Hold on Tight

by Serena Bell

  “Can we do Legos? If you babysit?”

  He looked at Mira, not sure how to answer. Was he going to babysit?

  “Sure,” she said. Answering both Sam’s question and his, with a tight nod, as if to say, You’re on probation, buddy.

  And that was just fine with him. They’d all try this out. See what happened.

  “I’m trying to think if there’s anything else you need to know,” Mira said. “If you’re still game to do it tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” he echoed her.

  “So if there’s an emergency—”

  “I’ll call 911. Or patch him up myself. I’ve done that a time or two. All Rangers have some medical training.”

  “I guess you’re a little overqualified for this job, huh?”

  “My dad’s a soldier,” Sam reported.

  The room suddenly shrank, closing in on them. Mira’s face drained of color.

  “You don’t say,” Jake said. “Where is he now?”

  Mira shot Jake a hard look.

  “He was my sperm donor.”

  Holy shit. He felt like he’d been hit in his chest plate with a round. He guessed it should have occurred to him, before this moment, that Sam had some mythology about his father—about him—that wasn’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. But sperm donor?

  Jesus.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but Mira grabbed and pinched his arm. “Can I talk to you a second?”

  He followed her without protest. He wanted to hear how she’d explain this one.

  “I’m sorry, okay?” she said. “I’m sorry I told him that, but—you tell me if you can think of a better way to explain it to a little kid. Why his dad isn’t anywhere around, why he shouldn’t be out on a campaign to find him. I’d already looked for you. I’d already called bases. I knew it would be hard, if not impossible, to track you down. I didn’t want him to turn it into a quest.”

  “You could have told him I was dead,” Jake said quietly.

  She turned away. When she turned back, there were tears in her eyes. “I couldn’t,” she said.

  He didn’t ask her why not. He was already reeling, already feeling more than he’d felt in months. Years, maybe. He didn’t want to know the answer behind the tears.

  Sperm donor.

  Yeah, that was about all he was good for, these days. And on bad days, not even that.

  “Look,” she said. “I know this is weird. I know it’s—hard to believe. If—if it would help, I could do a paternity test.”

  Her offer helped, oddly enough. It eased something. Not that he’d ever really doubted her, not even when he’d been so grumpy and difficult in the PT’s office. The world was full of women who would lie to ensnare a guy, but he just couldn’t make himself believe Mira was one of them.

  But the fact that she’d offered, and how vulnerable she’d made herself in doing so—it soothed him.

  “I think we can wait on that a bit,” he said. He’d leave it open. Maybe at some point he’d feel like he needed to know for sure, some evidence beyond those too-familiar blue-gray eyes of Sam’s. But he couldn’t see himself demanding a cheek swab.

  Not now, not when he wasn’t even completely sure what, if anything, he wanted from them, or what, if anything, they were asking of him.

  Chapter 6

  When Mira opened the door the next morning, she wore tailored gray slacks and a matching blazer over a silky-looking scrap of pale-blue fabric. The slacks and blazer were all buttoned up and professional looking, but that scrap of blue was as insubstantial as tissue.

  Like a sexy nightgown. It would feel good to her, against her bare skin, cool and light. You could tease her with it.

  No hesitation this time, only a surge of blood, powerful in his veins, the chain of neurons all the way from the images burning into his brain to the quick tightening of his dick. She’d woken something up, and it wasn’t going back to sleep.

  Bloody hell.

  It felt good.

  It felt urgent.

  It felt extremely inconvenient. Why now? Why wake from the dead now?

  She wasn’t some random woman he’d met in a bar. She was—

  God, he didn’t even know who she was. The mother of the son he hadn’t known he had. A fling that hadn’t even been consummated. She wasn’t anything, except she was, which made it totally fucked up for him to be thinking about—

  He shouldn’t be thinking about her at all. It was so out of place with the moment. Out of place with her outfit, which was a Professional Lady Camouflage Uniform. Her hair was pulled back into some kind of twist behind her head, her face made up; it was the first time he’d ever seen her with makeup. She looked tightly wound and slightly scary.

