Between Ghosts

by Garrett Leigh

  Then the pain in his shoulder brought him back to his senses, and panic returned. He rolled over, lurching to his knees. His brain told him Behrouz was dead, but where was Connor? And what the fuck had he been doing with Nat’s gun? “Connor? Connor? Where are you?”

  “I’m here, Nat.”

  Connor caught Nat and together, they crumpled to the ground. Nat stared up at the cobwebbed ceiling. The peace he’d felt a little while ago returned and merged with the warmth of Connor beside him. “You unjammed my gun.”

  “Bobs showed me how.”

  “Wanker.” Nat coughed painfully. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

  “So have you, mate. Hey, hey, Nat. Don’t sleep. Stay awake for me. Please?”

  Nat hadn’t been aware of his eyes closing. He forced them open and met Connor’s molten gaze. “We need help.”

  “Yes, we do,” Connor said. “But we’ll have to wait for it to come to us. I don’t think I can get up.”

  That fact concerned Nat far less than it should have. He fumbled for Connor’s hand and squeezed. “We’ll wait here, then.”

  “Okay.”

  Connor lay down. He put his head on Nat’s good shoulder and the dried blood in his hair tickled Nat’s nose. Nat touched it, running his fingers over Connor’s scalp, tracing the bumps and bruises. Jesus. Connor was as much of a mess as him. Maybe more. Perhaps they could both do with staying awake.

  “Connor?”

  “Yeah?”

  “While we wait, can I tell you how your brother died?”

  Epilogue

  “While we wait, can I tell you how your brother died?”

  Connor blew a speck of dust from the solid-black frame that held the only photo of James he kept on show. Even now, he wasn’t sure if those words, and the devastating tale that followed them, had been real. “I loved him, Connor. He was my best friend.”

  And you were mine. Connor gazed at the photograph. New Year’s Eve, ’00, the only Christmas James had made home in the decade he’d been in the Army. They’d had a ball. Tearing up Manchester’s Canal Street, James prancing around the gay bars like he did it every weekend. Dear God, Connor had missed him after he’d departed for Brize Norton the next day.

  Still missed him. But there was someone else he missed more.

  With a heavy heart, Connor stepped away from the mantelpiece, tracing the silvery scar on his abdomen, where Behrouz had slashed Connor open, enraged at having his carefully orchestrated execution interrupted by the noisy arrival of Nat and his crew.

  Nat. Jesus Christ. Connor traced the scar again as it throbbed the way it always did when his thoughts turned to Nat—which was more often than he cared to admit. It had been three long months since he’d come to on that dusty floor to see Nat with a gun to his head. What happened next remained a little blurry, but the moments after, laid out on the ground with Behrouz dead beside them . . . fucking hell. Connor would take that precious, quiet bubble of time to his grave.

  Especially now, when it seemed those moments, laced with the brutal tragedy of James’s death, were to be his last memories of Nat.

  Connor didn’t remember being rescued. He’d come round in a civilian hospital in Cyprus with no military personnel to be seen, save a lone intelligence officer from the MOD who’d informed him that Trooper Robert Wood—Bobs—had been killed in action. The woman couldn’t tell him anything about Nat, though, except to confirm he’d survived his injuries. Stuck in Cyprus, there’d been little Connor could do to track him down.

  Back in Manchester, recuperating at Jenna’s, he’d had even less luck. His letters to the base in Hereford had been returned undelivered. Nat had never told him where he lived, and his SAS status meant there was no record anywhere of him ever being in Iraq. The MOD wouldn’t tell Connor jack-shit. Dozens of emails had gone unanswered, phone calls not returned. Short of causing a scene at the Regiment’s base in Hereford, it had seemed a hopeless cause, until a random conversation with Jenna had changed his mind.

  “When you were missing, I would’ve done anything to take back the times I’d only spent a few moments with you, just so I could soak them up . . . relive every minute, make the most of you. It felt like every second was worth an hour, and there was nothing I wouldn’t do to live it all over again.”

  When had Jenna become so sentimental? Connor had no idea, but the guilt he felt over what she’d been through on his behalf was indescribable. Sworn to secrecy, and virtually held prisoner herself by the MOD, she’d carried it all alone and still come out smiling.

