He saved my life. And he was my friend.”
Amira rested her hand over his, and he met her gaze.
“I didn’t like him much,” she said softly. “He scared me a little.”
“Damn,” said Smith. “Just a little? He’d have been disappointed.”
TICK TOCK (EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) Book 1) Page 21