“You were serious about that?”
He lifted one shoulder. “What do you think?”
She twined her arms around his neck and lifted her chin to look up at him. It was such a simple embrace. Simple but powerful. Laced with something more than just sexual attraction.
Something vibrated between their bodies. “Is that me or you?” she asked.
“Me.” Reza reluctantly leaned back to pull his phone from his chest pocket. There was an angry text message from none other than Captain “I Don’t Text” Marshall. Wisniak is being held by the military police. They won’t arrest him because they say he’s suicidal.
Reza sighed and dialed his commander. He held his index finger over his lips and Emily nodded. “Sir, what’s going on with Wisniak?”
How the hell had he found the kid? Wisniak had promised he’d stay in his room until the investigators finished up. Now he was being held by the military police?
“Nice of you to answer your phone.” Reza could hear the leading edge of a full-blown tantrum in Marshall’s voice. “Apparently, he made some comments about blowing up the theater.”
That didn’t make a damn bit of sense. Wisniak hadn’t been around anyone in the company since Reza had relocated him across post. How the hell had Marshall found him?
“Then why don’t they just arrest him?” He had to play it off like he didn’t know anything about where Wisniak had been.
“Because he tried to slit his wrists, apparently.”
“Ah fuck.” Reza rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “All right. I’ll head in and pick him up.”
“He goes straight to the emergency room for an evaluation so I can brief the battalion commander we’re actually doing something with him.” There it was. The classic Captain Marshall. No concern about whether or not the trooper had actually tried to slice his wrists. Just, how could we shape this so the boss doesn’t get pissed.
“Roger, sir.” Reza ended the phone call before he said something that would really irritate Marshall. He sighed and looked at Emily. Regret was thick in his voice. “I have to go.”
“Is everything okay?” Genuine concern. For once, it didn’t piss him off.
“It’ll have to be, won’t it?” There was no acrimony in his words. Just fatigue that he could feel in his bones. He wanted to tell her what was going on with Wisniak. Maybe he should have. But right then, he didn’t want to see the shadows creep back into her eyes. He wanted her to be able to sleep tonight.
He’d call her if he needed to but he hoped that Marshall was wrong.
Emily slid her arms around his waist. Her warmth penetrated his clothes. Made him want to hold on to her with everything he had.
“It’s my job,” he said softly. “I take care of soldiers.”
“Even guys like Wisniak?”
Her words hurt, cutting him with a reminder of his own callousness. He did nothing to staunch the wound. He deserved it. “Especially guys like him. Guess I forgot that for a while.”
He tucked his phone back in his pocket and wrapped his arms around her. Brushing her hair out of her eyes, he kissed her gently, struggling to hide the magnitude of feeling that swelled inside him from simply being near her. “I’ll take you back to your car,” he said softly.
She nodded, slipping off the bike and back on behind him. Her arms wrapped tightly around his waist and he felt her cheek pressed against his back. He closed his eyes for a brief moment before firing the engine.
Everything had been simpler before she came into his life. Now? Everything was twisted and complex. But with her arms around his waist and her thighs gripping his from behind, he knew it was worth it. She was worth it.
Whatever the cost.
He pulled down the gravel drive toward Talarico’s a little while later and came to a stop near her car. The bar was brightly lit against the night lake and people were scattered in various alcoves surrounding the bar. Emily climbed off and Reza killed his bike, leaving them surrounded by shadows. “Will you be okay?” she asked, smoothing her hair down.
“I’m always okay.” A non-answer. For once she didn’t press him.
She reached for him, her palm warm against his chilled skin. Her thumb brushed against his cheek, the gesture a comfort. “Let me know if there’s anything you need?”
Because he couldn’t resist, he tugged her toward him and claimed her lips. It was not a gentle kiss; there was too much storming inside him for it to be anything but fierce. She opened beneath his onslaught and met his passion with her own.
