by CD Reiss
Footsteps and a door closing. None of it was as clear as the changing smells and sounds as I walked into the army’s office in a strip mall in San Diego.
“Grey,” Caden said, “I’m going to take this sheet off you and get you dressed. It’s just me here.”
The sheet tickled my torso as it slid down. Cool air on damp skin. His hand on my shoulder to turn me. The touch wasn’t sexual, but it was a flicker in my attention. A place where two universes melted together.
I felt the desire to desire again. It pushed through and grabbed his hand.
“Grey.”
I was too muddled for words, but actions were feasible. I pushed his hand to the place my legs met.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
I kept the pressure on his wrist as a world opened up in the places our bodies touched. Everything was there. The screen sped up, flicked, went slow. Where we were together was where the loop ended.
“I didn’t know if it was the orgasm that changed you. I guess you’re telling me.”
He removed his hand. The recruiting office smelled of coffee and off-gassing. There was a tip-tapping of keyboards and the buzz of overhead lights. A deadbolt slid and clicked. The bed leaned, and Caden’s voice was in my head.
“I want you to know,” he said, running fingertips along my collarbone, breaking the loop, “I know what you’re going through. I think I do. If it’s similar. I’m trying to stay calm about it because I can’t help you otherwise. But I have to tell you…I hate to see you like this. I hate it. I know this is as much a part of you as the woman I married, and I love every fucking piece of you. But I’m afraid we’re being forced to live our lives in pieces.”
With two hands, he opened my legs. I was on fire. Bloated with desire. The insides of my thighs were tender where he stroked, sensitive as new skin. My universe revolved around his touch. Everything else was bathed in a silvery gray that shimmered like a movie screen.
His hand stopped. There was a fly in the recruiting office. I heard it buzzing like a circular saw.
“I need you to say yes,” he said. “I can’t do this without that.”
My will was tied up in my backward story, but another will needed to speak, and it would not be denied.
“Don’t…”
He stopped. That wasn’t what I wanted.
“—ess.” I couldn’t make the Y. I could only hope I was clear enough.
Caden didn’t say anything. I wondered for a moment if he’d heard me, then the bed shifted with him. His hands ran the length of my body and back again, pausing to toy with my hard nipples. He opened my legs all the way, leaving me exposed, unable to resist or comply. A doll in his hands as he stroked and kissed inside my thighs before bending my knees over his shoulders.
Cool fingers slid inside me, and I screamed for more, harder, faster, but nothing came out. I was trapped into submission by my own fugue.
“Yes.”
Fingers gone, I heard his belt. His button. A zipper. The rustle of clothing and the creak of the bed, and he bent over my folded body.
“I can’t wait to hear your voice again,” he whispered in my ear as he entered me.
Warmth spread like a stain into me. My knees were pressed against my chest as he fucked me.
As the pleasure grew, so did my will. It pushed through the screen in the shape of a woman trying to run through a latex wall.
“Come on, baby,” he said. “Give it to me.”
The rubbery wall broke at the sharpest points. Knuckles. Knee. Nose. Yielding to the force of the oncoming climax, giving way with tiny rips that grew around the contours of my body, breaking as I came through and living inside a pleasure whose gratifications were so satisfying, so all-consuming, so temporary.
The screen was in tatters.
I was out.
* * *
Caden sat on the edge of the bed, rumpled but clothed.
“What do you remember?” he asked as I got dressed.
I didn’t care. Remembering was the past, and I was in the future, living my next second, not my last. But where was I going? What was my future? “Nothing.”
“Noth—?”
“Like I said…” I pulled my button-front shirt over my head. Easier than fastening and unfastening a bunch of—
“If you’d stop moving for a second, you might.”
“I’m hungry.” I jammed my heel into a shoe. “I can’t think.”
“It’s been three days since you—”
“Let me eat first.” Second shoe.
“Ronin’s bringing the car. I want—”
“There’s an American place a few blocks away.”
I opened the door. The world. The earth. Huge. Massive. Accessible through a doorway, sucking me into the curve of infinity. I could walk straight forever and wind up exactly where I’d started… but only if I got out.
He stood. “I’ll walk with—”
“You can catch up.”
“Can you let me finish a sentence?”
Sure. He could finish a sentence. Outside.
* * *
The sun was a diffuse disk behind a thin veil of flying sand and heat. A convoy rolled by at half a mile a fucking hour. Five tanks and a bunch of Humvees draped in armed men. They waved. Some nodded. Two jumped off and kept us from crossing the street.
“You need to get out of the way,” I said. “You’re going so slow I can make it between.”
“Sorry, ma’am.”
I wanted to slap the mirrored sunglasses off his fucking face, but Caden had my right arm in a vise, and he growled in my ear, “Calm the fuck down.”
“I can’t.”
“Listen to me. Just pay attention to my voice. You’ve been in a fugue since last night. Ever since the last time I fucked you. Do you remember?”
The sex. I’d ridden him to orgasm. Could I walk down the block and go around this snail parade? No. They were standing at each intersection to prevent exactly that.
