Murder

by Ella James

  “Yes,” I moan, putting a hand over her hand. “But when I take you—” My jaw clenches. I’m so hard I can’t think straight. “I don’t know if I can… Fuck.” I groan again as she encircles my head, feathering her fingertips over the rim, then tightening her grip as she strokes firmly down.

  “Don’t worry. You’re all good.” And with that terrible untruth, Gwenna leads me toward her room.

  THREE

  BARRETT

  “Why do you think…I can’t sleep?” I manage as we walk through her dark office. I clutch her arm as her hand moves between my legs. “What do you think…I remember?” My voice is hoarse with all my secrets.

  Her hand squeezes my shaft. “It doesn’t matter, Barrett. Don’t push me away.” Her free hand lifts my shirt, glides down my abs, and joins the one that’s stroking me inside my boxer-briefs. I groan as she starts to work me with both hands, one pumping up and down my shaft, the other gently tugging on my sac.

  “Fuck, Gwen— Ohh.” My balls draw up and I can feel my cockhead leaking. “You keep that up…” I pant in warning. She pauses in mid-stroke to kiss my bicep, then resumes her stroking, her hand squeezing tighter, stroking faster.

  She knows just how I like it…on my dick. I try to catch my breath and find I can’t. Her hand…

  Gwenna’s voice cuts through my heavy breathing. “That’s right, baby. Come in my hand.” She jerks my cock just right, making my hips tremble and my balls tighten. She fondles me there, lifting up and stroking just behind them.

  “Fucking hell…”

  Bliss billows through me, hot and potent. I thrust against her hands because I can’t help it. I need…

  I buck against her. Panic streaks through me, but I can’t grasp it. I spread my legs and clench her shoulder. Groan.

  “You made me come, so now it’s your turn, Barrett. Keep your eyes shut just like that and think about my mouth on you…sucking.” Her hand grips me underneath my head. “My tongue would lick just under here…” Her finger strokes around the rim. “Then I’d pull you into my mouth, where it’s warm…and soft. I’d stroke my tongue right here—” She fingers the sensitive notch under my head, making my legs tremble. “Then I’d pull you out and lick underneath one more time and…flick my tongue over this little slit.” She drags her thumb over it, and my body bucks.

  I let out a loud moan.

  “You’re so big,” she whispers. Her palm cups my head, twisting slightly as her other hand tugs on my balls. My shaft throbs, desperate for attention. I can feel my legs move, my weight shifting as I thrust my aching member at her.

  “Gwenna…please.”

  “That’s right,” she murmurs. The hand around my head moves down my shaft, sliding toward the base. “If you…were in me…” She strokes up and down, making my balls bounce. “It would stretch me. I’d be…tight…around you.”

  Her hand plays under the rim of my head, stroking so light it should tickle…but instead it makes my legs feel weaker. “Oh fuck, Gwen…I’m gonna come…”

  “That’s right. I want to see you, Barrett…” Her words are whispered, warm against my chest. I feel my cock swell and stiffen further, pleasure building, moving through my belly, down my thighs. Her hand grips tighter, strokes me faster.

  “Gwen—”

  I think about her pussy, swollen, slick against my mouth. Her hand rolls my balls as the other strokes my head, and I come like a fucking cannon, throbbing once, then blowing in her hands.

  A sound that’s neither sigh nor groan and maybe part sob burbles from my throat. Then my eyes squeeze shut, heat fills my head, I put a hand over my eyes.

  “Oh fuck.” I start to tremble, feel the sting of bile in my throat. “Why’d you do that? Gwen.” I grip her forearm.

  Her eyes find mine. “You didn’t like it?”

  I laugh. “Holy fucking— Fuck.” I pull away from her and hold my head. She grabs a tissue from her desk, and my eyes feast on her. Her cheeks are flushed. Her nipples push against the fabric of my jacket, which is stained from what we just did.

  “Fuck.” I pull my hair.

  She pauses, hands reaching for me. “Are you mad at me?”

  Her eyes are wide and innocent.

  Because she doesn’t know.

