by CD Reiss
“They’re actually holes in my head,” he said. “You’re seeing right through.”
Caden ran his fingers over the top of my hand, connecting the knuckles like a man taking territory one hill at a time. We were so deep inside each other, there was no such thing as a public place.
I hadn’t gone to Iraq to fall in love. I was there to do the impossible—talk to soldiers about how they felt in a situation where feelings could kill. It was exhausting.
Caden energized me.
He traced the scars I’d gotten when I broke my wrist. “Does anyone think you tried to kill yourself?”
“Everyone. My mother still thinks I’m trying to hide a suicide attempt.”
“Why?”
“I was a goth teen. Eyeliner out to here. The world was so boring, like, so uninteresting.” I rolled my eyes dramatically.
“Can’t imagine it.” His fingers kept tracing the scar.
“I did want to… well, I almost gave up after I broke it. I lost flexibility, and it was permanent. I wanted to be a medic.” The admission embarrassed me, because I’d failed.
“That doesn’t surprise me at all.” He lifted my face by the chin. “You’re an adventurous spirit.”
“So are you.” I nudged him.
“No, really. You’re pretty angry at your limitations.”
“Angry?”
“Frustrated. Don’t worry, we’re going to get rid of either the anger or the limits.”
“When?”
“Don’t rush. We have a lifetime.”
* * *
Jenn showed up in leggings and a gray army hoodie, exactly on time. Five in the morning like a good soldier. I was early, stretching on the summit of a huge boulder in Central Park. She joined me.
“Ronin’s coming,” she said. “That all right?”
Ronin and I had dated, if that was what you called sporadic sex in the first year of enlistment, then a long separation, then a few rolls in the hay when I was a resident at Walter Reed and he was working in Intelligence.
“What’s he doing in New York?”
We took off down the boulder, stopped at a small rock embedded in the grass, and dropped for push-ups.
“Who knows?” Ten then back up the rock.
“Really?”
“Left Aberdeen Proving grounds.” Top of the rock. Squat thrusts.
After everything that happened at Abu Ghraib, they’d sent him to Aberdeen. Jesus Christmas on a ladder, the army was fucked.
“They sent him here? Why?”
“He’s out of uniform now.”
Our breathing became unavailable for talking as we worked out. Ronin showed up midway through, in designer jeans and a sport jacket. He may have gone spook, but he was a handsome one. Dirty-blond hair, dark blue eyes in a face that had been chiseled and pristine when we met, but was wearing its ruggedness well.
“You doing it in that jacket?” I said between finishing push-ups and running back up the boulder.
“In a minute.” He took out a cigarette and lit it.
Jenn gave him the finger. He waved.
I didn’t think I could do another. The push-ups were murder on my wrist and my lungs burned.
“One more!” I cried, heading back down the boulder.
“I can’t!” Jenn put her hands on her knees.
“You can!”
I was telling myself more than her. I pushed myself. Push-ups. Run. Squat thrusts. Run.
I fell to my knees on the grass and rolled onto my back.
Ronin slow-clapped with the cigarette dangling from his lips. “Nice work, Major One More.”
Instead of telling him to go to hell, which would have taken a spare breath I didn’t have, I held up my middle finger.
“Two from me!” Jenn held up both of her birds.
Ronin laughed and put his cigarette out under his shoe. “You’re just jealous I don’t have to work as hard as you.” He picked up his cigarette butt and flicked it toward the garbage pail. It was too far to reach and too small a target, but it landed.
“What are you doing here, Ronin?” I asked.
Jenn put in her two cents. “Did Intelligence kick you out for lack thereof?”
He held his hands over his heart. “I’m wounded.”
“No, really.” I sat up. “I’m asking nice.”
He shrugged. “Got an offer in the private sector.”
Jenn and I both asked “Where?” at the same time.
“I can’t say, and you both owe me a beer.”
“Can’t say?” I asked. “You were doing medical research.”
“I still do. But, you know, it’s still military shit. La-di-da.” He broke a piece of grass and tossed it my way. “How’s civilian life, Major? You adjusting?”
“Yeah. It’s fine.”
“She sucks at it,” Jenn interjected.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“You’re still trying to impress the brass with one more lap.”
“Shut up.” I threw blades of grass at her, but she was right. I wasn’t at home outside military life. Not yet.
“And the practice?” he asked. “How’s it going?”
“She needs clients.”
“Can I talk?” I kicked her gently.
“You’re too slow.”
“I could use some more clients.”
“Said so.”
We smiled at each other.
“Jenn here sent me a couple of guys from her art therapy group, and thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“But that’s only a couple.”
“Most of my vets are from Jersey anyway,” she added.
“Manhattan’s tough,” I agreed. “I specialized in battle trauma. They don’t grow military here. They grow, I don’t know, hedge fund managers and musicians.”
“Yeah, here’s the thing. How far are you going to push to do this?” Ronin asked, then continued before I could ask him what the fuck that was supposed to mean. “You’re far outside your comfort zone here.”
“I don’t have a comfort zone.”
