Girl On the Edge

by CD Reiss

  Jenn was a good friend, but that kind of attention to detail was all Colin. I took three Advil and put my watch in front of my face. Blinked. Arranged my thoughts around the spike in my head. Blinked again.

  07:21 hours.

  First session was at 09:30.

  I could make it.

  Jenn came in from the hallway in a yellow robe with a towel on her head. “Good morning, sunshine.”

  “I have to go.” I got up. No, I didn’t. A sledgehammer hit my head, and I sat back down.

  “Take it easy. Have coffee and let the Advil do their thing.”

  “I can’t believe everything I told you last night. You’re never going to be able to look Caden in the eye again.”

  “I just did.” She handed me a cup.

  “What?”

  “He’s waiting outside.”

  “How—?”

  “You think I’m going to put you on my couch for the night and not tell your husband where you are? I will not be party to breaking you guys up.”

  “But you think we should?”

  “No. No, no, no.” She sat on the edge of the couch. “Don’t put words in my mouth. I never said that, and I never thought it. He loves you. He’s fucked up from the war, and he loves you.”

  “Not just the war.” The coffee scalded my tongue, but I drank it anyway. I didn’t think I’d told them about the bottle room, but I wanted to make sure.

  Jenn shook her head and looked into the middle distance, holding her cup with both hands like a safety blanket. “Yeah, well, it’s rarely just the war. Anyway. Listen. If I had someone to send you to, would he go?”

  “What’s the specialty?”

  “Dissociative disorder.”

  “It’s not that. Not textbook at least.”

  “I’m not pressuring you. Just tell me if you want the referral.”

  “What’s with you and Colin?” I changed the subject.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you obfuscating?” I managed to sit up. “Or do you really not know what I’m talking about?”

  She shrugged. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “Did he—”

  “No. Not Colin. He’s fine. And no. There’s nothing. We’re friends.”

  That was a bald lie, and the twist of her mouth after she said the word friends proved it.

  “And you don’t want to talk about it?”

  “Right.”

  “Didn’t you spend all of last night raking me over the coals for keeping things in?”

  “I did. And it was fun. But you have a husband downstairs waiting for you, and he’s the cold and possessive one. So, for him to give you enough distance to wait out there instead of in here? You gotta respect that by moving your ass off my couch.”

  She slapped my leg and held her hand out to help me up.

  * * *

  I was born in May of 1974, the middle of three. The only girl. My father was twenty and in Vietnam when my mother had me in a base hospital. When she cried out in labor, the nurse snapped and told her she was disturbing everyone. It was time to stop crying like a baby and grow up.

  She did both.

  My father didn’t hear about the nurse until I was eighteen months old and my mother mentioned it in passing. He was home from the war, but he’d brought the war back with him. We were still living on base, which meant my dad could grab his rifle and storm to the hospital maternity ward where, before the era of viral clusters of mass shootings, there were no guards.

  He didn’t point the rifle at anyone and he didn’t find the exact nurse who’d said the exact thing, but he gave the entire staff a good talking to before he was hauled away to spend six months in a white room “getting better.”

  I had to break my wrist to consider a career in mental health. Maybe it was avoidance. Maybe I had to shed a crust of ideas about what being a soldier meant. But really, it should have been obvious I knew the effects of a war on a man’s soul.

  One night, while studying in the med school library, exhaustion twisted a menstrual cramp from an uncomfortable ache to a stabbing agony. As I laid my head on the carrel desk, trying to breathe through it, I told myself to stop crying like a baby. It was time to grow up. For the first time in years, I thought of that nurse and wondered if she’d been in Vietnam. I wondered if my mother’s cries had triggered a memory or flashback. I wondered if she’d actually given the best care and advice she could have under the circumstances.

  * * *

  Even though the Advil swathed the sharp wedge in my head with cotton and gauze, moving exacerbated the pain. Freshly showered and wearing my best friend’s clothes, I took the stairs slowly to find Caden on the sidewalk, waiting.

  “Morning,” I said at a volume designed to maintain equilibrium.

  “Good morning.” He laid his hand on my lower back and guided me to the Ferrari parked at a hydrant, its hazards flashing.

  “Sorry I made you wait.”

  “I don’t mind.” He opened the door. “I’m sorry about this stupid car.”

  He helped me lower myself into the asphalt-scraping seat, shut the door, and got into the driver’s side, stopping before he turned on the ignition.

  “What happened to your hand?” I pointed at his left wrist, which was wrapped in an Ace bandage.

  “Sprain. I fell on it. It’s nothing.” The car roared when he gently pulled out of the spot. “Please tell me he bought this without telling you.”

  “He bought this without telling me.”

  He looked at me as if asking whether I was honoring his request or telling the truth.

  “Seriously. You just showed up with it.”

  “Are there any other large expenditures I should know about?” he asked.

  “A ring.”

  “A ring?” He held out his fingers. Nothing but the wedding band half-covered in bandage.

  “For me.” I held out my hands. Nothing but the wedding band. “An engagement ring. It’s home.”

  The car jerked when the light turned green. “Is it nice?”

