Hold on Tight

by Serena Bell

  Mira wanted to tell someone. Because there was a part of her that still couldn’t quite believe it was real. That she’d seen him, that she’d told him, that she’d hired him, that she’d kissed him.

  That it had felt so good. That she wanted more.

  “I did something I really, really, really shouldn’t have.”

  “Let me be the judge of that.” Opal took a last bite of sandwich and crumpled her wax paper. She dug into the paper bag and pulled out a gigantic chocolate chip cookie. She unwrapped it and handed half to Mira.

  Mira didn’t know Opal super well yet, but the path to real friendship was paved with confessions, and she needed someone to either absolve or condemn her. “Long version, or short version?”

  “Um, Mira, have you met me? I’m not conversant with the short version of anything.”

  So Mira told Opal the whole story, starting with the long, long time ago part, and leading right up to the present.

  Opal proved to be as good a listener as she was a talker. “You’re right,” she said, when Mira was done. “Complicated.”

  “I wish I could un-kiss him,” Mira said.

  Opal tilted her head and gave Mira a doubtful look.

  Under her scrutiny, Mira caved and laughed. “No, you’re right. You know what I really wish? I wish he weren’t Sam’s father. I wish he were just some guy. And I could tell him I wanted to have a nonserious, fling-y type thing with him, and it wouldn’t be complicated at all. I wouldn’t have to worry that he’d want to move in and start making decisions about Sam’s upbringing, or that Sam would find out who Jake was and then something would go wrong and Sam would be crushed.”

  “And you have reason to think something would go wrong?”

  “He’s grumpy and messed up in the head …” She gave Opal a quick outline of Jake’s explanation of why she shouldn’t want him.

  Opal smiled, all dimples and teeth. “Sounds like a real prize.”

  “So you see why I’m not supposed to get involved with him.”

  “I do.” Opal’s smile faded.

  “But?”

  “Well, despite all that, you kissed him—why?”

  “He—I—” She could feel the heat rising in her face as she remembered. “God. It’s, like …” But words seemed to have failed her completely.

  “Oh, hon,” Opal said, her big, freckled face as sad as Mira had seen it. “In my experience, ‘not supposed to’ is a really flimsy barrier against chemistry like that.”

  Jake waited in a cushy chair in the new prosthetist’s office, an unfamiliar sensation in his stomach. Like nerves, only not quite. Like—

  Like maybe he was looking forward to this visit. To getting fitted for a new socket and a new running leg. Just a little.

  He sighed. Or maybe he was just having a flashback to another recent stint in a waiting room, when the world had shifted abruptly under him, the landslide that had dumped him out of one kind of uncertainty and into another.

  Jake’s PT had told him it would take several months to get an appointment with Harwood, who was new to the University of Washington prosthetics and orthotics group, fresh off a stint at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, but the receptionist had called him this morning to tell him there’d been a cancellation.

  It was Friday, two and a half weeks since he’d kissed Mira and fled. On the way home from her house that night, he’d felt his phone buzzing in his pocket. He ignored it until he jogged back to his apartment, then fished it out. Should have known, he thought, when he saw the screen.

  The text was from Mira. Don’t worry about tomorrow—I’ll go with the new sitter.

  Of course. It made sense. They’d proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that neither of them knew how to do simple.

  But it had still made his stomach sink.

  It wasn’t like she was cutting him off. She wasn’t telling him he couldn’t see Sam.

  And he didn’t need to be a babysitter. It wasn’t a good job for a twenty-eight-year-old man. For a soldier. He needed to find something real to do. But he felt …

  Fired. Dumped.

  He’d spent the shittiest night ever, tossing and turning. And he’d had some shitty nights, like the one he’d spent after his rucksack didn’t make a jump and he’d frozen his balls off without a sleeping bag, bundled to the gills in layers of the other guys’ clothes but still too cold to fall into more than a fitful sleep.

