Lethal Treatment

by S A Gardner

  I lay back this time, unable to move a muscle to participate, open, accepting, taking him and all he gave, letting him show me just what my body was capable of. He gave more than I should have been able to stand. I stood it fine.

  Then it was happening again. I bit down hard on the heel of his much-abused palm stifling a scream that would have brought our teams rushing to investigate. I didn’t want to come without him again.

  But damn his stamina, he still held back, kept watching me bucking and convulsing.

  Then he finally grunted, “Look at me, Calista.”

  My drooping eyes opened wider and understood the gift he’d bestowed on me, making me watch. There could be nothing more incredible than Damian in the throes of orgasm. His tortured growls of my name reverberated in my every cell as he threw his head back, every muscle in his body locking. I could swear I felt the pulse of his ejaculation even through its latex trap. My inner muscles, still fluttering in completion milked him greedily, as a wish flitted in my mind. That one day he’d take me without barriers, spill his seed inside me, and that seed would take root…

  I held up trembling arms, and his eyes told me he realized what I was offering. Communion after the devastation. He gave it to me, melted over and into me.

  Such mass should have been suffocating. It was just completing, anchoring. His arms went beneath me, lifting me into him, clinging to me as if I was vital. I clung back, full of him, of the harmony we generated.

  At one point I found myself on top, draped over him like a sated blanket. And it was full daylight outside.

  His lips were burying kisses in my neck, and I was lapping up his homage. Until the way he kept saying “Calista” registered. Once, then silence. Then again. And again. “Calista.”

  Curiosity rose first, followed with unease, until I had to ask.

  “Are you trying to get used to saying my name? Or will I revert to being St. James the moment we leave this tent?”

  He didn’t answer that. I could take his evasion as I pleased. Instead he said, deep, deep and gravelly, “You take your pleasure the same way you do everything—fiery, unpredictable, extreme. And it’s so arousing. Everything you do is damn arousing.”

  He sure didn’t sound happy about it.

  But everything I did? Now that was a staggering piece of news. “I thought everything I do mostly aggravates you.”

  The amber in his eyes grew thicker, brighter, like lava. “Aggravation is arousing as hell. Coming from you.”

  I felt all-powerful with his admission. As all-feminine as the earth goddess. Weird feeling, when I didn’t dwell on my femininity much. My femininity dwelled on me though, whenever he was around.

  “Never took you for an articulate lover, Damian. That’s so damned arousing. Overkill in your case, really.”

  He took a heavy lock of my hair and wrapped it around his forearm, let it slither over his face, catching at it with his lips, groaning in what had to be some kind of suffering. “Overkill should be your middle name. You stimulate me to the point of pain, Calista. You scorch me. I’ve been teetering on the brink of hell ever since I laid eyes on you.”

  We-ell. That was an articulation I could have done without. A reality check. More like a crash landing. A rundown of my flaws and sins couldn’t be far behind.

  No, thank you. I wasn’t up to that, now of all times. Maybe it was time to run back to our corners, take stock, think how to go on from here. Before this devolved in

  I extracted my hair, rose to my knees, tucked my legs beneath me and started braiding it. His gaze on me was as effective as his hands, sweeping me, knowing where to pause, where to fondle, how to inflame and addict. I shuddered.

  His voice broke over me, an inexorable invocation. “I want you again.”

  My eyes dragged from his lust-filled ones downward, checking out his claim. No claim there. Fact, as solid as could be.

  “And I want you.” But after that hell comment…I mean, that hurt. No reason why he shouldn’t share the torment. He reached for me and I pulled back. “Uh-uh. I wouldn’t want to push you over the brink. Wouldn’t do for my co-leader to be cast in hell”

  His shutters came down so hard I flinched. Without another word, he rose from his Roman-god-reclining-in-sexual-abandon pose. In seconds he was crammed in his pants, pulling on the rest of his clothes, regarding me with vacant eyes.