Reluctantly, he nibbled on her bottom lip before releasing her entirely. “Drive safely tonight,” he said softly.
She smiled and said nothing, merely stepping back until she bumped up against her car. He got back on the bike and pulled out, but the last thing he saw was a secret smile on her lips and a promise in her eyes.
* * *
Reza straightened and braced for confrontation as he walked into the MP station on Fort Hood. He waited to be buzzed in and then followed the portly young private first class back to the holding area. Reza couldn’t help but wonder how this kid would hold up downrange, wearing seventy pounds of gear in a-hundred-and-twenty-plus-degree heat.
He pulled his mind away from the trivial mental gymnastics as they rounded the corner to the holding area.
Wisniak sat in the corner. His shoulders were hunched; his elbows rested on his knees. His eyes were dark. Bleak. There were bandages wrapped around both wrists.
Rage boiled in Reza’s blood. If Wisniak had attempted suicide, the cops should have brought him immediately to the hospital instead of holding him here. “I need a copy of the official report,” Reza said to the desk sergeant, barely keeping his voice civil.
The heavy PFC slunk out of the room at the sound of an impending battle. The desk sergeant straightened and stood behind a desk fronted with bulletproof glass, and his expression flickered but he didn’t budge. “I need your commander’s permission to release that information to you.”
Reza slapped his cell phone on the counter with Marshall’s phone number visible. “Call him.”
He glanced at Wisniak as the sergeant dialed Marshall’s number. There was a spot of blood on the bandage on the inside of Wisniak’s left wrist. Reza scowled. “Who triaged his wounds?”
The desk sergeant pulled out the police report, holding the phone up to one ear. “His wrists were already bandaged when we detained him.”
Wisniak looked up at the sound of Reza’s voice. His skin blanched and he turned a sickly shade of green before his lips pressed together in a hard, flat line. He lifted his chin defiantly. Reza lifted one eyebrow at Wisniak’s expression and the soldier quickly lowered his gaze back to the floor.
The desk sergeant spoke with Marshall and hung up the phone. Reza held out his hand for the report, saying nothing as he skimmed the pages. Finally he looked up. Wisniak was watching him cautiously. “Let’s go,” Reza said.
Reza had swapped his bike for his truck on the way to post. Wisniak followed him to it without speaking, then climbed into the passenger’s seat. It was only a short ride to the hospital but the closer they got, the more Wisniak physically shrank into his seat.
Reza parked outside the emergency room, grateful that it didn’t seem too busy.
“I don’t want to be here,” Wisniak said. His voice was hoarse, as though he’d been screaming.
“You don’t get much of a choice after you threaten to blow up one of the theatres,” Reza said, killing the engine.
“I didn’t.”
Reza shifted and pinned the kid with a hard look. “So you’re telling me the military police have started arresting people for shits and giggles now?”
“I didn’t do that, Sarn’t Ike.” There was an urgency in his voice that quickly faded. “Not that I expect you to believe me.”
“Then explain it to me, Wisniak, because right now I’ve got Captain Marshall calling me, telling me you’ve been arrested, I’ve got a police r
eport of a text-messaged threat, and I’ve got you sitting in the police station with bandages on your wrists. So right now, your claim of innocence isn’t holding a lot of water with me.” Reza sucked in a deep breath and eased back the boiling rage in his voice. “You’ve got one chance to set the record straight.”
Wisniak looked at him, his eyes wide with shock. His mouth moved for a moment before sound actually came out. “Song set me up.”
Reza said nothing. Mike Song was one of Marshall’s boys, part of Marshall’s so-called A-Team, a crew that he’d brought with him from his previous unit once he’d taken command. “Wisniak, I saw the picture of the text message,” Reza said, wanting to shake Wisniak so badly for trying to lie to him once more.
Wisniak balked and looked at Reza like he had a dick growing out of his forehead. “You’re not very tech savvy, are you, Sarn’t Ike? All he did was take a screen shot of a contact that said my name. There’s nothing to prove the message was from my number. He faked the pic and sent it to Captain Marshall.”
