On the Edge: The Edge - Book 2

by Reiss, CD

  Chapter Twelve

  CADEN

  The pleasure of making her submit to an orgasm after denying her one was matched only by the gratification of doing a complication-free quad.

  After the disconcerting discussion preceding her surrender, I was left with the knowledge that he was still there even if I couldn’t feel him. He’d stolen days from me. He’d stolen her body. Her pleasure. He’d steal everything if he could.

  That idea was insulting enough. He was weak. Emotional. His thinking was imprecise and fractured, yet he’d managed to overtake me, and this fact was the most galling.

  After the quad, I was listing his weaknesses in my mind, placing his inability to cut into a plastic doll at the top of the list, when I froze, bloody gloves over the bin.

  Days and days had been stolen from me. The man everyone knew as Caden had done things I couldn’t remember, and I’d just stood in an operating theater, over an open rib cage, as if I had a right to do a quadruple bypass.

  What if he engulfed me during surgery?

  What if I’d gotten information yesterday that I needed in the OR today?

  I dropped the gloves in the bin and let the lid close.

  What happened that I didn’t know about when he fucked her?

  * * *

  The shower in the doctors’ lounge had gone cold, but that would help the swelling. I unwrapped the towel from around my left fist and flexed my hand. Pain jolted me from the second knuckle down to the wrist. Strained palmar ligament. Grade one sprain.

  Did I need a grade two? I was under no illusions that Damon would be gone in a week, but I didn’t want to risk permanent damage. I turned off the shower, and the pressure sent a shot of pain up my arm.

  I hadn’t punched a tile wall impulsively. I’d done as much thinking about it as I’d needed to do. I didn’t want to kill anyone, but if I reported my decline in functioning, I might never be allowed in the OR again. A sprain would give me a chance to fix this before it ruined my life.

  The pain jolted my every move. Toweling off. Getting dressed. I wrapped it and closed the bandage with butterfly clips.

  That was that for now. I reported the sprain. Wilhelmina asked how I’d injured myself, and I told her I’d slipped in the shower. She tsked as she took me off the schedule and joked that I should sue. Someone would be put out, but no one would be dead.

  I had two weeks to fix this mess but no clue how to do it.

  Mental brute force didn’t work. Switching between who I really was and Damon—who I wasn’t—was going to kill my career. Even if I got the position in thoracic, I’d need to remember case details if I wanted to advise correctly.

  With an hour before my Blackthorne appointment, I walked to clear my head.

  I had two things.

  Greyson and surgery.

  He threatened both.

  This Thing could ruin me.

  But Greyson had been right. She’d said it before, but I’d gotten more analytical in my approach and I was ready to hear the truth. He was me. The illusion that the Thing was a separate entity in the corners and white noise was gone. It was me. My mind. I’d cracked and split. I couldn’t battle a man named Damon any more than I could wage war against myself and win.

  Why hadn’t I admitted it before?

  I stopped at a store window on Fifth Avenue to consider a necklace for Greyson. It would drop between her tits just so. I could engrave it with my name. It would mark her as mine.

  In the reflection, behind my face, stood St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  We’d never had a real wedding. We’d run to San Diego, taken our vows in her parents’ yard, had a party, and gone back to Balad. We went back to our lives as if the wedding was a private affair.

  I knew Damon was the same person I was. The fact that I was crazy didn’t mean I didn’t have common sense. Yet I wanted to publicly take her as mine, not his, even if he was me.

  Walking again, I tried to piece together a strategy. My sense of self was crashing around me. I should have been depressed. Despairing. My fundamental realities should have been shaken to the core.

  I felt nothing but a need to solve the problem.

  And when my mind made the words “I feel nothing,” I meant it literally.

  Besides a need to own my wife, a sharp pain in my wrist, and a motivation to fix what was broken, I felt nothing.

  * * *

  BALAD BASE OFFICER’S QUARTERS

  FALLUJAH, IRAQ

  NOVEMBER, 2004

  In Fallujah, I didn’t realize I needed her until after.

  After I acted like an ass and showed her my dick.

  After I was obnoxious during my intake session.

  After eight days of casualties.

  After we fucked and sucked like people close to death.

  After I medevaced outside the wire to impress her and came back broken.

  After her need woke me from choking darkness.

  After I knew I loved her, even if it was too soon to define it as love, she told me she was tasked out of her unit at the combat hospital to work on a project at Abu Ghraib.

  “I don’t…” She stopped herself, then started again. “I don’t expect you to stay in the army, and I’m not leaving. So…”

  Nothing had seemed fragile until that moment. After it, the world showed me how brittle it was. Even her sentence broke.

  She was in my arms. We were sticky with each other’s bodies, sweat, saliva; the fluids of sex layered our skin, and we could break.

  Not just us.

  Everything could shatter.

  The universe.

  The planet.

  Me.

  Just from her. She owed me nothing, but she could break everything.

  She was holding me together. She was the one who’d pulled me out of the darkness.

  I was broken, and I needed her.

