Apparently, Marlena hadn’t been the only one remiss in informing her friends about the latest developments in her love life. “No. Liam. He was going to help me carry my massage table to the car.”
Will frowned. “He took off right after his shower. Just boom, gone, like he does sometimes. Sorry about that, but I’ll help you. I’ll go get the table. I remember seeing it in the corner.”
Marlena nodded, even though concern about what had gotten Liam so out of sorts that he had to bail without a word had her worried. After Will walked her to the car and stowed the folded table in the trunk, she called Liam’s cell phone, but it went straight to voicemail.
Her next call was to Olivia. “Hey, I’ll be a few minutes late to Locks. I’ve got a stop to make first.”
She swung by Liam’s apartment, then his workshop, but his truck was nowhere to be seen and neither was he. What if he went to Locks? He knew that’s where she would be. Her concern mounting, she drove to the tavern, distracted by thoughts about where she’d look for him next. Down the street from Locks, she spotted his truck.
He had earbuds in and the windows rolled up. She waved to get his attention, then knocked on the window, but he sat with his eyes closed, his expression somber.
She opened the passenger-side door. His pain poured out over the air like a tidal wave. Her skin prickled with visceral awareness of his torment, as it had begun to do every time she was near him after he listened to his P.E.T. recording.
He pressed the touch screen of his phone to pause the recording, then regarded her with heavy-lidded eyes. “You found me. I was trying to get this over with so I could hang out at Locks with you, but I don’t think I want to go anymore. It’s just too much.”
Though her instinct was to throw her arms around him and offer him all the comfort she could, to tell him to forget about the recording because it was hurting him more than she could stand to see, she understood his drive to get better. She also knew he wouldn’t start to recover for the night until the listening session was over.
She dropped into the passenger seat, took the earbud out of his right ear, and put it in her left.
His sigh in response seemed to well up from the darkest depths of his soul. “You’re not going to want to listen to this.”
She stroked the back of his hand. “Would it bother you if I did?”
“Yeah, it would. You don’t need these stories in your head, too.”
“You’re in my head, so your stories might as well be.”
His gaze searched hers. She tried to show him without words that she was strong enough to help him bear the burden of his trauma any way she could. After a long, hard look, he cast his focus back to the windshield. “Suit yourself.”
Then he pressed “play.” His voice came through the earbud, strained, painful. She wanted to take his hand, but didn’t know if that would be too much for him. He retreated into the darkness in his mind until she felt as though she was in the truck alone, visualizing every terrible moment of the horrible day Liam described.
She heard it in Liam’s voice on the recording when the emotion of the retelling got too much. His tone turned thick and low, defeated. As he used every medical trick in his arsenal to try to save the kid’s life, even after a bullet caught Liam, then the kid, exacerbating an already grim situation.
It got to the point in the recording that they were surrounded by insurgents, being fired on, the walls of the clinic crumbling around them, while he and the kid were bleeding out, and she feared for Liam’s life. He was sitting next to her, vital and strong, and that, in itself, was a miracle, given what he’d faced that day. She studied his profile, but he didn’t seem to sense her gaze, he was so lost in the memory.
On the street and sidewalk, pedestrians and cars passed, having no idea that one day not so long ago, lives had been ripped apart and ended. The world had moved on, and it was heartbreaking and healing at the same time to know that, no matter what, pain and grief were no match for the march of time.
The bottom tip of Liam’s winged staff medic tattoo was visible below his T-shirt sleeve. He’d joined the army a cocky, confident young man. They’d taught him emergency medicine and how to heal, and then given him a rifle and taught him how to kill. He’d gone on three tours of duty in Afghanistan and sacrificed so much. Too much. He’d held lives in his hands, so many lives, including his own. He’d risked everything—his future, his well-being, his life—to save people and fight for US freedom.
