Toward the Sound of Chaos

by Carmen Jenner

  I close the door as Spencer frees himself from the belt and Ellie stomps on the gas. The car rockets out of the drive and Spencer’s little hands beat the back windshield, his face red and howling for me as they disappear from view.

  I stalk up to the garden path and kick over the giant ceramic pot I’d bought for her yard. It lands with a satisfying crack and breaks apart.

  Elle was right to walk away; we both know it. It’s not safe for her here. I’m not safe.

  I might have sworn to protect them from Jimmy and from anyone else who might try to do them harm, but who’s gonna protect them from me?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Jake

  I know I shouldn’t be here, soaking wet, watching through the windows and hiding out in Ellie’s backyard during a rainstorm. Hell, if anyone needs an RO out against them it’s me, but I promised to keep the Masons safe, and that’s not an oath I intend to break. I hunker down into the bushes, miserable and sodden to the bone, though it’s certainly not the worst position I’ve ever found myself in. I didn’t bring a coat with me—didn’t think I’d need one in the Alabama heat—but the weather we’re having isn’t so much seasonal as it is caused by a hurricane off the gulf coast.

  The light in Elle’s bedroom switches on. The blinds are drawn, so I can’t see anything aside from her silhouette, but even that’s enough to have my dick twitching inside my jeans. She begins removing her clothes. I glance away, but I can’t keep my eyes off of her for long. I know it ain’t right, yet still my gaze follows the glide of the negligee as it skims her body like a second skin.

  Jesus Christ she’s beautiful.

  Before I can gather my wits about me, I move toward her window, my feet swallowed by the wet ground. I can’t be here. I shouldn’t be watchin’ her like this so I don’t know how I wind up on the front porch, banging on the door to her salon for her to let me in. One by one, the lights flicker on in the house as she moves towards me. She pulls back the blind and her shoulders fall as she glances at me. She opens the door, and I don’t give her time to speak. I slide my hand through her hair and pull her to me. She’s surprised, that much is obvious by the way she stares up at me with her gorgeous whiskey eyes.

  I lean my forehead against hers. “I know I shouldn’t be here. I know I’m no good for you.”

  “Jake—”

  “Just listen.” I shake my head. “I’m probably gonna break your heart, but it’ll break mine if I don’t get to kiss you just once.”

  I’m a desperate man. In my grasp is the only thing I’ve wanted in as long as I can remember. I’m holdin this woman’s heart in my hands, and I’m tryin’ so damn hard not to crush it. I should leave her be, but I can’t.

  Instead, I press my lips to hers. Her mouth opens, and her tongue moves between my lips, tangling with my own. Her hands slide through my hair. I groan into her mouth and palm her ass, lifting her so she can lock her legs around my hips. I stumble backward into the closed door, the wall, and then finally I get a hold of myself and march over to the washer. I sit her on top of it as I cup her face with my hands and devour her mouth.

  I can tell she’s trying to keep from touching me. Her arms are wrapped around my shoulders, but her hands don’t caress my neck or back. A part of me feels the loss of that, and another part relishes the fact that she already knows my triggers so well.

  I grind myself against her soft panties, and she breaks our kisses to moan softly into my ear. I wish I could just slip inside her, release my cock from my pants, yank her panties out of the way and bury myself right to the very hilt, but I know that ain’t the way you treat a woman like this. She’s been hurt before; she’s felt the touch of a man who wasn’t kind, and she deserves more than a quick fuck on top of the washer in her empty salon. If I could just stop kissing her, stop touching her, I could tell her that. That she deserves more than Jimmy, more than me, more than some scared Marine who hasn’t let a woman touch him in eight years, and one whose mind has been ravaged, eaten away like acid by death, blood, and war.

  If I could just move away out of her grasp, I could explain this to her. I could show Ellie her worth with my words and my heart, because it counts for nothin’ if you can’t tell a woman that she’s the most precious thing you’ll ever hold in your hands. I know I’m not worthy of a woman like this, because how could someone so perfect desire someone as ruined and ugly as me?

  “Mamma?”