  He’d come home from Mira’s house and poured out every drop of alcohol in his apartment and lain on his bed for eight straight hours, sleepless. Eyes jammed open like that godawful scene in A Clockwork Orange, only for him it wasn’t so much images as sensations, the feel of Mira’s mouth fitting into place against his, the slide of her tongue, the tingle and squeeze and draw of his body demanding what it had been missing. Her vague floral scent, a day’s sweat fighting its way through some girly deodorant, the sea smell of her arousal drowning his good sense. And those fucking noises, whimpers so low and deep in her throat he could feel them in his own chest, in his thighs, his balls, his toes.

  He should have kept her up against that wall and peeled her out of her clothes. Gotten his thigh between hers, licked her mouth, bitten her neck, breathed against the curves of her ear until she went limp against him.

  He should never have kissed her.

  What the fuck was he thinking, kissing her? This wasn’t some girl he could pick up in an off-base bar, take back to her apartment, enjoy like an ice-cream cone, and forget about. This was the mother of his fucking child. This was disaster and mess, weeping and ranting, judges and courts.

  And he couldn’t even stand on two good feet and kiss her like a man.

  He had almost gotten out of bed and gone out to Downtown Spirits to replace his goddamned Jack. But then he thought of Sam, of the races they’d run, of the way the boy had collapsed beside him on the front stoop afterward and then rested his head against Jake’s arm.

  Jake had rolled over with a groan, pulled the covers over his head, and given sleep another try.

  There was another noise she’d made, when he’d first kissed her. When his lips had only grazed hers, before the full intensity of the chemistry had registered with him. Barely more than a sigh, something like relief. Yes. This.

  He’d felt that, too. As if they’d been waiting. Years.

  He was hard again.

  But for the record? You can get it up.

  He’d rolled onto his belly, propped himself on his arms, sandwiched his cock between his own weight and the bed, and fucked the mattress, almost idly. He hadn’t jerked off—or tried to, he guessed was more accurate—since the night he’d gotten stuck with the interminable antidepressant erection. He and the guys had once laughed at that line in the Viagra and Cialis commercials: “If you have an erection that lasts for more than four hours—”

  “Then you’ll find me balls deep in a very happy woman,” Mike had said, hooting with laughter. Back when he laughed.

  It didn’t work like that in real life.

  In his bed that night after he’d kissed Mira, he could feel the pressure, the arousal, building, skyrocketing, so fucking fast. The way he’d felt it when Mira’s hand had slid down his chest and stomach and lodged itself in the waist of his jeans. Jesus. His mind had leapt ahead, his dick straining toward the notion of being freed from its denim bindings, and he’d thought, God, don’t let me come in my pants right now.

  In his mind, she knelt at his feet and opened his jeans, took him deep, her blond hair tickling his thighs as she worked. She hummed and moaned, and he thrust into her mouth, down into the mattress, and came so hard he strained something in his shoulder.

  First time he’d been able to get off in months.

  Then he’d slept.

  In the morning, he’d woken hard and mad. Mad at her, sure, but maddest at himself. For kissing her. For not staying to finish what he’d started. For being a hothead and a coward.

  Fueled by anger, he’d put on running clothes and taken
the bus to Green Lake. The bus dropped him off and he walked down toward the path. If he thought about it too much, he wouldn’t be able to do it, so he tried not to think. He let himself break into a run. One minute he was walking, the next he was skip-jogging. Foot, foot. Foot, foot—

  And then he realized he’d stopped thinking about it. That he was doing it, reflexively. Running.

  If he’d been the kind of guy who cried, he would have. It felt that good.

  He made one full loop. He passed no one. He was passed by cyclists, joggers, mothers and fathers pushing baby strollers, small children dashing ahead of their parents. Hot girls stripped down to sports bras, saggy-breasted old men who shouldn’t be running shirtless. He didn’t give a fuck. He’d run faster the next time. He’d run farther the next time.

  Once he’d done a triathlon with Mike when they were on leave. There had been a parathlete in that race. She had worn a different prosthesis for each event of the race—he’d noticed, because he’d found her attractive even as she was strapping and unstrapping her legs.

