Hold on Tight

by Serena Bell

  She laughed. He couldn’t. He was wound too tight around what they’d been doing. He craved more. More of her.

  “I’d better go tuck him in,” she said, still breathing hard, smiling at him.

  “I’ll leave,” he said.

  She scrutinized him. He wanted to look away. He wanted to hide under something so she couldn’t look into his eyes with that peculiar penetration.

  “No. Please don’t. Unless you want to.”

  He did and he didn’t.

  He wanted to stay, to find out what happened next. Where else she was as soft and yielding as her mouth. How else she could use those hands. Who would direct their bodies, how they’d cling, where they’d move. The first removal of an article of clothing.

  How far this could, and would, go.

  And he wanted to leave. To slip out from under the layers of complication already piling up. Sam, and sex, he’d said. But really? Could it happen that way?

  And if it could, if he could make this only the scratching of an itch, would he?

  He wasn’t sure.

  As usual, since the blast had rearranged his world, he had no idea what he wanted.

  “I don’t know,” he confessed.

  “Then stay, okay? Just sit there a minute. I’ll put him to bed, and we’ll—we’ll figure it out.”

  He knew his eyes were giving him away, showing her all his doubts, his confusion. “Will we?”

  “Maybe it’s simpler than you think.”

  Nothing had been simple in so long, it was impossible to imagine. “Maybe it’s more complicated than you think.”

  She smiled. “Maybe the truth’s somewhere in the middle.”

  “Go,” he said. “Put Sam to bed.”

  “Will you be here when I come back downstairs?”

  He regarded her for a moment. Her gaze was steady on his. She was a brave woman. None of what she’d done to raise a child alone could have been easy. None of what she was doing now, flirting with his broken spirit, testing the boundary line where complicated bled into disastrous, was easy. But she was doing it.

  Years ago, at the lake, she’d been reckless. But he didn’t sense recklessness now. There was no desperation in her. There was calculation. She was marching forward, weighing what it meant to engage.

  He wanted to know her better. He wanted to know what she’d be like under fire.

  He wanted to know what she’d be like under him.

  Most of all, he wanted to be as honest with her as she’d been with him that first night when they’d kissed and she’d said, “If you don’t want to have sex with me, that’s fine. I get it. Just man up and say you don’t want this.”

  “What if ‘probably’ is the best I can do right now?”

  She smiled, such a full, generous smile that it cracked a sheet of ice right behind his ribs. “I can handle that.”

  She went upstairs, feeling tugged in two. One part of her needed to be there for Sam, craved the nightly ritual, sitting at the side of his bed, running her fingers through his too-long bangs, soothing her fingers over his forehead until his blinks got longer and longer, as they had when he was a newborn.

  The other part worried that Jake was a mirage. That if she let him out of her sight, he’d disappear again, as thoroughly and for as long as he had before. All day she’d waited for him to come to his grumpy asshole senses and retreat into the foxhole he’d crawled into when he’d run away from their kiss. She worried now, too, that he might flee. Vanish.

  Whatever was between them had not diminished in force or intensity in eight years. And Jake’s presence in their lives made too much sense, perfect sense, so it was hard for her to imagine not exploring what was between them. If it worked, if the chemistry sustained itself, if there was something real …

  Then what?

  She knew it was crazy to imagine he could somehow fill the hole he’d left. That he could come home to a family he’d never claimed. Never, for that matter, been offered.

  The question was, could she take what she wanted from him without falling into some half-dead fantasy she desperately needed to renounce?

  Her brain whispered caution, but her body bellowed, You need this. Drowned out common sense, and she knew, she knew, she’d let it. When the moment came back. If it came back.

  “Mommy, is Jake still here?”

  He lay in bed with his covers pulled up to his nose, only those blue-gray eyes—Jake’s eyes—peeking out.

  She sat on the edge of his bed and smoothed his hair back. “I think so.”

  “Is he going to sleep over?”

  She hesitated.