  I leap back from Ellie and cover my mouth, angling my body away so the kid won’t see the erection straining at my jeans. Shit. I shouldn’t have come here. He’s gonna have questions that neither one of us are able to answer right now.

  “What are you doing out of bed, Spence?”

  “I heard a noise.” I glance at the kid who rubs his fists against tired eyes. “What’s Jake Tucker doing here? Hey, is Nuke here too?”

  “No, Spence, he’s at home. I was just out for a run and came by to make sure you and your mamma were alright.”

  “Well, what are y’all doin’ on the washing machine?”

  “Er . . .” I shoot a glance at Elle, hoping she’s a fast thinker, but she’s busy staring at the bulge in my pants while she bites her lip. Damn it, that’s just gonna make it even bigger. “Elle, you wanna tell your boy here what we we’re doing?”

  “Huh?” she says, her brows drawn together in confusion. “Oh, um . . . we were testing its strength, see? Jake bet me it couldn’t hold my weight.”

  “Well it can,” Spencer tells me, matter-of-factly. “Mamma says I ain’t allowed to sit up there because that’s her special place.”

  Ellie blushes all over.

  “That so?”

  “Uh huh,” the kid continues. “No one’s allowed in the salon when Mamma’s doin’ the laundry.”

  “Okay, Spencer,” Elle says impatiently. “Let’s get you back to bed.”

  “But I wanna stay up with Jake.”

  “Sorry, kiddo, I gotta get back and feed Nuke, and you best listen to your mamma now, you hear?”

  “Yes sir.” He salutes me with a yawn, and my heart plummets to the very bottom of my gut. I pray to God that this kid never makes it to Marine boot camp. I couldn’t stand to see him hurt by this lifestyle. I don’t want him giving up his freedom to fight a war that will ruin him, if he even comes back at all. I don’t want him ending up like me.

  “Please don’t run.” Ellie pins me with a look as she passes. I reach out and slide my fingertips over hers in the lightest of touches.

  “I don’t think I can run from you anymore.”

  I watch her walk Spence down the hall. If I was a better man, I’d walk away. I have nothing to offer the likes of her. Nothing but heartache and the demons I fight in my head, and she deserves so much more than that.

  I shouldn’t be here. But I am. I kissed her, and maybe it was selfish of me and stupid of her to let me in after what she saw last night. Maybe we both just got tired of fightin’. All I know is I’ve spent long enough being a prisoner to the Taliban, to the demons in my head, to my anger, and my grief, and to the feelings I’ve been tryin’ to hide from her. I’m awfully tired of tryin’ to break free from all of it, so I give up.

  I give in.

  I surrender.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Jake

  I left Elle’s last night shortly after she’d finished putting Spencer back to bed. I was soaked through from the rain and I didn’t want to ruin her furniture, but more than that, I didn’t trust myself not to take things further. I’ve fallen hard and fast for Elle but now that I’ve tasted her on my lips, held her in my arms and known the touch of her hands, I am afraid of fucking it all up. Ellie Mason isn’t a woman you screw; she’s a woman you make love to. She is the kind of woman you worship for hours between the sheets. She is that rare gem that if you’re lucky enough to find, you grab onto and hold on like hell. So with a lingering kiss at her door, I said goodnight.

  Walkin’ away from her was the last thing I wanted, but it was t
he smart thing to do—the right thing. What happened at my house—the screamin’, the nightmares—is the kind of thing she could expect every night if I took her as my wife, or even just as a girlfriend, and I needed her to be aware of that.

  Fuck, what the hell was I thinking? I’d never wanted a wife before. I’d considered myself a career Marine; the idea of leaving a wife and kid behind each time I deployed had been my worst nightmare. With every deployment, I saw the buddies in my platoon go through it, and it was some kind of hell that haunted them all those long days and nights in the desert. And then upon my return home, I saw the haunted looks in the eyes of the widows unfortunate enough to be burying half-empty caskets and handed neatly folded flags in honor of their husband’s service.

  I had no wife or children to survive me. My parents were gone, died long ago in a car accident, and my granddaddy and grandmamma had raised me. Mawmaw passed from throat cancer the year I joined the Marines, and I’m told Pawpaw died from a heart attack the day those service men came knockin’ on his front door to give him word of me being a prisoner of war.