“I’m asking if you’re committed, Major One More.”
“You know I am, Lieutenant Pain in the Ass.”
“Good.” He slapped his knees and stood as if we’d just ended a meeting. “I’ll send you some people. See you around.” He stepped away then turned back. “And Jenn?”
“What?”
He flipped her the bird and she laughed.
When he was out of earshot, she sighed. “Such a good-looking man with an ice-cold rock for a heart.”
“Oh, not really. He had a heart once.” I got my feet under me. “He never calls your rank.”
“No, I guess not.” I helped her up. “I never noticed.”
“I think he likes you.”
“I bet I can get to Columbus Station first.”
“Hell, no.”
And we were off for one more run.
Chapter Five
CADEN - OCTOBER, 2006
Greyson had been home three weeks the first time it happened. I was standing over a man with an empty chest. The pump kept his blood moving and the measured hiss of the ventilator told me he was breathing. We’d extracted a leg vein to replace the clogged artery.
I’d done this procedure at least a hundred times, and twice in an army hospital. I knew the rhythms of beeps and hisses. It was nothing. Vitals were good. Oxygen was good.
I held my hand out for the grafted vein. The nurse handed me the tray with the slice of flesh, and the whisper of the ventilator changed.
“What?” I said.
Everyone looked up. Pairs of dots of eyes over pale blue rectangles covering their mouths. Something was there with us, in the room, and it wanted me. If I’d been in a cave with a hungry lion, I’d be just as sure, except the lion didn’t growl. It breathed in a throaty rattle with the shushing of the ventilator.
“What, what, Doctor?” Amy Sullivan, the assisting surgeon, asked.
I wasn’t in a cave. There was no hungry lion. It was fine. The numbers were good. The ventilator was just…
“Can someone check the ventilator?”
“Ventilator checks out,” the tech’s voice came from behind me.
“You can tell that in two seconds? Can I have a swab, please?” I prepped for the graft. “Does it sound normal to you?” I said quietly to Amy.
“Yeah. Are you all right?”
I was sweating. My heart was racing. My adrenal glands were firing on all cylinders. This didn’t happen to me. I always put the right feelings in the right boxes and slid the deadbolt closed until I needed them. I didn’t make up stories, and I didn’t hear voices in the equipment.
But the feeling of being besieged was as familiar as it was real, and I knew how to handle it.
This was war, and I could do my job in the middle of it.
“I’m fine. Let’s put this guy’s heart back in.”
* * *
The feeling followed me that night to our first anniversary dinner. When I saw her outside the restaurant, I kissed her and held her hand while we waited for our table. I decided not to ruin the evening. When I took her hand over the table and she tucked her foot between mine, I decided she didn’t need to know at all. What was I supposed to say? “I was sure there was something but there wasn’t?” Or, “Can you please diagnose me before bed?”
Being married to a psychiatrist had upsides. She prescribed sleeping pills when I needed them. In Fallujah, when I was in the field hospital OR for eight days without rest, she’d managed vitamins and enough amphetamine to keep me sharp enough to not kill anyone. When we were deployed together, I never worried about her getting killed. But nothing kept me sane at home like loving her. She avoided her comfort zone, never got bored or was boring. She was serious but not dull. She was a bulwark against my worst impulses, and my God, my God I loved her more than I thought I could love anything.
Her opinion meant everything to me. She’d never think I was weak, yet I was terrified she would.
Truth incoming.
I didn’t want her to tell me it was nothing, even though I hoped it was.
I didn’t want her to have some easy cure, but I didn’t want to continue like this.
I didn’t want to become a patient in my own marriage.
I wanted it to go away by itself. Prove it was a bad day and that I could handle it at the same time.
But it didn’t. The second night with no relief from the feeling something was there, as Greyson breathed softly next to me, I lay awake in the silent dark, trying to isolate the problem. If I could build a wall around this feeling, hem it in, maybe I could identify it and throw it away. Pick the shrapnel out of my own guts to plink plink in the tray, shard by shard, observe them without the crust of shit and blood.
I must have been seconds from sleep. The shadows got deeper, outlines shifting with the passage of the moon in the window, taking on new, more threatening shapes.
Threatening, and yet… not.
My shrapnel had a shape, and it was compassion. A silent empathy and gentleness just this side of sweet. The Thing watching me, wanting me, the violent pressure on my mind I’d just gotten a shape around had a personality, and it was kind.
My body jolted with a cortisol flood, waking Greyson. She sat up on one arm. Her long straight hair covered her face in a veil. “Caden?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Just a dream.”
Why the fuck did I say that?
“Can you tell me—?”
“No.”
Twisting to her side, she lay down facing me, hands tucked under her pillow. She stayed silent for a few seconds. “You should write it down.”
“Go to sleep.” I stroked her hair away from her face.
When I’d met her, she kept her hair just long enough to keep in a ponytail, but short enough to care for easily. Now that we were civilians, she was letting it grow.
I loved her so much, I wanted to marry her every single day for the rest of my life.
Then a realization hit me like Reveille in the morning.
