by Jess Bentley
“Hey… It’s not like that. It was never like that. I… I love you, Arie.”
She shakes her head again. “I don’t think you know what love is, Pierce. But maybe you’ll learn. One day.”
With that, she gets up from the table and walks out of the coffee shop, without so much as a backward glance. And I’m left sitting alone, consumed by an emptiness I didn’t even know I was capable of feeling.
I let her walk away, and I have a sinking suspicion I will regret it for the rest of my life.
Arie
New York City, 2014
Since I left Pierce sitting in that coffee shop on Fifth Avenue a month ago, there’s not a day gone by that I don’t feel sick about it. It’s not that I didn’t love him, that I don’t love him, but after that night in the hotel… there’s no chance he’s going to grow up. He’ll just never be the kind of man I need him to be, and I can’t change that. I can’t force him to take responsibility for his own life.
Mr. Cochran apparently still thinks there’s hope for him, making him join the SEALs. I can’t picture it. Pierce was never good at taking instructions, or advice, or responding to any sort of authority, so the idea of him surviving six months of extreme training is above and beyond anything I can imagine. Since it worked out really well for his little brother Logan, I’m not entirely surprised that Mr. Cochran hoped it would do the same for Pierce. I know what Logan went through during his time in California, and it was no joke.
The truth is, since the hotel, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Pierce. I don’t exactly miss him. The last few years of our relationship felt kind of like we were on auto-pilot. Neither of knew how to get out, so we just kept going, hoping the other one would do something to save us. Even if it’s over, and the humiliation of the hotel room is fading, I’m not sure that the lingering haze of our relationship will ever fully leave me.
It’s ten in the morning, and I’m sitting behind the counter at my Uncle’s auto shop. Nobody’s called yet today, and there’s no simple work like oil changes to keep me busy, so my mind is obsessing over what happened with Pierce. I’d like to figure out something to do to keep my mind off him and to help my uncle and cousins keep this place afloat, but I look around and there’s nothing. It’s a tough city to succeed in at the best of times and my family has always struggled.
The only reason that I could even afford to go to the same high school as the Cochran boys was because I got in as scholarship student. Then, while Pierce was off at Columbia studying, I was working three jobs to afford night classes at a tech school. Now, at the ripe age of twenty-four years with no degree, here I am swimming in student loan debt, spending my days arguing with people over coupons for lube jobs.
Not to mention my boyfriend is gone.
This is not how I imagined my life would turn out.
I’m totally lost in thought when my Uncle Sal walks into the lobby from the garage, wiping the sweat away from his forehead with a grumble.
“Hot as hell today, huh, Arie Belle?”
I nod, leaning into the desk fan to try and clear some of the nausea that has been plaguing me since the summer heat set in. I seem to have lost my tolerance for it this year.
“It feels worse than usual this year. And earlier than usual too. I just want to go jump in the Hudson, sewage and all,” I say as I wave an order for parts in his direction. He walks up and takes it, then eyes me suspiciously.
“You look a bit green, Arie. Are you sure you don’t have the flu? Should you go home? I can call your Aunt Marie down to cover the phones.”
I shake my head. “I’ll stop by the clinic in the drug store on the way home, just to get checked out. They don’t charge as much as a walk-in and I’m… between insurance policies at the moment.”
Uncle Sal frowns and reaches into his jeans pocket, coming back with a fifty-dollar bill. I try to shove it away, but he won’t let me. “We both know I don’t pay you enough, Arie. The least I can do is slip you some cash to see a doctor. Working in this sauna has probably given you heatstroke.”
I cross over from behind the reception desk and give Uncle Sal a hug. But the minute he squeezes me, I feel my stomach start to roll, and I run for the wastebasket, where I empty the contents of my belly in one swift hurl. When I turn around, I’m not sure if my cheeks are burning from fever or from embarrassment. Uncle Sal just shakes his head and points toward the door.
“Would you get out of here, kid? Please? I’m calling Marie. Go to the doctor!”