  No one would have been left to mourn me if I’d died over there in that desert. The Tucker bloodline ends with me, and I’m okay with that. When my service had finally ended, I’d come home to an empty house, yet it had been bursting so full of all my demons and all my guilt that I’d never felt alone. Miserable, but not alone. And though this town had given me a wide berth because I was the face of a war that made them uncomfortable, I’d never felt the need to put roots down somewhere else. I had roots, and they might’ve been severed somewhere in that desert, but I’ve grown new ones and buried them right here in my granddaddy’s house. I’ve been alone a long time, but this woman makes me want more. Still, wanting and knowing how to handle more are two very different things. And it isn’t gonna be easy. I know that, and I guess Ellie probably knows that, too.

  I lace my running shoes and stretch, though not as long as my physiotherapist would like me to I’m sure. I don’t bother leashing Nuke—that way he don’t have a lead pulling at his neck and suffocating him as we run. He’s wearing his vest though, and I tuck his lead in my back pocket to attach once we hit the duck pond. Those ducks have been through enough these last few weeks without Nuke chasing ’em.

  We start out slow, one foot in front of the other. I ignore the ache in my left side, the way my T-shirt sticks to me after just a few minutes, and the wheezing coming from not just my lungs, but Nuke’s too. By the time I round the corner and hit the path to North Beach Road, I’m struck by the sunrise over the gulf. Not its beauty, or stillness, but the way it reminds me of the first glimpse I’d had of morning when those Green Berets had pulled me from that dark hole in Afghanistan.

  Every muscle in my body grinds to a halt as I sink into the sand the way I had then, my body too weak to carry me, too fucked up from the torture and from being kept in a room so small I couldn’t stretch my legs out properly. An anguished cry rips from my chest and frightens a flock of nearby birds. They take flight, and for a brief second as their wingbeats sound in my ears I hear the thump, thump, thump, of the chopper airlifting us out.

  “Jake?”

  Shit. Not here. Not like this. I don’t want her to see me like this. Not after last night. She’s already seen too much.

  I brush my hand across my cheek and I’m surprised to find moisture there.

  “Jake, are you okay?”

  I clear my throat. “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  I sit my ass back in the sand and scrub my hand over my stubble. I can’t talk to her about this stuff, but I’m tired of runnin’ every time shit gets hard, so I decide to change the subject. “Where’s Spencer?”

  She gives me a hard look, her eyes tellin’ me she knows exactly what I’m doing, but she lets it drop and sits down beside me. “They moved his physiotherapy appointments to Mondays before school.”

  “How did that go over?”

  “About as well as you might think.” She shrugs. “He’s there now, so that’s all that matters. They don’t like me to be in the room; they feel having me to fall back on might hinder his progress.”

  “And you let them kick you out?”

  She huffs. “Well, I didn’t go without a fight, but as much as I hate the idea, it’s important for him to know that I’m not always going to be around. One day he’s going to grow up and leave home, and I’m not doing him any favors by wrapping him in cotton wool.”

  “Is that you talking or his pediatrician?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Them, mostly. I understand what they’re saying; it’s just so hard to learn to let go, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “So, you wanna talk about it?”

  I grab a fistful of sand and let it sift through my fingers the way Spencer does. “No. I really don’t.”

  “Okay then, you wanna talk about last night?”

  “Which part exactly?”

  “All of it. What you were doin’ standing at my door in the pouring rain, that kiss? Where we go from here?”

  I frown. “Where do you want to go from here?”

  “I asked you first.” She grins and nudges my shoulder with her own. I don’t flinch at her touch. A part of me wants to pull her closer, but I don’t know if she wants … well, I don’t know what the hell she wants. I certainly have no idea what she sees in a hot mess like me.

  “What are we, in junior high?” I smirk.

  “Okay, clearly we’re not discussing that subject this mornin’, either.” She sighs and gets to her feet. “You wanna take a walk with me, Jake Tucker?”

  I stare at her outstretched hand. “I’ve never been much good at relationships or at opening up.”