Reza considered Wisniak’s argument. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility, especially since one could manually create contacts on phones. “Why would Song do that?”
Wisniak looked away and sat silently for a long minute. “It really sucks not having a combat patch.” There was shame in his voice. “It sucks not being a good enough soldier.”
Reza frowned, rubbing his hand over his mouth thoughtfully as he listened to Wisniak’s words and thought about what to say. His own prejudice rang loudly in his ears.
Finally Wisniak looked back at him. “All I ever wanted to be was not a fuck-up.” He blinked rapidly then squeezed his eyes shut. “Song said he was going to make sure I was run out of the army because I was a waste of time. That I didn’t deserve the honor of wearing our uniform.” He looked back at Reza, his eyes filled with the loss of something much more fragile than the most precious glass. “He’s right.”
“You tried to kill yourself tonight, didn’t you?” Reza finally said softly.
Wisniak looked down at his wrists. “I even fucked that up.”
Reza swallowed a hard lump in his throat as a memory collided with his present reality. This was not the first time he’d sat with someone wearing bandages on their wrists.
He was at a loss for words. He searched for something to bridge the gap between him and the wounded young soldier next to him.
He settled on the truth.
“We all take a knee sometimes,” Reza said softly, his voice rough.
Wisniak eyed him warily. “You never do.”
Reza pressed his lips together into a flat line. “You didn’t see me six months ago.”
“What happened six months ago?”
Chapter Nineteen
Reza took a deep breath. Fear gripped his throat as shame twisted in his belly.
It was hell to admit to someone that you were an addict. One fist clenched in his lap as he rubbed his hand over his mouth, thinking long and hard before he answered. Very few people in the battalion knew that Reza had gone to rehab. Even the army didn’t officially know he’d gone because he’d been on convalescence leave at the time.
But maybe this kid needed to know that Reza had spoken the truth: everyone had a breaking point. He held his breath until his lungs burned and begged for release.
And then he spoke, his voice raw, his words harsh.
“I spent a week in rehab.” Wisniak’s eyes widened but he wisely said nothing. Reza might have broken if he’d dared breathe a word. “I drink. A lot. It got out of hand on a mission a few months ago.” That was all he could manage of the truth. He looked at Wisniak. “So don’t think we’ve all got our shit together because we don’t. None of us do.” He swallowed hard. “We’re going into the emergency room and we’re going to have a doc look at your wrists and another doc look at your head. And you’re going to need to take some time to figure out what is going to make you happy. Not me, not your dad, not some mythical hero you think you want to be. You. Because this is your life. No one else’s.”
Wisniak’s eyes were wide as saucers. He blinked rapidly then nodded.
There was nothing more to say. Reza led him into the ER and checked him in. Because of the cuts on Wisniak’s wrists, they bypassed the normally hellish wait and were taken right back. Once it was verified that there was no physical risk of Wisniak dying, they began the wait for the on-call doctor. Around midnight, the on-call doc still wasn’t answering his calls, so the hospital began trying to get hold of the head psych doc.
They waited. There was no small talk but the silence was no longer filled with acrimony and harsh judgment. No, Reza had taken on another role the moment he’d shared his weakness with Wisniak. He refused to consider that Wisniak now looked at him like some kind of fucked-up hero. Reza didn’t deserve to be put on a pedestal.
More likely it was the first time someone had been nice to Wisniak. Reza felt the sour taste in his mouth echoing back at him over how badly he’d treated Wisniak and all the other troopers Reza had felt were unworthy of being called soldiers.
Guilt and shame danced at the back of Reza’s neck, a dreadful duo that made him crave the oblivion of alcohol just to escape the wretchedness that threatened to consume him. One more person knew that Reza had fallen down on the job. One more person could now look at him every single fucking day and wonder if he’d had one or two or six beers before lunch. One more person might stand a little too close to see if he’d taken a pull off the flask before first formation.