  And she’d caught him looking, and thinking, her head tilted, her gaze quizzical and—

  Was that interest in her eyes?

  Then Sam was running down the stairs. Sam. The reason he was here. Because he sure as hell wasn’t here to mess with Mira’s head and expose her to the bad shit that lurked just under the presentable surface of his skin. He’d hurt her bad enough once, and he was done hurting people. And maiming and killing, the darkest voice said, before he could squelch it.

  “Anything else I need to know? Any particular time he needs to eat?”

  “Lunch around twelve thirty. I made you guys sandwiches for lunch. They’re in the fridge.”

  “You didn’t have to make my lunch.” The fact that she had done so made him feel peculiar. It was so domestic and wifely, something his mother might have done before she’d had it scared and beaten out of her. It made him aware that the woman and the child in this room were the components of what, to another man, one who hadn’t seen what he’d seen, would be family.

  Even if he’d once had a remotely loving notion of childhood, even if he’d thought that a man and a woman living in a house together could make the kind of magic you saw on TV or in the movies, he’d given that dream up when he decided to become a soldier. He didn’t believe you could do both well. It wasn’t fair to taunt death on a regular basis while people at home were counting on you.

  The therapist who’d worked with him briefly at Walter Reed had asked him if he wanted a family someday.

  “No fucking way,” he’d said.

  “Why not?”

  “You need me to list the reasons?”

  Anyway, it was moot. He didn’t want a family, and neither did he have any reason to believe this family wanted him as a bona fide member. Sam didn’t know Jake was his father, and Mira hadn’t given him any sign that she saw him as anything other than a potential drop-in father figure for Sam.

  “Snacks not too close to meals,” she was saying. “I’ll give him dinner when I get home. I’ll bring takeout with me.” She hesitated, as if she’d been about to offer to include him, but she didn’t say anything more.

  Just as well, right? Having dinner with her wasn’t going to help any with his inconvenient attraction to her. “Go,” he shooed her. “We’re fine.”

  Mira looked doubtful.

  “We’re fine, right, Sam?”

  “Mom, we’re fine,” Sam said, sounding more like seventeen than seven.

  But as soon as she was out the door, Sam’s shoulders slumped. The bravado he’d displayed when he reassured his mother had apparently been all bluster. You had to give it to the kid for acting skills.

  “Should we go up and build with Legos?” Jake asked.

  “Don’t feel like it.” Sam threw himself onto the couch and looked in imminent danger of tears.

  “What do you like to do with your friends?”

  “Nothing.” If possible, Sam seemed to be sinking deeper into the couch.

  “You sit around and do nothing?”

  “I don’t have friends. We moved here after school was done. I don’t know anyone.”

  “Well, what did you used to do in—where did you guys move from?”

  “Fort Myers, Florida.”

  “What did you used
to do in Fort Myers with your friends?”

  There was a long silence. Then Sam confessed, “I didn’t really have friends there, either.”

  Apparently it was make-Jake-have-emotions week around here, because that delivered a chest smack on par with the sperm donor comment. It was all part of the great cosmic unraveling of Jake’s world. With each new blow, he felt like there was nothing more absurd that could happen to him. He’d lost his leg and nearly his life. He’d said goodbye to a close friend, to his vocation, his sense of meaning, his friends and colleagues, the world he’d grown up in, his whole adult life. He’d come back here to escape from Walter Reed, where the constant ebb and flow of army life reminded him of what he’d lost, only to be slapped with a new piece of absurdity: his son. Sam. Seven. Here in Seattle.

  In the scheme of things, discovering that Sam thought his father was an entry in a sperm bank shouldn’t be a huge additional injury. Nor should finding out that his son had no friends. But Jesus.

  He sat on the couch next to Sam. “What do you mean you didn’t have friends? Did you play with anyone at recess?”

