by CD Reiss
“She sucks at it,” Jenn interjected.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“You’re still trying to impress the brass with one more lap.”
“Shut up.” I threw blades of grass at her, but she was right. I wasn’t at home outside military life. Not yet.
“And the practice?” he asked. “How’s it going?”
“She needs clients.”
“Can I talk?” I kicked her gently.
“You’re too slow.”
“I could use some more clients.”
“Said so.”
We smiled at each other.
“Jenn here sent me a couple of guys from her art therapy group, and thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“But that’s only a couple.”
“Most of my vets are from Jersey anyway,” she added.
“Manhattan’s tough,” I agreed. “I specialized in battle trauma. They don’t grow military here. They grow, I don’t know, hedge fund managers and musicians.”
“Yeah, here’s the thing. How far are you going to push to do this?” Ronin asked, then continued before I could ask him what the fuck that was supposed to mean. “You’re far outside your comfort zone here.”
“I don’t have a comfort zone.”
“I’m asking if you’re committed, Major One More.”
“You know I am, Lieutenant Pain in the Ass.”
“Good.” He slapped his knees and stood as if we’d just ended a meeting. “I’ll send you some people. See you around.” He stepped away then turned back. “And Jenn?”
“What?”
He flipped her the bird and she laughed.
When he was out of earshot, she sighed. “Such a good-looking man with an ice-cold rock for a heart.”
“Oh, not really. He had a heart once.” I got my feet under me. “He never calls your rank.”
“No, I guess not.” I helped her up. “I never noticed.”
“I think he likes you.”
“I bet I can get to Columbus Station first.”
“Hell, no.”
And we were off for one more run.
Chapter Four
CADEN
OCTOBER, 2006
Greysen had been home three weeks the first time it happened. I was standing over a man with an empty chest. The pump kept his blood moving and the measured hiss of the ventilator told me he was breathing. We’d extracted a leg vein to replace the clogged artery.
I’d done this procedure at least a hundred times, and twice in an army hospital. I knew the rhythms of beeps and hisses. It was nothing. Vitals were good. Oxygen was good.
I held my hand out for the grafted vein. The nurse handed me the tray with the slice of flesh, and the whisper of the ventilator changed.
“What?” I said.
Everyone looked up. Pairs of dots of eyes over pale blue rectangles covering their mouths. Something was there with us, in the room, and it wanted me. If I’d been in a cave with a hungry lion, I’d be just as sure, except the lion didn’t growl. It breathed in a throaty rattle with the shushing of the ventilator.
“What, what, Doctor?” Amy Sullivan, the assisting surgeon, asked.
I wasn’t in a cave. There was no hungry lion. It was fine. The numbers were good. The ventilator was just…
“Can someone check the ventilator?”
“Ventilator checks out,” the tech’s voice came from behind me.
“You can tell that in two seconds? Can I have a swab, please?” I prepped for the graft. “Does it sound normal to you?” I said quietly to Amy.
“Yeah. Are you all right?”
I was sweating. My heart was racing. My adrenal glands were firing on all cylinders. This didn’t happen to me. I always put the right feelings in the right boxes and slid the deadbolt closed until I needed them. I didn’t make up stories, and I didn’t hear voices in the equipment.
But the feeling of being besieged was as familiar as it was real, and I knew how to handle it.
This was war, and I could do my job in the middle of it.
“I’m fine. Let’s put this guy’s heart back in.”
* * *
The feeling followed me that night to our first anniversary dinner. When I saw her outside the restaurant, I kissed her and held her hand while we waited for our table. I decided not to ruin the evening. When I took her hand over the table and she tucked her foot between mine, I decided she didn’t need to know at all. What was I supposed to say? “I was sure there was something but there wasn’t?” Or, “Can you please diagnose me before bed?”
Being married to a psychiatrist had upsides. She prescribed sleeping pills when I needed them. In Fallujah, when I was in the field hospital OR for eight days without rest, she’d managed vitamins and enough amphetamine to keep me sharp enough to not kill anyone. When we were deployed together, I never worried about her getting killed. But nothing kept me sane at home like loving her. She avoided her comfort zone, never got bored or was boring. She was serious but not dull. She was a bulwark against my worst impulses, and my God, my God I loved her more than I thought I could love anything.
Her opinion meant everything to me. She’d never think I was weak, yet I was terrified she would.
Truth incoming.
I didn’t want her to tell me it was nothing, even though I hoped it was.
I didn’t want her to have some easy cure, but I didn’t want to continue like this.
I didn’t want to become a patient in my own marriage.
I wanted it to go away by itself. Prove it was a bad day and that I could handle it at the same time.
But it didn’t. The second night with no relief from the feeling something was there, as Greysen breathed softly next to me, I lay awake in the silent dark, trying to isolate the problem. If I could build a wall around this feeling, hem it in, maybe I could identify it and throw it away. Pick the shrapnel out of my own guts to plink plink in the tray, shard by shard, observe them without the crust of shit and blood.