The Thing? The pressure? The entity that had its own personality that was all gentle kindness?
The Thing loved her too.
Maybe my mental weakness came from being tired, or hiding things from Greyson. Maybe I was jealous of a figment of my imagination. Maybe I wanted to show it who was in charge here.
For all those reasons, and some more complex instinct, I ran my hand down her back. She wore satin nightgowns, a civilian pleasure she reserved for herself and me. She sighed when my palm landed on her ass.
“Doctor?” One eye opened under the web of hair that covered her face. “Do you know what time it is?”
“It’s time for you to get on your hands and knees.”
“Excuse me?”
I got up on my knees and grabbed her hips on either side, lifting them over the mattress. She flopped onto her hands, half twisted.
I bent my body over hers, reaching around her waist and talking softly in her ear. “If ‘excuse me’ means no, then say no.”
She swiped her hand around her head to get the hair off her face, looking back at me with an unfiltered gaze. “It doesn’t mean no, but…”
I pushed my hard cock against her ass, and she didn’t finish the sentence. “Then you’re excused.”
I grabbed her breast harder than I normally would. She was mine. I would not be undercut, and I would not compete. I pulled her nightgown up and yanked down her underwear. Our eyes met over her shoulder as I got my cock out.
“I can’t lean on the wrist for long,” she said.
“I’m aware.” Running the head of my dick along her seam, I spread her wetness onto myself, then I lodged myself in her. She gasped.
Normally, I’d gently slide in, but not this time. Something more primal called, and I shoved another few inches inside.
Yeah.
Just like I thought.
The Thing was horrified.
“Let’s get pressure off that wrist.” I took her by the biceps and pulled her arms behind her, holding them together with one hand. “Better?”
“Yes.” Her head dropped forward.
“This is going to be different,” I said.
“No shit.”
I hesitated. My desire to show the Thing my dominance couldn’t be satisfied at her expense. I loosened my grip on her arms just a little.
“Don’t…” She stopped, took a deep breath, and turned her head as much as she could. “Don’t stop. I’ll let you know.” Her hips pushed into me.
Gently, I gathered her hair with my free hand and wrapped it around my fist, then I yanked her head back as I entered her with full force.
She screamed through her teeth. “God! Caden!”
Her cunt pulsed around me as I hesitated again.
“Say no,” I growled.
“Yes.”
I fucked her so rough, I didn’t expect her to come so hard and so quickly. I kept fucking her, holding her arms behind her, pulling her hair as if it were a bridle. I unleashed deep inside her, bruising her arms with my grasp.
Right there, a whirlwind spun around us as I pounded her, whipping me into a confusion of desire and need, surrender and dominance. Even as I thrust forward physically, mentally I was spun by the force of it. Flipped like a coin, revolving in the air, landing, settling on the mattress.
The whirlwind fell away, and there was only Greyson under me.
The kind, sweet Thing shrank back into the shadows, weeping.
Take that, you fuck.
Chapter Six
Greyson
In the weeks after he took me from behind in the middle of the night, we went back to normal. The episode seemed like a pleasurable blip in a pleasurable routine.
We were meeting at the Mt. Sinai fundraiser. It was a cutting day. When he arrived at the fundraiser, he’d smell of rubbing alcohol and cologne if he’d put some on, fresh coffee grounds and cut
grass if he hadn’t. He’d touch my shoulder. He’d run his finger along the edge of my strapless gown. At home, we’d barely make it in the door before he’d strip me naked and take me. Yes, it was predictable. Some things were worth predicting.
I crawled into the back of the car where my younger brother, Colin, waited. He was an engineer who’d been inspired to go to college after I’d found a way to go to med school, and he’d moved to New York for a job just as I was settling in. The education had done nothing to tamp his roguish ways.
“You look nice,” he said when I slid in next to him. He flicked one of my dangling earrings.
“You do too.” I straightened his black bow tie as the limo coasted toward the museum.
He shooed my hand away. “Thanks for the plus one.”
“Try to keep off the ladies.”
“What’s the fun in that when I have to watch your husband with his hands all over you?”
“Stop it.”
“You two are so in love it makes me sick.”
I looked away, trying to hide my silent laughter. “What happened to you and that woman? The painter? She seemed nice.”
“She wanted things.”
“Things?”
“Promises. Commitments. Me. I have things I’m doing. I can’t get sidetracked by a pretty face.” He tapped his knee for a second. “Or all the other things. Whatever. How’s the practice coming?”
“Not bad,” I said. “Better.”
“You like it?”
“I love it. We’re here. Put your jacket on.”
* * *
The event took place in a ballroom lined with Regency-era portraits and heavy drapery. I plucked a champagne flute from a server’s silver tray and Colin did the same.
“This is lovely.” He scanned the room like a cheetah selecting the weakest in the herd.
“Behave.”
“Oh, your friend Jenn is here. I like her,” he purred.
I elbowed him as Jenn saw us and headed over. She was awkward in heels and her fat black glasses always slid down her nose, but her smile was a beacon of light against her brown skin. We greeted each other, and she swapped her empty flute for a full one.