What did it feel like to lay your life on the line for others only to have them die while you were powerless to stop it? No wonder he didn’t care if Bomb Squad won or lost. No wonder civilians seemed so petty with their complaints and their narcissism. No wonder hellos and good-byes were so difficult for him. He was such a complicated, beautiful soul. Her throat constricted, and tears stung her eyes.
When the recording ended, horrifyingly, with blood and death and the cries of the wounded, in a blaze of gunfire, Marlena’s tears traced a path down her cheeks. She felt utterly bereft. Liam’s words from the first night he visited her apartment came back to her. There’s a violence in men.
Why did it have to be that way? Why did there have to be so much ugliness in the world to where you had to consciously and consistently work to heal the damage it wrought on you?
She closed her eyes. “You have to listen to that five times a day, every day. How do you survive it?”
He squeezed her knee as though comforting her, which was outrageous given the overwhelming pain he lived with. “I think about what happened to the kid so many more times a day than that. It’s on my mind all the time, in some way, shape, or form, anyway. Just like you with your trauma.”
“You keep drawing parallels between our pasts, but there’s no comparison. When I was ten, my brother had a psychotic episode and attacked me. He lifted me by the neck until my feet left the ground, then he slammed me into the kitchen counter.”
She saw it in her head as though she were watching a movie, from a distance—the stark opposite of the way Liam forced himself to relive his trauma. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when the perspective of the memory had shifted in her mind, but she was self-aware enough to know that she’d done so to protect herself from the mushroom cloud of pain and terror she vaguely recalled experiencing on the day of the attack. Though the memory sped her pulse and evoked unpleasant feelings, they were more like impressions of emotions, the raw sting of pain and fear long ago abandoned.
“As I slid to the floor, he grabbed my hair and pulled me back up, waving a kitchen knife at me. He nicked me with it in a few places on my arms while he shouted at me about the Foreign Legion. That’s the last part I remember clearly. My parents found me on the floor, unconscious, and called 9-1-1.”
Vague anxiety radiated through her. She released a long, slow exhale, breathing into the feeling. That day nearly twenty years ago had hurt her in so many ways, and had changed her life forever, but the event lost all its power in light of Liam’s story.
“What injuries did you sustain?”
She smoothed her thumb over his skull tattoo, taking comfort in the feel of his skin and the soldiers’ courage symbolized in his tattoo. “A fractured skull, a serious concussion, two broken ribs, and a lot of stitches on my arms.”
His hand twitched on her knee. “That’s a lot for a little kid to go through.”
“Before you came in for that first massage, I hadn’t thought about the attack in months and hadn’t spoken of it in years. Not since I told Olivia when I was thirteen. I never thought I’d have to deal with it again, but the universe had other ideas.”
“From my perspective, knowing what I do about your past, I’d say you built your whole world around avoiding the memory. You structured everything from your job to the men you slept with around avoiding the trauma. So I’d say you’ve pretty much dealt with it every single day of your life.”
She wanted to deny the truth in his words, but he was right. Marlena had devoted her l
ife to healing herself and others, to reaching beyond the garbage of day-to-day life and toward great spiritual clarity, to making peace with the things that are out of humankind’s control and out of her control. But still, no matter how diligently she devoted herself to her spiritual growth, she was haunted by her own brush with violence in deep, damaging ways that she was only now starting to recognize.
She leaned her head against his shoulder. “What I went through is nothing compared to what you went through.”
He kissed her forehead. “And you’re not nearly as screwed-up as I am, either.”
“With the other P.E.T. cycles you’ve done, were they for this memory or different ones?”
His hand left her knee. He closed his fist around his cross necklace. “Different.”
Someday, she’d ask him the significance of that necklace, but not tonight. She turned her face in to nuzzle his shoulder. “What do you usually do after you finish listening?”
“I figured out early on that the best thing for me is to do something normal and routine that proves I won’t let the memory sink me. When I listen after hockey games, I usually go right in to Locks and order a beer. Sometimes I have a smoke first.”
“What do you want to do tonight? You said you didn’t feel like going to Locks.”