I must have been seconds from sleep. The shadows got deeper, outlines shifting with the passage of the moon in the window, taking on new, more threatening shapes.
Threatening, and yet… not.
My shrapnel had a shape, and it was compassion. A silent empathy and gentleness just this side of sweet. The Thing watching me, wanting me, the violent pressure on my mind I’d just gotten a shape around had a personality, and it was kind.
My body jolted with a cortisol flood, waking Greysen. She sat up on one arm. Her long straight hair covered her face in a veil. “Caden?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Just a dream.”
Why the fuck did I say that?
“Can you tell me—?”
“No.”
Twisting to her side, she lay down facing me, hands tucked under her pillow. She stayed silent for a few seconds. “You should write it down.”
“Go to sleep.” I stroked her hair away from her face.
When I’d met her, she kept her hair just long enough to keep in a ponytail, but short enough to care for easily. Now that we were civilians, she was letting it grow.
I loved her so much, I wanted to marry her every single day for the rest of my life.
Then a realization hit me like Reveille in the morning.
The Thing? The pressure? The entity that had its own personality that was all gentle kindness?
The Thing loved her too.
Maybe my mental weakness came from being tired, or hiding things from Greysen. Maybe I was jealous of a figment of my imagination. Maybe I wanted to show it who was in charge here.
For all those reasons, and some more complex instinct, I ran my hand down her back. She wore satin nightgowns, a civilian pleasure she reserved for herself and me. She sighed when my palm landed on her ass.
“Doctor?” One eye opened under the web of hair that covered her face. “Do you know what time it is?”
“It’s time for you to get on
your hands and knees.”
“Excuse me?”
I got up on my knees and grabbed her hips on either side, lifting them over the mattress. She flopped onto her hands, half twisted.
I bent my body over hers, reaching around her waist and talking softly in her ear. “If ‘excuse me’ means no, then say no.”
She swiped her hand around her head to get the hair off her face, looking back at me with an unfiltered gaze. “It doesn’t mean no, but…”
“Then you’re excused.”
I grabbed her breast harder than I normally would. She was mine. I would not be undercut, and I would not compete. I pulled her nightgown up and yanked down her underwear. Our eyes met over her shoulder.
“I can’t lean on the wrist for long,” she said.
“I’m aware.” Normally, I’d gently slide in, but not this time. Something more primal called, and I shoved hard inside her.
Yeah.
Just like I thought.
The Thing was horrified.
“Let’s get pressure off that wrist.” I took her by the biceps and pulled her arms behind her, holding them together with one hand. “Better?”
“Yes.” Her head dropped forward.
“This is going to be different,” I said.
“No shit.”
I hesitated. My desire to show the Thing my dominance couldn’t be satisfied at her expense. I loosened my grip on her arms just a little.
“Don’t…” She stopped, took a deep breath, and turned her head as much as she could. “Don’t stop. I’ll let you know.” Her hips pushed into me.
Gently, I gathered her hair with my free hand and wrapped it around my fist, then I yanked her head back as I entered her with full force.
She screamed through her teeth. “God! Caden!”
“Say no,” I growled.
“Yes.”
I fucked her so rough, I didn’t expect her to come so hard and so quickly. I kept fucking her, holding her arms behind her, pulling her hair as if it were a bridle. I unleashed deep inside her, bruising her arms with my grasp.
Right there, a whirlwind spun around us as I pounded her, whipping me into a confusion of desire and need, surrender and dominance. Even as I thrust forward physically, mentally I was spun by the force of it. Flipped like a coin, revolving in the air, landing, settling on the mattress.
The whirlwind fell away, and there was only Greysen under me.
The kind, sweet Thing shrank back into the shadows, weeping.
Take that, you fuck.
Chapter Five
Greysen
In the weeks after he took me from behind in the middle of the night, we went back to normal. The episode seemed like a pleasurable blip in a pleasurable routine.
We were meeting at the Mt. Sinai fundraiser. It was a cutting day. When he arrived at the fundraiser, he’d smell of rubbing alcohol and cologne if he’d put some on, fresh coffee grounds and cut grass if he hadn’t. He’d touch my shoulder. He’d run his finger along the edge of my strapless gown. At home, we’d barely make it in the door before he’d strip me naked and take me. Yes, it was predictable. Some things were worth predicting.
I crawled into the back of the car where my younger brother, Colin, waited. He was an engineer who’d been inspired to go to college after I’d found a way to go to med school, and he’d moved to New York for a job just as I was settling in. The education had done nothing to tamp his roguish ways.
“You look nice,” he said when I slid in next to him. He flicked one of my dangling earrings.
“You do too.” I straightened his black bow tie as the limo coasted toward the museum.
He shooed my hand away. “Thanks for the plus one.”
“Try to keep off the ladies.”
“What’s the fun in that when I have to watch your husband with his hands all over you?”
“Stop it.”
“You two are so in love it makes me sick.”
* * *
The event took place in a ballroom lined with Regency-era portraits and heavy drapery. I plucked a champagne flute from a server’s silver tray and Colin did the same.