  “I’m a practical man,” I said. “A surgeon has to be. If you cut somebody open and you’re careless, you’re gonna kill them. It’s not bad luck. It’s not bad karma. If you’re casual or cavalier about germs or how you’re holding the knife, you can kill somebody. That’s just the long and the short of it. So, when I met you, I figured… pheromones. Early imprinting. Reproductive instinct. You meet all the standards for beauty and then some. I’m a straight guy. My brain and my spinal cord and my dick are wired to find a female of child-bearing age. My body reacts to you because my brain releases certain hormones at the sound of your voice or the smell of apples on your skin. It’s all science until it’s not.”

  I got up. I had rounds, and I couldn’t look at her and tell her this at the same time.

  “You know I had you down for a few fucks and a friendly good-bye. Probably about the same as you had me down for. We’re adults. It’s not like either one of us hasn’t ever had a pheromone-induced hormone rush. But it got weird. Somewhere in those eight days when you were checking on me, it was about more than the chemicals in my brain. I panicked. I went outside the wire because I was afraid I’d lose you if I didn’t. And I’m on that fucking Blackhawk, asking myself what the hell I’m doing, because the way I needed you wasn’t normal. Not for a man who knows how the body and the brain affect each other. I don’t believe in the Universe with a capital U, and I don’t believe in God. I believe in brain signals and blood. But now? I’m willing to think maybe I’m wrong about everything. This is what it comes down to. You expanded my view of the universe. I don’t know what to do with that. I’m not saying I believe in fate or karma or ‘meant to be’ now, but my thinking got bigger because of you. I feel woken up.”

  Maybe that was the moment of my birth.

  The moment he woke up.

  * * *

  The Blackthorne appointments went like this:

  The elevator took me up to the forty-fourth floor, where double glass doors led to a carpeted reception area. They’d decorated in light wood and alabaster tile. I never waited. A receptionist, sometimes male, sometimes female, always young, led me t
hrough a door with a code into a room with tiles and furniture that was slightly darker. Everyone wore strict business attire. The next door used retinal ID scans on both of us and unlocked to a dim hallway with dark brown paneling. Anyone walking around wore a lab coat. The incongruity of the coats against the hotel-like hallway was mitigated by the person I was passed off to, who usually wore something more formal.

  I was led to a different office by a different person every time. They asked about my week. They asked about any illnesses or injuries. Travel. Medications. I mentioned the wrist and the antibiotics. I got a shot they identified as cyanocobalamin. A.k.a. B12. Improves mental state, concentration, nerve cell health.

  They never asked about my mental state except to ask if I was improving. There was no follow-up when I said I wasn’t. Those questions came in the form of a post-session questionnaire that I usually finished quickly.

  “This isn’t helping,” I said in the black room as someone whose name was irrelevant took the sensors off my head. “It’s actually a waste of time.”

  “Your scans are improving,” she said.

  “I want to see the scans.”

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was convinced they’d show my brain bifurcated as the solution to the problem.

  * * *

  I checked my watch. I’d been in the dark room for an hour. It had felt like five minutes. The exercises were getting longer, and my perception of them was getting shorter. Maybe I was achieving a facility with them, or maybe I was getting muscled out by a little wife-fucking worm.

  We were intercepted by a tall blonde in a business suit. “Dr. St. John,” she said, turning to the tech once we stopped. “I have it from here.”

  The tech nodded and went through a nondescript door.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Our director would like a moment.”

  “Do I know them? I’ve never seen the same person twice.”

  From her deliberate nod, I knew that was by design. “I believe you’ve met Mr. Stevens.”

  * * *

  Ronin sat across from me in the same spot as our first and only meeting. A manila file sat on the table between us. I flexed and released my hand to work out the pain. Closer inspection revealed abrasions as if I’d punched a wall.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Fine, thank you.” I didn’t want to talk to Ronin about my problems now any more than I had when I let Greyson talk me into meeting him for dinner.

  “What happened to your hand?”

  “Fell on it.”

  A woman came in with a pitcher of water and lemon and left without a word.

  “I’m told you want to see your scans?”

  “I do,” I said.

  He nodded and poured water into two tumblers. A lemon wedge blocked the pinch in the lip before tilting and landing in my glass with a splash. “Well, here’s the problem: your scans are classified.”

  “My scans are…? It’s my brain. How can the scans be classified?”

  “All materials from this project are classified.”

  “What are you doing here, Ronin? Building some kind of super soldier or something?”

  “There was a movie about that.” He smiled. “It sucked because it wasn’t believable.”

  “That would explain why this shit isn’t working.”

  “How do you know it’s not working?” he asked.

  “The problem we came to you with isn’t fixed.”

  He took a sip of water. I left mine alone. I didn’t need the dramatic pause.

  “You’ve noticed we don’t ask you deep questions about your life.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s by design. We’re observing changes in the way the brain works so they can treat PTSD without therapeutic interference. It’s quicker and more effective.”

