He makes that noise again. “Yeah. I mean, he doesn’t believe in a lot of hand-holding. And he reminds me a lot of my old brigade commander, who believed you get the most out of people by demanding more than they thought possible.”
“Are you really doing this?” It’s interesting; I’ve watched him take the folder from Bruce and step into a contractor role without even flinching. As though it’s the most natural thing in the world.
He shrugs. “Bruce has threatened to hunt me down and kill me if I don’t stay sober. And keeping me busy is apparently a good way of keeping me sober. And so seeing how I’m not quite ready to slip off this mortal coil just yet, I’m inclined to do what he says.”
I smile easily. I can recognize the sentiment far too well from dealing with some of the senior NCOs I’ve met in the Army. Sandpapery but doing it out of genuine love of soldiers. “Well, that’s one form of motivation, I guess.”
He glances down at the paperwork then back up at me. “And if I get to keep my hands busy around you…well, I think that’s a pretty good use of my time.”
* * *
Caleb
She laughs. “Wow, you know how to make a girl feel special.”
I like the sound of it. Deep and throaty and husky, like she’s done it a million times before.
I wish laughing wasn’t such a foreign feeling for me. I wish I knew how to be completely fucking normal around her. Around anyone.
“It’s my specialty,” I mumble, letting the space grow between us. I focus on the paperwork in front of me, then close the folder and glance around at her space. “So I guess the first order of business is to clear everything out so we can get the lead paint removal team in here. They’re scheduled for Saturday.”
I look around at the boxes stacked to the ceiling. At the tables and bins and remains of potting soil. “It looks like a lot, but tearing down is always easier than building up,” she says. “The rest of my crew will be here in an hour or so but we can get started pulling everything out of here. I had no idea there was this much stuff left over.”
“This looks like a lot more than just a pot-growing business.” I pull my work gloves out of my back pocket. “The dumpster was being dropped off as I was walking in, so we can start sorting the trash from the things we can salvage.”
She nods and pulls on her own gloves. “I guess we’ll need to sort through everything and make sure that anything salvageable is, well, salvaged. I can resell it at auction or something.”
I glance at my watch. It’s just past seven a.m. and I’ve been up since three, unable to fall back to sleep. I wonder if this is going to help me sleep. I’ve done bigger projects with Bruce before but nothing like this. Nothing that actually mattered whether I screwed it up or not. “So you want to get started or do you want to wait for help?”
She shoots me a funny look. “Oh, definitely get started. Deadlines give me anxiety.”
I’m not sure what to say about that. She seems so blasé about some things, tense and tight about others.
I look away, over at a nearby pile of tables—some look like old barn wood, others like they’re pieced together from plastic and plywood.
“I wonder if Bruce would want the old wood for his…what did you call it? Maker Space?”
I frown and glance back at her. “That’s the second time that you’ve said what I’m thinking.”
Her expression softens and one side of her lip edges higher. “It happens to me all the time. I guess I’m used to it.”
“It doesn’t freak you out?” I follow her to a pile of boxes and she pulls a box cutter from her back pocket. I find myself wondering what else she has in those pockets.
“Not really. I guess it’s not so jarring when you believe we’re all connected at a deep level and sometimes those connections are easier.” She slices at the ancient dusty tape in front of her, lifting the edges.
“That’s a very Jungian perspective.” I grab a broken pallet, lifting it to one shoulder. My bones protest when it connects hard but it’s a good kind of pain. It feels good to just feel.
“Or it’s a very Hindu way of looking at things. Jung pulled from Hindu philosophy when he was developing his theory of the collective unconscious.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It’s only in the modern West that people are focused on individuals so heavily.” She lifts out a bundle of baggies, held together by a rubber band. “What the hell am I going to do with all of these?”
“Sell them on eBay?”
She makes a noise as I take the first load of garbage out to the dumpster. The box of baggies goes on a flatbed trailer to be taken to storage. We work in silence for a while, moving trash outside in massive black contractor bags.
I lean one of the metal tables against the wall. “You’ve got a retail space planned, right?”
“Yeah?”
“You could repurpose these into shelves.”
She steps close enough that I can feel the heat radiating from her. She tucks a strand of hair out of her face. “Can you do that?”
She glances over at me and for the first time, I notice tiny flecks of gold in the deep brown of her eyes. “Yeah. I’m discovering all kinds of talents now that I’m sober. Shelves are easy.”
She smiles and damn if I don’t notice her eyes drop to my mouth as I’m speaking. I don’t step away. Being so close to her, it’s a compulsion. A need I never knew I was missing.
Or maybe I always knew and that’s why I drank.
I lick my bottom lip. I’m so fucking afraid of screwing this up. That maybe I’m misreading the situation and she’s just being polite.
It’s an easy thing to lean closer, slowly, so slowly. Giving her every chance to say no, to walk away. To put a barrier between us—a barrier I’m apparently desperately incapable of respecting.
And then she is there. Her lips brush against mine. Soft. Teasing. Just a whisper of a sensation.