He thought for a minute. “I like sitting here with you. In there, it’s rough. So many stupid people who have no clue about the world. It’s a travesty, what this country has become. I mean, I love it—I’d die for it—but civilians are . . .” He shook his head, as though whatever civilians were was beyond words.
He retrieved a cigarette from a pack in the center console and hung it from his lips. She set her hand on the door handle, ready to step out should he light it. She cared about him and she was learning to tolerate the smoke, but she drew the line at being trapped in an unventilated truck cab with a lit cigarette.
He reached for the lighter, but almost immediately tossed it back down, his cigarette unlit.
Maybe he did realize she wasn’t a fan of him smoking, despite the fact that she’d so far kept herself from mentioning it. She’d watched Olivia peck at Liam to change so much, and she watched him with his P.E.T. and the daily pain of it, that there was no way she’d ask him to change right now. Someday, when he was done with P.E.T., when he’d found peace, she’d broach the topic. But he was going through enough without feeling pressured to change for her. She wasn’t even sure that he would.
He’d probably tell her, in so many words, to get off his back because it was none of her business. Except that it was her business. He was her business.
“I see you eying my cigarette like it’s a snake,” he said while balancing it at the corner of his lips. “I’m going to quit one of these days, but I’m not ready to yet, so don’t even think of giving me some kind of ultimatum about it. I know who I am and what I can handle. Right now, I can’t handle quitting on top of everything else.”
“Understood. As long as you don’t take it personally if I keep my distance while you’re lighting up.”
“Deal. And I’ll tell you something else. Smoking or no, I’m not ever going to be a good enough man to deserve you. You can’t change me or save me or any bullshit like that. So you’re going to have to decide if you can accept me as I am or if I’m not worth it. Either way, I respect your choice. I know I’m not easy to be around.”
Pain and the heartbreak of the traumas he’d suffered made his voice raspy and vulnerable, not unlike his voice in the recording. He talked tough, but he was putting all his cards on the table for her to judge. This wasn’t just her high school crush, or the man she’d wanted to prove something to a few weeks earlier. This wasn’t the post-army Liam that Olivia and their friends had constructed in their minds. This was the real Liam—flesh, blood, pain, joy, and a million complicated facets in between.
In return, he’d seen a side of her that no one ever saw, her most fragile moments, yet he wanted her still. She’d seen glimpses of him in those fragile states, too. On their souls, they carried layers of impact from each other.
He was right—he wasn’t easy to be around, but worth it. So worth it.
She leaned across the seats to press a kiss to his cheek, but he tossed the cigarette aside, then angled his mouth over hers. Reaching his hands to her waist, he pulled her halfway onto his lap.
The kiss that started out slow and tender turned urgent fast. Their tongues stroked along each other, tasting, teasing. His hand slipped beneath her shirt to caress her back, then dove beneath her pants to clutch her ass. She touched him everywhere she could reach, marveling at the hard planes of his chest and the muscles in his shoulders and arms.
They broke apart, breathing hard. Marlena felt each of Liam’s belabored inhales and exhales beneath her palms, in the rise and fall of his clavicle against her fingertips.
He smoothed her hair away from her face, searching out her gaze. “Leave it to Miss Know-It-All to figure out exactly what I needed after my P.E.T. listen.” The thick rasp in his voice was still present, and the lust she read in his eyes and words was tempered by a lingering pain. There was no way she could take the pain away from him; only he had that power. But he’d helped her temporarily forget the dark anguish she’d felt on Sunday night, and she yearned to do the same for him.
She curled a hand over the button fly of his jeans as an idea took root in her mind, something that might sweep away the last vestiges of hurt in his eyes—something she’d fantasized about doing in his truck since they were seventeen and he’d driven her home after walking in on her and Olivia in their family’s den one night, getting drunk because Olivia’s boyfriend had broken up with her.