  He could do that. He could get bike and swim prostheses. He could get a real running leg. He could do a triathlon.

  In some ways, the seeming unreachability of the goal was exactly what he wanted from it. He wanted to slam his body against an immovable wall, part punishment and part—well, that was what he fucking did. What soldiers did. As he’d thought the other day while running with Sam, if you didn’t push yourself past where you knew it was possible to go, you couldn’t know who the hell you were. And of all the things that were pissing him off right now, not knowing who he was was the biggest.

  If he’d known who he was—he told himself, dick in hand for the tenth or fifteenth or hundredth time—he’d never have kissed her.

  Or he’d never have stopped.

  After he’d assured himself there were plenty of tri’s he could run in the Seattle area, he called the prosthetist who had originally fitted his leg at Walter Reed and asked for a referral.

  “Come down here,” Frank Morales had said. “I’ll work on the socket; I’ll fit you for a leg.”

  “Three legs. I want the best running leg, the best biking leg, and the best swimming leg I can get.”

  “I can give you the best leg for making fucking pancakes, if that’s what you want,” Morales said.

  Can you give me the best leg for …?

  For what? For one-night stands? For delving into a woman he should be giving a wide berth? For getting himself in too deep, too weird? For wanting things he didn’t deserve to have?

  “I’m not coming down there,” Jake said.

  Because he didn’t need to be reminded of what he’d lost. He’d left Walter Reed in the first place to get away from those daily reminders, the men who’d be back in the fight in a week, a month, a year, even five years. Itching to be back. Thoroughly convinced they were doing what needed to be done.

  That wasn’t him, and he wasn’t sure it would ever be him again.

  So instead of heading down to Walter Reed and working with Morales, he had this unexpected appointment today with John Harwood, a former colleague of Morales’s who was now practicing in Seattle. “He’s the best. Better than me,” Morales had told Jake.

  Harwood, short and built like a tank, and oddly hyper for such a compact man, couldn’t contain his excitement at hearing Jake’s request for three new legs. (“And not,” he told Jake, “because it’s a buttload of money.”) He liked to work with athletes, he said, because it gave him more range for messing around with sophisticated knees and ankles.

  “It’s generous to call me an athlete because I’m training for a triathlon,” Jake said. They were sitting in a large room, filled with exercise equipment like parallel bars. And other things. Strange objects. Human parts crafted from an assortment of nonhuman materials. Tubs of water and strips of cloth. A 3D printer and plaster casts of people’s stumps. A cross between an artist’s studio and a physical therapist’s office.

  “I’m a generous guy,” Harwood said.

  Harwood was the best socket guy on the West Coast, Morales had said, and he clearly had the combination of gear lust, curiosity, and willingness to experiment that made him perfect for building legs. He asked Jake if he wanted to be cast for the socket immediately.

  “Sure,” Jake said. “Nowhere I need to be.”

  He thought of Sam, hanging with some overgrown teenager, playing video games, watching TV, and sinking back into a version of himself that had to be careful not to overexert.

  Harwood examined Jake’s stump with a dispassionate, scientific interest, probing the scars and bone ends. Jake winced. “It’s a little sore. I just started running.”

  “We’re going to fix that,” Harwood said.

  His certainty pleased Jake.

  Harwood tilted his crew-cut head. “I could do it with measurements. But I think for what you’re looking for, we’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”

  Jake’s current socket had been built off intricate measurements programmed into a computer, but he knew what Harwood was talking about. The “old-fashioned way” meant that Harwood was planning to make an actual cast of Jake’s residual leg and fit the socket exactly to the stump’s topography. Harwood laid paper and plastic strips over the stump until Jake felt like human papier-mâché. He marked bones and other details with pens that would show through the cast so he could mold the socket to take Jake’s most intense pressure points into account.

  “It’s an art,” said Harwood. “I’m like a sculptor.”