  “Probably not,” she hazarded. “I don’t know him very well. You have to be good friends with someone to have a sleepover.”

  Sex ed for seven-year-olds.

  “But you were good friends with Aaron and Aaron never slept over.”

  She touched his cheek, smooth and soft. “Oh, Sam.” She kissed his nose, then his forehead. Both cheeks. The feel of his cheek on her lips still had the power to make her teary. She wondered if that would ever change. Someday that cheek would be rough and stubbled. Would she still be able to recapture the feeling of kissing her baby? Would she still remember the satiny sensation of his face under the pad of her thumb?

  Time went fast. Eight years ago she’d been a teenager, choked with the feeling of the world wanting to get inside her. Determined to shake off parental control. Eight years from now, Sam would be a teenager, bent on making the same kind of trouble.

  “Just because a thing is true in one direction doesn’t mean it’s true in the other. You should always be good friends with someone before you have a sleepover, but that doesn’t mean that because you’re good friends with them you have to have a sleepover.”

  “But you didn’t answer why Aaron didn’t.”

  Smart boy. Damn.

  “Grammy and Grampy weren’t the biggest fans of sleepover parties,” she told him. Even though toward the end there, her father probably would have begged for her to have Aaron sleep over if it would make her stay. If it would somehow convince her to marry him and settle permanently in Fort Myers.

  Sam wrinkled his nose, as if piecing together the adult lessons he’d learned. “Could I have Jake for a sleepover? Because he’s my good friend. He came and helped me out today.”

  She laughed, but this line of conversation made her nervous. The excitement, the sizzle, of being with Jake had worn off, leaving her with damp, cooling panties and a mother’s anxiety. This situation was a dangling piano, waiting to fall. Jake had been totally up front with her from the beginning. He’d told her he was damaged, fearful. He had told her he was bad for her. Bad for Sam. He’d told her he wanted to go back to the fight if he could, told her flat out that he might not stick around. What kind of idiot wouldn’t listen to those warning signs?

  What kind of mother wouldn’t listen to them?

  “Sam, Jake is just a babysitter right now. Okay? Babysitters come and go. Like do you remember Maura, who watched you a couple of times? It was fun playing with her, but then she had to stop coming. It might be like that with Jake. He might come a few times, then we might get a different babysitter.”

  She tried to think about how that would translate for her. He might get laid and move on.

  She didn’t like that. Not at all.

  Maybe it would be better if he was gone when she went downstairs.

  She kissed Sam again, naming the body parts as she went. “Forehead. Cheek, cheek. Nose. Chin. I love you, buddy.”

  “G’night, Mommy.”

  “G’night, Sammy.”

  She pushed the edge of his comforter more securely between the bed and wall, then turned and went out, shutting off his light. At the top of the stairs, she hesitated.

  Do I hope he’s down there, or that he’s not?

  Her mind had no answer for her.

  She went downstairs. She could hear him pacing. There was only the slightest unevenness to his tread—as if his we
ight didn’t come down as heavily on the artificial leg as the natural one. Her heart contracted, not quite a leap, not quite a palpitation. Something wedged halfway between anticipation and fear.

  He was in the kitchen, wiping the table clean with a sponge. He set the sponge down. “I’m still here,” he said. There was a question in his tone and on his face.

  Something unfurled in her chest, like the release right before tears.

  Chapter 17

  She looked different. Relaxed. A little rumpled, as if from the mere proximity to a bed. He wanted to rumple her more.

  “Yeah. You’re still here.”

  They stood facing each other. He wasn’t sure where things went now. It had seemed more possible, before she went upstairs, to pick up again where they’d left off. Now complications loomed again.

  “Let me get you another beer.”

  He nodded, and she went to the fridge, pulled out two beers, and poured them. He could get used to the frosted stein thing. Maybe he should buy himself a set. Or just spend more time at her place.

  It was disturbingly easy to contemplate.

  “Couch?”

