by Amelia Wilde
“What would be so terrible about making promises?”
Eva looks into my eyes, and I swear I can see her hope and anguish battling it out. “It always ends up being a burden. Sometimes one that’s too heavy to carry.”
“There’s nothing too heavy for me to carry.” I flex one arm to support my point. “I never gave up my army fitness.”
Eva looks at me skeptically. “You don’t know what you’re getting into.”
“Because you won’t let me know what I’m getting into. It’s not like I can torture it out of you.”
“There are probably ways.”
This is a serious conversation, and Eva’s face is still streaked with tears. But there’s a curl in her voice that reminds me of the bedroom and the pink in her cheeks at the fact of me looking at her in broad daylight. “If you still think torture is all about pain, then I’ve neglected you on this...retreat.”
She sighs. “See? This is the problem. Every time I get close to this...past bullshit, you’re there with your pretty face and your—” Her eyes flick down to the front of my pants, where there’s an undeniable bulge. “—manly ways, and I end up thinking that more sex with you is going to solve everything.”
“Eva.” I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life. “There’s only one way to know if more sex with me will solve all your problems.” I lean in and taste the salt of her tears on one cheek then the other. She tilts her lips up and catches my lips with hers on the way back through.
“Only one?”
I pretend to consider it. “You’re right, more than one. You could be on your knees, on your back, bent over the bed....”
She puts a hand to my chest, right over my heart. “But what happens when it gets too dangerous?”
“Are you saying you’re too dangerous for me?” The idea is laughable. I am the one who will hurt Eva, because I’m the one who’s always being pulled to one side of the country or another, or worse, the opposite side of the globe. And not for my work—for myself. I have to know how things fit together. And you can’t go to war without becoming aware of how they all fit together. All my projects—all my searching—will always lead me on to the next thing. That’s the nature of the beast.
“You have no idea how dangerous I am.” There’s no more playfulness in her voice. “I’m serious, Ben. I—”
“I don’t care.” There’s no more playfulness in mine, either. “I don’t know how to be any clearer about it. When I look at you…” When I look at Eva, I’m convinced there’s no greater mystery in the world. And I know that even if I figured all of it out—even if I knew every single thing there was to know about her—I’d still want to know more. It’s a bright, pulsing need at the center of my core. “I want you,” I say simply. “I want to be with you. I’d have driven you home a long time ago if this wasn’t what I wanted.”
“You can’t possibly know that,” she insists, her voice barely above a whisper. “You can’t possibly feel that—”
“I felt it when I saw you at that party. I felt it when you slept in my bed. And I sure as hell felt it when that truck was coming at us. Are you saying that’s not real?”
“I’m saying the consequences might be more than you’re prepared for.”
“And what are the consequences, Eva? I’ve had a broken heart before. I can survive it again.”
Eva looks down into her lap then back up at me. “I don’t want to break your heart. I want...”
“Tell me.”
“I want to stay with you. For, like, as long as I live.”
She might as well have shoved me over the cliff with her own two hands, because I’m falling hard. Harder than I’ve ever fallen before, for anything. No, not falling. I’ve fallen. If my knees weren’t already on the ground, they’d be bruised from the impact.
Eva leans forward at the same time I do, and this time, there are no more tears on her cheeks to kiss away. There are only her willing lips inviting me to taste her. So I do. God, I do, with the moonlight falling down in a silver sheet over us and the night wind stirring the leaves in the trees.
When Eva makes a little noise in the back of her throat that’s somewhere between a moan and a sigh, I know it’s time to go back inside.
I lift her in my arms for the hell of it and she laughs, the sound bouncing off the front of the cabin, her moment of joy multiplied. I feel her lips on my neck, her kiss light and hot, and it’s so different from the way she tried to hold me at arm’s length that my mind can’t make the two things work together.
“You’re like that Katy Perry song.”
“Yes. I am a firework,” Eva says haughtily.
“No. That old one.” I reach out with one hand and open the storm door then kick the screen door open so we can step inside. “The hot and cold, yes and no thing.”
“Deep cuts,” Eva jokes. “I didn’t take you for a fan.”
I set her on her feet and kiss her again. Yeah. All of our clothes are coming off as soon as possible. I’m sure that’s in another Katy Perry song somewhere. “Are you like this with your family too? Or do you save all this mental whiplash just for me?”
Eva’s head is tilted up, and the moon is shining fully in through the front window, so I see the sad little smile that rises and falls on her face. “Oh, no. I don’t have a family anymore.”
19
Eva
Bennett looks winded, like all the air has been sucked right out of the cabin and there’s no emergency oxygen mask. “Shit, Eva.” He runs a hand through his hair, keeping the other one at my waist, and the pressure of it there, somehow both light and possessive at the same time, makes something inside of me twist and ache and heat. “Honestly, fuck. I’m sorry. I think.”
