by CD Reiss
“Oh.” I was surprised. Troops seeking mental health care weren’t usually sent back. “When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Are you going to be all right?”
“Yeah. I really think I am. I have this. I feel like I can shut a lot of this off now.”
She was the last patient of the day, and it was my second week without Caden. We’d had an unsatisfying call from Fort Bragg. He’d be in Iraq now.
I missed him.
The last months had been stressful. Damon’s appearance had thrown me, and the months before that, with the unexpectedly rough sex and the more unexpected reason for it, had been a slow crawl of emotional tightness that unwound just as slowly without the day-to-day chaos.
In the unwinding, my own feelings were freed. Disappointment unraveled to reveal anxiety, which dissolved into a puddle of worry that boiled with anger that steamed into sadness before soaking into resentment.
With the coil of emotions unwound, I was left with a deconstruction of everything that overlaid the only thing that mattered.
Caden. Me. The love that bound us together wasn’t connected to the skein I’d built around it. It stood discrete. It was at the heart of every decision I was about to make.
As an officer, Caden was allowed a cell phone, but the service was so spotty and he had it off so often I never got through.
When Yarrow told me she’d been stop-lossed despite her issues, I had to talk to him. His voice would take this spinning feeling and pin it down.
I started the calls in the afternoon. The AMEDD recruiter gave me his stateside unit contact, and from there, I knew enough of the right things to say to get me a number to the Baghdad CSH office. After midnight, when the sun was rising over Iraq’s capitol, I sat at the edge of our bed and punched the numbers in the night table phone.
“He’s off base,” the nurse said after he’d looked at the chart.
“I’m sorry?”
“Probably be back in a few hours.”
“Wait, Lieutenant, hold up,” I said. “He’s outside the wire?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is he in the Red Zone?”
“Everything outside the green is red, ma’am.”
I had to stop myself from asking why he’d gone or if it was the first time. I thanked him and hung up.
He sent me an email with Skype names. Mine was MrsVitaminG. His was MajorRabbitsFoot.
I was sure any emotion that weakened him was still locked away, but I was glad that hadn’t affected his sense of humor.
According to the email, the docs had chipped in to share an old computer and prohibitively expensive and totally crap Wi-Fi. I needed to dial in at two in the morning EST on Wednesday. The connection was terrible. It dropped three times before I heard him.
“Grey?” His voice came over the speaker.
The screen was black with a little red phone in the center and a slash through a video icon. I saw myself in the little rectangle on the lower left.
“I can’t see you,” I said.
“The camera on this thing doesn’t work. I can see you. You look beautiful.”
I patted an errant length of hair. I’d become a connoisseur of my husband’s vocal inflections. He sounded like himself… mostly. Not like Damon, but not without a certain edge.
“You look like a little red camera with a slash through it.”
“New uniforms.”
I laughed. Sense of humor intact.
“How are you?” I asked. “I tried to call, and the nurse at the desk said you were off base?”
“It’s different now. And Baghdad is different. We’re in a permanent building. Not trailers.”
He was changing the subject.
“Where did you go off base?”
“Not far.”
I was embarrassed I’d asked the question. He wasn’t allowed to give me any locations, and I was asking what any self-respecting army wife knew not to. “I’m just worried.”
“You think I went to a brothel?”
“You wouldn’t do that unless you wanted me to fly there and start burning shit down.”
“You could put an end to the entire war.”
“All you have to do is cheat on me.”
“This war’s going to go on a long time then.”
“Yeah.” I swallowed and tried not to think about it. “Have you heard from Damon?”
“No. Can you tuck your hair behind your ear? I want to see your throat.”
My neck tingled from the attention. I pulled my hair away, watching myself in the little box as I showed him the pale length of my throat. “Does it look okay?”
“I want to mark that neck so bad. I want to suck all the blood to the surface. Break the skin just a little with my teeth.”
“You’re alone, I hope?”
“Pull up your shirt.”
Naively, I hadn’t prepared mentally or physically for Skype sex, but there I was with wet panties anyway. I pulled the hem of my T-shirt up over my bra.
“Your tits, Grey.” He sounded like a teacher I’d handed the wrong assignment. I pulled the sports bra over my breasts, showing my hard nipples to the little box that was my mirror and the black screen that was his window. “Yes. I want to mark those too.”
“Where?”
“Underneath.”
I ran my hand over my nipples to the soft skin underneath. “Here?”
“There. I’d bite you until you screamed.”
I pinched a bit of skin and twisted it, cringing when it hurt, then pushing myself to twist harder.
“Grey,”—his blind whisper came over the speakers—“watch yourself do it.”
Grunting, I watched as I bruised myself for him. It wasn’t sexy, but it aroused me because it was for him.
He didn’t speak until I whimpered.
“Stop,” he said. “Show me.”
I pulled my shirt and bra off in one motion and stood for the camera. The red mark was angry and raw. It wasn’t finished either. It was going to blossom into a nasty bruise.
He sucked air through his teeth. The idea of him jerking off to my pain was arousing and sickening at the same time, with the arousal being fed by the aversion.