  “I knew you’d come through this, Connor. I read every word on your laptop, and my heart knew you had so much more to say.”

  Jenna the Wise. Jenna the Optimist. Some days Connor thought he hardly knew her, but fuck, if he didn’t love her to death. After moving back to London, he’d followed her cryptic advice and published all the material left on his laptop—though some had mysteriously disappeared—and his final column was to be printed tomorrow. The MOD had managed to keep his adventure with Behrouz out of the press, so he’d been forbidden to document it, but it mattered not. When Connor had sat down at his battered laptop in his poky King’s Cross ground-floor flat, he’d found he had plenty to say. Overnight, his column had become a semantic argument against all military action in the Middle East, of killing in the name of peace, and he was far prouder of it than he would’ve been if it had remained a simple fly-on-the-wall account of his time with Charlie-3, laced with his grief for his long-dead brother.

  The dead brother who’d been killed as he slept. The dead brother who’d been shot three times in the face by an Iraqi soldier he’d taken under his wing.

  The dead brother who’d called Nat Thompson his best friend.

  Connor glanced at James’s photo again. He’d never told Jenna the tale Nat had shared with him. After the astonishing coincidence had sunk in, he hadn’t seen the point. She’d never shown much interest in the facts. To her, James was dead, and nothing would ever change how she felt about that.

  On cue, Connor’s phone rang, like it did every night at 6 p.m. Connor answered it with a grin. “Hey, sis.”

  “Brother dearest,” Jenna replied. “Are you all packed and ready?”

  Connor got up and drifted to his tiny hallway. A small overnight bag sat by the front door. “Packed. Not sure about the ready part, though.”

  “You’re ready,” Jenna said. “You’ve been ready for weeks. I don’t know what you’re so afraid of.”

  Connor scowled. He hadn’t told Jenna where he was going or why, but somehow she seemed to know he was chasing down the piece of his heart he’d left in the Basra desert. Causing a scene on an Army base wasn’t his style, but now he was fit to travel, a shufty around Hereford seemed a good place to start. Nat had always given him the impression he didn’t live far from the Regiment HQ.

  “Connor? You there?”

  “Hmm?” Connor zoned back into the present. That had happened a lot since he’d returned from Iraq. He could lose whole minutes to something and nothing, and have no idea until someone roused him. It had got better with therapy, but the zone-outs still happened. “What were you saying?”

  Jenna sighed. “Never mind. You’d only accuse me of pinching my morals from the back of a cereal box again. Just let me know you get there safe, yeah? And if you find what you’re looking for? The curiosity is fucking killing me.”

  She hung up before Connor could remind her that cursing wasn’t ladylike and she could tell him to piss off in return. Connor dropped the phone on the hallway table and stared at himself in the mirror. He’d lost weight while he’d been in Iraq, and more since he’d come home, leading him to wonder if his appetite was irrevocably damaged by the few days he’d spent starving and dying of thirst with Behrouz. His eyes certainly hadn’t recovered. Dark circled them they’d sunk into his face. Connor was sure he’d aged ten years—

  A knock at the door made him jump. He glanced between the door and the mirror a few times, considering
the tall frame he could see through the frosted glass. It wasn’t the postman. That arsehole was short and fat, and fond of delivering Connor’s most important mail to the kebab shop down the road. Perhaps it was the Yodel man. Connor had been waiting on a new laptop for a few days. As fond as he was of his battle-scarred netbook, gazing at it for days on end was bad for the soul, according to Jenna, at least.

  Connor opened the door with his gaze down, still lost in a world of shiny new computers, and worrying that his files wouldn’t survive the journey from the old machine. The familiar black boots on his doormat didn’t register at first, not even when they moved, shuffling closer, and bringing with them two warm fingers that tilted his face upward to the sun.

  It was the smile that broke through. The smile he’d always known was hidden behind that damn wry smirk. “Nat?”

  Nat’s grin widened. “All right, mate?”

  It took Connor a few moments to recover. In his most far-fetched fantasies of seeing Nat, it never once occurred to him that it would be Nat tracking him down. “What are you doing here?”