This is the part I hate about letting people in on this life detail. I hate it so much that my chest goes numb and my fingertips go cold. This is a place I don’t want to be in. Ever. “I didn’t run away from home or anything. It was a car accident.”
“Fuck.”
“When I was nine.”
Ben takes a deep breath and studies me. “Then you’ve heard all the bullshit people have to say. I won’t add to it. ”
Oh, what sweet, sweet relief. I take both of Ben’s hands and raise his knuckles to my lips then kiss every single one of them. This—this swooning, lightheaded feeling, along with a genuine beat of I’m so impressed—is the closest I’ve ever felt to the kind of head-over-heels love you see in the movies. Not that the bar should be that low for Ben, or any man. But no one other than Whitney has said anything so frank in response to this revelation.
“Is this part of the terrible consequences of being with you?” He says it with a husky laugh in his voice.
“This is a thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not saying ‘they’re in a better place now.’”
Ben shakes his head, scowling in a way that says I wouldn’t ever say something so stupid. “You know, after I got out of the army, people used to say that to me about my buddies who didn’t make it back.” He breathes out sharply through his nose. “It doesn’t matter if they’re in a better place, when it feels like you’ve got a stab wound through the chest. That shit was almost as bad as when my dad died.”
Oh—oh.
I move in closer and trace one of his lips with my fingertip, hyperaware of every beat of my own heart, very much alive in large part thanks to this man. “When did he die?”
“What?” The corner of Ben’s mouth curves upward. “You’re not going to tell me how sorry you are?”
I tilt my face up toward his and kiss him with all the pain that’s in my heart. It never goes away when someone you love dies. Never. It’s always there, aching with every heartbeat, like a cut that won’t heal. A stubborn cut. One you keep going to the doctor about, and they say “as long as you’re not bleeding to death, you’ll live” and shrug you out of the office. Some days it’s easier to tolerate the mess. Sometimes it’s like a fresh stab wound. The
re’s nothing to do but keep living with it. Even so, I still have room to feel the hurt that echoes in Ben too.
I’m sorry, I tell him in my mind as I lick that bottom lip and draw it in between my teeth. I’m sorry for what happened to you, but I’m not sorry to be here with you, even though I should be, because I’ll only cause you more pain.
The thought starts to burrow its way into the center of my brain, and I squeeze my eyes shut tighter. If I let it get too far, it’s going to shut down all the progress I’ve made. Better to leave it lurking in the future, which, as we both know, may never get here at all.
I don’t have another choice, because Ben is done with apologies. He’s done with soft kisses and sorrowful little breaths. It’s the middle of the dark and the cabin is soaked with pale moonlight, and the look in his eyes shifts from searching to needing. “Come back to bed,” he growls.
“Take me there,” I tell him.
He does.
“You’re good at changing the subject.”
Ben stirs, unhooking his arm from around my waist and rolling onto his back. It’s darker in the bedroom than the living room, so—woe is me—I have to feel for his abs in the dark instead of seeing them with my own two eyes. I skim the hard muscles with my fingertips and explore down to where the sheet is in a tangled line at his hips.
“I can’t help that sex like that sends me into the sweet embrace of sleep.”
“I’m not talking about that subject.”
He takes in a deep, even breath and lets it out slowly. “Name the subject. Any subject. I swear, I’ll stay on track. You have my complete focus.”
I slip my fingers beneath the sheet and graze the fine curls there. Ben groans, lifting his hips. “That’s warfare.”
“I’m helping you focus.”
“You haven’t asked me a question yet.”
I leave my hand where it is and rest my head against his shoulder. “You never told me when your dad died.”
He gathers me in, looping his fingers gently around my wrist to hold it in place. “That’s really what you want to talk about? Right now?”
“It’s dark.”
Ben huffs a laugh. “You’re right. In the daylight, I’m too busy spreading—”
I twist my wrist in his grip just for show. “You promised.”
All I hear for a little while is the sound of Ben breathing. It’s so level and rhythmic that it relaxes me against my will, carrying my mind neatly away from this golden opportunity and into—what did he call it?—the sweet embrace of sleep.
“Two years ago.”
I’m so far gone that at first I don’t know what he’s talking about, but then it all clicks neatly into place. “Was it…sudden?”
“It felt sudden, but it wasn’t.” I thought it wasn’t possible for our bodies to get any closer, but Ben proves me wrong. “I was...traveling a lot at the time, and he died right after I got back to the States.”
“I mean, you have to know this raises a ton of questions.”
“Does it?”
“Was your dad sick?”
Another little sigh. I know this pain intimately. So, so intimately. “Lung cancer.”
“Shit.” When I was in middle school, I had a friend named Autumn whose dad died after several years of fighting some kind of cancer. I assume it must have been testicular, because adults never wanted to say that in front of anyone from my age set. I’ll never forget how bitter that tasted. Everyone told Autumn and her family the usual bullshit, only they got to say how glad they were for those extra few years with him. It only occurred to me later that every year we get with someone is an extra year. In middle school, I only wished I could be Autumn. At least, I thought, I’d still have a mom left. But now, lying here with Ben, I see it more clearly. His mother left without a backward glance, and she probably didn’t have cancer.