  They took their beers into the living room and sat at either end of the couch. She tucked herself into the corner in a way that was so wholly feminine, it made him want to smile.

  “Your kid’s cute,” he said, to give himself a little space.

  She shook her head and smiled. “He’s your kid, too.”

  “You did all the hard work.”

  The whole childbirth thing was an act of heroism, women humping thirty pounds on their fronts, down low where it had to beat the shit out of your lower back. Passing a bowling ball between their legs. And then, in Mira’s case, being a single mom. As for his own mom …

  She’d let him down. Sometimes. Often. Drunk when he’d needed her, cringing when he desperately wanted her to stand up for herself. But other times she’d hung in and shielded him as best she could and she’d given some normalcy to his childhood, cooking dinners and tucking him into bed and—when sober—helping him get his homework done, which was way more than he could say for his dad. And after his dad died, she’d gotten it together. Quit drinking, started managing one of the shops in the Oregon beach town where she lived. She’d rebuilt herself quite handily.

  Not a saint, but there was some heroism to her, too.

  She had a grandson she’d never met.

  “I’d love to take Sam down to the Oregon coast sometime, to meet my mom. Once we tell him. If we decide to tell him, that is.”

  “God,” she said. “I sort of forgot. I forgot this means Sam has a whole other family. You have siblings, too, right?”

  “Yeah. He should meet his aunt and uncle, too. I’ve got a sister in Vancouver, Washington, and a brother in Portland, who has two kids. So, a boy and a girl cousin.”

  “I don’t have brothers or sisters,” Mira said. “Sam doesn’t have cousins. Until now, I mean. Except, I guess, he’s had them all along, right? Only not known it. How weird is that?”

  “I’m going down tomorrow, and my brother and sister are coming to the beach house, but that’s pretty short notice. Maybe in a couple of weeks. You could come with us. The house is kind of crappy, but the setting is beautiful.”

  He imagined building a sand castle with Sam, with buckets and an army-issue shovel and a small U.S. flag to fly from the ramparts the way they had when they’d visited the Oregon coast as kids. He imagined walking on the beach with Mira at night while his mother kept watch over a sleeping Sam. Tending a bonfire on the beach, his arm tight around her, her face lit by the flickering flames, eyes aglow.

  “We’d have to tell him the truth, though, right?” Her expression was deeply wary.

  “Yeah. When we’re ready.”

  Mira pulled the beer mug up to her breasts, where he wanted to bury his face, and regarded him for a moment. He felt the question before it came, a rush of dread in his stomach.

  “I don’t know if it’s a really bad question, and you don’t have to answer it, but will you tell me what happened to your leg?”

  He wanted not to answer at all. He wanted to shake his head, reject the question like a pitcher brushing off a catcher’s signals. Damn straight it’s a really bad question.

  “I don’t tell this story much.”

  “You don’t have to,” she said again.

  But they both knew he’d tell it. She was leading him along, tugging him deeper. One bargain with the devil after another, each feeling negotiable because it was only a baby step, until he would realize that the hillside had slid out from under him, that there was no terra firma left.

  Of course there had never been terra firma. Not since. There were only these baby steps—somewhere. Into the dark.

  “We were on our way to a training exercise. We were supposed to teach some Afghani soldiers how to storm an empty building. That’s mostly what we were doing there, trying to train the Afghanis to fight their own war. We were heading north toward Kandahar. A bunch of kids blocked our progress. Blocked the road.”

  He couldn’t tell the story without seeing it. The rough surface you could barely call a road, the skinny kids in their motley mix of traditional and Western clothes, the movie advancing, herky-jerky, slow mo, then in a vivid forward rush, the mind’s collection of images before trauma. Dust on everything, in everything, all the time, the scent of that dust, like ash and metal, mingling with diesel exhaust. The silence that fell in the truck, five men collectively registering danger.

  “My gut was screaming at me that it was an ambush, that something was wrong. I wasn’t driving. One of my guys was driving.”