  “Erm, not really sure. Marc got hold of your medical notes this morning and pinched your address. He gave it to me at lunchtime, and I was on a train before I knew it.”

  “Why?”

  Nat’s grin faded. “I don’t know.”

  “Oh.” Shit. It was hardly the reunion Connor had dreamed of in his darkest hours. He took a deep breath, disentangled himself from Nat’s gaze, and tried again. “Sorry, mate. You’re just the last person I expected to see. Come on in.”

  He went inside without waiting to see if Nat followed. The door closed quietly behind him, and he breathed a soft sigh of relief. Nat could tread silently on a shingle beach, but Connor felt his presence seep into every pore.

  He put the kettle on the stove. “Fancy a brew?”

  “Does the pope shit in the woods?”

  Connor glanced over his shoulder. Nat was leaning against the doorway, gaze fixed on something outside the kitchen window. “James used to say that. I’ve never really known the answer.”

  “He used to say, ‘Fill yer boots’ too. Funny, eh? You’re the only other fucker I’ve ever heard use that phrase.”

  Connor poured hot water onto tea bags with a shaking hand. “Our dad used to say it. Least, I think he did. James remembered him better than me.”

  “Why did you have different surnames?”

  “Our mum changed ours with hers when she remarried. James changed his back as soon he was able. I could never be bothered. Her bad decisions didn’t cost me as much as him.”

  Nat said nothing, perhaps all too aware that lost school years and broken dreams had led James to the Army in the first place. Connor grasped the two mugs of tea and inclined his head to the living room. “Come sit. You look dead on your feet.”

  “Better than when you last saw me, though, I’ll bet.”

  “I’d say so. I thought you were dead.” Connor sat down with a shudder. He saw Nat bleeding on the ground in his dreams. “They didn’t tell me you weren’t for a couple of days.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Cyprus.”

  Nat nodded. “Marc said they took you there.”

  “Where did they take you?”

  “Kuwait, then Selly Oak. Was stuck there for three bloody weeks.”

  Connor took a sip of his tea. “I looked for you in Birmingham. They wouldn’t even tell me if you’d been there at all.”

  “They wouldn’t,” Nat said. “They had me hidden away in a special wing.”

  “Special, eh? I always knew you were fucking special.”

  Nat set his mug down on the coffee table. “I’m sorry, Connor. I should’ve come here sooner. It’s just—”

  “What, Nat?” Connor snapped. “You thought you’d just disappear into the abyss, and I’d live the rest of my life not giving a shit what became of you?”

  Nat’s eyes flashed, like he’d absorbed Connor’s anger and made it his own. “No, I just wasn’t sure you’d want to see me. Everything got so messy out there . . . I’m just not used to anyone giving a fuck whether I come home or not.”

  “What about your men?”

  “That’s different,” Nat said. “And you know it. Look, I’m sorry, okay? I was a bastard to you over there, and then you got . . . hurt, and the last time I saw you, Jesus. All I remember is garbling in your ear about Pogo and praying you wouldn’t die because I’d been too pigheaded to protect you.”

  Connor set his own mug aside and folded his arms around himself. The heating was on full blast in the flat, but he’d felt the cold more since he’d been home. “You did protect me. You saved me. If you hadn’t come for me, Behrouz would’ve slit my bloody throat.”

  “Yeah, well.” Nat looked away. “He wouldn’t have had the chance if I hadn’t been such a dick, and your brother would be alive if I hadn’t let that other cunt slot him, so I’m a fucking liability all round, eh?”

  Silence. Connor didn’t know what to say. He’d spent the past few months piecing together Nat’s whispered account of James’s death with whispers he’d overheard from Charlie-3 about the mysterious “Pogo.” It hadn’t taken much to figure James and Pogo were one and the same.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Nat, none of it. Not me, not James. Bobs told me that. He said you told Pogo to get some rest because he’d been out all night. That you took his turn on patrol, and nearly got yourself killed in the process when that patrol was ambushed. How the hell were you supposed to know that bloke had set himself up on a martyrdom mission?”

  “Bobs is dead too.”

  “I know. That much, they would tell me.”