I grab my bag and squeeze his hand as I walk out onto Avenue C with an achy sigh. The heat outside is no better, and the buildings are blocking any airflow, so it’s even more oppressive on the city streets. I love New York, but sometimes… I wish I could pack my things and move to a ranch in Wyoming. Sure, you can’t get a decent Pad Thai at three in the morning, but at least there is always fresh air.
After walking six blocks to the pharmacy I’m informed that there’s a two hour wait. Since I don’t have a smart phone, unlike the rest of even the most destitute New Yorkers, I pick up an eight-month old magazine to pass the time. The celebrity gossip is as new to me as it would have been when this thing first came out. The time creeps by slowly. It feels like a lot longer than two hours before I’m finally called to the cubicle. I sit down nervously, my stomach pitching like I’m on a boat. The nurse practitioner looks at me with bored eyes and taps her pencil against the desk.
“What are your symptoms?” she asks.
“I think I have heat stroke or something. The last few weeks, I’m dizzy and nauseous all the time. Headaches. It’s not debilitating or anything, but I’ve thrown up a few times.” I scrunch up my face, trying to remember. “And thirsty. Oh my God, I’m thirsty. All the tiem.”
The nurse twirls the pencil around in her fingers. “When was the date of your last period?”
“What? Oh, I don’t… I don’t know. Last month I guess? The month before? Honestly, I’ve had a lot going on, and they’ve never been that regular. I guess I haven’t been keeping track. But why would that matter if I have heat stroke?”
The nurse gets up for her chair with a weary sigh and disappears down one of the aisles of the pharmacy. She comes back a moment later holding a box, and she hands it to me without a word. It’s a pregnancy test. I look at it nervously.
“I don’t need this! There’s no way...” I bite my lip. It was only one time.
“Have you had sexual intercourse recently?”
I feel my shoulders inadvertently slump. “Well. Yes. But…”
“Did you use protection of any kind? Are you on birth control?”
My mind starts spinning. I find that I suddenly incapable of understanding words. Where am I? What is protection? Birth control? Shit. She sees what must be an expression of pure panic on my face and softens a little.
“Honey, just take this and go in the bathroom. Bring it back out to me when you’re done. When we know the results, we’ll go from there.”
I take the box from her with a shaking hand and wobble my way to the bathroom at the back of the pharmacy. There’s a dick drawn on the wall, and I stare at it while I take the test. I keep staring at the wall for a long time after that. I’m not even sure how long I’m in there. Without looking, I shove the little cap back on the pregnancy test stick and hide it inside the box. When I finally get up and exit, the door to the bathroom slams a little too loud. The nurse looks up at me. It looks like she’s been drawing doodles on an old prescription pad, but I can’t be sure. She gestures to me, and I walk towards her. It feels like a mile instead of a few feet — that’s how unsteady my feet are. The queasy feeling in my stomach could be from anxiety. But it could be from pregnancy. I could look at the test, but I don’t. If I don’t look, maybe it won’t be real. Instead, I put the box down in front of the nurse, who sighs heavily.
She takes the box from me and points back at the chair.
“Have a seat. It will only be a couple more minutes. We should wait
the full three minutes to be sure.”
I don’t hear anything but the second hand ticking away on her watch. Time is moving in slow motion, and the bottomless swamp of chaos that is my life only seems to be getting deeper and more overwhelming with each passing second. Finally, I hear her tapping the desk with her pencil, trying to draw my attention back to the present.
“Honey, the test is positive. You’re going to need to make an appointment with an OB in the next day or so to confirm with bloodwork, but given your symptoms and what you’ve told me, I think it’s pretty likely you’re pregnant.”
I’ve had sex one time and one time only, and my luck, I get pregnant. Fuck. I should have known. I should have thought. All I wanted in that moment was him. And here I am.
Pregnant.
Pregnant.
The word is the last thing ringing in my ears before the spinning in my head becomes too much.
When did I eat? Was it this morning? Last night?
