“For what? You stripping down?”
“Huh?”
“For a swim.”
“Oh,” he said, stuffing socks into empty shoes. “A swim . . . Should we?”
Annica looked at her other preferred view, the ocean. It looked black and infinite. “Maybe later,” she said.
“I just wanted to match you,” he said. “Bare feet. It looked good.”
“It feels good.”
He walked up to her, smiling like a kid. “It does feel good.” He looked somehow innocent, like she’d not just encountered Cole the hired thug just a few hours ago. Like he wasn’t constantly strapped, shooting holes into office walls. Perhaps into worse . . . things that could bleed.
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
“What?” The smile disappeared as quickly as her image of his innocence. He looked vulnerable now, and barefoot. Wounded.
“Sorry,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean in your work,” Annica said. “The kind of work you do.”
“What about it?”
“Have you shot anyone?”
Cole seemed to want to continue walking. He’d already taken a few slow steps until she finally joined him, side by side at his hip. Despite the topic of conversation, she felt good there. But maybe that would change, depending on how he answered.
“I have shot someone,” he said. “More than one. More than once.”
For some reason, she kept walking right alongside him. It almost made no difference, like they were talking about something as harmless as how many college courses he’d failed.
But he never went to college.
Annica finally said, “Did they . . . die?”
“Are we talking about here, or overseas?”
“Oh, you mean in the army?”
“You know I’ve served,” he said.
“I guess I forgot.” She felt relieved, and still a little drunk. It was probably not the best idea to talk about this, but she couldn’t stop her curiosity. She couldn’t think or move in any direction that wasn’t Cole. She even swayed into him as they walked, her foot coming down on the sand wrong and sliding her off-kilter toward his large frame. The meat of his shoulder held her up. “Sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“I’m just so curious about you.”
“That’s your job, isn’t it? To be curious?”
Oh, Christ, he was talking about her job.
“Isn’t it?” he said.
“I’m not working right now.”
He took a few more steps without saying anything. And then, “I’m not working, either.”
“Well, I hope not.” Annica laughed.
“Yeah. You saw what that was like.”
“I did,” she said. “You have poor aim.”
“Don’t worry, I never miss the second time.” He gave Annica a little shove when she didn’t laugh. She finally did, and shoved him back, her fingertips digging into his warm side.
“Watch it,” he said.
She pushed him again, her hand this time touching something hard next to his belt.
“Hey.” Cole pushed her hand away.
Their laughter faded as she remembered what they’d just been talking about. “Sorry,” she said.
“Don’t make me nervous.”
Was he joking?
She looked at his smile and knew that he was. “I never touched a gun before,” Annica said.
“You still haven’t. That was just the holster.”
It gave her an odd sense of relief. And a curiosity, also, about the other untouchable and dangerous hard objects hidden under his clothes. Emboldened by the drinks, and from an old habit of testing the boundaries of male authority figures, Annica pressed on, against him, this time losing her balance on purpose and falling into him with her arm wrapping tight around his waist. She held onto him, needing him.
“Watch it,” he said again, this time saying it a little more warmly, and this time with his arm coming around and holding her in place against his muscular strides. They walked together, hip-locked, warm, with no breeze in between.
“I’m only doing this because I’m a gentleman,” he said.
“Sure you are.”
“You don’t think so? What part?”
“What part what?” she said, laughing after the ridiculous sound of her words.
“I am a gentleman.”
“Okay.”
“Right now I’m holding you up because you’re wasted.”
“I’m not,” she said.
“You’re not a lady.”
“Heyyy,” Annica said without pulling away. Without doing anything, really. She clung onto him.
“I’m just kidding. You’re a fine, proper lady.”
“No, I’m really not,” she said. “And I didn’t care about that so much as the drunk part. I’m not drunk.”
“I know.”
“And I can walk just fine.”
“Mhmm.”
“I just don’t want to.”
“Tired?”
“A little,” Annica said. “You know, it would be better if you just carried me.”
“I’ll carry you into the ocean.”
She gripped tighter. “No.”
“That’s the price.”
“And then what? You just throw me in there and let the tide take me?”
“Yep. Who needs a gun when you can just throw a drunk woman in dangerous surf?”
“Oh, do you surf?”
Cole laughed.
“No? What’s so funny?”
Cole slowed his walk and took his arm back from around her. “Do you want to sit?”
They were close to the water. She could see the latest traces of waves on the sand below them, the faint crescents only slightly darker than the rest of the moonlit white.
“Just right here,” Cole said. “Who cares?”
She sat first, cross-legged and stifling a giggle with the back of her hand. She felt like a little girl, giggling over her first crush. She lowered her hand from mouth to the sand, cupping a little of it, letting it fall between her fingers. She scooped up some more as she watched Cole drop to his knees. His knees dug in the sand until he leaned back on his palms. Then he stretched his legs out fully.
“I wish I had shorts on,” he said.