Until she surrounds me, her gloved palm wrapping slowly around the back of my neck, drawing me closer. It’s so damn easy to nudge her lips apart, to drink from her slowly. To savor the sensation of our breath mingling together, the slide of her tongue against mine.
“This could get complicated,” I whisper when I’m certain I can breathe again.
Her lips move against mine. “It already is.”
“I think I’m okay with complicated.”
Now she smiles and I can feel it in the depths of my soul. “Me, too.”
I’m here. In the moment. Tasting. Drinking. Feasting on her every touch, every sensation.
I’m lost in her.
11
Nalini
I’m not big on regrets. I don’t believe in living my life looking back, no matter how much I sometimes feel trapped by the past.
Kissing him was a risk. A joy. A touch of light after so much darkness.
My body is still humming from his touch. I’ve found ways to brush against him as we move in and out of the door. To be near him for no reason at all.
It’s hell on my productivity. And there is still so much to do in order to get this down to a vast, empty space that we can properly remove the old lead paint from. When it’s finished, it will be a wide area, capable of holding three hundred people. The main floor won’t be just a yoga studio but an event space.
I take a long pull off my water bottle, staring at the dark hole in the floor. It’s captured my thoughts, tormenting me with nightmares of what could be down there. Stephen King’s It scared the living shit out of me when I was ten years old and I’ve never really recovered from it.
Which made Iraq fun as hell. Walking through the maze of trailers to the latrine at night was a real trip to the beach. The crunch of boots over stone. The weird silence beneath the distant hum of power generators. The shadows moved and danced along the walls, bouncing with the light from the flashlight.
The stuff of nightmares.
Literally. I’ve found myself, time and again, trapped in my sleep
in the terrors of that dark hot room where my life burned away and I was helpless to do anything but scream.
Caleb walks up, stopping close enough that our arms touch. “You seem awfully focused on that hole in the floor.”
“I don’t want it to be storage,” I say finally. “Sam suggested that I rip the floor open here but…I think he’s right. I want to open it up. To bring light down there so that it’s not this dark nightmare factory where I keep extra yoga mats and mala necklaces.”
“Those are the stuff of nightmares.”
I bump into him for the terrible joke. “You know what I mean.” I take another gulp of water. “The way he made it sound wasn’t too complicated, depending on where the load bearing beams are in the building. Basically, rip that part of the floor out so that there’s a wide open hallway running through this space. Put in glass doors and make two separate yoga spaces. One can be a heated studio. One can be a meditation room. It expands my options for classes…assuming things keep growing.”
“It’s a great idea.” He makes a rough noise. “I was worried you were going to say we should start working in the basement and I was about to violate my no-drinking thing.”
“That makes two of us.” I grin. I shouldn’t but I can’t help it. “I’m avoiding the pit until I’ve smoked a lot of pot or gotten really drunk. And seeing how I’ve never really gotten into pot and I’m not a big drinker, it’s going to be a while.” I push my hair out of my face again. “So how much do you think that would add to the schedule and budget?”
“Well, considering Sam is the god of preparedness, he’s got an alternate schedule laid out. It adds about three days, depending on the locations of the load-bearing beams. And considering that the two of us are too chickenshit to go into the dark and spooky basement to see what the structure looks like down there, I can’t really say until we know that.”
“Damn, you sound like you know what you’re doing.” I grin over at him, teasing lightly. “Are you sure you’ve only been doing this stuff a few months?”
He makes a noise. “I was in an engineer unit at Fort Hood. We built a lot of shit in Iraq and Afghanistan, only for the insurgents to blow it up the following week.”
“Yeah, that pretty much mirrors my experience in northern Iraq and Syria,” I say after a moment. I release a deep breath. “So everyone else should be here soon. Maybe we can summon some collective energy to go into the basement as a group or something.”
He grins. “You’re fine with telling everyone you’re afraid of the dark?”
It’s really hard not to lean into him again. “It’s called humility. Admitting weakness is a sign of strength.”
He makes a noise. “I’ll try to remember that. Let me shoot a text to Bruce and let him know what you’re thinking. He’ll be able to give you a better estimate on everything.”
He lifts the phone to his ear and moves over to one of the massive windows. I try not to notice the T-shirt straining across his back or the strong black lines rippling over his forearms.
But the black letters on his wrists catch my eye. Quo Vadis—where are you going?
I’ve never really thought about that question before. I’ve always been a little outside of wherever I was. I always fit the best after I left.
Except for West Point. I never looked back at that place and felt like I fit there. Funny how the Long Gray Line has tried to be a permanent part of my life no matter how many barriers I keep putting up to keep it out. I was so fucking happy to drive away from that place at graduation.
I’ve kept so very few people in my life from that time. I want to forget it. To forget what it tried to make me become.
I’ve never been back. I skipped the reunions. I skipped the Facebook groups and all the bitching about the current corps of cadets has gone to hell in a handbasket.
Some Old Grads have too much time on their hands. The current class of cadets are not my problem. And neither is the Army, for that matter.