  He’d turned off. Just like that. My comment had probably knocked his priorities back in place. Snapped him out of the sexual fugue.

  It was over then.

  As I feared it would be. As it should be.

  I was fully dressed, too. I should get the hell out of here without another word. But I owed him, owed what we shared, better than that. Damn.

  I opened my mouth, groping for a better way to conclude this, to leave the door ajar…

  His next words slammed it, right over every vulnerable and exposed thing in me. “I want you to know I take full blame for this lapse.” Lapse? “You were way beyond your endurance, were exhibiting classic post traumatic stress—”

  I cut him off. “And you what? Took advantage of me? Give me a break, Damian. I wanted you, and I took what I wanted. You did, too. Let’s not start devaluing it now so we can stomp it into non-existence. It happened. And it was magnificent. Let it stand there, a moment out of time, a healing outlet. Who knows, we could have defused our relationship. Maybe we can continue on better terms now.”

  His winged eyebrows rose in disdain. “And if you believe one word of that, you’d be suffering from total lack of insight and foresight, and would need some serious psychological reassessment.”

  “No need to get offensive, mister. So we messed up. What do you suggest we do, keep at it, since it’s already happened?”

  God, I wanted him to say yes. To consent to turning to each other whenever the hunger grew too huge to contain. I wouldn’t do it, but I wanted him to propose it, to want it…

  I should be careful what I wanted. His eyes were still opaque but his words were transparent enough. “Yes, Calista. I want to keep at it, as you so delicately put it. And at it.”

  My knees knocked once, my body readying itself for the pleasure it now expected from him and was already addicted to it. It would turn on me when it realized I intended to deprive it. Withdrawal of the severest kind would ensue.

  Damian braced his legs apart, eased the bulge in his pants. “But what I want doesn’t matter. If we keep at it, we’d perpetually be either hungry or sated. It will take the edge off our every thought and action and we can’t afford that now. But frustration can actually keep us sharp. We also need to keep it out of the equation so we can be impartial.”

  “And if you believe that’s what we’ll be, whichever way we go now, you have some serious judgment issues, too.”

  His teeth did a nail-scratching-a-chalkboard number on me. “We can’t afford attachments in such conditions.”

  Hadn’t he left it a bit late for that? The bastard. Or was he talking about his own detachment? Made him a bigger bastard.

  “Is that why you kept your lover right where you could have front-row seats to each other’s death? Or is that the lesson you learned from hers?”

  His eyes died. My heart kicked me so hard I almost stumbled. I sure deserved it.

  Why did I bring this up? How could I? Under any provocation? Apart from going crazy wanting to know the answer, some stuff should never be asked. Should never be exhumed.

  My throat closed Damian took three loaded steps, bringing him within inches of me.

  When he talked his voice was soft, calm. Deadly. “I learned my lesson all right. I learned that I deserve every bit of suffering and self-loathing I live with, that I deserve anything at all that is still coming to me in this gruesome line of work. I hate no one more than I hate and despise myself. No one but you.”

  My heart tried to batter its way out of my chest.

  That anguish. That stark revulsion…

  I didn’t mean—I never—I sho
uldn’t have said…

  Retract this, erase it.

  Grief and remorse ricocheted inside me, suffocating me with the need to throw myself at him, to defuse his torment, atone for my unforgivable sin.

  I couldn’t. I shouldn’t.

  It felt like the day he’d ended my career, and cut me loose into the unknown multiplied by ten thousand. Like amputating a limb without anesthesia. Yet it could be the only way out of this mess. A surgical excision, merciless, final.

  I squared my shoulders, crushed the pain and the compulsions and looked up at him, sort of saying goodbye.

  “You hate me, De Luna? Good. Keep it up.”

  My heart drained, my legs numb, I turned away and walked out of the tent.

  And right into Jake.

  Thirty-One

  “So—am I dreaming, hallucinating, or are you really here?”

  There was another possibility to the multiple choices this apparition of Jake was proposing.