  “Not usually. I usually played by myself. The other kids played with each other outside school at playdates and did soccer and baseball and stuff, so they knew each other better. I didn’t know them that well.” His little face was pinched and grim. He had a crusty spot at the side of his mouth, probably dried milk from breakfast. It made Jake remember, with disgust, how his mother had licked her fingers and cleaned his face when he was a small child. He’d hated that, squirmed away.

  Now he wished his mother would look at him with that same critical eye, instead of with pity and concern. He wished he could believe she called him twice a week for some reason other than that she was terrified that he’d fallen and couldn’t get up.

  His mother. He was going to have to tell her about Sam at some point. She would—God, he had no idea how she’d react. With joy, he supposed, which he hoped would overcome the pain of the lost years. His sister, Susannah, too. And his brother, for that matter—Pierce would think it was the best thing ever. Two single-dad brothers—because Pierce was on his own now, since his marriage had imploded. Pierce would be all Let’s take them to the zoo.

  He and Pierce had been close, but Jake had been avoiding him. Since. He hadn’t liked the sympathy or the awkward silences.

  “Didn’t you do soccer and baseball and play outside school?”

  “I didn’t have that many playdates.”

  “Why not?” Jake recognized that his question had been dodged, but he stuck to hearing Sam out. He had the feeling that this was the most delicate interrogation Special Forces had ever undertaken.

  “Grampy didn’t like to have them. And Mom said we couldn’t ask him to very much because Grampy and Grammy were already doing so much.”

  Oh. Poor kid. And poor Mira, because he bet Sam had been closemouthed about his friendship woes.

  “Did you tell your mom you didn’t have any friends?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  But Jake thought he might know the answer. He thought it might be buried in the scene he’d already witnessed. Mom, we’re fine. When Sam was feeling anything but fine.

  Sam had clamped his mouth shut.

  “It’s okay,” Jake said. “You can tell me.”

  “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” Sam said.

  Fucking wiseass. He was old enough to know Jake wasn’t a stranger. He’d said that because he knew it would wound.

  “I’m not a stranger anymore,” Jake said.

  “You have a fake leg. That’s strange.”

  Trust a seven-year-old to get straight to the heart of the matter.

  “True enough. But that makes me more trustworthy. I can’t run and tell anyone else what you tell me.”

  “You can’t run?”

  “Not really. I just learned how to walk.”

  “If you practiced, could you run?”

  He knew guys who were doing it. Training to run, even prepping for the Paralympics.

  “How ’bout you answer my question, then I’ll answer your question?”

  Sam considered that carefully. “Okay. What was your question?”

  “Why didn’t you tell your mom you didn’t have any friends?”

  “Because stuff like that makes her sad, and she worries too much already.”

  That was what he’d suspected, that Sam protected Mira. Damn it, a seven-year-old boy shouldn’t have to do that. He shouldn’t have to think about anything other than Halloween and baseball practice and feeding the dog.

  “Now me. If you practiced, could you run?”

  “Yeah,” Jake said. In fact, he knew from hearing it talked about at Walter Reed that there were runners—Oscar Pistorius, a double amputee, was an infamous example—who ran faster on prostheses than they could on their own legs.

  Sam was sitting up now, his face lit. “I’m a good runner. My mom doesn’t like it when I run fast, but I’m good at it.”

  Why the hell did Mira make him hold back like that?

  “Do you want to see me run?” Sam asked.

  “Your mom said you hurt your shoulder and arm and knee.”

  “I did. But they’re better now.”

  “So let’s see it.”

  “I won’t run super hard.”

  A spark of rebelliousness made Jake say, “You can run as hard as you want. That’s why you have an inhaler.”

  “Oh.” Sam frowned.

  She’s going to kill me, Jake thought, and then, Really? I must have left my balls in Afghanistan.

  They went out front. There were cars parked here and there on the street, but otherwise it was empty. “I’m going to run from that red mailbox to that fire hydrant.”