  I stalk out her office door, and through the den. I hear her voice behind me as I throw her front door open. My legs are so weak, I sink down on her porch stairs, holding my head with both hands.

  She doesn’t know I can’t stop now. I can’t stop now. My dick is still hard. I can’t breathe.

  I feel her come around in front of me. Her little hands cup my knees. She’s so gentle. I can feel the kindness emanating from her and it makes me want scream and tear my hair out.

  “Barrett? Will you look at me?”

  My eyes lift, involuntary.

  “What’s wrong, Barrett?” She strokes my thigh.

  I laugh. I rub my eyes, shielding myself from her warm gaze with my fingers.

  “If I went too far…I’m sorry. I thought… You were hard and I— That was the first time since…” I open my eyes and find hers wide, her face gone pale and earnest. “I’m scared with other people,” she whispers.

  I swear to God, I feel it all fall down around me. My resolve. My desperate barriers and all my longing—dead leaves scattered at her feet.

  I stand up. Walk away! Just walk. You can’t stay here. You can’t tell her. Don’t keep lying. There is nothing you can do, you stupid fucker.

  And still—my gaze finds hers. “It’s been that long?” My voice is low and soft, almost unrecognizable.

  Her eyes go teary. “Please don’t pity me. I just…I don’t get out, you know? I’m stubborn, and I have my habits, staying here. I’ve gotten…bad at taking chances. I think over time it all got worse. I lose my nerve more every day and until you moved here I thought…”

  “You thought what?” I rasp.

  She blinks. A tear falls. “I don’t know.” She rubs her eyes. “I’m probably embarrassing myself. I think I did already.” She looks down at her—my—jacket. Her face reddens, and another tear falls. “This is how I’ve always been. I get so dumb and reckless. It’s been even worse with you.” She turns around, her back to me, her face lifting so I think her eyes are on the treetops.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I see her hands clutching her elbows. She’s hugging herself.

  Before I have to choose—to go to her or not—she turns to face me. “I’m the kind of person who gets carried away. I think tonight I did that and I won’t do it again.”

  She takes my jacket off, then pulls it to her chest.

  “I’ll wash it,” she says, moving toward her door. She turns around and looks me in the eye when she gets on the top step. “Still friends?” she asks.

  She gives me a tiny smile, her tongue sweeping over her lower lip as it begins to fade.

  This is my out.

  This is the moment that I close this door. I tell a lie. My girlfriend died—the Burka-wearing one. Now is the wrong time. I’m a mess. Not well enough to get entangled. Anything.

  Words are clogging in my throat; the wrong words. I swallow them back. I nod, hoping my eyes don’t scream too loudly.

  “Always.”

  FOUR

  BARRETT

  September 20, 2011

  Dove is at the highest point in our overwatch formation, on an outcropping above my head, when the call comes through the Porta Phone.

  “Pack up shop and go back to the insert point,” McVay tells him.

  “Uhh…what?”

  “You heard me.” McVay is an asshole. “Get moving.”

  Over the mountain peak. Back to the field we ID’d back at base as our entry and exit point.

  Dove doesn’t tell McVay that the highest of all our high-value targets— a top-ranking al-Qaeda officer we’ve code named Ugly Fuck—has just shown up in the village down below us. Dove himself has not yet noticed this.

  We’ve been waiting on Ugly F
uck for weeks up here in the barren Hindu Kush, a stark, 25,000-foot-elevation mountain range between central Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. Two of our team’s best assaulters have been on the ground for the last four days, but we got no warning about Ugly Fuck’s appearance, so they clearly didn’t have the intel for it.

  Ugly Fuck is on a tall camel, fifth in a long caravan of rocket mortar and AK-bearing beasts that’s trickling into one of the most Taliban-friendly Pashtun villages.

  During the thirty minutes I use to photograph Ugly Fuck’s bearded mug and document his location, Dove struggles to signal me. I don’t notice the pebbles he’s lobbing at my head because my mind is in the game.

  I pull some pale, dry-looking faux grass from my pack and stuff it in my camo cloak, then start the slow scuttle to Breck, due west and a little lower down the barren mountain face.

