by Jodi Watters
His face blanched, then reddened in anger.
The choking sound he made was unrecognizable as human, certainly not even close to a word in the English language, his outrage clear. Yanking on his discarded jeans, his movements were angry, the seams nearly splitting in his powerful hands.
“Let me make sure I understand,” he hissed. “Is it that you’re afraid I might give you a bad case of the crabs? Or are you more appalled that I might give you a baby?”
“Don’t act surprised.”
“Don’t act fucking heartless!”
The denim held, and he turned his back to her, hanging his head for long seconds. Finally taking a deep, heaving breath, he stared out the window, the approaching sunset turning the Pacific a steely blue.
“What are we doing here, Olivia? And why are we doing it?” Void of emotion, his voice was as distant as his demeanor. “We keep one-upping each other. You bruise me, so I bruise you. Why is it a competition to see who’s been hurt the most? To see who can fire off the final kill shot?”
“It’s not a competition.” The marina held his attention as she grabbed his T-shirt off the floor, the warm cotton covering her from neck to knees. “If it was, I’d be the winner, hands down.”
Hanging off one shoulder, the shirt hid her nakedness, both inside and out.
Exhaustion lined his face when he turned his head. “I’m tired of carrying this burden. It’s too heavy. I never wanted to hurt you. I only wanted to love you.”
“But you did hurt me!” The tidal wave of emotion simmering in her belly boiled over, this conversation—this fight—years in the making. “I needed you, Ash. I needed my husband! I was in shock, I was bleeding and losing my mind, and still I had to beg you. Down on my knees, I begged you to stay.” She hit her chest with each word. “But you didn’t. You left. How’s that for not wanting to hurt me?”
She stared at him, his profile set in granite, waiting for an answer. Knowing nothing he said would be good enough.
“You hurt me, too. You gutted me.”
His simple admission was a bombshell. She didn’t think anyone could bring down Asher Coleson. He was the Teflon man.
“Yeah, but I never broke my promises.” The tears streaking her cheeks had come out of nowhere, and she wiped them away, composing herself. “My word was good, and my choice was you. Always. I can’t trust you anymore.”
“Oh, really?” He scoffed, shaking his head. “That’s a glowing endorsement for somebody who’s been MIA for four fucking years. So guess what, Liv? I can’t trust you. I can’t trust that you won’t bail at the first sign of trouble. That I won’t come home one day, desperate to see my wife, only to find her gone. Moved right the hell out of our home and in with dear old Dad, goddamn pillows and all. And considering you did exactly that once before, I have a valid concern.”
“At the first sign of trouble?” She was incensed by his casual turn of phrase. “Is that how you remember her? As trouble? Because I remember her as an actual person! With a name and everything!”
And there it was. What their four-year separation was really about.
Her.
The air vibrated in silence. No sound. No movement. Only the ugly truth hanging heavy in the room.
She was the reason a sea of anger and resentment divided them.
“You know what I mean.” He spun his hand impatiently. “Things got rough. You left.”
Her laugh was sarcastic. “That’s rich, coming from you. A man so busy saving the world, he couldn’t be bothered to spend even a second saving his own marriage. You were out gallivanting the globe wearing camouflage, automatic weapons, and a Superman cape. Passing through town occasionally, expecting me to keep the home fires burning. Expecting me to pick up the pieces and be all peachy keen after”—her breath caught—“after her.”
Looking away before she lost it entirely, Olivia filled her lungs slowly, exhaling to a count of ten. Breathing methodically through the surge of grief. A trick Marie had taught.
“You don’t know the meaning of the word rough,” she added, shaking her head.
Pursing his lips, Ash nodded once, but she knew he flat-out disagreed. “How much longer are you gonna hold this grudge?” He lifted his arms. “Another year? A decade? My whole fucking life?”
“I don’t know, Ash. How long do you think it’ll be before I don’t see her face in my dreams anymore? Or worse, in my nightmares?”
“We’ve been apart four years. Enough is enough.”