“Do you remember?” he asked again.
“I remember.”
“What happened after that?”
If I wanted to think about it, I’d be thinking about it. I swung my gaze away from the troops at the corner to his eyes. The blue was not comforting. It was a reminder of everything that was broken.
“Please.” I didn’t know what I was pleading for.
“After that. What happened?”
I swallowed, paying attention to the way my throat opened and contracted. Sand bit my eyes. I narrowed them, bringing my husband into greater focus.
“I was enlisting. I remembered that day. It was with Jake, and I’m sure it’s because he’s on my mind. But it feels bad. I don’t know how else to explain it.” Bouncing, I looked up and down the block. Still trapped for the next few minutes. “It was the shot. The BiCam. Not a placebo, Caden. Not a placebo. I don’t know what effect it would have had on you. Jesus, I want to strangle someone for trying to do this to you. It’s awful. So awful. This isn’t worth it. Nothing’s worth it.”
He cupped my jaw in his hands and held my eyes in place with his. “It’s going to be okay.”
“How?”
“I swear it, Greysen, I swear on my life I’m going to fix this. Can you believe me?”
Could I?
I believed he believed it, but the feeling of being on defense was so awkward that relief seemed impossible. The need to move-move-move to get away-away-away before I was overtaken was as mentally uncomfortable as I’d ever been.
“I feel it. It’s another me. It’s a me who knows things that she wants to show me. My God, Caden, she has a name. I split, and she has a fucking name. How did you cope with this?”
“I had months. This came on you quicker.”
“Why?” I was suddenly desperate for some kind of answer.
“The dose maybe? Maybe years of repression made the doors open slower? I don’t know.” He moved his hands to my shoulders, squeezing where they met my arms. “All I know is we’
re going to fix it.”
“When?”
“What’s her name? The one you’ve locked away?”
“I don’t want to say it.”
“Say it so I know what to call her.”
“Respite.” I said it as if I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t a name, but it was the word that came to me over and over. Respite. A reprieve. A suspended sentence. And the name of mental discomfort. The name of its opposite.
The convoy creaked by, and the soldier blocking us moved to the left to block two women wearing abayas that blew in the wind.
I ran across the street—toward-toward-toward.
Chapter Seventy-Six
caden
There were so many things I’d wanted to do. Bring her to the hospital. To Blackthorne. Home. I wanted to try circular breathing. Anything and everything…but one thing at a time.
Then she was off like a shot, across the street through a break in the line of military vehicles. She was hard to catch under the best of circumstances. When she ran, she took off as if she was taunting me to catch up.
I was in heavy boots and a uniform built for protection against harsh elements. Not speed. Not comfort. My feet were heavier than hers, and her timing had been as catlike as her risk-taking.
Guns swung toward her. Clicks echoed off the sky.
I had a choice.
Use the air in my lungs to run after her and catch her bullet-ridden body before it hit the ground. Or use that air to stop the shots.
“Hold fire!” I shouted from the deepest, widest part of my lungs.
I had no authority over these men, but I was a major and I was in uniform. I held my hands out to both hold them and show I wasn’t a threat.
The convoy shut down, and men piled off the Humvees.
The guy who’d stopped us from crossing the street jogged to me. “What the fuck—?”
“She’s with me!”
“Who was that?” A dusty sergeant came to the sidewalk. I looked small and sad in the mirrors of his goggles. That was intentional. Self-reflection was intimidation.
“My wife,” I said, straightening so I looked a little more authoritative in the mirrors. “She’s with a contracting operation.”
“Is she trying to get shot?”
In his mirrored glasses, I looked at myself expectantly. Small or not, I had leaves on my collar.
“Sir,” the sergeant added. “Is she trying to get shot, sir?”
“Just in a hurry, Sergeant. If you give me room, I’ll be following her.”
He stepped aside and kept his opinions to himself. “Let’s move out!”
They hustled back to the line of trucks, and in the moments before they moved again, I dashed across.
* * *
The Green Zone was both militarized and demilitarized, with one making the other possible. The pop-pop of live rounds went off sixteen hours a day at the Blackthorne training compounds, where the sight of a person rappelling or jumping off the roof of a building onto a yellow-and-blue stunt bag coexisted with a Subway franchise and a makeshift Burger King.
The restaurants didn’t stop me in my tracks as much as the man falling in a controlled jump. My eyes widened and my heart stopped until I heard the smack and whoosh of him hitting the safety bag.
Get it together. It’s just a stunt.
The American place Greysen had mentioned existed in the nether region between the white-tablecloth restaurants the diplomats and businesspeople frequented and the fast-food joints the low-rent contractors went to.
I jogged after her, avoiding the piles of rubble that dotted the streets as a reminder of how we’d gotten here. When I turned the last corner, she was half a block ahead and walking into the diner. I slowed down, relieved she hadn’t changed course on a whim.
“I ordered you an egg sandwich with cheese,” she said when I walked in. “They only have cheddar.”
