by Tina Whittle
“It’s been two weeks since I’ve had my way with you, boyfriend.”
“Six days. Don’t exaggerate.”
“We can fix that, you know. Upstairs. Where there’s now—surprise surprise—an honest-to-goodness real bed. With 600-thread-count, Egyptian cotton Frette sheets.”
He leveled a look at me. “You took my sheets.”
“The spare ones, yes. Also your shampoo and a pair of pajamas. And some towels. Do you mind?”
He shook his head. I could almost see the picture forming in his mind. No longer was my upstairs living space a wretched hovel. Tiny, yes, as cramped as a ship’s cabin. But thanks to a trip to Goodwill and a teensy raid of his bathroom closet, well stocked with everything he’d need to feel at home, at least for a few hours.
I looped my arms around his neck. “Stay here tonight.”
“I can’t, I’ve—”
“So stay right now.”
“That doesn’t…Oh.”
I flicked a glance at his watch. “It’s seven-fifty-five. Your bedtime is nine o’clock. The drive will take forty-eight minutes tops, which leaves seventeen free minutes.”
His eyes slid to the right, the better to access his perfectly sharp left frontal lobes, the seat of logic and time management and schedules. The right side of his brain had some hiccups still, an artifact of the car accident three years earlier, but the rest of him agreed with me, that two people could do a lot with a new mattress and seventeen minutes.
I moved closer, hip to hip. “Sixteen minutes and counting.”
He exhaled softly, his posture loosening, and I knew the battle was mine. His left brain made a formidable opponent at times—rigid, calculating, inclined to lock down the systems at the slightest emotional chaos—while his right brain tended to lurch into paralyzed befuddlement. My strategy was simple—bypass the neuronal circuits and go straight for the body, which had its own agenda.
I reached to loosen his tie. And he froze.
“Tai?”
“Yes?”
“Did you hear footsteps?”
Chapter Three
“What?”
He cocked his head. “Footsteps. In the alley. There shouldn’t be anyone back there this time of night.”
I listened, but all I heard was the buzz of overheads. Our breathing, suddenly quickened. “I don’t hear anything.”
He pulled out of my arms. “I’ll go take a look.”
“Trey—”
He slipped his gun from the holster. “Stay here.”
I recognized the tone. It always happened so fast, the shift from boyfriend to bodyguard. I felt the chill, involuntary, a flash of memory. Not all stalkers stopped with stalking. Some shot at you from across great distances, the crosshairs trained on the back of the skull, or the T-zone between your eyes, or the bull’s-eye where your heart and lungs pumped….
I grabbed his elbow. “Don’t go out there.”
“Tai—”
“I’m serious. Call 911.”
“I have to check.”
“Trey!”
He slipped backward into the hall, then slammed the door behind himself so fast I didn’t have time to stop him. I snatched at the handle, but without the code, the door wasn’t budging. I kicked it once for good measure, but Trey was already out the back door and into the night.
Cursing loudly, I shoved aside two garbage bags filled with packing peanuts and climbed on top of the display table, then stood on tiptoe and peered through the window into the lot below. The yellow haze of security lights bathed the deserted pavement, washing my red Camaro a sickly orange. The dumpster squatted directly below me, surrounded by shadows as darkly impenetrable as the mouth of the alley, which I could barely see from that vantage point.
No sign of Trey.
I cranked open the window and pressed my face to the opening. “Goddamn it, Trey, get back here right now and let me out of this room!”
No answer. My lips felt numb, my hands too. I rubbed them together, but the sensation spread.
“Trey!”
Still no answer. I climbed down, but the coldness remained. I willed my heart to stop galloping, my body to stop shaking, my vision to stop collapsing, but my body wouldn’t respond. I dropped cross-legged to the floor, my back against the wall, and drew my knees to my chin.
I did hear footsteps then, outside, leather on pavement. Trey. Finally, I heard the back door open and close. A series of beeps, and then the inner door opened and he came inside, his gun back in its holster.
“Whoever was there never left the alley,” he said, “so the camera didn’t…Tai?”
I looked up at him and tried to speak, but no words came. The shivering intensified, and my chest hurt as if I’d taken a punch.
He knelt in front of me. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
“No, I…”
I tried to stand, but a new wave of dizziness crashed and broke. All I could see was Trey, his face centered against a collapsing gray blur.
“Give me your hands,” he said.
I did as he said, automatically, and he squeezed my fingers, his touch firm and steady.
“Good. Now breathe.”
I tried, but the air wouldn’t go in all the way. My eyes flew open. “Omigod, I can’t…I don’t…”
“Breathe on my count. In for two, out for two.”
I drew in a shaky breath as he counted. One, two, one, two. Gradually the shaking subsided. My throat opened, my chest too. The anger rose then—at him, yes, for dashing off into the night, but mostly at myself. Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere else than on this dirty floor.
I fought down tears, but they flowed anyway. “Damn it, I don’t know why this is happening! I’m not some panicky spaz girl!”