“No. It’s never enough. It never goes away,” she pressed, stepping toward him. “I feel angry and sad and empty every day because of what happened. I have to live with the pain every day. You should, too.”
“I do live with it.”
“Then you’re doing a fine job of hiding it! You haven’t brought her up once since I’ve been here. Not one time. Why can’t we talk about her? Why are you acting like she didn’t exist? You’ve just forgotten. Erased her from our history.”
“I don’t wanna talk about it. I can’t talk about it.”
“If I can, you can,” she snapped. “Say her name.”
He ran a rough hand over his head, cupping the back of his neck. “Stop it. This isn’t solving anything.”
“You said you wanted to air our dirty laundry. You were gonna make it all better, like some kind of freaking miracle worker or magic time traveler. So? Let’s air it all out.”
“Not this.”
“Why not? Stop acting like she wasn’t a part of our lives.”
“What difference does it make now? She’s gone. You need to let it go.”
“Let it go?” She blinked in surprise. “You must have brass balls and no soul to say that to me. I will never, for as long as I live, let her go. That’s the difference between you and me. That’s the irony in all this. You never really wanted her, and I can never let her go.”
“Jesus, Liv.” He let out a frustrated sigh. “How are we ever gonna move on? You can’t keep dwelling over it. Haven’t we been unhappy long enough? Haven’t you punished me long enough? It happened, nothing can change it. I couldn’t fix it then, and I can’t fix it now.”
“Stop calling her it!” The walls echoed her hoarse shout. “Use her name.”
He shook his head, turning to stare back out at the water, arms crossed.
His silent denial only increased her fury. “I want you to say her name.”
“Olivia, I’m telling you…,” he warned, leaving the threat open-ended. When he finally looked at her, his eyes were chips of blue ice. “Don’t do this.”
She couldn’t stop the flow of words to save her life. They left her mouth of their own volition, pulled straight from her soul.
“She was just a blip on your radar, wasn’t she? Barely enough to move the dial on your attention meter.” She shrugged negligently. “I get it. You only had time for The Unit. They always had your heart. Neither one of us ever did, that’s for sure. Never could and never would.”
His jaw clenched, voice grave. “Be careful with your assumptions.”
“Then talk to me! Tell me! Did you want her, Ash?” She didn’t know what motivated her to push him to the brink, except the need to make him feel an ounce of her pain. “Did you love her?”
His answer had a fifty-fifty chance of breaking her heart all over again.
“Yes,” he whispered, scrubbing a hand down his face, raw emotion replacing the mask. “I loved both of you. Very—” His voice broke and he swallowed. “Very much.”
“Then say it,” she pleaded, relieved to her core, but needing his acknowledgment. “Please. Say your dead daughter’s name.”
When you immersed yourself in a depraved underworld where violent men committed ruthless atrocities before their morning coffee, there was bound to come a day when the lines blurred. When you took a good look in the mirror and realized the hardened, bearded man staring back at you was as savage as the adversary you were trying to eradicate.
And that was the day you eit
her started planning an exit strategy or you started sliding into stark raving madness.
If you were lucky, the urge to beat feet back to civilian life hit you before the crazy did.
If you were lucky and good, you actually stayed alive long enough to see your plan through—no easy feat when the average life expectancy while in combat was roughly seven and a half minutes.
Ash was lucky. He’d seen the crazy coming. His contract expired in ten months, and when it did, he was flashing The Unit a big, fat Peace Out sign. There was still a long, IED-filled road to go, but waiting at the end would be his girls. His world.
Liv and his baby daughter.
Currently copping a squat at Rocket City, a base infamous for taking a ton of incoming, his team was prepping for their next mission to Nigeria and enjoying all the Afghani Tourism Association had to offer before their transport flight. The Taliban’s spring offensive had kicked off earlier in the week and rocket attacks were up all over the country. Tin Man likened getting hit by a rocket to winning the lottery—except the exact opposite. Ash agreed. The sirens, an old-school alarm reminiscent of the mushroom cloud days, had been silent for the last half hour, but indirect fire sounded in the distance. More often than not, the rockets proved ineffective, but one golden BB could change your opinion real quick.