  Jake personally thought the guy was kind of an egotist, but he didn’t much care as long as it resulted in a leg that fit well, felt good, and stayed put.

  As Harwood was seeing Jake out of his office, he said, “Are you thinking about returning to active duty soon?”

  Jake turned, startled. They’d been talking a few minutes earlier about how Jake was running a ten-minute mile. Surely he couldn’t be asking that question seriously.

  “I assume you’re on the Temporary Disability Retirement List at the moment?”

  “Yeah.” Jake was drawing disability pay now, but he had to be reevaluated soon and deemed either permanently retired or fit to return to active duty.

  “Lotta guys are going back fast now. Did you read that book? Back in the Fight? The one about the Ranger?”

  “Nah,” Jake said. Everyone wanted him to read some inspirational book or other. One of his buddies had brought him a book called Amped, about a soldier who’d lost a leg in Iraq and gone on to be a Paralympian. Jake had tossed the book into the garbage—though he was pretty sure a nurse had fished it out and recycled it through some other guys who were more willing to be inspired.

  “That guy went back fast. Book starts with him in the middle of battle.”

  “He was BK.” Below the knee.

  “Things are changing,” Harwood said. “AK guys are going back fast too. Motivated guys. You could pull it off. You could be back in a combat role in a few months, if you wanted to. With your determination, and your strength. And my socket,” he added.

  Jake felt a prickle of anger. What the hell did this guy know about his strength or his determination? What the hell did he know about what it felt like to lose a leg, lose a friend, lose direction? Or what it felt like to be the one who lived? “Stick to leg-building and leave the headshrinking to the trained professionals, okay?”

  Harwood shrugged. “Have it your way.”

  He cleared out of there before Harwood could give him any more life advice. But the guy’s words rang in Jake’s head as he headed out for his run that day. He ran harder and faster than he’d thought he could, and he pondered it. Going back. He thought about what he missed. Order. Hierarchy. The simplicity. How it was always clear what needed to happen next, or at least whose decision it should be. Not that things never degenerated into chaos—of course they did. But he’d had a clarity in those moments of chaos, a sense of certainty about what mattered, and about what he was meant to be doing, t
hat he couldn’t recapture now.

  He missed working on a team. Leading a team. Knowing those guys so well, he could half the time predict what they were going to say before they said it, almost always predict what they were going to do before they did it. Knowing their strengths and their weaknesses …

  Knowing Mike’s strengths and weaknesses hadn’t helped anyone.

  He hadn’t gone to Mike’s funeral. Hadn’t made the phone call to Mike’s wife. Because he’d been struggling to live, then drowning in rage and regret.

  Pain shot through his residual leg and he nearly fell. There was so much sweat between the silicone sheath and his own flesh that it was a miracle the prosthesis was still on.

  He’d been fueled, fighting all those years, by conviction. What would it be like to fight without that certainty? What would keep you slogging up mountains, through snow, across wasted desert land?

  There was this army cliché that you fought the war for the guy next to you. He’d always thought his fight was bigger than that. But now he wasn’t so sure. Mike had been the guy next to him. And now he wasn’t—because of what Jake had done, or not done—and when Jake looked in his heart for reasons to fight, he couldn’t find the old ones.

  Sometimes he thought they’d never existed. He’d needed a reason to run away from his dad’s emptiness and rage, his mother’s self-loathing, his siblings’ self-destruction. 9/11 had dovetailed with his needs. He’d needed to think he was fighting instead of running, and war had given him that.

  The explosion had blown the whole construct to hell, and all that was left were the things he’d tried to run away from.

  Maybe going back to the war would be better than this. At least it would be something. Soldiers lost faith all the time—he knew that. That was why that cliché existed. Sometimes the act of putting one foot in front of the other, the work of saving the life at your right shoulder, could be enough.

  Would it be enough for him?

  It had to be better than this. At least he wouldn’t be his father.

  He was someone’s father, though. Whether he liked it or not. What would it mean to Sam if he went back in? What would it mean to Mira?