“Tai—”
“This isn’t making any sense, I’m not…I don’t…”
And yet there I was, on the floor, in the dark—embarrassed, angry, suddenly exhausted—with my boyfriend assessing my vital signs. I stretched my legs in front of me, fighting an itchy restlessness. Gradually the cramping pain in my chest subsided, and my vision cleared, and when I inhaled, the air went all the way in.
Trey rocked back on his heels and watched me, fingers at my pulse point. Part of me wanted to yell at him some more, but another part held onto the sensation of his hand against my skin like a drowning person clutching a life preserver. It was physical, grounding, real.
Trey assessed my progress. “How are you feeling?”
I glared at him. “Don’t you ever shut me up in this room again, you hear me?”
He glared right back. “I heard footsteps. In the alley. Where no one should have been.”
“For which there are a dozen possible explanations.”
“Yes, including the fact that someone could have been in the alley.”
“Checking is one thing. Pulling your weapon and stomping out there is something else entirely!”
“Are you saying I overreacted?”
“Hypervigilance is the official term.”
His head snapped back a quarter inch, but he showed no other reaction. I knew he recognized the word, though. It referred to an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by exaggerated threat-detecting behaviors, and his psych profile was littered with it.
He kept his expression neutral. “We’re discussing your reaction—”
“And now we’re discussing yours. It happened to you after the accident, this same thing.”
“Not the same.”
“I saw the symptom list.”
“Then you also saw the diagnosis. Post-concussive syndrome. It was resolved within six months.”
“I know. But I also know that anniversaries can trigger relapses. And Sunday is three years to the day you went head to head with that concrete embankment.”
“Trey?”
“I heard you. But the anniversary of the accident isn’t a trigger for me. It never has been.”
“Something is, though.” I kept my voice steady. “I may be the one on the floor, but I’m not the only one cracking up.”
He looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“I mean the nightmares.”
“What nightmares?”
“The ones you’ve been having almost every single night.”
He looked astounded. “I have?”
“Tossing, turning, mumbling nonsense. I tried to wake you up once, but you got a little…” I pantomimed a right hook. “Punchy.”
All the color drained from his face. “Did I—”
“Of course not. I got back on my side of the bed fast, and you went back to sleep.”
He exhaled slowly, shakily. “I am so sorry. I would never…Why haven’t you told me?”
“Because I thought you knew. Why wouldn’t you know?”
“Because this kind of nightmare is very different from normal dream states. There’s no recall, just a feeling of…I don’t know. Mental exhaustion.” He dropped his eyes again. “You’re right, however. Combined with the rest of the symptoms, they’re a clear PTSD indicator.”
“The rest of what symptoms?”
He kept his eyes down. “The headaches. Backaches. Tiredness. I know you’ve noticed.”
I had. The migraines that floored him for hours at the time. Muscle spasms in his lower back. A lack of interest and energy bordering on depression. Things he’d explained as a hard afternoon at the gym, an extra-long day at work, the shorter days and longer nights of winter. Suddenly I realized what a great job the two of us had been doing at playing denial.
I tried to meet his eyes. “Trey? If it’s not the anniversary, what is it?”
He didn’t answer. I pulled his face up so that I could look at him straight on. I saw a muscle in his jaw tic. I got another flash of memory—the rain, the lightning, the desperation—and felt light-headed again.
“It’s what happened in Savannah, isn’t it? For all your training and Special Ops smarts, it got to you too.”
He exhaled heavily, then sat next to me, his back against the wall, our thighs touching. We made a pair of peculiar bookends, Trey and I, as he propped his arm on his bent knee. He leaned his head back against the wall, stared at the ceiling.
“It doesn’t make any sense. I’ve been in multiple threat scenarios; that’s what I trained for. And yet…Savannah was different.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how to explain.”
“Can you try?”
“No.”
“But—”
“Talking about how I don’t know how to talk about it is not going to help.”
He had a point. I leaned my head on his shoulder. He flinched again, and then forced himself to relax.
“Is this who we are now?” I said. “The PTSD poster couple? I slump in a panicked stupor while you pull your weapon at the least provocation?”
He shot me a sharp look. “I heard footsteps.”
I didn’t feel like arguing anymore. I stood, a little wobbly, but on my own two feet. I held out my hand. He took it, eyeing me from top to bottom as he let me pull him to standing.
“Come back with me to Buckhead,” he said.
“I can’t. I’ve got—”
“Please.”
Damn it. He had to go and use the p-word. “Fine. If it makes you happy.”
“It does. Go get your bag.” He held the door open for me. “I want to check the cameras one more times, video and audio, see if they caught something. And you really do need to talk to your neighbor about that dead zone in the alley. There’s absolutely no reason—”
I let him gripe. It was forty-five minutes back to the steel and glass safety zone of his Buckhead apartment. One short elevator ride to the thirty-fifth floor, then the triple-lock system would engage, the deadbolts and the Schlage platinum keyswitch and the security alarms too, all the primary and secondary and tertiary systems. No more quickening panic. No more opportunity for everything to slide and crash.
No more surprises, of any kind.