Liv didn’t know about his decision to retire. A bullet, a bomb, or a fluke helicopter malfunction could earn him an early retirement party with a body bag as a parting gift. A cartwheeling piece of shrapnel could slice his carotid, shooting blood and his future all to hell. It was better to surprise her once his odds of survival ticked upward a bit.
The grim reaper was lurking, and now more than ever, he felt it breathing down his neck.
“Let’s name our baby, Liv.” Static crackled across the line when she answered on the first ring, Ash speaking without preamble.
It was his first call home in three hellish weeks.
“Ash?” Her voice echoed, the sweet southern accent a balm to his blackened soul. “Are you okay? I can barely hear you.”
“I’m here, Livvy. I’m here.” In this godforsaken wasteland, worlds apart from the woman he loved.
“Where is here? Jupiter? It sounds like you’re on another planet.”
“I’m far away, darlin’. Too far. Let’s name our girl.”
“Are you really okay?” She hesitated, sensing his mood. “What’s going on? Are you in danger? Tell me the truth, Ash.”
Yeah. He was surrounded by danger. Even a shitty phone connection couldn’t mask that. But the bone-deep weariness in his voice is what gave him away.
In theory, she wanted the truth. In reality, she was better off not knowing. Anytime a compromising noise made it through the phone, he was quick to explain it away and even quicker to end the call. No, that’s not machine gun fire, just a jackhammer. No, those aren’t grenades, just engineers detonating old munitions.
Liv was smart, though. Catching on to his game, he’d resorted to a simpler lie. Training exercises.
“I—I need to know her name. I need to know she’s real.” In case I never meet her.
“Oh, she’s real all right. I have a forty-two-inch waist to prove it. Marshall told me I was wider than one of his Bordeaux barrels, then gave me a raise when I sobbed uncontrollably. You’ve been getting my texts and photos, right?”
“Yeah. Flip through them a hundred times a day, too.” He’d been home only once during her pregnancy, at the twelve-week mark. She’d been sending him full-body selfies every Wednesday since. The caption always the same.
Happy Bump Day, Daddy! We Miss You. Come Home Soon.
Ash scrolled through the slideshow constantly, monitoring the progression of her pregnancy the only way possible. Digitally. His discontent with The Unit was growing at the same rate as her belly.
“You look beautiful. All soft and lush and womanly.” He wasn’t spouting fluff to make her feel better. She was straight-up fucking lovely, and he ached with the need to touch her. “And yeah, you could be mistaken for a thief shoplifting a basketball, but so what. You look damn hot, and if anybody says otherwise, I’ll kill them.”
There was no humor in his voice. He wasn’t joking.
“Only two more weeks to go,” she said in a wondrous voice, ignoring his threat. “Soon I’ll see my feet again. And my husband, too. You’re gonna be home in time, right?”
He hesitated, knowing the truth would do more harm than the lie. “Right.”
He’d promised her he’d be there. And he’d tried like hell to make it happen, too. But radical insurgents didn’t table their reign of terror for the birth of a baby, nor was The Unit too keen on their operators taking paternity leave in the middle of a war. Country before family.
His request had been denied. His wife didn’t know it yet.
This lie, like all the other white lies, was for her protection. Preserving her state of mind.
“We need to assign a name to our little tax deduction,” he said, circling back to the reason for his impromptu call when he should be running mission drills.
“Well, I have been making a list.”
Of course, she had. Liv was the most organized person he knew. And he wasn’t talking clean and tidy, organized. He was talking forward facing labels on all the canned goods, tall in back, short in front, alphabetized for quick selection. She had a mental inventory of every item in the condo, including their coordinates. He’d once asked her where the peanut butter was. Her answer from two rooms away? Kitchen pantry, right side, second shelf down, two o’clock.