  I don’t want to risk electronic comm, not yet, and this is how we’ve planned things.

  Dove is at the top left of our square, and I’m at the bottom left. Since Dove has comm on this mission, I’ll rendezvous with Breck at the bottom right point of our square. Breck and I will make a plan, which Breck will take up to the square’s top right corner—Bluebell—while I go up to Dove. Who, if things go correctly, will make a call to base to coordinate a backup plus withdrawal.

  If we’re on our game, this should be achievable in less than twenty minutes.

  About the time Breck is laughing silently at the big, awkward bush scuttling up to him, Dove, whose sole mission at this point is telling us we have to leave, is finding my spot empty.

  After a couple minutes, Breck and I determine a course of action and part ways, me returning to my spot, from which I’ll head up to Dove, and Breck picking his way up a cliff face to inform Bluebell of our plans.

  The square can work a variety of ways, but in this situation, this is our plan. McVay or not.

  As it happens, I’m the last man back to my spot—after hiking up to Dove’s spot, where the two of us traded deets. While I get back settled, Dove calls McVay and the rest of the head shed, seeking official permission to take out our HVTs and put in the order for a withdraw. From that point on, the four of us Operators communicate with hand signals.

  Unless the group of Taliban in the village square stops logging equipment and something changes, Bluebell will take out Ugly Fuck. Breck ID’d two other high value targets, so Dove’s asking the head shed about those guys. If we get permission to eliminate them, Dove will take one and I’ll take the other.

  I’ll fire first, then scramble up toward Dove. He’ll fire shortly before I reach him, and we’ll head over the mountain’s peak toward the withdraw point, while Breck hikes up to Bluebell and the two of them will scurry up behind us.

  Three near simultaneous shots from three coordinates should confuse the enemy, and assuming our backup arrives in the prescribed timeframe, those guys can keep Taliban reinforcements from coming up the other side of the peak and spilling down over the summit onto us.

  We’ve got a bunch of backup ready and waiting by a chopper for this very thing back at base, a mere thirty fly minutes away.

  As I await Dove’s go-ahead and watch Ugly Fuck and Co. unload their weapons, I start thinking about my brothers. I’ve got this bad feeling that the call Dove got was about one of the twins. They’re still fucking teenagers, and both of them have cancer. I haven’t seen them since February, right after Kelly was diagnosed. I did a cheek swab test in April to see if I could donate bone marrow to help cure one of them, but I wasn’t a match for either of my little brothers.

  Now the transplants are done. The boys are hanging in there. I try to call when I can, but we’ve been out here doing this for coming up on two months now. I asked the head shed for a short pass home, but since both boys are doing okay, they didn’t want to grant it yet.

  I look down at Ugly Fuck and hope the satisfaction of eliminating such a piece of shit will seem worth it if something happened to either of my brothers.

  Dove signals me a few minutes later. Yes—take out the targets. But don’t do it right now. Wait twenty-five minutes, unless Ugly Fuck moves out of range (in which case, we shoot and make a messy, risky withdraw).

  The twenty-five-minute delay before taking out HVTs is almost unheard of. The reason for it: due to the planned—and now canceled—early withdraw McVay called about, the guys at base aren’t ready and waiting in a chopper. So—take out the HVTs in twenty. Backup will, by that time, be twenty minutes away. Not ideal, I think, but not the worst. And then I realize, “Holy fuck.”

  I told Breck if Dove got the order to not eliminate Ugly Fuck immediately, I would let him—Breck—know within thirty minutes. Instead, I’ve been lying here thinking about my brothers.

  By the time my gaffe is realized, Breck’s already a third of the way to Bluebell, about to give Blue the order to fire more than half an hour before our backup is in place.

  I realize this and I tell Dove. We start to head toward Bluebell.

  Right about the time Dove and I near Bluebell and Breck, the camel crew starts moving. Breck is right by Bluebell. They decide to aim for Ugly Fuck—and Bluebell hits him. The camel caravan scatters.

  Not five minutes later, as we scramble for the withdraw point, fire starts coming down from the upper ridge of the mountain. Taliban militia from another village. Fuck, they got here fast.