  I’d finally snapped. Lost it. Taken the leap over the edge. Common consensus said I was already crazy.

  This had to be a compensatory mechanism. I’d just lost the one passion I wanted, so I summoned up the only other one I’d ever had.

  The real Jake was somewhere deep in the mountains. We might never find him. Or if we did, might never get him out.

  He couldn’t be here.

  But I’d never developed the ability to take refuge in wish-fulfillment phantasms, even in dreams. Would be too easy. I didn’t do easy. Even involuntarily. This meant one thing.

  Jake was really here.

  It made no sense. But he was. Real. Here. Standing before me under the stark light of early morning. Alive. Unharmed.

  And nothing like I remembered.

  His metamorphosis was even more shocking than finding him here. My Jake had rivaled Paul Newman in flawless good looks, and Errol Flynn in effortless panache. The man before me was a cross between Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen in their prime. On a very bad day.

  But it was him.

  “Jake.”

  Without a flicker of volition, I sailed across the three paces separating us. Then I was all over him, sobbing his name like someone suffering from palilalia, as if still afraid he was an illusion, and saying his name enough times would solidify him.

  For two years after he’d been lost I’d gone mad for this. For one last look or touch, one chance to scream “Forgive me.” Every day had brought a new variation on the same defeat, chasing shadows and slamming against dead-ends until I’d been pulped. Until I’d given up.

  I shouldn’t have given up. And because I had, he’d rotted in an eight-year-long nightmare.

  “You’re real. Not to mention even more demonstrative—than all of my imaginary Calis.”

  His voice spread through long-atrophied memory pathways. Deeper. Rougher. The sophisticated accent more pronounced. The acerbic humor that had always permeated it gone. The words carried it, the tone didn’t.

  Something else had changed. My Jake had loved my impulsiveness, reciprocated it in devil-may-care abandon. He hadn’t attempted to hug me back, his arms rigid at his sides.

  Yeah, sure. As if he’d scoop me up and spin me in the air. As if these years of hell hadn’t separated us. As if we weren’t standing right in the middle of hell.

  But how was this possible? Was it a dream after all? All of last night and up till now?

  It would be an ingenious wish-fulfillment exercise, giving me all I craved. Thorough satisfaction with the object of my long-simmering passions, followed by a brutal severance, sparing me the emotional fallout, then wrapping up by giving me my impossible yearning, Jake delivered right up to me.

  I squeezed him with everything I had.

  “This Cali is also far stronger than I remember. I would appreciate that you don’t re-fracture my ribs just yet.”

  At his groan, I unclamped him but grabbed his arms instead. I wasn’t taking the chance he might spiral away in a puff of smoke.

  “Oh, God, Jake—how?”

  Elegant chestnut eyebrows rose. “How what exactly?”

  “How everything. I’m still unsure I’m not the one hallucinating.”

  My eyes clung to his, searching for something familiar. Their blue-skies color was the only thing unchanged about him. There was nothing there. He just looked back at me.

  Then he shrugged. “It’s safe to say we’re both sane—so to speak. There’s probably tons of information we have to exchange before any of this makes sense. But for now, you’re here, I’m here. It’s enough.”

  It should be. It was. I tried to drag him to me again, and he stepped out of reach.

  “Maybe we should take this somewhere less public?” he said so formally it was almost funny.

  But his words brought our surroundings zooming back into focus. Damian was a few feet behind me. The rest of the camp and our teams were coming and going in the background.

  Then I noticed Jake’s shadows. Six militants. Ones on a far higher level of fitness from any I’d seen so far.

  I’d sure given them a show.

  No wonder Jake was acting so weird. Like the refugees. No, not like them. His weirdness was different somehow.

  He turned to the militants, said something. I didn’t get it. The one who looked like the squad’s leader nodded.

  Jake turned to me. “So where is ‘somewhere less public’ here?”

  “They gave you permission?”

  “Not for long. Is this your tent?” He pointed to Damian’s tent. “Can we go in there for a while?”