Before she could overthink it, she brought her knees up and knelt on the passenger seat. As they kissed again, she unlatched his pants by feel. When he tried to guide her fully onto his lap, she pulled away from the kiss and stroked his cheek. Her other hand closed around his girth.
“You are so fucking hot,” she said, using his own words from the first time they’d been intimate. She didn’t curse all that often, and it felt good on her lips, rebellious and sensual.
“You stole my line.” He pulled on her hips in another attempt to haul her over to him. “Get over here and straddle me.”
She answered his command by freeing the erection straining against his boxers. It curved up his abdominals, obscene and glorious, a perfect cock. She trailed kisses down his cheek, then neck, then lowered her head to his lap.
“You doing what I think you are?” he said.
With the tip of her tongue, she traced the largest vein from the root of his shaft to the head, then gave a suckling kiss to the base of his cock head. “You talk too much.”
With a wry chuckle, he rested his head on the headrest and slouched.
She wrapped her lips around him, then flattened her tongue against his shaft and dragged it down his length, getting him wet all over so that by the time she was ready to take him all the way to her throat, he would slide without resistance. He tasted of soap and spicy flesh, with a hint of lingering sweat, as though his shower had been too brief to cool his body properly. She inhaled through her nose, taking in the masculine scent that was unique to him, and that she could never get enough of. The idea of serving his needs as a man, of letting him use her like this, turned her on in a way she’d never experienced before with other men.
Somehow, Liam was more than a man—stronger, bigger, more aggressive. Everything about him oozed raw virility. Maybe someday, she would let him tie her to the bed. Maybe she was underestimating the pleasure she would take in making herself utterly vulnerable to his wants. Someday, perhaps.
Tonight, she worshiped every wrinkle and every vein in due time, then gripped him hard with her hand and flicked his slit with her tongue. She jerked the length of him with her hand until he squirmed. She could tell he was getting impatient for her to suck him properly by the way his hands curled into fists against his jeans and the way he arched and thrust u
p as though rooting for her mouth. Instead of sating his need, she took a firm hold of his balls with one hand and pulled his foreskin up with the other to tease the rim of it with her tongue. She kept up the assault until he groaned.
His hands plunged into her hair and gripped, pulling it in a way that gave her a moment’s panic. She fought through it, recognizing it for what it was, but he was already easing his grip again. He stroked her hair. “Shit, Marlena, I’m sorry. I don’t know how to . . .”
She dropped her mouth over his head and sank down, taking him all the way in until he bumped the back of her mouth and down her throat. The rest of his words came out as a hiss through his teeth.
She bobbed up and down the length of him, giving him what he’d been waiting for. Her hand trailing her lips up and down while her other hand tugged and kneaded his balls as she worked, ruthless in her search for his release. When she sensed he was close, she tilted her face and looked into his eyes as she sucked and jerked and kneaded, a tantric trick that worked almost every time.
He wore a fierce scowl. With a curse, he pushed her mouth away and took over with his hand, working himself with small, quick finger moves.
She got her mouth close to his head, her tongue extended. “Let me swallow.”
He jerked her shirt down past her bra. “I’d rather see it on your pretty skin,” he bit out as he found his release. Grunting, his teeth bared and clenched, he shot ropes of come on her chest and neck. When he was done, she licked the last drops off his head, then sat up to give him a good look.
He smiled at her chest, admiring his handiwork. “That might be my second favorite look for you.”
“Do I dare ask what your first favorite is?”
“Next time I see it, I’ll tell you.”
From the glove compartment, he grabbed a stack of fast food napkins and wiped off her chest. “You still want to go to Locks?”
For a split second, she almost lied and told him ‘no’ so the two of them could go home together, which she was certain would be his first choice. The trouble was, she could see how being in a relationship with Liam could be isolating, if she let it be. Already, Olivia had noticed her pulling away. “I’m going to go. My friends are in there waiting for me, but I get it if you don’t want to. I can see why the tavern isn’t your favorite, so no pressure.”
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