“Yeah. He never smoked, which was—” Ben laughs. “It was one of his pet peeves, people smoking. He did a stint in the army too, so you’d think....”
“Did you smoke in the Army?”
“Hell no. I didn’t want to get lung cancer.” He breathes in and out, and it’s so steady and healthy I can’t even picture it.
“Yeah. Maybe I should avoid cars.”
Ben is silent for a moment. “Is this because of that semi truck? Because if you ask me, it’s trucks you should be wary of.”
This, of all moments, is the moment that I should tell him what happened. I should lie here in the dark and give him all the details. Not that I was there for any of the details; I only heard about them afterward, secondhand, in the way that you tell a nine-year-old about the greatest tragedy of her life.
But I don’t want to.
And it’s not because of the intense urge that follows me everywhere I go, to keep the heartache hidden. It’s because I’m here for Ben. If I can just keep my mouth shut about it—about what really happened—he’ll see me for a person who’s here for him.
Who loves him.
He’ll never know what a risk he’s taking, wanting to be with me like this. And God, I want him too. I want to lie here in the dark listening to the beat of his heart and the breath in his lungs until daylight, and then on into forever. Even if it means that he will eventually see all the ugliest parts of me.
But then, what hasn’t a man like Bennett Powell seen? Can I really be uglier than war? Can I be needier than the army?
I follow those thoughts down a darkly wooded path until it’s too hard to look at them, and then my mind drifts over to things like sandy beaches and lawn chairs and solid wood walls that keep out all the worst parts of the world. It drifts into that illusory knowledge that everything is fine, that everything will always be fine. In this lovely dream, the prospect of losing everyone who matters to me is somewhere in the far future. It’s not the weight that anchors my past.
The rush of the waves on the sandy beach takes over. The sound is half real, amplified by the dream, so I miss what Ben says the first time.
I curl against him, tighter, tighter. “What?”
“I wasn’t really there.”
I hastily retrace the steps of our conversation. “For your dad, you mean?”
“Yeah.” There’s a catch in his breath that might as well be a gunshot. “I was in the Middle East. Afghanistan mostly.”
“Deployed?”
“No.”
“You went back?”
He gives a little sigh. “I spent eighteen months chasing answers about what happened that day in the Humvee. And during that eighteen months, my dad dealt with his cancer by himself.”
My stomach twists.
“I asked him if I should come back every time we talked, and he always told me not to. I shouldn’t have listened.”
“Was work really that important?”
Another pause.
“I called it work. But really it was my own personal project, I guess you’d call it.”
“You spent a year and a half overseas for that?”
Ben doesn’t sound defensive at all when he answers me. “I’d planned on two. Things fell into place early. I had a contact in Kabul, a friend of a friend. He had more information than I thought. That’s when I found the pieces.”
“The pieces of what?”
“The pieces of the IED.”
The way this knowledge sinks in is like an enormous boulder plummeting toward the surface of deep water, leaving behind the light as it falls.
That’s how far he’ll go.
I didn’t understand until this moment that Bennett Powell is not only a man who sees. He seeks.
And there’s very little that will stop him once he’s decided on a goal.
The sheet pulled up around me is suddenly trapping ten times the heat, and it’s too close. What would Bennett do if he found out about my family? What if he got to the bottom of that and discovered that it was really me all along who was at the heart of the tragedy?
This can’t last, a voice in the back of my mind whi
spers. It can’t, because every path leads to the same place.
The forks in the road are only an illusion. The destination will always be that Bennett will look elsewhere for whatever he needs in this life.
I pull away from him with an exaggerated yawn and stretch my arms above my head.
“But I did find them,” he says, almost to himself.
One breath in, one breath out.
That’s how I pretend to be asleep.
20
Bennett
I can’t tell if this is the longest week of my life, the best week, or both.
It all seems dreamlike. A scene out of an action movie. Did that truck really almost hit us? Those first few moments of waking, I can hardly believe any of it happened. The thunderstorm. The semi. My brain accepts it; of course it does. I saw enough during my deployments to know that terrible things happen in the world, and sometimes we witness them.
There are terrible things, yes.
And then there’s Eva, who is something else entirely.
We’ve had as much sex as we’ve had work. By rights, she should be dead to the world until noon, but she’s up early this morning. The bed is empty when I open my eyes, and it gives me the strangest plummeting feeling, though there’s nothing to be worried about.
The first thing I do is look out the window.
There she is. My stomach rights itself.
Down by the lake, in one of the lawn chairs, her hair in an enormous bun on the top of her head. I didn’t feel her leave this morning. The conversation we had last night is hazy, but something about it itches at the back of my mind. Did I say something that upset her? I don’t see how I could have. It was nothing but the truth. Still, the set of her shoulders makes me think I did. But it could just be her focus on the story.