by CD Reiss
My watch beeped, cutting my thoughts like a scalpel.
I had to report for duty in half an hour.
“Grey, listen, if you’re in there. Listen.”
I lifted her chin until she faced me. With my other hand, I moved my finger across her field of vision, left to right and back again. Her eyes did not follow.
“Jesus, baby, what’s happening?”
My watch beeped. So close to her ear, yet she didn’t move a muscle.
“I have to report for duty in half an hour. Talk to me. Tell me what to do.”
The watch stopped. Like the silence of the crickets, it opened the door to heartbeats and breaths.
“Greysen.”
Twenty-eight minutes to report, and if you’re not ten minutes early, you’re late.
“Greysen.”
No answer, but her lips were puckered in my fingers. I smashed my mouth on hers. The woman in my hands felt like her. My tongue fit between her teeth just the same. She tasted like my wife. But she didn’t respond. I pulled my lips away but held her head still. I was torn between staying with her and reporting for duty. The hospital needed me. The army needed me, and I’d made commitments.
“Talk to me,” I said.
“I beg him not to leave me.”
“I won’t leave you.”
“He says he never will.”
“I won’t. Ever.”
“He’s my brother, and we’re all we have.”
“We’re all we have.”
Did she hear me? Did she understand? Was I even talking to her? Or was I reminding myself of what was important?
Her eyes focused and found mine. I let her jaw go. She was my wife again. Partly, at least. She was still soft and docile, but she didn’t seem as young or fragile. “Caden.”
“Yes?”
“That part? It’s over. I remembered everything I had to.”
“Everything?”
“Everything that was there. I feel the things before bubbling up.”
“Are you all right?”
“I didn’t know you back then. It’s weird to think there was a time in my life without you.”
“I was there.”
Her brow knotted, and she sat perfectly still, as if breathing and remembering couldn’t coexist. Finally, her eyes met mine and she spoke. “I don’t remember that.”
She took memories and facts very seriously.
“Always. We were a promise the Universe made before we were born.”
She looked away but not back inside herself. “I don’t know if I felt it.”
“You don’t need to feel it to make it true.” I gathered her hands in mine and laid them in her lap. “I knew it the first time I saw your face. You were a promise kept. I knew that if I let you go, I’d be breaking something bigger than me.”
She slid her hands out of mine and around them until my palms were on her bare thighs.
I saw my watch against her leg. Twenty-seven minutes. I was going to have to walk a quarter mile in a storm to get to the hospital. I had to leave… or not. There was another issue: an orgasm would bring back the other Greysen.
“I have to report.”
“Okay.” She lay back, legs still open, the fabric of her underpants creased in the center where moisture made them stick.
She was going to get herself off. If I reported, I’d come back to an empty apartment. She’d be somewhere in Baghdad, walking toward some purpose she made up just to give herself forward motion. We’d be separated again, and I’d have no control of the situation.
That was not acceptable. The US Army was going to have to deal with my absence.
Leaning over her, I hooked my fingers in her underwear. “Pick up your butt.” I slid them off her and balled them in my fist. “Bra off.”
She unhooked the front and wiggled out of the bra. I took it. She closed her legs.
Grabbing her ankles, I pivoted her until she was lined up with the direction of the bed.
Stroking her legs, I said, “What do you remember about us?”
“That I love you.”
“About sex.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Do you remember the spankings?”
Eyes wide with shock, lips parted. The idea shocked her.
“So, you don’t?”
“No!”
“What about pain?”
“It hurts?”
She was my wife, but she was different. What had Greysen gone through with Damon? Had it been anything like this? Had it felt just short of infidelity, or had it gone over the line?
I put a knee on the bed and pressed her inner wrists together. I wrapped her black bra straps around her pretty elbows.
“I’m going to tie you to the bed.”
“Why?”
“So you don’t run away.”
I tied her elbows to the bed, letting her hands clutch the bars. Her big, brown eyes watched me.
“I won’t,” she said. “I promise.”
You can still make it to the hospital.
I could. But I couldn’t leave her tied up for ten hours, and I couldn’t leave her untied alone to switch back to a woman on a mission, any mission as long as it took her forward. No. This was the right thing. Shirking duty went against every fiber of my being—except the ones that prioritized Greysen. Those fibers far outnumbered the dutiful ones.
“Do you remember the last time I fucked you?” I asked, standing over her.
“No.”
“Right before, you were soft and detached like this. Were you remembering things?”
“I think so. Scott. At the pool.”
“Let me tell you how it’s going to go then.” Gently, I ran my finger between her legs. “I’m going to taste you. You’re going to come in my mouth, and if I’m right, you’re going to flip. I have to talk to Greysen.”
“But I have to remember.” She tried to sit up, stretching the bra straps against the cheap piping. “She can’t remember.”
“Remembering can wait.”
“No. It can’t.”
I slid two fingers inside her, and she gasped. “It will wait. I need to talk to my wife.”
