Nights Without Night (Fox Lake Book 2)

by Marina Vivancos

  He talks at me, and I listen. At me, because he seems to simply be sorting it out in his head, and I am just a witness to his testimony.

  No matter if he talks about a memory, or his service, or not at all, the experience is always exhausting. Sometimes, he’ll disappear straight into his room. Others, though, he’ll stay in the living room and eat with me.

  Progress, I think, taking it one step at a time.

  **********

  Some days are worse than others.

  One Tuesday I go into his room with an armful of clean sheets.

  “Hey. I know you don’t wanna sit for me today, but let’s change your sheets?” I say to the figure in the bed. Isadoro doesn’t move. “I’ll be a second. You can even take a shower and you’ll have a clean bed waiting for you,” I wheedle. He makes a huffing noise but doesn’t react otherwise.

  I set the sheets down on his desk and turn back to the bed.

  “Come on, Isadoro,” I say, impatient, head full of the end-of-year projects and studying I have to get back to. I don’t have time for this.

  When he doesn’t even turn to look at me, I pull at the sheet. He holds fast. I pull again. He yanks back. I pull harder. Finally, he sits up in a flurry, glaring.

  “Stop!” he growls.

  “You stop!”

  “I’m not a fucking child!”

  I bite back my immediate response. “I know you’re not. I’m trying to help.”

  “I don’t need your fucking help! I can change my own fucking sheets!”

  “Obviously you-” I clench my teeth. My breath whistles between them. “Isadoro, it’ll just be a moment, and then you’ll have clean sheets,” I try to reason.

  “I don’t want clean sheets.”

  “Everybody wants clean sheets!”

  “I don’t! Don’t you get it? I. Don’t. Want. Clean. Sheets.”

  “Why? Why? Everybody deserves clean sheets.”

  “Not—I don’t want them. I don’t want them!”

  “Well I want them!”

  “Then fucking take them!”

  “I want you to have them!”

  “Fuck!” Isadoro flings his sheet to the side and jumps out of bed. He starts ripping the linen off the bed with such force that the mattress gets caught in the fitted sheet and bends, slamming down as it springs free. I try to grab the clean set from the desk, but he yanks them from me and starts to make the bed with such fury that it takes him several times to get the fitted sheet on.

  “Fuck!” he shouts in frustration.

  “Let me-”

  “Don’t!” he snaps. I let him do it, watching as he fights with the pillow until it’s a lumpy mess in its new cover. When he’s done, he gets back in, pulling the untucked sheet up to his chin and curling into a ball.

  I watch him breathe heavily for a minute, letting the frustration and guilt ferment in my stomach.

  I pick up the dirty sheets and leave.

  **********

  Some days are better than others.

  I come back home to see him doing push-ups in the living room. It’s a ridiculous scene. The room smells faintly of sweat as it glistens on his rippling back. He’s breathing hard, face clean-shaven.

  I’ve never seen a porn video start like this, but all of them should.

  He catches me looking, and the expression on my face must give away exactly what I’m thinking because his smile is immediately feral. He collapses on his front for a moment before sitting back, legs sprawled open in front of him. The sweatpants slinging low on his hips are thin and utterly perfect.

  It feels like it’s been years since I last touched him like I want to right now.

  He must be thinking the same thing because suddenly he’s up. I meet him in the middle. I’ve missed him, not just his body but that look on his face, that light in his eyes, his smile.

  He pushes me against a wall as we kiss savagely. There is no patience, no moderation. There is only want.

  My nails rake across his back as he grinds against me, his thick thigh against my hardening cock, keeping up a rhythm that is immediately maddening. He lets up just enough to get a hand down the back of my opened pants and press a finger against my hole, over the cloth of my underwear. He starts grinding against me again and I moan and bite at his shoulder and bicep, at the impenetrable solidity of him.

  “Fuck you. Fuck you,” I say, and shove him off hard enough that he stumbles back.

  “Get the lube,” I order. He pauses for a moment as if stuck between two equally appealing possibilities but disappears a moment later.