Admitting his weakness shamed him. It had been the right thing to do but still, he felt like a failure. Like a broken thing on top of a trash heap.
An old washed-out infantry sergeant who could no longer cut it. Some wrung-out GI who would be relegated to sitting around, swapping war stories while young men went off to actual war.
Reza suddenly felt far older than his years. Infinitely older.
He wanted to go to sleep and not get up for a week. Maybe then he’d feel something akin to normal. Maybe everything would turn out to be a bad dream and he’d wake up and everything would start over. Sloban would still be alive and he’d think to ask how his former soldier was doing. Wisniak would not have taken a dull blade to his wrists and Reza could ask if he needed help instead of condemning him like everyone else had.
He rubbed his hands over his face. He wouldn’t have met Emily, though.
He considered the sweetness of her laugh, her terror as he’d taken her through the shoot house. The way her eyes had darkened the first time she’d seen the memorials he’d carved into his skin after each deployment.
There was a quiet knock on the waiting room doorjamb.
Reza looked up into a familiar face.
Emily stood in the doorway.
* * *
She hadn’t had time to pull on more than old sweat pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt when the call came in. She’d been half asleep, drifting into slumber with the memory of Reza’s kiss on her lips, worry for the man weighing on her heart.
She’d known immediately who waited for her at the hospital. Part of her had hoped that she was wrong, that it wasn’t Wisniak.
Emily didn’t bother to ask where the on-call doctor was. She spent five minutes with one soldier, a skinny kid from someplace called Benedict, Arkansas, before she had him admitted. He was high from smoking synthetic marijuana and believed that ants were crawling on his skin. Lacerations covered his arms and legs. He’d need to spend time in Intensive Care before they could admit him to Psych.
The second kid had puked up a fifth of Jim Beam and was, according to him, feeling significantly better. No, he’d just been screwing around when he’d told the guys he felt like he’d be better off dead. Yes, ma’am, he’d be fine.
She couldn’t hold him against his will. No matter how much the staff sergeant who sat with him demanded she did. She wrote up a profile that recommended he be kept under unit watch for the next 48 hours, which prompted the staff sergean
t to get loud enough that Reza came into the exam room a moment before the security guards. The sergeant wisely shut his mouth when he saw Reza glaring at him from the door.
And then it was time for Wisniak. She pulled Reza into an empty room. “So what’s the story?” she asked, skimming the triage notes. Strictly professional, regardless of what was between them.
“He’s admitted he tried to kill himself,” Reza said, mirroring her stance and keeping his distance. “But he says he was set up with the bomb threat.”
He looked exhausted but the last thing Emily could do in the middle of the emergency room was offer any sort of physical comfort. She was the doc. He was the supervisor.
Nothing more. At least not right then.
“He’s pretty upset. I think if he’s right and some of the guys did set him up, they probably saved his life.” Reza’s voice was rough. Broken.
“Okay. I’m going to talk to him. You’ll have to wait outside.”
Reza’s smile was flat. “I know the routine.”
It took her more than an hour to get Wisniak to admit to still thinking about hurting himself. But when he did, she did everything she could to reassure him that he was going to be okay.
He shook his head sadly. “Ma’am, I appreciate everything you’ve done, but I doubt it. I always feel this way.”
Emily paused from writing her notes and looked up. “It feels like that now but you don’t have to feel this way. We’re going to figure this out.”
Wisniak nodded and said nothing as she stuck her head outside and motioned for Reza to step into the room. “We’re going to admit him,” she said softly. “My assessment is that until we get him stabilized, he poses a risk to himself.”
Reza nodded and said nothing. He looked dead on his feet but still he stood ramrod stiff and straight. She had no doubt that if he’d needed to react to an emergency right now, he could have done so.
Thankfully, the rest of the night didn’t call for anything so extreme.
All for You Page 22