  “And has mine been changing?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s getting worse,” I said.

  “How do you mean? Your questionnaires are vague.”

  I never knew if he was reading the post-treatment surveys, but I had been vague on the off chance he did. Good choice. “I mean there’s no change. I’m learning to live with it. That’s all.”

  “Your last two sessions were different apparently.”

  “When was that again?”

  I earned his suspicious look. I was fishing, and he knew it.

  “Last two Thursdays. You were more forthcoming than usual.”

  “I wasn’t feeling well.” I held my hand out for the file even though I could reach the file myself. “Let me see it. It’ll refresh my memory.”

  Ronin handed it to me. “I hear you had reservist training this past weekend.”

  “Yes.” I opened the folder. The standard pages were there but filled with my handwriting. Flipping to the previous session, I recognized the one-sentence answers.

  “How was that?”

  “Uneventful.”

  Back to the previous week, with Damon’s puling and complaining. Jesus Christ. You’d have thought the flu was going to kill him. And he went on and on about the effects of the breathing. How he’d felt happy.

  Happy.

  If feeling like the king of the world with all the uplift of power and weight of responsibility was happy, then I knew less about him than I thought.

  He is you.

  He reported a marked improvement in the feeling of being watched and complimented the treatment as if he’d been delivered an unexpectedly delicious meal.

  He wants out of the sessions.

  With every passing answer, his desire to stop coming to Blackthorne became clear.

  At least to me.

  Because he’s you.

  Why did he want to stop? Was he afraid of losing? Was he running scared? Or was he sure that he’d won already?

  I had a flash of… I couldn’t call it a thought. A flash of a thought process that was unlike anything I was capable of. The process was nuanced in webbed layers of connections. It was like seeing the fourth dimension. It did not have a decision at its end, only a path that wound between who I was and who Damon was.

  The course of it was a series of questions and unactionable conclusions.

  You invented Damon.

  You are not you.

  Don’t hide.

  You have a problem.

  You didn’t know she was pregnant.

  I’m not hiding anymore.

  I closed the file.

  The enemy is you.

  “Thanks. I think I was running a fever.”

  You’re crazy. Shitbird crazy.

  That awareness, like the ones before it, opened up to new paths where emotion crisscrossed sense, sending my thoughts in a direction before I could identify which one I was on.

  Greyson deserves better than crazy.

  And with that, a cluster of thoughts between the two personalities, all shaped like fear.

  “Our team would like to do another assessment,” Ronin said. “Like the one you did before we started. To measure against the benchmark.”

  The nuanced, complex thought process shut down steadily, strand by strand, until everything aligned into tight, sane little rows.

  “Not today.”

  “You can set up an appointment for whenever you’d like.”

  “Fine,” I said. “That’s fine.”

  We shook on it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  GREYSON

  After I finished my last session, I could have stayed home and cooked dinner. I could have waited for my husband just to see who showed up.

  Instead, I called Colin. He wasn’t around. I left a message and made plans to meet Jenn. As a result, I wound up at Jenn’s place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, waiting for Colin to show. She had a loft on the second floor of a brick townhouse. The only things that made it a loft were an open floor plan, high windows and ceilings, and concrete pillars where walls used to be. She shared it with two active-duty nurses who were on short deployments and had
it all to herself for the time being.

  “Who did this?” I pointed at a huge canvas above the low bookcase. It was an abstract with a yellow chevron pattern exploding inward on a blue sky cracked with blood red.

  “Me.”

  “Wow.”

  “You like it?”

  “It’s really powerful. I can feel it shaking.”

  “It’s me after the mortar hit.”

  My silver scar ached as if it had been called out from oblivion. I touched my chest as if that might soothe the memory of the blast, the dead silence after the shattering explosion, the intense ringing in my ears as Caden carried me to the hospital, the pain in my chest with every step as the shard of metal got closer to my heart, piercing my lung, leaving me gurgling blood.

  “That was bad,” I said.

  “It was nothing compared to what the medevacs were bringing in,” she replied. “I felt guilty for having PTSD over it.”

  “The mind does what’s necessary for survival.”

  “Ain’t it the truth.”

  There was a knock at the door. I went to the stove to stir the pasta while Jenn answered it. The penne had floated to the top of the water like soap suds, crowding together in a herringbone. I stuck the spoon in and stirred, forcing them to swim to the bottom before they fought their way back up.

  The mind did what was necessary for survival.

  A boy locked in a concrete box underground might invent a story of his own strength and detachment, which he has to believe in order to survive.

  A war might break that detachment, or it might drive the wedge deeper.

  Pushing the spoon down, I drove the penne to the bottom only to watch them pop stubbornly back to the top. Every one a survivor.

  And what had happened the day Caden went outside the wire? Why had he returned so soaked with blood I’d thought he was shot? Had that broken him? Was there an instant before and a life after?

  When did a man break?

  Why did I insist there was a single moment?

  How did I not know better already?

  “Oh, Caden,” I said into the hot steam. “I’m failing you.”