“I won’t come,” she said. “I just won’t, and you can’t make me.”
My wife was my wife no matter which side of her personality was on display, and when she decided what she wanted—or didn’t—that was the last of it.
“Challenge accepted.”
I got up and undressed. She watched as piece by piece, I stripped my uniform. Each article of clothing I took off made it less likely I’d report for duty. Each badge and buckle laid itself down in service to my wife until I crawled between her legs, fully naked.
“I’m not going to come,” she said. “I can feel the next memory coming.”
I pressed her legs apart as far as they’d go and sucked gently on her nub before running my tongue down to her entrance. “You’re going to come now.”“We’re calling Jake on a payphone. The quarters won’t go in. There’s gum in the slot.”
“Oh, no, you don’t.”
Three fingers inside her.
“Pick up, Jake.” Her voice was lower, less demanding. I was losing her. “Pick up. We don’t know what to do. He answered! Jake! Jake. We need you!”
“Come, Respite.”
“He sounds sleepy and pissed off. He’s asking where we are. We don’t want to tell him because we said we were at Anna’s.”
“You’re almost there.”
“Don’t tell Mom and Dad…We’re at the Red Spot.”
She elongated the O and came as if it was the last vowel she’d ever utter.
With Respite.
We’re at the Red Spot.
Respite.
Red Spot.
Her name was a slurring of Red Spot.
I knew why Respite didn’t keep the promise of her name. She was the reminder of a night eight kamikazes had hidden.
“Get off me,” my wife growled.
“Welcome bac
k.”
* * *
“You’re going AWOL?”
She’d gotten up like a shot the moment I untied her.
“I’m not leaving you.”
She was already getting into her pants as if she was late for an appointment with the president. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
This woman was impossible. Both personalities tested what little patience I had.
“You need to stop long enough to listen.”
“I can talk and move at the same time. First we have to talk about what’s going on with you.”
“With me?”
“Caden doesn’t go AWOL.” She pulled a clean shirt over her head. No bra. “Caden shows up.” She stepped into a shoe. No sock. “You’d better get in before they court-martial you.”
“I am showing up. I’m showing up for you. Listen. We can beat this if we make a plan. I can’t keep going without your agreement.”
“To what? Let you spend five years in Leavenworth? I won’t be party to that.”
“We need to hole up here and let Respite finish. Go backward far enough until she finds out what you’re running away from.”
“I’m not running away. I’m living my life.”
I’d assumed I’d have a minute to talk to her, but I didn’t. She went for the door. I leapt off the bed and stood between her and the exit.
“I’m tired of trying to talk sense into you,” I said.
“Then this is the perfect opportunity to stop talking.”
“This? The way you’re acting? This is not you.”
“Who is it then? Because this is the real me. The other one is a shadow of me. Maybe a subset of things I haven’t done. Or have done. Or the bits I don’t like… or traits I don’t use… the waste all bundled up and shoved into the light. But she’s not me.”
“When I had this, I felt like one of me was real and one was an intruder too. But that wasn’t it, and you know it.”
“You’re you, and I’m me.”
“Meaning?”
I knew what she’d meant, but I thought she’d backpedal. Soft-shoe it. Say she was sorry or pretend she was talking hypothetically.
No such luck.
“Let me spell it out,” she said. “You were always unstable. You were a psychopathology study waiting to happen. The moral rigidity with the personal impulsivity? The trauma denial? The detachment? The way you joyfully cut people open?”
“That’s enough!”
“Did you start fires when you were a kid and forget to tell me?”
“I see what you’re trying to do.”
“Did you dissect your dog?”
“Yeah. I jerked off into the open carcass of my dead fucking dog. But I never, ever fucking said shit to you like you just said to me.”
She folded her arms over her chest, inspecting the floor with her mouth pushed to one side of her face. She was cowed for a few seconds before she set her jaw and stared right at me. “Deal with it.”
She put her jacket on, which she should have done before the first time she tried to leave, but she literally didn’t know whether she was coming or going.
“I’m not going to turn my back on you because you insulted me,” I said.
“Everything just got really clear.” She zipped her jacket, and I realized just how naked I was. “You’re in my way. You’ve always been in my way. You’re an obstruction I don’t need.”
“I need you. I need the woman who could listen and think. What I have now is two people, and neither of them has a fucking brain in their head.”
“You didn’t hear me.”
“I heard you.”
“You didn’t. So, let me say it again. I. Don’t. Need. You.”
I knew better than to take her words personally. She wasn’t herself. Anyone with an ounce of detachment could see that. But I’d used my last ounce listening to an old story about a nightclub. I had no armor left, and she was on the attack.
“You just proved you do,” I snapped. “You just proved Respite is your filter. You’re a real bitch without her.”
“Sorry to step on your toes. Get your clothes on and get out.”
She threw my pants at me. They unspooled in midair. Their full length landed against my naked body and collapsed onto the floor when I didn’t catch them.