  I rip the clothes off my body before walking over to the couch. I bend over the back of it, moaning slightly at the feeling of the material against my cock. I don’t give a shit about stains. I want to be fucked just like this.

  Isadoro finds me like that, naked and draped over the back of the couch, rubbing myself off on it like an animal.

  “Jesus,” I hear him say behind me, and I’m so turned on even that has a shiver running through me.

  “Yeah. Come fuck me, come on,” I goad. I hear the sound of his sweatpants hitting the floor and then his big hands are on my hips, his leaking cock rubbing against my ass, slipping to the small of my back.

  “Fuck. Fuck,” he says as I press myself against him. His hands are gone for a moment. I hear the sound of a condom wrapper, the lid and squeeze of lube and then one of his hands is back on my hips while two fingers of the other breech me at once.

  “Yes,” I hiss, not knowing if to seek friction against the couch or if I want more of him. My decision is made for me, however, as he holds me in an almost bruising grip and pumps his fingers into my hole, stretching me mercilessly.

  I forget myself for a moment, the pleasure is so bright and blinding.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” my mouth is saying.

  Isadoro doesn’t need any more encouragement. One moment it’s his fingers and the next his cock is sliding into me, a thickness that fills me at once. I groan, my head hanging between my shoulders, but Isadoro is done playing around. He sets a pace that has me grunting against the couch, struggling to get a grip on the back cushion as he fucks me slow enough to be good and hard enough to be perfect.

  The slap of skin on skin, the noise of our breaths and groans, fill the living room obscenely. The past weeks disappear.

  I come untouched. It’s too good, the pleasure too much, and I just tip over the edge. I shoot against the back of the couch, my ass clenching around Isadoro’s dick. He drapes himself on me, mouth pressed against the back of my neck.

  The scent and warmth of him are so familiar.

  He comes with a deep groan I feel all the way through me, a rumble of the earth.

  It takes us a while to come down from it. I feel I’d slide right off the back of the couch and onto the floor if it weren’t for Isadoro’s panting, sweaty body pinning me in place.

  Eventually, Isadoro hauls me back with a groan, and we round the couch, collapsing onto it.

  “Condom?” I ask half-coherently.

  “Uh…on the floor,” he says.

  “Jesus,” I laugh.

  We lay there, my body sprawled over his. His hand rubs against my back as my brain slowly comes back online.

  “Wait,” I say and get up on legs that are still a little wobbly, heading for my bag. I grab what I want and then return to the couch, stretching over Isadoro.

  “I made you something,” I say, and hand him the token. He takes it, lifting it up to his face to inspect it. It’s small enough to fit easily in all pockets, made of glazed clay of a deep brown. The design is simple, a circle with the imprint of a paw as if a small creature had passed upon the wet earth and it had been caught in amber.

  “It’s for when…if you ever have a nightmare or a bad memory and need to, you know. Remember you’ve been where you’ve been, but this is where you are now,” I say. I don’t want to say the word ‘grounding’ in case it clams him up, but the idea had come from what Mansur had said
about techniques to bring a person back from a triggering event.

  Isadoro looks at it for a while, passing his thumb over the grooves of the paw print. I watch him until he secures the token in his palm and then closes his hand around it. His eyes are serious and open as he looks back at me.

  “Thank you,” he says, voice quiet. I smile, the golden light of relief shining through me.

  I kiss him, just a press of lips, and feel him breathe against me.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The end of the school year approaches on the oscillating wavelength of good and bad days. There’s no pattern to it I can see. I was hoping that slowly, he would come out of his room more and more, farther and farther, but the tether tying him there will yank back at any moment, refusing to give more lead. Despite this, my collection of drawings grows steadily. Paint, charcoal, water and colour; fragments of memories from another life.

  It's late on a Friday. The week has been brutal, and only more work awaits on the weekend. Sometimes I feel the only reason I’m not drowning is that I can’t afford it.