  Mike had been driving. Mike, who should have been on a plane home. Who would have been on a plane home if Jake had been able to do what needed to be done, if he’d been able to man up.

  Mike’s home was barely an hour from here, in DuPont. Mike’s wife lived there, still.

  “You talk to any guy who’s fought in Afghanistan or Iraq, he’s learned to read kids. Kids are a barometer in unconventional warfare. Like if you’re in a village, and it’s totally deserted of all kid life, you know something’s wrong. Probably an attack coming. The villagers know, because they’ve heard it through the grapevine, because someone’s got ties to the Taliban, so they make all the kids come inside, out of danger. The kids vanish, and it’s like when the birds stop singing before a storm. Too quiet.”

  Like the inside of the truck. The only sound Mike’s breathing, too fast. Jake had willed it to slow down. You’re okay, dude. You told me you were okay.

  Even now he was doing it. Willing Mike to calm down, to focus, to hang in. As if he could change the past.

  He was getting too far inside his head. He was supposed to be telling Mira his story. He made himself come back out again, made himself see her, the beer mug snuggled to her chest, her eyes big, hair a little wild, something he could smooth down. Something he could make wilder.

  The thought was steadying. An anchor to the here and now.

  “Plus you have to be careful not to get suckered by kids. Because the other side will use them as bait, use them to trigger IEDs.

  “These kids, they blocked the road. I told my guys it felt wrong. They agreed. I told one of my guys to get out of the truck and get them out of the way, that we needed to move and we needed to move fast. He started to scatter the kids. I saw one had a cell phone, which is how they detonate IEDs usually. I screamed at Mike, who was driving, to go, go, go—and that was the last thing I remember.”

  Her eyes were big. The softness in them was killing him, splitting his tough skin like gutting a fish. “Other guys were injured?”

  “Some. Percussion injuries—busted eardrums, a lot of shrapnel. The driver was killed.”

  The driver, he’d said. Michael J. Watson. He’d given his full name, like that, before he’d shaken Jake’s hand on the first day of Ranger training.

  “God.”

  That was all. Just “God.” If he were the kind
of guy to see stuff this way, he’d have said it was almost like a single-word prayer. And she was clutching that beer so hard that her fingers were white against the glass.

  It hadn’t been as hard to tell her as he’d expected it to be. Of course, he hadn’t told her the whole story. But he couldn’t go any further. Down this path were the mistakes that had gotten Mike killed and cost Jake a leg, a calling, a life. Down this path was self-flagellation and a dark night, and he was pretty sure that wasn’t where either of them wanted this to go. He was pretty sure both of them had better ideas for how to spend this evening.

  He sure as hell did. He wanted to kiss her stupid again. He wanted to find out if all her skin tasted the same as her throat and her cleavage. He wanted to find out if her noises would get deeper and more guttural when she was splayed out under him on a couch, on a bed. What she would cry out when she came.

  “Put the beer down,” he said.

  Chapter 18

  She did him one better. She set her beer on a coaster on the coffee table and crawled across the couch to kiss him. He put his arms around her and groaned into her mouth, and his hands were grabby, picking at her clothes as if he couldn’t wait to get them off her. She had seen in his face that he couldn’t talk about what had happened any more, and she understood that now he needed a way to lose himself. She wanted to be that way for him. She wouldn’t have thought she had any kind of savior complex, any need to drown someone’s pain, but the thought of him unburdening himself in that particular, visceral way, inside her, lit her up. She could feel lines of heat moving through her limbs, radiating from her core.

  He stretched out under her and she luxuriated over him, settling herself into the warmth of his body, finding that place where she could grind against him. Aaron had been a good size but she’d remembered Jake being bigger, and he was. There was enough of him that she figured that had probably been a factor in why they hadn’t been able to go through with it at the lake. Even now, well past virginity, she’d have a tough time handling him. She’d be at that thin line between full and too much, and she knew—knew—it would take her someplace she’d never been.