  “Okay,” Jake said. Today the Seattle summer weather was perfect, a slight fog lifting away as the morning wore on, the sky vivid blue behind the scrim of gray. “Do you want me to time you?” He got his phone out and selected the stopwatch app.

  “Yeah.” Sam got into a runner’s starting stance and almost made Jake laugh, he was so earnest and coiled.

  “Twenty-five seconds,” Jake reported, after Sam had collapsed, panting, on the mostly dead grass.

  “Is that good?”

  “I think so.”

  “Will you race with me?”

  Jake hesitated. He wasn’t sure what would happen. In PT, he’d done some of the early jumping, hopping, and skipping exercises that would eventually translate into jogging, but he’d only run once. The street was reasonably flat and even, but even small irregularities could trip him up.

  The time he’d run had been on a track, under the watchful eye of his physical therapist. There had been no joy in it, only frustration. He’d heard that walking—forget running—generated eight times the amputee’s body weight in force at the point where prosthesis met body. Eight times his body weight. Slamming his prosthesis into his residual leg. Jarring dead meat and bone, jamming his aching hip, stunning his miserable brain. He’d only wanted it to stop—the impact, the pain, his PT’s eyes boring into him.

  And then he’d taken a spill, skidded across the red rubbery composite surface. Sprained his wrist. Set himself back another week and a half.

  He hadn’t run since.

  He wanted to say no to Sam. I don’t run. Running is hard for me. I’m slow. You’d beat me.

  I’m afraid to fall.

  Not words he wanted to model for a seven-year-old boy. I won’t even try. Things that are hard aren’t worth working at. I’ve quit trying to get better. I’ve given up on myself.

  I’m afraid.

  Sam had it hard enough with a mom who was asking him to hold back for his own health and safety. He didn’t need other voices in his head working against him. The least Jake could do was to do no harm.

  “Sure,” Jake said.

  They stood together on the imaginary starting line suggested by the red mailbox. Sam got back into his runner’s crouch. Jak
e thought about what he knew about his prosthesis. It was an all-purpose leg, meant at best to allow for a casual jog around the neighborhood. It wasn’t a sprinter’s leg, but it would let him run. He just hadn’t before. There hadn’t been any reason to. There hadn’t been any reason to do anything, and he’d been used to reasons being supplied to him for so long, he’d forgotten that sometimes in life, you had to make them up yourself.

  Just because.

  Or more accurately, as Sam gazed at him expectantly, Because it’ll make his day.

  “Ready, set, go,” he said, and Sam took off.

  He’d meant to take it easy, but when he pushed off, he stumbled and he had to hop and skip a few paces hard to get his balance back. Then it was easier to keep going than to stop.

  Today felt so different from that day on the track. Maybe because of how much he’d been walking, maybe because of the work he’d done in physical therapy on the treadmill. He had to use far more of his brain than he wanted in deliberate decisions—right leg, left leg. Knee up. Push off. Push, push, push. It was more like skipping than running.

  But there was a rhythm, an alternating thwack of artificial and natural limbs against pavement. Not the feel of two good legs, earth moving away beneath his feet in a steady, even pulse, but something you could cling to, something you could almost lose yourself in—step-step, step-step. More like jazz than rock, but still.

  He could feel Sam beside him, could feel the pavement under his real foot. His residual leg ached, but bearably.

  Air rushed past his ears, and he felt—

  He felt good. Strong.

  He pulled ahead of Sam, lurching but moving fast on two legs, and beat him.

  “Mom lets me win,” Sam said.

  Jake was panting. Sweaty. His heart pounded, because despite all the work they’d done to get him on an exercise regimen, he hadn’t been able to motivate himself to walk or swim regularly. There had been no reason to.

  Sam was pissed, struggling hard to keep the tears back. Damn, he was a competitive little guy. He’d wanted to win, and he’d wanted it bad.

  Jake liked that in a man.