So did she. For him and her. For his comfort, and for her view of his legs.
What did they look like, aside from muscular? She remembered, when he was on the deck, that one of the first things she’d noticed were his thighs. His build was obvious even through pants, him looking like an Olympic sprinter. A hurdler, perhaps, from the way he got around the deck railings of cargo ships. Even that last time . . .
A retired hurdler, then. A man, a wounded man just trying to get on with his life somehow.
“So, Cole . . .” She wanted to ask him about it. She wanted to know. But she couldn’t come up with words that were precise enough. Delicate enough. She had been witness to perhaps his lowest, most vulnerable moment—Cole leaning off the railing of Batchewana, facing down to the same angry surf that they were both now staring at. She continued clumsily, but with a buzzed persistence: “So, um, how are you doing?”
“I’m good,” he said. “Right now I’m good.”
“Me, too.”
She looked out into the blackness in front of them. There were stars on top of the horizon, brilliant clusters of twinkling constellations. The heavens. A clear line separated it from the ocean, and their beach, and them. Below that line was just a single distant light, an ocean freighter perhaps, bobbing in the stark blackness of the ocean.
“We haven’t really talked about . . . the boat, or anything,” she said.
“What about it?”
“We haven’t talked about the interview, either. And why you skipped out on it.”
“You saw why.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything.”
“You saw me,” he said, �
��out on the deck. Over the rails.”
“Yeah,” Annica said. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t then, and I still don’t.”
“I understand if you felt . . . helpless.”
“Yeah . . .”
“I’d feel the same way,” she said, “if I didn’t see a way out.”
Cole nodded.
“But there is a way out. I was trying to offer you one. I was trying to help.”
“I know.”
“We were working together weeks, building trust. They were just emails, but I felt like I got to know you. I felt like I trusted you.”
“Of course,” he said. “Annica, I wouldn’t have even offered to meet with you if I hadn’t felt that way.”
“Felt what way?”
“Like I trusted you. That was never the problem.”
“So then what was?” Annica chuckled and said, “You didn’t think I was a good enough writer or something?”
“Come on. Like I’d notice? I can barely string a sentence together. You read my emails.”
“I loved your emails.”
She caught him looking at her, a faint twinkling in his eyes, as if they’d reflected back starlight. Blackness returned when he blinked and kept his eyes shut, taking a deep breath. The poor guy had been through a lot in the last twenty-four hours. And probably for longer than that.
He opened his eyes. She was glad to see life reflecting back again.
“I liked your emails, too,” he said. He chuckled to himself, looking away from her.
“What,” she said, “now you’re getting all shy?”
Cole had his hand in the sand, playing around like she’d just done.
“Aside from the general theme of it, I haven’t told anyone,” she said. “We haven’t gotten into the details about the drugs yet. I guess I was waiting for you.”
“I’m not sure if they’re necessarily secrets,” Cole said, still looking away. “I just didn’t want to end up getting killed.” He raised a handful of sand high in the air, spreading his fingers to let the wind take it back toward the palm grove separating them and the rental house. He brushed his hands together and looked at her, shrugging.
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess we went wrong somewhere.”
“Yeah, you followed me to work.” He grinned at her.
“I didn’t know it was you.”
“Then why the hell follow me?”
“I thought it could have been you,” Annica said. “And even if it wasn’t, from what I saw on the deck . . .”
“What about it?”
“I was . . .” Annica felt her mind cloud over again. While she searched for the words, she watched Cole’s eyebrows slowly rise. He wanted to know what she herself hardly had time to think of, or to make sense of: what drew her in so strongly to this man . . .
She tried again: “I was . . . interested.”
“Interested? In what?”
“In you,” she said. “I mean, in who I thought you were. The man from the deck. I had no idea if he would be part of the story, or if he’d even want to talk to me. I just knew . . . I just wanted to follow him.”
“Me,” Cole said.
“You, yes. You all along, I guess.”
He brought his knees up to a bend, his hands rubbing the sand off along his thighs. And then wrapping around kneecaps, holding there. Holding himself in.
Maybe they were both just two kids. Two lost kids.
“What was it about me?” she asked.
Cole chewed on to his lip for a minute, thinking. “What do you mean, exactly?”
“What made you contact me? You said it was my stories?”
“Well, I’m not super well-read on them,” Cole said. “I’m not even well-read in general.”
“Well, you’re a good writer.”
“Thanks.”
“A persuasive writer.”
“Yeah,” he said, chuckling. “Aren’t you glad?”
She laughed too. “No, not really. But go on.”
“I know enough about the news, the industry at least, to know that it’s ninety percent bullshit.” He paused for a moment as if to let it sink in, but Annica felt herself already in silent agreement. “So it took some time to find someone I could trust. Someone who wasn’t already co-opted. Bought and owned. It seems like they come that way out of journalism school. Don’t you think so? They come standard like that. Pre-made shills.”