  Go in there? With the tempestuous night I’d just spent with Damian permeating the very air? Didn’t think so.

  “Uh, no, it’s not mine.” I wasn’t supplying the need-to-know fact it was Damian’s. Or the never-to-be-disclosed reason I’d been there.

  Speaking of Damian, he was coming forward. Jake’s appearance must have taken him by absolute surprise, too. Not to mention my hysterical demonstration. After he’d established his claim on me to the militants. It must make him look pretty bad, me coming out of his tent and jumping on another man like a delirious dog at her long-lost owner.

  The charade he’d devised was the last thing I cared about now. But damn him, I couldn’t ignore him now he’d asserted his presence. He probably had to establish he didn’t know Jake, since his affiliation with GCA had come after Jake’s time with them. I had to go along with that.

  Stilling clinging to Jake’s arm, I made introductions. “Jake, meet Damian De Luna, our mission’s logistician. Damian, Dr. Jacob Constantine.”

  Both men came into the same frame for the first time and my breath disappeared again.

  Boy, I had superlative taste.

  Very inconsistent, too. I clearly didn’t have a type. Two more different men didn’t exist. Damian was night and Jake was day—uh, make that sunset. Damian had the all-around advantage physically, but Jake was mesmerizing. With his honeyed complexion offsetting butterscotch hair and backlit eyes, that new harshness, the slow-burn maturity and the silver-brushed temples had augmented his looks about a thousand percent. And then came his body.

  Since I’d found out he’d been captured not killed, I’d tortured myself imagining his deterioration. But not only hadn’t he been abused and degraded, he’d been upgraded.

  My memory of him wasn’t that defective. The muscles that had tensed beneath my digging fingers, the breadth that had filled my arms, hadn’t been there before. His very carriage screamed lean, sinewy fitness. Even all these clothes couldn’t hide that his body had been honed like his face.

  Had they been putting him to hard labor? If they had, they must be feeding him really well, too.

  My center-stage focus was yanked by the way the two men looked at each other. A moment too long, both their faces and body language studies in emptiness and opacity. Then they shook hands, brief, formal.

  There was instantaneous and intense aversion for you.

  Sour chemical reaction? Male territor
iality? Over me? When one hated me, and the other barely remembered me?

  I just had to giggle.

  Both men turned on me, eyebrows raised.

  “Pardon me. Shock. And you have to admit this is one black humor situation. Here I am, introducing you Jake, the man I thought dead for eight years, just minutes after you materialized out of thin air, as if you were away for the weekend. But what takes the cake is you two shaking hands as if you’re about to go on a business lunch to be politely hateful to each other.”

  That won me my first shadow of a smile from Jake. And another delicious spanking look from Damian.

  The militants chose this moment to call to Damian.

  He stiffened even more. Tsk. Who’d believe the man had spent the night getting all his tension thoroughly relieved?

  Okay, maybe not so thoroughly, since he’d wanted more. I was grateful I’d denied him, whether due to hurt, vindictiveness, self-preservation or a combination of all. If Jake had arrived with us in the middle of another round of delirium… I shuddered at the very idea.

  Downside was, Damian was so tense he seemed beyond summoning his affable persona.

  As he turned away, he pinned me with an urgent gaze. Telling me something I couldn’t read. As he completed his turn, he gave the militants a more amenable salute. The day’s leader hooked his arm through Damian’s and led him away.

  Too bad. I would have really liked to see how this thing between the two men would have played out.

  My basic bitch was wagging her tail. And could I blame her? There were the two men in my life, one hurling his hatred in my face, the other stiffening in my arms as if I had something highly contagious. Some sort of rooster fight would have been a much-needed appeasement.

  Tangent alert! The one important thing here was Jake. And getting answers.

  I looked at him, the man who used to be my suave lover. Hardened, harsh, his years in hell polluting his every line. A building pressure built inside me, an overpowering urge to snatch him and run out of here. Back to safety.

  Back to the man he used to be.

  For now I took him back to my tent.