“Pants off. Everything off.” I slid my pajama pants and underwear down, stepping out of them as he said, “Show me. Open your legs and show me.”
My clit throbbed and grew heavy inside my seam as I angled the screen down so that when I sat with my feet on the desk and my legs spread, the little box in the corner centered around the space between my legs.
“I’m so turned on,” I said, sliding my hand into my seam. “And I can’t even see you.”
“I can see you.”
He said it as if his view was all that was important, and maybe he was right. I was there for him, and that satisfied me.
“I’d bite inside those thighs and make you stay still for it,” he said with a rumbling depth. “I’d bring you to the edge and give you enough pain to pull you back, then start over until you begged for me to finish you.”
All of that. I wanted all of it. Not just the orgasm I was about to give myself, but what he described. My fingers circled my clit in circles wide enough for him to see, but the movement brought me too close.
“You’d do it like this?” I tugged on a pinch of flesh inside my thigh, squeezing and twisting until it hurt, then doing it harder. My orgasm was a growling pit bull, held back by the leash of my pain.
“Leave a mark,” he said, and I twisted into exquisite agony. The leash frayed but held.
“It hurts,” I groaned as the pit bull bucked against her restraints.
“Like that. Come like that.”
The orgasm broke free, and I went blind in a swirl of sensation, agony, and pleasure with every stage in between. Him watching my three-dimensional orgasm expanded it further, adding the conquest of humiliation and the embrace of shame.
Deaf inside my own experience, I didn’t hear him come
. I only heard his sigh at the end. I threw my head over the back of the chair and moved my hands away.
“Ow,” I said.
“That’s going to leave a bruise.”
I bent as far as I could to see between my legs. “Yeah. No bikinis for me.”
Slowly, I lowered my legs off the desk.
“I want to watch you get dressed,” he said.
I pulled my shirt down, grimacing when I touched the spot I’d bruised under my breast.
“That’s mine. Think of me when it hurts.”
“Are you smiling?” I asked as I hopped back into my pants.
“A little.”
“Do you have any more time?”
“Five minutes.”
“What’s it like? Your day? Just talk to me. I wonder what you’re doing all the time.”
“The surge isn’t the same as Fallujah when we were there. Casualties are spread out. We haven’t had anything like those eight days.”
“I hear the Red Zone is constant guerilla warfare.”
“Yeah. Less of a front line. More of a huge, very shitty neighborhood.”
“And you’re safe in the Green Zone?” I smoothed my clothes over my body.
“It’s like a regular neighborhood, and I’m some asshole doing my job.”
“When I called, they said you were outside the wire.”
“It’s different here, baby. You have nothing to worry about.”
The bruise between my legs shot through with pain when I sat in the chair again. It would get worse before it got better, and that seemed exactly right.
“Surprise.”
At nine thirty at night, two days after I’d bruised myself for Caden, Colin stood at my doorstep with a droll smile and a suitcase at his feet. My mother pushed past him with her arms out, and Dad came right behind her until I was crushed in a hug.
“What are you guys doing here?”
“Your mother—”
“I said I was coming with him or without him.” Mom picked up her suitcase, but Dad shot Colin a look until his son took the hard-sided case.
I got out of the way and let the three of them in. “It’s a bit of a mess. I can’t believe you came.”
“You sounded so sad,” Mom said. “I couldn’t wait until you came to us.”
“This is quite a place,” Dad said, letting himself into the living room. He was checking out the furniture and woodwork.
“Priceless, apparently,” I said. “I haven’t set up the guest rooms, but—”
“We can get a hotel,” Mom said.
“No, no—”
“It’s all right,” Dad chimed in. “The city’s full of them.”
“They haven’t seen the prices,” Colin said.
“Yeah.” I picked up the suitcase. “You’re staying here. This house is huge, and honestly, it’s wasted.”
My parents jumped at the opportunity to reduce waste.
After a trip to the linen closet for sheets and towels, I settled them into the guest bedroom. With military efficiency, we made the bed and got the clothes in the drawers. My father closed the closet with a definitive click, and I took a deep breath.
“I’m so glad you came,” I said.
“We’re always there for you,” he replied.
“I just… I thought I had this, but now that you’re here, it’s like I didn’t realize how much I wanted to be near people who understand.”
“That was the thing your mother always had on base. A community. You don’t have that luxury in the shitstorm city like this.”
I’d always considered that community oppressive, but I’d only seen it from the point of view of a disaffected teenager.
“She woulda died of loneliness without those magpies,” Dad continued as we walked downstairs. “But everywhere we went, there was a group of women who didn’t look at her funny or exclude her.”
“What are you telling her?” Mom had made herself right at home in my kitchen. The teapot was warming, and she’d cut cheese slices I’d left in the fridge into bite-sized pieces. They were fanned out along the edges of a plate, a stack of crackers in the center. Little bowls of olives and pickles were set out on the island.
Colin was tapping on his Blackberry.
“I’m telling her you weren’t miserable.” Dad slid onto a stool and popped an olive in his mouth. “You might wanna back me up.”