“Sounds like you’ve done some research.”
“No, I just compared the news stories to what’s actually happening in the world.”
She nodded. Perhaps she didn’t need to bring up her stories on Libya, on what happened to the original DARC Ops guys. Cole seemed to already know about it. He certainly knew about the theme, in general, about how news and politics had been acting out in every way except for the public’s best interest. Their original mandate had been cast aside for decades, if not longer.
“Fake news,” Annica said. “As much as I hate that term.”
“You’re goddamn right, fake news.” Cole sighed, swearing again under his breath. “In my line of work, I get to see underneath a lot of these stories. I get to know the people involved, what they’re really involved in. And then I read their quotations in the papers and it’s like they’re two completely different people. With two completely different stories.”
“A duality,” she said.
“Yeah, whatever you want to call it. Fake, evil. You’re the writer.” He looked at her, and said quietly, “Aren’t you scared?”
She wasn’t sure if it was a rhetorical question. By now it was probably obvious that she was scared out of her mind, and that there were things out there to be scared of. And that Cole had even more to tell her about.
He continued. “I mean, haven’t you noticed that anyone actually doing real, old-school reporting is either blackballed or killed?”
“Yeah,” she said. “But I’m still alive. Does that mean I’ve been co-opted?”
He tilted his head to the side, looking almost surprised at the question.
“Does that mean you don’t trust me?”
“No,” he said. It wasn’t surprise on his face, but something more like frustration. Nostrils beginning the slightest of flares. “You just told me yourself, about the cage . . .”
He had a classically lined face. Expressive and beautiful. Something a sculptor should memorialize with a bronze bust.
“Right?” he said. “They went after you.”
“I wouldn’t say my reporting is old school. I can’t credit myself like that. But I do investigate. And by investigate, I mean I piss a lot of people off.”
“Exactly,” Cole said.
“I’m glad someone likes it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Someone really does.”
“I’m glad someone can trust me.”
“Someone really trusts you.”
Annica could no longer fight back her smile, the lower half of her face almost burning with it. “Well, I’d really like to meet that person,” she said.
“I think you have.”
“Really? Who?”
He smiled back to her, shrugging his shoulders.
“Hmm,” Annica said. “Would that person happen to like long walks on the beach?”
Cole nodded. “Especially at night.”
“What else?”
“Huh?”
“What else does he like?”
“Have I already said you?”
Annica shrugged. “You said someone likes me.”
“I like you.”
“You do?”
“Or else I would’ve actually shot you.” He laughed quietly, leaning into her, his shoulder against hers.
“Yeah,” she said, resting her head against him. Somehow, right there, touching him, it wasn’t so scary. “I keep forgetting that part.”
“I’ll have to stop reminding you.”
“Please,” she said.
“Or even better.”
“What?”
“Take your mind off it.”
“How?”
His hand was already around her far shoulder, pulling her in even closer. Annica leaned her head back, her body going limp with him. She closed her eyes and knew he would be there. His face near hers, the warmth of it. And then the fine edge of his jaw, his stubble over her soft skin.
His face seemed to roll onto hers until flat and full, his lush lips between hers, moistening them with a kiss that was almost shocking in its delicateness. For a man of his line of work, of such a rough life handled with such rough hands, his kiss came in soft and warm like ocean mist. She felt that, too. All around her, the life of the ocean, the life of him. His earnestness, his energy. She drank it in.
She opened her eyes when he pulled away, smiling. He looked at her almost guiltily, like he’d crossed some line in their journalist-subject enterprise. But that line had been crossed a while ago. It wasn’t the drinks she’d had earlier, or even just how good he looked in the sand. It was from that very first contact, a warmth indescribable, a draw that pulled her in and led her to this moment, from first contact to first kiss.
He was still grinning at her. “What are we doing?”
“I don’t know,” she said, laughing and sweeping hair across her forehead as the breeze picked up.
“Should we stop?
“No.”
The wind blew even harder, kicking up her hair and the sand, both pelting into her face. She squealed and tried covering with her hands, turning and twisting away. Then came Cole’s hands, and then his arms, his thick biceps doing all the protecting she’ needed. He wrapped them around her and pulled her face against the hard contours of his chest, the warm safety of his body wrapping around her. The smell of sea spray and him, his dirt bike, gunpowder. Danger. But always a controlled danger. She had seen that firsthand, initially through his emails, and then how he’d straddled the line at the Kahn facility, how he’d risked it all to save both of them. It was the kind of safety she’d needed, especially since the cage . . .
But in his arms, she felt him become the cage itself, though a different kind and for a better purpose. Not to keep her in, but to keep the world out. It was what she needed most at times, a blanket, a shield. An impenetrable love. He was certainly big and strong enough, as any cage, but could he offer more than the convincing facade of something real? Could it be more than a beachside fling?
Dark Salvation (DARC Ops Book 7) Page 11