  “I see that.” Elle jams her hands in the pockets of her jeans. “But I’ve never been good at taking no for an answer.”

  “Yeah, I see that about you.” I laugh, feeding her own words back to her as I climb to my feet. Even though walkin’ through town right now with everyone starin’ is the last thing I want, the smile she gives me makes it all worth it. “Alright, I’ll walk you. But you should know, you have terrible taste in men.”

  Her shoulders rise and fall with the quiet chuckle that escapes her. “I really do.”

  “Terrible taste.” I shake my head and clip Nuke’s lead to his collar, and together we walk toward the town center and the Pier Park Fountain, the town’s pride and joy. There’s an unusual amount of people gathered around it for this early in the morning.

  Elle’s soft hand slips into mine, and I snatch my hand away as if her skin was a branding iron. “Sorry.” I clear my throat. “It’s gonna take some time to get used to that.”

  She offers me a tight smile. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have—”

  “No.” I tentatively reach out for her hand, and she slides her fingers between mine. I’m so used to hiding the disfigured monstrosities from everyone that it feels odd to have another person holdin’ onto them. I turn and face her. “I don’t ever want you to apologize for touchin’ me, Elle.”

  The high-pitched wail of a police siren interrupts the hush of morning by the bay, and I glance over toward the commotion. Joggers and couples out for an early walk on the pier crowd around the fountain to see what all the fuss is about. I pull Elle closer to the commotion. The throng is thick, but through it I catch glimpses of the fountain, and water bubbling from it that’s red as the roses in the garden surrounding it.

  I blink. Flashes of my past, of blood bubbling out of the mouths of my men, crimson spraying my neck and face as I knelt on a thick Afghan rug, my best friend, Gunner, alive just seconds before, his body now slumped on the carpet and bleeding from a golf-ball-sized hole in the back of his head. Nothing I’d experienced in my nine months with the Taliban had ever been as horrifying as that. One second my buddy, a man I’d met in boot camp, and who I’d deployed with on four tours, was alive, and the next his skull was blown open from a single bullet.

>   Nuke pushes his muzzle against my thigh and whines.

  “Jake?” Ellie’s eyes are wide with worry. “Where did you go just now?”

  “Nowhere good.” My voice trembles, and I wipe a sheen of sweat from my brow. “Come on, you don’t need to see this.”

  “What’s going on?” Elle pushes forward into the crowd, and in the swarm of people, I lose my grip on her hand.

  I dive into the throng. Even though the press of so many bodies makes me want to curl into a fetal position, I can’t let her see that. Sweat prickles down my spine, my skin itches, and my head screams at me to get out, but I can’t because I have to protect her from this. I scan the scene; three officers urge the crowd back, blood spatters on the ground are smudged by the shuffle of our feet, and there, lying face down in the fountain, the one turning the water as red as the roses around us thanks to an exit wound in the back of his skull from what looks like an assault rifle, is Ellie’s husband.

  Her hands cover her mouth. Her face is frozen in horror, and a deep, keening cry tears from her throat. I grab hold of her and pull her into me, turning her head away from the sight. The words start as a whisper, but are soon so loud it appears as if they’re being shouted at the two of us:

  Gunned down.

  Husband.

  Marine.

  Affair.

  I cover her ears, as if I could protect her from the vitriol that spews from their mouths as if it were gospel, but I can’t help her un-hear it or shield her from the disgust in their gazes, so I take her hand and I drag her out of the throng.

  When we’re back at her car, I put her in the passenger seat, getting the strangest sense of déjà vu, and then I drive her to Paws for Cause where I tell her to stay put with Nuke in the car. She doesn’t even nod; she’s catatonic. I can’t say I blame her. It’s one thing to see a dead body—it’s another entirely to know that body intimately. She had a child with this man. Whatever he was after that no longer matters because the man who fathered her son is dead.

  Inside, I tell Olivia about Elle’s husband. She’s halfway to the car before I can finish the sentence. After a lot of tears—Olivia’s not Elle’s—she offers to pick up Spencer from his appointment and keep him with her at the shelter for the day.