  “Very nice.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “I love it, but I don’t need it.”

  “No, you do,” he said matter-of-factly. “I should have taken care of that a long time ago.”

  The car roared like a stallion chomping at a bit, protesting any kind of safe driving.

  “It goes really fast when you open it up.”

  “It’s rush hour.” The car rumbled over the Williamsburg Bridge.

  “In New York,” I agreed.

  “What a dolt,” he mumbled.

  I put my hand on his knee. He was the dolt, and he wasn’t. “Thanks for picking me up. I needed a night without… you know. It.”

  “This has got to be stressful for you.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I’m sorry I’m doing this to you.”

  I gave his leg a squeeze, but he didn’t look at me. He looked straight ahead with his right hand on the bottom of the steering wheel, left arm bent against the window.

  “Goes fast, huh?” he said as we coasted along the off-ramp. Space opened up in front of us.

  “Gets quieter the faster it goes.”

  He let the car slow even more. “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  The light turned red up ahead, but the three cars ahead of us ran it to make a left.

  Caden hit the gas and the car took off quickly and smoothly. I screamed. Half a block of pure inertia-defying, door-clutching, back-against-the-seat acceleration. He slammed on the brakes for a red light. Tire smoke surrounded us, and my heart pounded like a jackhammer.

  Then I laughed. “You asshole!”

  For the first time as Caden, he laughed too. “That’s fucking fast!”

  We were in hysterics all the way home.

  * * *

  The headache subsided, but the cloud of guilt over having a ring I hadn’t told him about clung to me. Even though he was him and he knew… but didn’t.<
br />
  After work, I went upstairs. On the way to our bedroom, I passed him in his little office on the second floor.

  “Hey,” he said, standing by the desk and slashing open an envelope. “I’m stopping Blackthorne.” He flipped the paper open, scanned it, tossed it onto the desk, and picked up another.

  “Why?”

  “It’s not working, obviously.” Slash.

  I went into his office. “I went there the other day when you couldn’t make your appointment.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He blew open the envelope. “What did you think?”

  “It was fun but had the distinct odor of bullshit.”

  He let out a short laugh and pulled out the letter. Tossed it. “Yeah.”

  “We need to see a specialist.”

  “We, huh?” He continued through the mail. Slash. Blow. Open. Toss. Slash. Blow. Open. Toss.

  “You can go yourself. But we can’t do nothing.”

  “Anything else you’d like to prescribe?”

  “I mentioned leaving this house.”

  “Was that his idea?”

  “No.”

  “No. Just the ring was his.”

  “He said it was your idea.”

  “I’d like to see it before I let him get away with that.”

  I went to the bedroom and returned to the office with a box the size of a fist.

  “Tiffany,” he said when I handed it to him.

  “Open it.”

  He opened it.

  “Is it what you envisioned?” I asked when he took out the ring.

  “Close. Why aren’t you wearing it?”

  “I didn’t know what you’d remember. I thought you’d freak out. I don’t know.”

  He placed the ring back in the box and put it on the desk. “You know how much I love you.” He tapped the desk surface in front of the open box. “When you were too close to that mortar and you started to fall… the thought that you might be dead… it lifted me out of myself. I wasn’t important without you. I didn’t even exist if you didn’t. When I opened you up to take that shrapnel out…” He touched the left side of my sternum, the scar under the fabric, as if he was so intimate with its placement he didn’t need to see it to know where it was. “You’re the beating heart of my life. You’re the blood in my veins.”

  “I love y—”

  “Did he fuck you after he bought it?” He cut me off as if the last question was the whole point of the previous speech.

  “You did.”

  He kept his eyes on the emerald, pushing his jaw forward as if he could hold back his rage only so long. I put my hands on his, pressing down until the box snapped closed.

  “God dammit, Greysen.” He pulled away, body rigid as if he had to hold back from hitting something.

  “You cannot be jealous!”

  “It wasn’t me.” His growl came from the deepest part of his chest.

  “It was!”

  With his good hand, he took me by the jaw and squeezed just enough to keep me still. “Did you like it? Did he make you come?”

  Cold Caden was detached except when laughing about speeding to a red light or demanding I not fuck him when he wasn’t him. Cold Caden was Hot Caden when he was mad, and my body went limp with desire.

  “Yes, you did,” I spit, unable to get my mouth to move around his hand.

  “How many times?”

  Did he want the play-by-play? Was I supposed to write it down and have it notarized? Because fuck him. Fuck this. I had two unpredictable halves of a single sane husband. Nothing was what it was supposed to be. I hadn’t signed on for any of this.

  “So. Many. Times.” Giving in to my impulse to egg him on was the only satisfying thing I’d done in weeks. The power of my agency was a drug. Pushing him and myself made my blood hot with challenge.

  He raged with betrayal, and the fact was I raged for the same reason. He pushed me back until my spine ground against the edge of the desk. He could hurt me, and the realization didn’t frighten me as much as it thrilled me. His power… unleashed on my body.

  “I don’t want you fucking me when I’m that way,” he said an inch from my face. “Did I say that with the right words?”