Was I just an obstacle? Did she feel nothing at all? Or did she feel plenty, none of it affection?
“What’s the Red Spot?” I asked.
“The what?”
“The Red Spot. It’s where Respite got her name.”
She stopped long enough to register the way Red Spot fell right into Respite, then she snapped right to the issue at hand: getting away from me. “If I tell you, will you leave?”
“Yes.”
She leaned on the arm of a chair and laid her hands flat on her thighs. “It was a club in Logan Heights. They took our fake IDs. They played the music I liked, and it was just a completely unexceptional cinderblock box.”
“Did Jake go there?”
She answered with a derisive laugh. “Jakey wouldn’t be caught dead at that freak show.”
“What if I told you he did?”
“You’d be lying.”
“Respite remembered.”
“Then she’s lying. Damon was unreliable. She’s unreliable. She’s manipulating you.”
In a single unguarded moment, the creature in my wife’s body looked at my dick. She shifted, as if feeling the sore dripping I’d left between her legs from a fuck she couldn’t remember.
She felt something. Even if it was jealousy, it was something.
“If you won’t go, that’s fine.” She slapped her thighs and stood. “I’m hungry.”
I was sure she was telling the truth, but I also knew this side of her as well as I’d ever known anyone. Greysen never changed a subject without a greater goal in mind.
“Me too.” I snapped up my pants.
“If we go to base chow, you can check in at the hospital.”
Check in. As if I could just say hello and walk out. That wasn’t going to work, but getting thrown out of her apartment wasn’t sustainable either.
“Good idea. You can save me a seat.”
“Deal. I’m going to the bathroom, then we can leave.”
She went into the bathroom and closed the door behind her, trusting that I was a complete fucking idiot.
Chapter Eighty-One
GREYSEN
The sand crackled against the narrow bathroom window, then stopped. It opened onto an air shaft that sometimes caught a burst of wind that spun into the funnel of the space, then petered out. I considered climbing out, but even if I could swallow my fear of heights, the door had no lock and the window squeaked when raised. He’d be in here like a shot.
Peeing was a chore because I had to sit still for it when I could have been on the way to base. I’d catch DeLeon, and she’d tell me what she knew about Jake, or she’d send me to someone she knew or whatever. But when I sat still, I had to think about what I was going to do with the information, and that just slowed me down even more.
I had the nagging feeling I was missing something. Convincing Caden to go to base to eat had been too easy. But I couldn’t look back and take it apart. All I could do was get to the base and slip away while he got chewed out for being an hour late.
Maybe everything was just easy and I should have been thankful.
I washed up, checking myself in the mirror.
Stopping was mentally painful, but I had to figure out what I was looking at.
I didn’t recognize myself. I looked the same but different. Like my own twin sister. How interesting. Was I different because of my expression? Was it the peeling off of weakness that left behind a cold mask? Or was my way of seeing different?
Thump-thump-thump.
Three hard, quick knocks turned me away. Not the bathroom door, but the apartment door. A voice from outside.
“Greysen? Are you in there?”
And then
Caden joined me in the mirror. Still naked from the waist up, he burst in and put his hand over my mouth.
“Quiet.” His breath was wet in my ear. I struggled, but he held me in a vise of bone and muscle.
Thump-thump.
“Greysen!”
It was Ronin. I didn’t necessarily want to see Ronin any more than I wanted to see Caden in the mirror, trying to burn silence into me.
I didn’t like being told what to do. I especially didn’t like being held down and hushed.
“I want you to understand something,” he murmured. “This is what they wanted. They want to create people without emotions. Better doctors and soldiers. We fell right into it. What you’re going through seems right to you because you’ve had all your bad feelings moved over to some separate part of you. You’re a surprise success story, and they want to bring you back to Blackthorne. They want to poke you and prod you, but they aren’t interested in helping you.”
I spit sharp syllables that added up to “Get off me!” into his hand while the pounding on the door continued.
Thump-thump.
“Stay still.”
He had a fucking boner pushed against my ass. My pussy was still dripping from fucking her, and he was erect all over again.
I hated that I wanted it. I hated how the painful constriction of his bare arms turned me on. I hated that the only thing that soothed my need to run out the door was his body. Stopping to go to the bathroom had been mentally painful, but stopping to fuck him? Not painful.
The thumping stopped, but he still held me. The sand ticked against the window. Silence reigned. We watched each other in the mirror, and the blue eyes I could always spin up into were just a color to me. No sky. No canopy. No bowl of protection. Just blue.
Since I’d taken the BiCam, I’d known something was wrong with me. I was sick with a mental flu. But a flu came with the assumption of recovery. It wasn’t until I felt nothing in Caden’s gaze that I knew I was broken.
And even in that knowledge, nothing changed. Caden could slow me down with sex, but he couldn’t protect me or heal me. I was crowded with the need to push forward even though I knew my drive toward purpose was fake. It was a result of this brokenness. I still had to move.
It was as if my self-knowledge had been split from myself.