Bile rises in my throat, mixing with the cold, metallic taste of fear. I close my eyes to steady myself, but it doesn’t work.
My vision turns to black, and I pass out, collapsing onto the scratchy pharmacy carpet.
Pierce
Location: Classified, 2015
The rotor blade on The Nightstalker helicopter escorting us to our destination is humming quietly above, and I’m trying like hell to focus on the mission at hand. We were given almost no details before leaving our installation in Mina Salman, Bahrain. We were only told to prepare for a covert reconnaissance mission with limited human interaction. We were also outfitted with our underwater demolition equipment and given a dossier on hydrographic reconnaissance under an unnamed arms manufacturing facility. All of this adds up to mean we’re about to get into some crazy shit.
I am secretly grateful that Force Master Chief Wallace, my dad’s buddy from his days at Cornell, made it his personal mission at BUD/S to kick my ass.
I hadn’t been in Coronado for more than six hours when Wallace cornered me in the mess hall and told me he was going to break me like a horse. I fought him like the bastard I was, but by the time we got to Hell Week, half way through Phase One of physical conditioning, he could have saddled me up and ridden me like a pony. I tried to quit on at least seven different occasions. I was pretty fucking close to giving up when, after four hours of sleep, we were forced to lay on our backs in freezing cold water until it felt like we were going to die of hypothermia. But Wallace told me if I could survive Phase 1, I could survive anything. I kept that in my mind, pressing forward, keeping on. I was changing. I needed to change. For my dad. My mom. For Arie. Wallace said it was time for me to stop being a selfish loser. To prove I was more than the sum of my privileged parts, and commit to a greater whole.
In the middle of the shivering, so hard I thought I was going to die, something clicked. Wallace was right. Only a fourth of the people that come into BUD/S actually finish, and I wasn’t about to scrub out. I wasn’t going to quit or fail at something again, like so many other times in my life. After that, the next seventeen weeks flew by, as I trained in undersea and land warfare, learning how to engage in hand-to-hand combat underwater, or how to rappel silently in a small brush of trees. At the end of it all, I was standing in front of my friends and family in my Navy Uniform, graduating from the program and meeting the teammates who would have my ass in the SEALs for years to come.
The next day, I was given my assignment. I’ve been bouncing from location to location since then. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been successful at. Sometimes I think it could be the thing that changes me for good, that leads me back to Arie. But that’s all wishful thinking. The humiliation on her face is still crystal clear in my mind after all this time.
Tonight, I have no idea where we are. Once we left the airspace above Bahrain, we could have been anywhere. They usually don’t give us full mission details until we’re airborne, but tonight seems especially covert, which means it’s likely a high-stakes situation. Our mission leader, Daniels, is focusing exclusively on his briefing packet, and isn’t paying any attention to us, so we’re all trying to get in the right headspace for whatever may be lying ahead. There is no question that we’re nervous, but part of being a SEAL is shoving down those nerves and choosing instead to run on pure adrenaline. At the moment, I’m having trouble accessing the adrenaline, so it helps when Daniels finally looks up and addresses us.
“All right, guys. Time to rally. ETA to destination, ten minutes. We’re going to enter the facility from the water underneath. Giles, you’re on demolition. You’ll be blowing the gate blocking our entrance. Minimal noise if we can help it. Want to stay as stealth as possible. Cochran, you’re on mapping. Coordinates have already been uploaded to your tracking device. Once Giles blows the entrance, we’re going to follow you in. You have ten minutes to full prep. I’m sorry for the last minute debriefing, but nothing about this was planned.”
Giles straightens her shoulders and leans forward. “Sir, what exactly are we after tonight?”
Daniels turns around his tablet and shows us a photo of a well-dressed man standing next to a fireplace. He’s also American, which gives all of us pause. You can feel the mood in the Nightstalker change.