  I pushed his hand off my jaw. “I heard you.” I shoved him back by the shoulders. “And I’ll fuck you any time I want.”

  Now. Now would be a good time.

  A conflict flickered across his face. He didn’t know what to do.

  “Don’t test me,” he whispered.

  “Pick up your pencils, class. Question one: who can your wife fuck any time? Answer: her husband.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you!”

  “Yes, you do!”

  My agreement was permission, and he knew it, grabbing a fistful of hair and pulling me close. “Tell me to stop.”

  “No.”

  “Say it!”

  “Any. Time.”

  He reached under my skirt, fingers limited in their movement from the wrapping, and ripped through my stockings. “I’m going to fuck you now. Now.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not going to like it.” His fingers drove roughly under my panties.

  “Try me.”

  He spun me and pushed me face-first into the bookcase. Heavy medical textbooks fell around me. I grabbed a shelf as he yanked my skirt up and my underwear down to mid-thigh, restraining me and exposing me at the same time.

  “You knew I wouldn’t like it,” he said, grabbing my ass with a painful grip. “And you did it anyway.”

  “It’s my right.”

  With a thwack and a stinging sensation, he slapped my bottom so hard my knees buckled. He pulled my hips toward him, forcing me to bend deeper and grip the shelf harder.

  “You can’t just leave me to explain to the other guy that I can’t have sex with him,” I said.

  “So, you don’t want to?”

  “I do. I like him. He’s not perfect, but he’s nicer.”

  I got a hard slap.

  “Since when do you like nice?”

  “Sometimes. And you were nice. You were. You were sweet and conceited and rough and sincere. You were everything. Now you’re just someone else.”

  His belt buckle clacked. I looked around to watch him get his dick out.

  “Face forward.” He slid the belt out of the loops. “Don’t look at me unless you’re telling me to stop.”

  I turned back to the books. Essentials of Surgical Medicine. Post-Operative Technique. “You were so real. You wanted me to be happy. You were so dominant but so confused by what you felt for me. And just impulsive. But remember when you asked me to marry you? You freaked you out.”

  A sharp pain burned my ass. I gulped and cried a clipped vowel at the same time.

  The belt. He’d used the belt. Without a moment to breathe, he did it on the other side, searing the skin under the leather.

  “That’s enough, Greysen.”

  “I was reassigned to ABG, and you were staying at the combat hospital. Right on the tarmac, you threatened to redeploy if I didn’t marry you.”

  He swatted me hard enough to make me grunt. He’d have to gag me to shut me up.

  “I realized,” I choked through tears. “You were so desperate, I realized if you redeployed, it would break you. I could save you and keep you at the same time.”

  Two hard thwacks stung me.

  The sensible part of me wanted him to stop. Caden was trustworthy when he was whole, but who was this? Could I trust him? The insensible part of me did trust him. That part was an animal. She wanted to see how far he’d go because the animal was stupid, and the animal had something to say.

  “I miss my husband,” I spit out.

  The animal was exhausted.

  She wanted fight and pain.

  She was so strained, so tired, so bottled up keeping it all together.

  The animal was aroused by surrender and subjection.

  She wanted to break.

  I gave in to myself before I gave in t
o him. Sensible had surrendered to the animal by the time the third stroke hit even harder on already-enflamed skin. He grunted behind me for the fourth, and I bit back a scream.

  If I screamed, he might stop.

  He moved to the side, and I turned my head away so I wouldn’t look at him.

  The bandage on his left hand was rough on my lower back when he pressed it down. “Put your ass up where I can reach it.”

  I heard the whoosh as the belt cut the air and landed over and over across the tender backs of my thighs. The pain was its own thing. It pushed out worry. Muscled past responsibility. It had weight of its own, a density to its throbbing need, lasting even after the blows stopped.

  “Stand up.”

  I straightened my back, cringing from the burn where he’d beaten me. He took me by the chin and made me face him, but I averted my gaze.

  “You’re crying.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was crying with a sort of relief I’d never felt before.

  “You want your husband.”

  I nodded, unable to speak.

  “You have him.”

  I shook my head, denying his truth.

  He took half a step back. “Tell me to stop.”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to use you like a piece of meat if you don’t make me stop.”

  I met his gaze then, and again I saw that flicker of wholeness. But though I tried to hold everything still, it was gone in a breath. “Use me.”

  “On the desk. Move.”

  Like a good girl, I pulled the chair out and sat on the desk, bottom burning when it touched the wood. My ripped stockings were mid-thigh, and my skirt was pulled over my waist. My hair was half out of its ponytail. I was a wreck, but Caden’s eyes burned bright blue with a desire to tear me apart.

  God, I wanted to be shredded.

  He unceremoniously pulled off my stockings and underwear and jerked my legs open so violently I fell back on the desk with my knees up. He bent them back and ran his eyes over my bottom and thighs.

  When he touched the raw skin, it burned all over again. “Hurt?”

  I nodded, biting my lower lip.

  “You know what to do if you don’t like it.” He swatted me hard, sending a shear of pain through me, then waited for my objection. “Fine.”