by Ivy Black
“You look pretty good,” I tell him.
He arches an eyebrow at me. “Pretty good?”
“Yeah, pretty good. I’m totally not going to overinflate your already healthy ego by telling you that you look incredible. I don’t know that I could bear it.”
“Ahhh… so you think I look incredible.”
“That’s not what I said.”
He shrugs. “It’s what I heard. It was in the subtext of what you said.”
I laugh and slap him playfully on the arm knowing that he got me, that it was in the subtext of what I said. The jerk. When my laughter tapers off, he is looking at me with an expression of earnest sincerity on his face.
“If I had to pick one word to describe you, it would be ethereal,” he says. “You are absolutely radiant.”
His words make my eyes well with tears and I turn away from him, trying to wipe them away so they don’t ruin my makeup. I’m wearing a simple vintage style blue dress with white polka dots that hangs to my knees, and a white belt around my waist. My hair is pulled back into a simple ponytail and I’ve got a white cardigan draped around my shoulders. I don’t exactly feel ethereal or radiant.
He takes my arm gently and turns me back to him and I look up into eyes that are brimming with compassion.
“I’m sorry if I upset you,” he says.
I shake my head. “You didn’t upset me. It’s just… it’s been a really long time since somebody said that to me, and it hit me harder than I expected.”
His smile is gentle, his expression kind. “Well let’s go have a glass of wine, some good food, and a few laughs.”
I sniff back the tears and nod. “That sounds amazing.”
Max offers me his arm and I slip mine through his, letting him lead me up the walk and into the restaurant.
Chapter Eighteen
Domino
After a dinner that delivered everything I promised, good food, good wine, and a lot of laughter, we’re walking down Harrison Avenue arm in arm together. It really has been a long time since I’ve been on a date, and I have to say, as weird as it all feels, it also feels really nice. I’ve had a better time with Ashley than I anticipated.
“I have a confession,” I tell her.
“Uh-oh. Already? I thought confessions were usually a second or third date thing.”
“Oh, so you’re already planning future dates?”
“That’s not what I said. I just said I thought that’s when confessions were usually made. Not on a first date.”
I laugh and shake my head. “Are you always so precise with language?”
“As a future counselor, it’s kind of my job. Have to see through people’s hidden meanings and all that, you know?”
“Fair enough.”
“So, confess. I hear it’s good for the soul.”
I give her a sly smirk. “When you slipped me your number, I thought you were giving me a fake.”
“Now, why would I do that?”
“To get me to back off.”
She chuffs. “Right. As if that would have done anything. I’m sure if I’d given you a fake, you would have been twice as obnoxious in trying to get me to go out with you. I gave you my number as a matter of self-defense.”
“You know me so well already.”
“I have a confession, too.”
“Lay it on me.”
“I’m glad we went out tonight. I’m shocked as hell that I agreed to it, but I’m glad I said yes.”
“I am, too,” I tell her. “Shocked you said yes, and also glad that you did.”
We sit down on a bench in front of one of the multitude of fountains in town. For whatever reason, fountains seem to be Blue Rock’s thing, and there are about a thousand of them. But with the soft and colorful lighting and nice sculptures, it’s actually kind of pretty.
As we sit in a companionable silence for a moment, I hear the throaty rumble of a group of bikes coming our way and groan inwardly. A moment later, half of the guys are cruising by us and I’m doing my best to avoid being noticed by them. Fat lot of good that does me, though, as I hear them all hooting and hollering at me. I’m not much for blushing, but my face is burning hot and I’m sure turning an impossible shade of red as the guys hurl sexual innuendos at me.
The sound of the parade mercifully starts to ebb, but their laughter and hooting lingers for another few moments before it, too, fades away. I turn to Ashley to see her blushing, but also with a small smile on her face.
“Well, that was charming,” she says.
“Yeah, sorry. The guys aren’t real keen on not being assholes 24/7. It’s kind of their thing.”
“Well, you’re one of them, so what does that say about you?”
“Oh, I never said I wasn’t an asshole 24/7. In their place, I would have done the same exact thing to whoever was sitting here with you.”
Her laughter is high pitched and musical, and I could listen to it all night. But then Ashley looks at me and I can see that her expression is suddenly serious, and she squeezes my arm gently.
“What happened to you over there?” she asks. “What happened that made you so scared of children?”
I sigh and run a hand over my face, doing my best to banish the maelstrom of emotions swirling around inside of me. I know why she’s asking. She wants to know how her son will impact things between us. She’s making a decision right now whether to move forward or cut her losses before things start getting more complicated between us. Which, as much as I hate to think about it, makes it a fair question.
Swallowing hard, I close my eyes and gather my thoughts, trying to tell her as dispassionately as I can.
“I was a sniper in the Corps,” I begin. “We got intel that a Taliban leader was planning an attack on one of our FOBs near Kandahar.”
“FOB?” she asks.
I sometimes forget that civilians usually aren’t conversant as military slang as we are, so I give her a rueful smile.
“Sorry. FOB is a forward operating base.”
“Ahh. Okay.”