Chapter Four
The next morning, the sky had the low ponderous weight of a mudslide. Yet there I was standing under that sky with an umbrella and a bag of pastries, the sideways rain and thick humidity playing havoc with my hair. The headquarters of Atlanta’s FBI Field Office loomed before me. Somewhere on the top floor of that graphite-glassed cube was the temporary office of Dan Garrity, Trey’s former partner and slightly estranged best friend, who had recently been promoted to the Atlanta Metro Major Offenders Task Force. Though still technically an Atlanta PD detective, Garrity’s main gig for the next two years would be here, with AMMO—assuming he didn’t go to prison, flee the state, or get shot down in his driveway like his three predecessors.
I tucked the phone between my ear and shoulder. When Garrity answered, I waved. “Look out your window, Secret Agent Man.”
A few seconds’ silence. “Is that you under the umbrella?”
“Yep.”
“There’s a tornado watch on, you know. Not the best idea, standing out there like a lightning rod.” A pause. “So what’s in the bag?”
“Doughssants. Like croissants, only doughnutty. With brandied peaches on top.”
“That’s a real thing?”
“Smells real. Wanna take a coffee break and find out?”
***
Garrity met me in the lobby under the official FBI seal, with its corona of navy and gold flourishes and the stalwart motto: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity. I sat on the bench with my knees together, raindrops beating against the window, stronger now. Not a single dark-suited agent spared me a second glance, which meant, I knew, that every single one was examining me with the thoroughness of an X-ray.
Garrity brought two coffees in paper cups. “Compliments of Uncle Sam.”
He unbuttoned his navy jacket and sat next to me. He looked very special agent-y, even if his hair refused to conform to suit-and-tie standards, flaming about his head in rust-colored cowlicks. Despite his quasi-federal status, he still wore the Atlanta PD shield on his belt and the department-issue S&W on his hip.
“Still a cop,” I said.
He grinned. “A cop with my own urban tactical team and a Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopter at my disposal. Beats that old Crown Vic any day.” He accepted the bag, tested its heft approvingly. “So…what have you done now?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, you only bring me food when you want something. What’s up?”
He had a fox face, with a sharp nose and sharper eyes. I still found it hard to picture him and Trey working together—Trey with his detached, mathematical precision and Garrity with his kinetic street smarts. They’d met on the Atlanta PD’s infamous Red Dog Squad, and Garrity still maintained a fierce protectiveness, but sometimes I saw loss in his eyes, the heart-gouging kind.
I took a sip of coffee. “So there is this one thing on my mind.”
Garrity pulled a doughssant out of the bag, waved his hand in a “get on with it” gesture.
“Sunday is the anniversary of Trey’s accident.”
“Right.”
“Does that ever…I mean…” I tried to keep my tone easy, nonchalant. “Does that ever look like PTSD?”
He put down the pastry, suddenly serious. “What’s going on?”
I told him about the previous night—the refurbishing of the gun shop, the footsteps in the alley, the drawn gun. I told him about Trey too—the nightmares and headaches, the battening down of the psychological hatches. Garrity listened without interrupting. He had an interrogator�
�s knack for silence—he could twist it like a screw when he wanted—but he could also be gentle with it.
“How long has this been going on?”
“Months.” A hard burst of rain lashed the window—stronger now, laced with hail—and I jumped.
Garrity noticed. “You’re feeling it too. Leftovers from Savannah?”
I started to deny it, then nodded. Whenever it rained, I remembered the driving wind, the terror of helplessness, the soaking obliterating storm. And then Trey, as rending and total as a lightning strike himself. There had been no charges filed against him for the shooting; it hadn’t been lethal, after all. Obviously in self-defense, the officials had said, as if they couldn’t quite believe the Trey they’d seen in the aftermath—battered, soft-spoken, deferential—could have been capable of killing anyone.
But I knew better. And so did Garrity. I’d seen Trey come close to homicide, but he’d seen Trey actually do it—one night years ago, a robbery gone bad, Trey putting a single bullet right through the bad guy’s heart. Garrity and I weren’t fooled by Trey’s dropped eyes and quiet voice. Not by a longshot.
“I don’t know what happened to me last night,” I said. “All I know is Trey shut me in that room, and I lost it. Lots of ungood things. He was the one stuffed in the hold of a boat down in Savannah, not me, so I don’t know why…it makes no sense.”
“Have you talked to Eric about this?”
I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose. My brother. The occupational psychologist with a sub-specialty in PTSD.
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because my brother is an alarm bell you can’t unring. He’ll sink his hooks into whatever freaking complex he thinks I have this week. Besides, things are otherwise good. Trey’s got this new project—resilient security systems—and he’s re-doing my storage room into a state-of-the art safe room.”
Garrity snorted. “That’s what always he does right before the anniversary, throws himself into some project. Then on February ninth, he hides in his apartment and avoids all contact with his fellow humanity. Won’t answer his phone, won’t respond to e-mail or texts, won’t answer the door. He denies this is what he’s doing, but he does it anyway. Like the rest of his life. He knows it’s all one big mirage, but as long as it keeps him functioning, he doesn’t poke too hard at it.”