  I leave my stuff slumped in the living room. Everything is so quiet and still. I grab the sudden urge to cry by the throat and fling it away.

  I don’t have time for that. If I go there, I don’t know if I’ll be able to come back.

  My shadow stretches from me. It walks to Isadoro’s room and cracks open the door.

  “Can I come in?” it says. Isadoro must recognize its kind because he turns over immediately, looking at the creature. He nods. My shadow walks into the gloom of Isadoro’s room. I follow.

  Instead of sitting on the edge of the bed, I get inside with him. The sheets are relatively clean and he smells nice, only the beginning of stubble on his jaw. Isadoro wraps his arms around me. He’s lost muscle mass, infected by the shadows in his own room, but his hold is tight and secure. I almost start crying again. I tamp it down.

  “You can say no, obviously, but…can I use some of your pictures for my final project?” I ask, my voice quiet in the strange, malleable air. Isadoro shifts a little against me, moving back just enough so our faces rest on the pillow. We look at the soft outline of each other’s features in the dark.

  “How many people are going to see them?”

  “The examiners, unless they’re chosen for the summer gallery show, and that would be anybody who went to the show. But I can turn that down.”

  “No.”

  “Okay-”

  “No, I meant don’t turn it down. You can use them, but don’t turn the show down.”

  “I haven’t even gotten it yet.”

  “You will,” he says with all the confidence in the shadowlands. I snort but smile. Something in me settles.

  Isadoro pulls away from me suddenly, rolling towards his bedside table. He turns on the lamp and I close my eyes, pushing my face into the pillow to guard them. I hear rustling, and then feel Isadoro rolling back towards me. I open my eyes.

  Like an offering between us, Isadoro is holding one of the clay animals I made him when we were young. My hands wrap around his, holding it with him, twisting the creature so it catches the light.

  I remember making it when I was eighteen out of real clay, painted and fired so it’s hard and shiny. The figure is a nebulous mass of curling smoke, caught in the shape of a prowling wolf. Its eyes stare back at you, a challenge. It dares you to touch what is his, to reap the consequences. The billows and muscles of the smoke seem to move when the light ripples across it as if you’ve caught it just at the right moment before it dissipates into something else.

  “The other ones are at home, but I keep this one with me,” he explains. I don’t have to ask him why this one.

  It’s the one that fits him the most.

  His other hand envelopes mine where it's tracing the grooves of the animal’s face. I look at him. He looks back.

  We fall into the kiss.

  The creature is placed carefully on the bedside table and we burn into each other. God, it feels so good to have him pressed against me. To have him in my hands, even if he turns to smoke when it ends.

  Each time we touch now, I feel desperate. Feel like yanking at his clothes and digging my fingers into him until they pierce skin and muscle and bone and I’m all inside him, but Isadoro is a tempering force. He drags the kisses on, and on, and I go with them. He rolls on top of me, pressing his whole body against mine, sinking my body into the bed. I let out a moan. I try arching against him, but I’m trapped.

  There’s nowhere I want to go.

  When the kisses have left my lips puffy and raw and wet, he pulls away and drags my shirt over my head. We undress, uncoordinated, slow, tripping over each other and kissing in between like we can’t help it. When we’re done, he presses me down again, his whole body against mine, and I almost can’t take it.

  This is what people don’t talk about. The simple pleasure of having someone else’s body against yours. All their skin and their rivets and the framework of their bones. The feel of their muscles, of their soft undersides, the dips and rises that make them. The small movements of their bodies, the rise of their chest against yours as you feel them breathe, the shudders of their skin.

  Oh, their miles of skin. I can feel all of Isadoro’s textures. I feel the rough skin of his hands and the dryness of knees, the prickly hair down his stomach, the soft down across his ass. The little scars from battle, from childhood, markings on the canvas of him. All those little things that make him human. They all add up to one thing. Isadoro. The one person I’ve always loved.