  “Figures. Always quick with the bad news, that lot.”

  “Nat.”

  “Don’t say my name like that. Are you seriously telling me you haven’t torn yourself to bits knowing Bobs died trying to rescue you?”

  A tremor rippled through Connor. Bobs’s death had haunted him every day since he’d been told of it, but he was learning to live with it . . . one day at a time. “Of course I have, but that doesn’t mean I deserve to. Bobs didn’t give his life for me. Any mission could’ve killed him. He told me that himself.”

  Nat nodded slowly. “Sounds like Bobs told you a lot, but it doesn’t matter what you say. I’ll never forgive myself for leaving your brother. I felt it, you know? There was something in the air. Even the ambush was planned so we couldn’t get back to him.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Wasn’t it? Some days I feel like I failed him in every way possible. We were best mates, and I had no idea he came from the home you told me about on the roof. I never knew anything about his childhood. Never knew your stepdad was such a cunt.”

  “He never told you about his family?”

  “Oh he did,” Nat said. “He talked about you, his brother, all the time. Said you wrote those snippy film reviews for the Telegraph back in the ’90s. He was the only fucker you’d ever catch reading a broadsheet on opps, and it was because of you.”

  Tears burned Connor’s eyes. “He never told me he read them.”

  “Every one he could get his hands on. He loved you, Connor. I promise. He was so fucking proud of you. I just wish I’d taken the time to read them too.”

  Nat’s embrace caught Connor off guard. He fell slack against Nat’s strong chest before he realised he was crying. The wetness on his face felt surreal. He hadn’t cried in years, even when he’d buried James beside their father. But Nat’s embrace felt right, like he’d always been there, and they’d never been apart.

  Time seemed to stop as they sat entangled on the couch. After a while, Connor couldn’t tell whose tears were whose. He wrapped his arms around Nat’s waist and absorbed every tremble and sob, endured each one, and let Nat’s pain entwine with his own until it ceased to matter who’d hurt who. And who’d reached out to fill the void that all they’d been through had left behind.

  Nat inhaled a deep, shuddering breath. C
onnor looked up. Nat’s watery gaze was devastating, and suddenly, his cradling, consuming grip didn’t feel enough.

  Connor stood and held out his hand. “Come to bed with me.”

  It was a short shuffle to Connor’s bedroom. Nat seemed lost at first, like his body and mind weren’t connected. He stared at Connor like the little boy Connor had often imagined him, bewildered, and not loved quite as much as he should’ve been.

  Connor drew him close and kissed his lips, his eyes, his nose. He touched his cheek and ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m sorry too,” he said. “For everything and nothing. Just be here now, Nat. With me. Don’t look back.”

  Nat trembled. For a moment Connor thought he would cry again, but Nat’s tears didn’t fall. He just pulled Connor into the tight embrace Connor remembered from the roof of Basra Palace and tumbled them both to the bed. They fought for dominance. Nat wasn’t as strong as Connor recalled, nor as quick, but it didn’t take him long to have Connor pinned.

  His rough kiss was just as heady as Connor remembered it. He left Connor breathless, then pulled back as Connor fumbled with Nat’s clothes. Nat’s jacket and T-shirt found their way to the floor, and then his boots, jeans and underwear. Connor’s clothes followed, then, when they were both bare to the dry heat of Connor’s pumping central heating, Nat climbed over Connor, straddling him, and pushed his thumb into his mouth.

  Connor ran his tongue over Nat’s thumb, sucking, as Nat drove it gently in and out, craving the first taste of friction. He’d almost forgotten Nat’s slightly kinky side. Their past encounters had been snatched, both of them—Nat especially—watching the proverbial door. A shiver ran through Connor as he considered how things might play out now it was just them, a bed, and no other fucker within reasonable hearing range.

  Nat withdrew his thumb from Connor’s mouth. He ghosted it over Connor’s bottom lip and circled his hips, hot and hard, but as he stared at Connor, the change in him became more apparent. This wasn’t the man who’d shoved Connor face-first into a stone wall, or wound his arm so tight around Connor’s throat he could barely breathe. This was a different man altogether, a man crying out for something Connor couldn’t quite decipher.