I glance over at Caleb again. It’s really hard not to notice the way his shirt clings to his skin. His back is broad, his arms thick. I wish I could remember more about him from that time, but then how would that shape how I see him now?
I’ve worked far too hard in my life to go back to the place I was as a cadet. To what the Army almost made me. He told me I was kind when he’d gotten in trouble. I don’t remember being kind.
I remember being an asshole. Unsympathetic. Demanding. Telling the plebes that they were going to do degrading and demanding shit because, well, tradition and all that.
I didn’t even recognize him during the storm. I’ve tried to block everything out from West Point but sometimes, the memories come back.
And I am not proud of them.
It took me realizing what my company had become to pull back entirely. To turn away from the abusive subculture I’d become a part of.
It wasn’t rational.
I watch him stretch one arm up the edge of the window. The way his back moves with the motion. It’s a good distraction from the memories I’d rather forget. I’m not entirely sure I’m being rational right now, either, with the way my thoughts are derailing into a soft warm space where my body is pressed to his.
Priorities. Getting naked with Caleb is not a priority, no matter how much certain parts of my anatomy might disagree.
The storm has forced me to make a decision and in doing so, I’ve assumed a massive risk – not just financially. Everything I am is riding on this investment. On my fervent focus that I can make a go of bringing traditional yoga to a hipster college town. I only hope I’m taking the right lesson from the events the universe has sent me.
He hangs up the phone and slips it into his back pocket, then frowns. He pulls on his gloves and reaches down behind a box near the window.
“What do you want to do with this?” I have to look again. He’s…holding up a dead rodent.
“Um, perhaps one should not be handling the detritus we find? Ever heard of hanta virus?”
“Well, are there laws about just throwing dead bodies in the trash around here?” He asks the question like he’s asking about coffee or tea. It’s so damn matter of fact that I have to wonder if he’s trolling me.
“Not that I’m aware of. At least, not small bodies like that. Bigger ones you need to roll up in carpet and dispose of in concrete.”
He tosses the rodent corpse into a black contractor bag, his lips creased slightly at the edges. “Well, that escalated quickly.”
I turn away, letting the smile cross over my lips once I am safely turned away.
Dead rodents aren’t exactly a dozen roses. I can’t explain why it’s so damn funny to me at the moment. Or what exactly has me shying away from the very emotions he’s drawing out of me.
I need his help. A strong back and helpful pair of hands. As much as I find myself drawn to the smooth voice and strong hands and the dark ink on his wrists, I also need barriers.
I’ve worked too hard to let my hormones get in the way of good business.
* * *
Caleb
I thought I was used to workaholics in the Army but Nalini King takes it to a whole new level. By eight a.m., we’ve managed to get all of the tables sorted into what will be repurposed, what will be kept, and what’s on its way to the dumpster.
We’ve got a long way to go before we’re ready to start removing all the old paint but we’re making progress toward getting everything stripped down to the bones.
I guess this building has hit rock bottom, too. I know the feeling. Looking around, I can see the potential that Nalini sees. The designs that Bruce handed me show the beauty this place is currently hiding. The high vaulted ceilings create a sense of majesty; the beams will support the lights so it’s not dark and dreary. The high windows already let in a ton of light but when she adds window treatments the light is going to soften. Create a glow to the space.
She’s got a plan and that’s a hell of a lot more than I can say about my own l
ife. I’ve just been puttering along, doing busy work with Bruce. Keeping my hands busy.
I drag a busted up pallet outside, tossing the wood onto the pile for recycling.
It’s easy to fall into the physical work. It empties your mind so you’re not thinking about any bad shit, or the burning need to take a fucking drink.
It’s the kind of work that makes you sweat and collapse into a pile of exhaustion.
It’s the good kind of work.
Not the kind of work that I’m avoiding back on campus with Professor Blake. I wonder what she’d say if I told her that I didn’t want to finish grad school? Would she call my father? Would he even care at this point? The very idea of my father feels like I’m chewing glass—great bleeding slices of disappointment.
I walk back into the old warehouse, the scuff of my boots echoing in the silence. Nalini is standing near a window, tapping away on her smartphone, her brows furrowed into a faint scowl.
The light slants across her cheek, highlighting the soft contours of her face. A strand of liquid black hair falls from her high ponytail. Even in this moment of heightened focus, she’s somehow hard and soft all at once.
It’s strange, this hard twist of sensation sliding over my skin. Just watching her is pure pleasure. Like a caress of something electric and soft running over the length of my body.
I watch her then, knowing I’m supposed to be working. She looks so different from when we were cadets. God, but I hated her then. I hated everyone. Even Eli. The memory of so much hatred feels foreign now. But what does it say about me that I miss the anger that kept me going for so long? That the anger and the bitter little ball of hate in the center of my chest has been such a part of me that I’m lost without it?
It may have been a shitty way to live but at least it was consistent. Familiar.
That consistency is gone and the silence it’s left behind is deafening.
Until We Fall Page 10