She shook her head. “I don’t wish that life on you,” she said to me. “But it could’ve been worse. Cracker?”
Nothing like being offered your own food in your own house. I took a cracker and put a piece of cheese on it.
“Have you spoken to him?” Mom asked.
“We had a Skype call.”
“How is he?”
“Fine.”
“Why the fuck did he go in again?” Colin got right to the point once he’d put his Blackberry down. “I thought he was done.”
“He was.” I pressed my fingers to the counter to get the crumbs up.
“So, what was he thinking?”
“Colin!” Dad scolded. “Just because you don’t understand a sense of duty doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
My brother rolled his eyes. My father wagged his finger twice. This was such an old argument between them that they could get into it and out of it without actually having it.
“What are you guys going to do while you’re here?” I asked. “You going full tourist or just hanging out?”
“Whatever’s easy for you—”
“No,” Colin interrupted. “Why, Grey? You won’t answer me when I ask you, so maybe you’ll answer in front of Mom and Dad. Why did he sign on again?”
Our parents would try to deflect, but the question would remain. In Colin, the family tenacity had manifested in curiosity. I’d have to address it at some point.
“He did it for me,” I said, glancing at my mother, who was frozen with a pickle halfway to her mouth. “I wanted him to take part in something, and he had to be in the reserves to do it.”
“Something?” Colin raised an eyebrow.
He knew about Day Caden and Night Caden. Was he being intentionally thick, or was I being too cryptic?
“I told you he had PTSD, Colin.”
“Ah!” Everything must have clicked for him because he picked up his Blackberry again.
Dad held up his hand. “Wait, wait, wait.”
“He’s fine,” I said. “He had to be in the reserve system for the treatment, and he got called. End of story.”
As if to punctuate my reluctance to speak further on it, the teapot whistled.
“Well,” Mom said, turning down the heat, “he’s a good man. I worried about you with men.”
“Mom. I’m deeply offended. I didn’t have a ton of boyfriends.”
“Two words,” Colin said. “Scott Verehoven.”
“Hey!” Dad snapped. “We don’t mention that name.”
“What? Why?”
All three of them started talking at once. Colin called for Jesus Christ. Dad cursed. Mom tsked.
“That boy.” Mom shook her head, pouring tea for Dad.
“Douchebag,” Colin mumbled. My brother had been at UCLA the same time as me, though he hadn’t been in ROTC.
I shrugged. “Everyone dates a douchebag at some point.”
“When he called you a dyke in front of your entire patrol,” Colin said, “and all his friends thought it was hilarious?”
“There’s nothing wrong with being gay,” I said, taking my teacup. I’d gotten a haircut, and yeah, there was nothing wrong with being gay, but he’d meant it as an insult, and it had hurt my feelings. He was supposed to be my boyfriend.
“And the diving board.” Colin went to pick up his Blackberry again but just flicked it across the counter. “Asshole.”
“Platform,” I said. “It was the platform.”
LOS ANGELES
MAY 1994
The night Scott called me a dyke was my twentieth birthday. My patrol had told him to sh
ut the fuck up. Even Nancy, who was indeed a lesbian, told him to go pound sand up his ass or she’d do it herself. He left in a huff.
At midnight, I slipped away to find him. The gate to the high dive was open. He was a star and had the key so he could start practice at four thirty in the morning. His body landed in the water like a knife, a dark blade against a darker backdrop.
“Hey,” I said from the edge of the pool as he surfaced. “Sorry about Nancy.”
I shouldn’t have apologized for my friend. She was wonderful. He was an asshole. But I was newly twenty and continually insecure.
“She knows I can’t do anything to her.” He bowed his back and went underwater. The muscles of his back were molded in the moonlight, shaped like the surface of the water.
We’d only made out and done some groping in the six weeks we’d been dating. He acted as if he’d put all this work into grooming me and gotten nothing in return. I should have dumped him. He was beautiful to look at, but he never made an attempt to be a nice person. I stayed with him because I liked the way other girls looked at me when we were together. The ROTC uniform made me look like a dumpy asexual. Having those sexed, free, powerful young women look at me as if I could be one of them made me feel sexed, free, and powerful too.
Scott got out of the water. Compared to most of the country, Los Angeles nights were warm in May, but his nipples were hard and his pecs were pulled into tight mounds.
“You coming in?” he asked, taking stock of my body in modest civilian clothes.
“I can’t dive.” I couldn’t swim well either. And I wasn’t great with heights.
He shrugged and headed for the ladder, his shoulder blades sharp wedges under his skin, wet shorts falling just below his waist to reveal a perfectly formed Adonis belt.
Beauty aside, he’d challenged me by climbing up that ladder. I kicked off my shoes and stuffed my socks in them. I didn’t have to dive if I didn’t want to, right? I peeled off my jeans, folded them, and put them on a chair with my jacket.
“Come on then.” He was past the lower platform already.
In my underwear and T-shirt, I went up the ladder.
“I remember the look on his father’s face,” Dad said in my kitchen fourteen years later, smiling with the inner satisfaction that comes from reliving a great memory.