Bingo. She’d been spot-on.
Reading his mind, she laughed. “There’s a human being doing a kickboxing routine in my stomach, Ash. An actual person that stores sell clothes for. It’s hard to concentrate on anything else. Unless it’s food. I have a raging addiction to apple juice and chicken wings. At the same time.”
Her euphoria was palpable. Getting pregnant hadn’t been easy. They’d been actively trying since their honeymoon in Maui, but it was a full year into their marriage before she’d called him a month after a memorable trip home, screaming with excitement.
“I’m pregnant!” He’d just come off a two-day firefight in southeast Pakistan and the joyous words were so foreign after the nonstop, horrific violence, it took him a full minute to process them. “Ash? Are you happy about this?”
“I’m happy, Livvy. So happy.” Laughing with her, he’d filed the bloody images from the busted mission to the back of his brain. “And good news on top of great, we’ll have a nice little tax deduction now. I give the government a damn lot of myself. They can give me a little bit back every year.”
Some parents called their unborn baby sprout or bean, but not Ash and Liv. They were the epitome of a career-driven, fiscally-responsible power couple. The nickname stuck.
“I was thinking maybe Mercedes,” she said now, her words fading in and out with the bad connection. “Or Crystal. Then she’ll have her stripper name if she needs to earn some extra cash during those lean college years. Or if she becomes a porn star. Macy says even the ugly girls can make good money if they’re willing to do anal.”
“Over my cold, dead body, Olivia.” But her joke made him grin for the first time in weeks.
She laughed. “That’s better.”
“What’s better?”
“I can hear you smiling now. It’s better than what I heard before. Stress and worry,” she answered, before he could ask. “And something else. You say you’re okay, but I know you’re lying. Come home. Let me love you until you’re better. Or until your baby starts crying.”
“Yes, but what will that crying baby’s name be?”
“Geez, here you go again with the name thing. Okay, let’s get serious. How about Minnie?”
He paused, waiting for the punchline. “As in… mouse?”
“As in, my great-grandmother on my father’s side,” she emphasized. “She hid the family jewels from the Yankees under her saggy breasts.”
>
While he searched for a tactful way to tell her there was no way in hell they were naming their daughter after a cartoon character or a Rebel sympathizer, she took mercy on him.
“Oh, wait. I have another one you might like better.” He pictured her scanning the list. “Cricket. Isn’t it cute? I like it.”
“First a rodent, now an insect. Can we move out of the animal kingdom and into something more human? And normal?”
“If you say Ruth or Dorothy, I swear to God, I’m hanging up on you.”
“Grace.”
Consumed with covert raids under the cover of darkness, his nights were occupied with both real-life monsters and the kind his mind conjured up in fitful sleep. The traditional name had come to him in a rare, wonderful dream.
“Wow.” Static filled the line. “You’ve thought this through.”
And now he just felt silly. He knew jack shit about girl babies anyway. Fuck, he knew jack shit about boy babies. He should stick to counterterrorism and modern warfare, and let Liv make all the child-related decisions.
“If you like Cricket, I could get used to it.”
“You’re running a scam, you know. You act all macho, wanting everybody to think you’re this big, badass soldier. But deep down you’re a marshmallow. A softy with a heart of gold and a panty-dropping smile.”
“I haven’t seen you in months, darlin’. All I can think about is you, buck naked and soaking wet, riding me with wild abandon. Trust me when I say, there’s not a damn thing soft about me right now.”
Her sexy laugh didn’t help his condition. Nine months pregnant, and she still made him rock-hard and horny. He was an animal.
“Okay, then. Our baby’s name is decided.” Her voice brooked no argument. “I love it, and I love you.”
“Love you, too, Livvy. So goddamn much. And our baby.” Cricket. Good Lord.
“Great. So if you don’t mind, little Gracie Coleson wants her daddy to come home tomorrow, if not sooner. The doctor says I can go into labor anytime. Can you catch a flight out yet today?”