  He opens me up with slow fingers. Takes his time, watching me, feeling my own skin and blood and organs and bones. He scissors two fingers wide and I moan at the sudden stretch, arching. He turns them around and hooks them, rubbing inside, and the pleasure is a trembling light. Blinding, perfect.

  I let my body be his. Let him look at me, settled under the shelter of his body. When he pulls his fingers out of me, I don’t protest. When he turns me around, I don’t question it. Trust is a clear water flowing between us.

  When he sinks into me, it's followed by the press of his body against mine. My hips are tilted up, but my chest is flat on the bed, my face turned sideways on the pillow so he can see me gasp and flush and say his name. He digs an arm under me, holding me close as his other one leans on the bed. When he starts thrusting, I feel it in my whole body. I feel it in the chest against my back. I feel it in his breaths against my neck. I feel it everywhere, inside and out, in the air all around me. It’s Isadoro. It’s always been him.

  His arm under me shifts and he tightens a fist around my cock. I mumble his name, or maybe that’s just in my head, as he starts stroking me. It’s a perfect tempo with his thrusts. The pleasure rises as a steady tide. The salty wash rides up, and up, and up until it reaches my feet and drags my whole body with it. It goes through every part of me. It washes me away.

  Isadoro fucks me through it and then further still until his hips are stuttering. He buries his face in the back of my neck and I hear my name there, to be buried between skin and hair forever.

  We stay pressed close in the aftermath. Our panting breaths turn to soft silence until my voice comes out of nowhere to break it.

  “I went to the V.A. a few weeks ago,” it says. I don’t want anything in particular from this conversation. Suddenly, I just want him to know.

  “I just asked for advice. I just wanted to…know. That I wasn’t doing the wrong things. To try and know what’s going on,” I say. The silence that follows is long, but he doesn’t move away from me. His hand traces a line, up and down and up and down my back.

  “What did they say?”

  “That…you’re your own person. That I can’t be in charge of change, only facilitate it as far as you’ll let me. That trauma can take many shapes, but that the biggest thing right now may be the process of adjusting to civilian life. Stuff like that,” I say.

  This silence is even longer, but when he talks, he finally says something. />
  “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know why I’m in this fucking bed I can’t seem to leave. I was a Team Sergeant of a Special Ops Alpha Team, and now I’m throwing a fucking tantrum over making a bed. It’s like I don’t know myself. It’s like I’m trapped in somebody else’s body. A civilian body I just don’t know how to navigate,” he says in bursts of frustration. I don’t reply, sensing there’s more.

  “What am I even going to do here? I can’t go back. I just, I just can’t…but what else is there here? What, I’m gonna deal with fucking drunk people for the rest of my life, watching you get grabbed by sleaze-balls and having to shut up and be nice about it?

  “And I know I’m fucked up, okay? I know the way I’m thinking about things isn’t right. It’s like the line between mission and life is blurred, and I’m always looking for something to react to. There’s no structure, there’s no…purpose. I just…” he trails off, lost. I pull away slightly. He resists for a moment, but I push until I’m looking at him. He doesn’t look back.

  “Isa, that’s what normal life is like. In the military, there’s always someone telling you what to do. Mission, rest, mission, uniform, formation, team. Sure, there’s a sense of purpose, but a lot of it is decided for you. In life, civilian life, there are periods of doing, and periods of figuring shit out. We all feel like we should be doing, doing, doing all the time. And I get how this can be worse if you’re used to not just doing, but doing something purposeful, life-threatening, filled with adrenaline—all those things. What you have to get used to now is the fact that, here, the purpose is preceded by having to find it. With times of feeling like you’re going nowhere simply because you’re not there yet.

  “That’s the thing about being lost. You can walk, but every step can feel meaningless if you convince yourself it’s not taking you to the place you want to go—if you don’t even know where that is. It’s easy to stop in the middle of the forest and give up. But you need to put value in just putting a foot in front of the other, putting effort into just moving, and trusting you’ll learn enough about the forest to figure it out,” I say. The advice is for me as much for him; for my past selves, for every future self that is still filled with doubt.