  By the time our withdraw chopper sets down in a small field on the back side of the peak, the four of us are surrounded on all fucking sides.

  Bluebell takes a bullet to the shoulder, but he doesn’t let that stop him from taking out a dozen Taliban fighters. Breck gets pinged in the calf and catches some shrapnel in his left forearm, but he never goes light on the trigger either. Dove covers us all and takes out probably fifteen of the fighters on the high ground. I take out another dozen or more before we manage to crest the ridge. At the center of the field in front of us is a bird: a beautiful Black Hawk that is a welcome sight to all of us.

  I’m in the rear—it’s only fair, since I fucked up this gig—so when one fucker rises from the dead to spray the field with bullets, my brother Operators have already made it to the bird.

  I hit the ground, waiting for Breck, who’s on a drop rope, to cover me. That’s how I get hit in the back. The bullet gets me in the liver.

  I’m stabilized at base and flown to Landstuhl Hospital in Germany.

  I don’t remember much, but according to Breck later, I ask about my brothers every time my eyes are open.

  In the Landstuhl ICU twelve hours later, I wake for the first time after surgery.

  “My brother. Which one?”

  Breck’s eyes go red and wet, and through the veil of sedatives, I feel something sharp.

  He tells me Lyon died the eighteenth. Unexpected. All the chemo they gave him fucked his heart up.

  Breck lifts my IV-laden arm and wraps his hand around it. He leans down and puts his forehead on the mattress, still holding my arm.

  Lying there in Landstuhl, watching my best friend’s bowed head with blurry eyes, I remember why I failed to get to Breck before he left to give the okay to Bluebell.

  I was thinking of my brothers.

  The mission went wrong because the call that came summoning us back to base—triggered by the call that informed the base my brother died—got me distracted, worrying about my brother. Worrying about my brother got me shot.

  Breck tells me the funeral is the twenty-first. Being shot keeps me from getting there in time.

  I try to wrap my head around the fucked up circularity of fate.

  I tell no one—certainly not Breck, who brings me fast food and spends hours laughing his ass off as I play Assassins’ Creed doped up on opiates—but for the first time in my life, I use pain like a salve.

  Action and consequence. Isn’t that life?

  I should have fought harder to get back stateside. I should have seen Ly. I should be there now with Kelly.

  I embrace the gunshot as my
punishment.

  When, a week later, I’m discharged back to Afghanistan because our guys are getting their asses handed to them by the angry Taliban, I fight like I never have before. For Lyon. For me.

  Blood drips down the backdrop of my dreams.

  FIVE

  BARRETT

  November 5, 2015

  It’s not hard to tell myself this is the best thing for her.

  I’m still waiting on the house to close. Mallorie the realtor says she thinks it’ll be next week. Next week, I’ll be glad I did the right thing. Actually, I’ll probably still feel guilty. But at least I won’t have fucked things up worse than I did already.

  Gwenna last touched me on Monday.

  Tuesday, I call in a favor and have Bluebell’s phone tracked to a little highway in bumfuck Illinois. I get a chuckle when, that night, he spends three hours in a country music bar, then drives his luxury rental car to a nearby roach motel, where he stays for four hours before driving to the next Hampton Inn: the only place stateside where fucking Blue will lay his carefully gelled head.

  I wonder when he’ll be off leave. I could find out if I answered Dove’s calls—but I don’t.

  Dove and his fucking writer wife.

  I spend Wednesday burning all the Polaroids I have of Gwenna in the bedroom fireplace. I keep one in which she’s sparring on the foothill behind her house. Most of the days I’ve been here, that’s the way I spent my time: watching her practice her Taekwondo.

  She looks pissed off in the shot. She’s got her arms out and her hands balled into fists. Her hair is swept up in a ponytail, but much of it has come loose and hangs in her face. In the image, her left ankle looks uncomfortable and stiff. I remember in the moment after I took the picture, she said “shit-fuck” a bunch of times and kicked a stump.

  I watch the other pictures burn, and tell myself she won’t always have so many shit-fuck moments. I have plans to ease her pain.