“This is Foreign Minister Archibald. According to our intel, Archibald has been using his position as a government ambassador to broker arms deals with some very bad people. All you need to know is that it is our job to get into this manufacturing plant and stop him from completing his latest deal. If we can snatch and grab without running into anyone else, all the better. If not, so be it. But our mission is to get Archibald, and bring him back to the good old USA to answer for his crimes. Understood?”
“Sir, yes sir!” we all respond in unison. Everyone goes quiet again as we begin to read over the details of the plan. Odds are good that this plan has been carefully staged down to the last possible eventuality, but it’s not normal for us to be kept out of the loop until the final moments like this. That makes me uncomfortable. But when the helicopter begins hovering over the water a solid half mile from our destination, my feelings don’t matter anymore. It’s time to suit up, jump out of the idling bird, and swim the rest of the way to the arms facility, all the while hoping no one sees us approach.
The swimming is the easy part, despite the chop of the water around us. We stay in a tight formation, ignoring the burning in our lungs, in our muscles, and focusing only on doing our job. After what feels like an hour, we can see the base of the massive building start to come in to view. Giles gestures for us to hang back as she swims onward to set up the underwater charges. Once she gets them in place, she’ll have less than a minute to swim away as fast as her legs can carry her, and this is after the distance we’ve just swum to get to the gate.
Everything happens in an instant. All at once, Giles is swimming double-time back in our direction, and a billowing cloud of water chases after her. All we can do is keep our fingers crossed that the gate isn’t equipped with an alarm. In a single-file line, we swim through the hole that has been blown in the gate, and one-by-one, surface, removing our re-breathers. I reach into the pack on my back and pull out my mapping device. It starts blinking gently, showing us the way through the underground vents we are currently in and up into the room where, apparently, the meet is going down.
I gesture for everyone to follow me forward once we’re properly armed, and we inch through the knee-deep water, step-by-step, until we come to a set of stairs leading up. The door blocking the stairwell is locked, but our newest recruit, Morrison, is on it in a flash, using a handheld blowtorch to destroy the lock. I pull back in front, and we make our way up the stairs, down a series of dimly lit corridors. Everything is quiet as we approach what the map tells me is the main holding area for the weapons facility.
In fact, it’s too quiet.
I barely have time to raise my hand to let the rest of the team know that I want them to retreat before gunfire descends on us from above.
It’s an ambush, and whoever gave us the intel for this mission was badly prepared, because Archibald is nowhere in sight. Instead, we are surrounded by men we can’t see, shooting automatic weapons at us faster than we can get out of the way. In my peripheral, I see our second-in-command Amari fall to the ground, and Giles grabs his arms and drags him back into the last corridor we exited. Morrison gives up any guise of stealth and begins yelling for air support, when out of the corner of my eye, I see Archibald, sneaking around a corner and out a back door with a briefcase in his hand.
My instincts kick in, and I make a move to chase after him. Whatever is going on here, I refuse to walk away from this clusterfuck empty-handed. But I don’t make more than a few steps away from my team when I collapse in a heap on the cold cement floor. Nothing makes sense; I can’t seem to separate one flashing light from another. The Nightstalker is outside the building now, firing directly into the catwalk above us where our attackers are stationed. But why am I on the ground?
Why can’t I feel my leg?
Why can’t I move?
The last thing I see before I lapse into unconsciousness is Morrison’s face, and his voice shouting at me, “We’re going to get you out of here man! Just hold tight! Giles! Get me something to stop the bleeding or he’s going to lose the leg before we can get him on the chopper!”
After that, everything is dark.
Arie
New York City, 2016
It’s four in the morning, and I wake up to the sound of crying. Again. Except this time, it isn’t Chloe, my little girl. My own tears stir me from a miserable, nightmare-fueled sleep. For the last view months, I’ve been dealing with horrible stomach and back pains that leave me curled up in a ball on the floor. At first I thought it was the stomach flu, but then I started losing weight and the pains just wouldn’t go away. It’s been steadily getting worse, but between trying to take care of Chloe and working at the garage full-time, I’ve done my best to ignore it.