“Anyway, once we got the intel, I was tasked with neutralizing the mastermind of the plan. Take him out, the attack goes away, right?” I go on. “So, for three days, I’d positioned myself above the compound where I had a good sight line and could observe the target.”
“Three days?”
I nod. “It’s pretty common. You have to get a feel for their routine and know when the best time to strike is,” I explain. “Anyway, the day to act arrives and I radio in to let my handlers know I’m going to pull the trigger. But then, I notice a couple of kids getting out of a car. A boy and a girl, maybe nine or ten. I radio it into HQ and tell them to abort the mission. They refuse to let me. Some snot-nosed lieutenant fresh out of war college, and only puttin’ his boots on the ground for the first time thinks he knows the place and the people better than I do. Idiot.”
My voice trails off and I take a minute to collect myself. Ashley squeezes my arm again and I can see the worry in her face. She looks like she regrets asking me to tell her what happened. And though I’m tempted to cut the story short, it’s important she knows what happened, and why I’m hesitant about kids. It really isn’t that I don’t like them, it’s just that I can’t look at a kid and not see the two Afghani kids… and know what I did.
“Anyway, I tell them we need to abort, that there are non-combatants present. I’m ordered to take the shot, anyway. So, I do. I hit the target, but then shit goes sideways and I’m in a nasty firefight. I’m scoping up targets and shooting as fast as I can because if I don’t, they’re going to be on me. I see two duck down behind a row of bushes, so I squeeze off two shots, and…”
I hear the hitch in my voice as it trails off, and when I look over at Ashley, her face is drawn and pale, and she looks horrified. Her expression tells me I don’t need to finish the story since she’s already figured out the ending. Can’t say I really blame her, though. What I did was monstrous, and it’s not something I can forgive my
self for. Or at least, I haven’t found a way to do it yet.
“Jesus, Max,” she says, her voice barely more than a whisper. “And you’ve been carrying that around with you all this time?”
“Shouldn’t I be? That’s weight I should have to carry for the rest of my life. They were kids, and I snatched the life right out of them,” I tell her.
“How could you know? Like you said, you were in a firefight. I’m sure things were moving fast and were very confusing. They don’t call it the fog of war for nothing. Besides, you were ordered to kick that hornet’s nest.”
“It was an order I should have ignored.”
“I doubt you could have even if you’d wanted to, Max. They don’t train you to think for yourself. The military depends on people following orders.”
“So, I’m a mindless drone then. Great.”
The moment the words cross my lips, I regret them. The memories bring up a lot of shit inside of me, but I shouldn’t be taking it out on Ashley. I turn to her and give her an apologetic expression.
“Sorry. I don’t mean to bite your head off. It wasn’t your fault,” I tell her.
“And it’s not your fault either. You did what you had to do to say alive. It was your commander who put you in that position to begin with. If anybody’s at fault, it’s him.”
“My brain agrees with you. But my heart doesn’t. It was me who took the shots. It was me who put them down.”
Maybe it’s because she knows she can’t talk me out of the way I feel and doesn’t want to keep pressing me, or maybe it’s because she genuinely doesn’t think I should blame myself, but Ashley pulls me into a warm, tight embrace. I lay my head down on her shoulder and let her hold me. And for the first time since it happened, I feel a slight lifting of that weight upon my shoulders. It’s not much, but it’s something.
We remain like that for several long moments, and I cherish every single one of them. That she can look at me after hearing what I told her and not think of me as a monster but as somebody worthy of forgiveness makes my heart swell with emotion. How can she forgive me when she has a son of her own? The fact that I’ve killed children should have sent her screaming into the night. But she’s not screaming, and she’s not running. She’s encouraging me to forgive myself.
Although I’m reluctant to leave her embrace, I finally sit up and look at her, amazed that she can be so kind and so forgiving in the face of a story so heinous as the one I told her. But she takes my hand and favors me with a small, warm smile.
“We need to find a way for you to get past this,” she says.
“I’m not sure it’s possible.”
“Of course, it is. But we need you to find a way to forgive yourself. This is not your fault, Max. This is a weight you should not have to carry.”
I open my mouth to respond, but she puts her finger to my lips to silence me. With a small smile on my lips, I do as she says, and close my mouth.
“We’re going to work on this. We’re going to find a way for you to shake off this burden.”
“So, I guess that means you’re in for a second date, huh?” I say.
She laughs softly. “Always with the jokes and sarcasm.”
“All the better to deflect you with, my dear.”
“As I well know,” she says. “And do you want to know the first step in getting you to that point is?”
“Tell me.”
“Ice cream.”
She laughs and nods. “The magical power of ice cream has long been known to be a cure all.”
I laugh along with her. “Well, then, let’s go get this magic elixir.”
Chapter Nineteen
Ashley
We’re sitting in his truck on a bluff overlooking the water. Far out on the sea, bolts of lightning arc down from the clouds, and we can see the silhouette of the massive ships on the water. Over the course of our evening together, the clouds had rolled in, blanketing the sky with a thick screen of slate gray.