“This is lovely.” He scanned the room like a cheetah selecting the weakest in the herd.
“Behave.”
“Oh, your friend Jenn is here. I like her,” he purred.
I elbowed him as Jenn saw us and headed over. She was awkward in heels and her fat black glasses always slid down her nose, but her smile was a beacon of light against her brown skin. We greeted each other, and she swapped her empty flute for a full one.
“Easy there, tiger,” Colin said.
Jenn took no shit, and she was a terrible flirt. “I’m grown, but thank you.”
“He’s on the make,” I offered.
“Good luck with that.” She tipped her glass to him, and he responded with a clink. “Ronin’s here,” she said to me.
“Where is he?” I craned my neck. “He sent me some referrals. I owe him a drink.”
I saw him before the last word was out of my mouth, but he already had a drink in his hand. He wedged his way through the crowd toward us.
“What are you doing here?” I asked as he kissed my cheek.
“Business.”
“Obviously,” Jenn said. “No one’s here for the food.”
“Thank you for the referrals,” I said. “I owe you a drink.”
“Open bar doesn’t count.”
We were talking about something unimportant when Ronin put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me to him, but we were laughing.
“Blah blah,” Colin complained. “Caden’s here.”
He crossed the room to my husband, whose eyes were on me. Caden wore a deep navy suit and a gold tie. His cufflinks sparkled, and his hair was combed off his face. The fact that he hadn’t shaved contrasted the crispness of the suit against the animal body inside it.
We went quiet. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Ronin.
Ronin removed his arm from my shoulders.
Colin interrupted the gaze by shaking my husband’s hand and making some sort of wisecrack he must have found hilarious.
Caden, not as much. He’d turned his attention back to me.
“Girl. He looks like he wants to eat you alive,” Jenn said into her glass.
I turned to Ronin so I could blame him, but he was gone. Caden maneuvered to us.
“My dad never looked at my mom like that,” Jenn continued.
Before I could offer a snappy answer, Caden found us and kissed Jenn on the cheek. He kissed my cheek in the same platonic way, then looked behind him, but no one was there.
“Where’s Colin?” I asked.
“Bar.”
When I turned to scan the bar for my brother, I leaned into Caden a little. We had a pattern. A rhythm to our interactions. The shape of the space between us, laid out over the time together, was as predictable as the phases of the moon, and his touch always came when expected.
But when we looked at Colin as he tried to charm a young lady in a gold dress, Caden didn’t lean in when I did. He didn’t put his hand on my back. When Bob Abramson found me and said he wanted me to meet someone, my husband didn’t take my hand. When Wilhelmina, the head cardiac nurse, her hair braided into long, neat rows, gave me a kiss and asked how I was handling my husband’s hours, Caden didn’t come close to me and brush his thumb between my shoulder blades. When we all sat down for a presentation about the hospital’s goals, he kept his hands folded in his lap.
When he released his hands and placed them on his knees, I put my left hand over his right. He patted it, smiled at me, and slipped it away before looking behind him again.
I thought he was in a bad mood.
What else could it be?
Chapter Six
Caden
The war had been building for over a month. The ventilators were left to do their job, but the squeak of gurney wheels on linoleum, the tip-tap of computer keys, the murmurs of the hospital staf
f all held a thread of the Thing I thought I’d banished. I could have a conversation with Greysen, but only if I concentrated on not hearing the Thing in the boiling pasta water or the radio news. Every day, it got a little stronger. Every day I was a little more tense, a little more afraid, a little more uncomfortable. The Thing got harder to box away and cart off. Harder to hide behind a wall. Impossible to ignore. I was pressed in on all sides by a Thing I couldn’t even define.
And what had become more and more clear was that it wanted my wife.
I could put on a suit and knot a tie. I could put jeweled links into a starched cuff. I could shower, shave, comb my hair, but it was all a lie. It was all a costume, a mask. Under it, I was no more than a knot of bodily needs and overwhelming sexual urges. My mind was a set of neurons firing commands to my glands, and the glands sent emotions through my bloodstream.
She was mine.
Not his.
The Thing was male, and its strength was its persistence.
The neurons said I had to have her in my line of sight, but I’d bring the Thing right to her.
The only way to keep it away from her was to keep my distance.
But the animal said no. The animal I was knew that wouldn’t work because she was mine.
Navigating between all these urges was exhausting. But as I entered the fundraiser, I took a breath. The exhaustion was under my suit. Behind my smile and polite words. No one could see.
She was with her brother and Jenn. Her hair was piled on top of her head and her earrings dropped down the length of her neck. She wore nude lipstick, and under the satin bodice of her gown, her nipples were hard. She was the picture of grace and charm, with a smile that transformed everyone around her and eyes that comforted people into talking.
The Thing saw her. In the bouncing acoustics of the room, it whispered its longing.
“Hello.” Colin shook my hand.
I hadn’t even seen him coming toward me. Just her. Only her.
“Nice to see you.” I angled myself so I could see her over his shoulder.