Too early for lunch and too late for breakfast, the place was nearly empty. She was standing by the front counter as if she was ready to make a getaway.
I leaned over to the woman at the register. “We’re having it to stay.”
“Caden,” Greysen said behind me, annoyed.
“Sit anywhere,” the hostess said.
I took my wife gently by the elbow and guided her to the back.
“I don’t want to stay,” she hissed.
“Neither do I, but the convoy could be another ten minutes at the rate they were going.”
She slid into the back booth facing the rest of the room and folded her hands together on the table. I got in across from her. The window to my left was coated with a fine layer of dust.
I clasped her hands in the center of the table, squeezing briefly as if that could transmit my level of empathy. “I know what you’re going through.”
“Is it wrong that makes me feel less alone?”
“That’s a question for a priest.” I pulled our fists to my mouth, kissed her hand, and put them back on the table.
“I feel like my mind is a record that’s skipping. I have this nagging pressure from ‘her,’ and the only thing that shuts her up is moving forward, and the space between them is just on and on.”
“Where does it tell you to move forward to?”
“Just anywhere.” The space between her brows knotted, and her hands tightened around mine. “And Jake. I’m so worried about him. It just says, ‘Do something,’ but there’s nothing I can do.”
“They’ll find him.”
“What if they don’t?”
A waiter in a stained white polo shirt brought our breakfast on paper plates and left a fistful of metal silverware in the center of the table.
“Please eat.”
“I’m not hungry. I mean, I’m starving actually. But this anxiety.” She pressed her thumb to her sternum.
Being married to a psychiatrist had its downsides. She thought everything could be solved with talking. She had clinical terms for everyday discomforts. The upside was the fact that she could identify what she was feeling and verbalize it without a song and dance. Right to the point without a hedge or word of denial.
I picked up a fork and reached across the table to cut a section of her omelet before spearing the piece so I could hold it up to her mouth. She glanced at it, then at me with big, brown eyes that considered my offer to do half the work for her. With parted lips, she accepted, chewing slowly.
“What do you think her name means?” I cut another piece.
“It doesn’t mean respite, that’s for sure.” She took the food.
“The core of my problem was in Damon’s name.”
“What about the other thing?” she asked. “You split again. That didn’t even have a name.”
“It might have come out if a bomb hadn’t hit the building.”
“Do you realize this means it can go on forever? You think you solve one split, and another pops up?”
“We didn’t solve Damon with the deployment. Come on.” I waved another forkful at her. “Eat. Don’t make me do the plane and the hangar.”
Ruefully, she opened her mouth and ate. After she swallowed, she said, “I’m glad I took it. Instead of you.”
“I’m not.” I pushed the half-eaten omelet around to get a better angle. “I didn’t want this for you. And we could have handled it if it was me.”
“I can handle it.”
As I fed her the last of her breakfast, I had no doubt she could manage at least as well as I had. I was worried about my ability to handle being the sane one.
“I’m going to kill Ronin,” she said.
“He thinks he’s doing the world a favor.” I put the fork down and put my plate in front of me. Dark spots had formed under the egg sandwich. “Fucking dangerous, that attitude.”
I took a bite. It was salty and tasteless at the same time. I was starving. This thing was going down in two bites.
“I don’t care if it works half the time,” she said. “I want to destroy every one of those syringes.”
“They’ll just send more.” I finished the sandwich with one last bite.
“I’m bringing it down.” Her voice was determined, and a new fire lit up her face. “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m ignoring the NDA and bringing it down.”
The wind was picking up. Sand ticked against the windows like sleet. They could prosecute her for destroying property or revealing trade secrets. This Greysen was impulsive and action-oriented. This wasn’t a side of her that thought through consequences. I had to do that for her.
“If you do,” I said, “if you do anything to lose your access to Blackthorne’s data, you won’t have a case. They’ll just hide.”
“I don’t care.”
“And if they have a fix, you’ll never get it.”
“There’s no fix. Nothing short of a completely accurate recreation of past trauma.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“Damn it, Greysen.” The force of my voice was raised, but the volume was as low as I could make it. “You need to bend a little.”
“I’m bent near breaking.” She took her napkin off her lap and tossed it on the table. “I’m going to work.”
I stood with her, blocking her way. “Don’t do anything reckless. Please.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise me.”
“I won’t do anything reckless.” She had mischief on her mind. Worse, it was mischief with a purpose. “Not today.”
Chapter Seventy-Seven
GREYSEN
The wind whipped. The sand pelted my skin. I covered my mouth with a scarf to get into the building. I wanted Caden. I wanted to stay with him. He soothed my need to be in motion. Without him, I was bigger than my skin. A balloon filled and filling faster, stretching thin as I tried to focus on getting into my office. I passed the storage room. Behind the coded door was a refrigerator stocked with prefilled syringes that, depending on the patient or the dose, delivered either madness or relief. All I had to do was go in there and smash them to pieces.
“Greysen!” Dana called.