Small droplets of water dot the windshield and I hear the tick-tick-tick of rain falling on the roof of the truck. It’s peaceful and the silence between us is companionable, but the atmosphere inside the cabin is saturated with a sense of anticipation. Expectation. Or maybe it’s just me. I don’t know.
My date with Max has been unexpected in a lot of ways. It’s honestly been a lot better than I thought it would be, and we’ve shared more of ourselves than I expected. Like most all of us, he’s a damaged person, but unlike so many, he acknowledges his faults and flaws. He doesn’t hide from them or try to pretend he’s perfect. He’s more real about who he is than I’ve found most people to be. It’s actually refreshing.
Max has been more open with me about his life and who he is. And I have to say, I find him even more attractive now than I did before. Which, I suppose has led to this feeling of anticipation bubbling up inside of me. I’m not sure what it means or where the rest of this night is going to go, but there’s a part of me that hopes it’s going somewhere good.
I take a bite of my sundae as the hit song, Natural, plays softly from the speakers. It’s yet something else that surprises me about him.
“I never had you pegged as an Imagine Dragons guy,” I say.
“No?”
I shake my head. “I figured you’d be a country guy.”
His laughter, a deep, booming sound, fills the cabin and sends goosebumps crawling along my skin. The vibration of his voice rumbles through me deliciously, making me tingle from head to toe and everywhere in between.
“That is such a cliché. Not all bikers listen to country. We don’t all fit into the box you’re trying to stuff us into, you know,” he says.
“True. But you were in the military, too, so I figured between the two things, that it was a pretty good guess.”
“It was a terrible guess. I knew a guy in my old unit who listened to nothing but Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby… all those old crooners. Another guy I knew listened to EDM incessantly. And another guy—”
“Okay, okay,” I laugh. “You made your point. I’m a terrible person for stereotyping you like that.”
“Yeah, you kind of are, actually.”
I throw a wadded-up napkin at him. “You’re such an ass.”
We both turn back to our sundaes as the rain starts to pick up outside, the steady thrum of the drops on the roof growing louder.
“So, you never told me how you ended up out here,” he says.
I bite my bottom lip and consider how to answer the question. My instinct, of course, is to clam up and not say anything. I’m a private person by nature, but every year I was with Ryan made me draw inward even more. He always made me feel terrible about myself and talking about my own issues was forbidden. Ryan always made me feel like I was a burden and that my problems were trivial compared to his. It got me to the point I’m at now… where I don’t even know how to talk about anything happening with me or in my life.
But Max makes me want to open up to him. He makes me want to share because I get the feeling that I’m not a burden to him. That he would never think my problems, my fears, or my issues, are trivial or not worth talking about. When Max looks into my eyes, I see that he cares, and even more, that he wants to know those pieces of me I’d always had to shut away because Ryan just didn’t want to hear it.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I nod. “Yeah. I’m fine. I’m just not used to somebody asking about me. It’s been a long time since anybody’s cared enough to ask.”
“I want to know. I want to know everything there is to know about you,” he says.
And I believe him. Slowly and haltingly, I tell him my story. I start from when I first met Ryan and continue on until this very moment. As I speak and pour my heart out to him, I feel the shadow that’s been draped over my heart for as long as I can remember, lightening. The weight that I’ve been carrying around on my shoulders begins to ease, and I feel like the shackles that have kept me tied to my past are starting to break. I feel m
ore… free.
I fall quiet, finally out of words, and a silence descends over us. Max looks at me with an expression I can’t interpret, but his eyes are filled with a compassion so pure and so genuine, it makes my own heart ache.
“I’m really sorry you had to endure that. You shouldn’t have had to,” he says, his voice thick with sincerity.
The air between us crackles with an intense and sensual electricity that warms me from the inside. I feel the heat growing between my thighs as I become wetter than I have in… I don’t even know how long. Setting my sundae cup down on the dashboard, I lean over and press my lips to his. He seems taken aback at first and starts to pull back. But I grip the front of his shirt and keep him where he’s at and press my mouth to his even harder, forcing my tongue between his lips.
Max warms quickly. He sets his own cup down and leans forward, pressing his body to mine. His kiss is forceful. Passionate. And as our tongues swirl around one another, I feel a quiver run through my entire body. He pulls back, a sultry smile on his lips, leaving me feeling breathless and a little lightheaded. It seems like it’s been years since I’ve been kissed with such heat and intensity.
“I think you should show me just how comfortable that back seat is,” I tell him.
“Thought you’d never ask,” he quips.
It’s a bit awkward climbing into the back seat, but we manage, giggling and groping each other like a couple of horny teenagers. Max falls forward onto me, his hard, toned body firm against mine. Our mouths crash together, our kiss full of fire. He grips my ponytail and yanks my head back, making me gasp as he plants a line of kisses down my neck. A soft yelp escapes me when he nips the skin on my collarbone.
Max pulls the straps of my dress down and I slip my arms out of them. He pulls it toward my stomach, exposing my breasts. As he cups one of them, circling my pert nipple with this thumb, he takes the other into his mouth, sucking on it fiercely. He nips it with his teeth, drawing a sharp squeal from me that makes Max smile.
