by Myke Cole
—
Schweitzer bounded up the steps three at a time, heedless of how the thumping of his boots might wake the neighbors. When the corpsman had come to him in the squad bay, Schweitzer simply shook his head, hoping his eyes would convey his need. The corpsman understood. He made some marks on a piece of paper, tore off the yellow carbon copy, and handed it to Schweitzer. “Welcome back,” was all he said, before moving on to check Ahmad. Schweitzer had looked numbly down at the yellow paper. FULLY MEDICALLY READY, it read.
He’d tucked it in his pocket and headed to the armorer to stow his gear.
Schweitzer fought impatience as he went through the necessaries: shower and a fresh uniform, the clunky, slow-as-molasses computer system used to file his report, the last-minute tasks and questions, the traffic on the drive home, inexplicable given the odd hour.
It was three hours before he was finally on his way up the stairs to home. He turned the key roughly in the lock in his excitement, making the old door creak as he opened it before he remembered the late hour. Sarah and Patrick would be asleep. He slowed down, but too late, he could hear Sarah stirring from the bed in their loft above the living room, surrounded by her paintings. Moonlight would be filtering in through the huge bay window overlooking the Chickahominy River.
Patrick’s room was off to the side on this floor, but the boy could sleep through anything, and Schweitzer let his seabag thump to the floor without bothering to slow his roll.
Sarah appeared at the top of the stairs, cuffing sleep from her eyes. Her pink hair was tousled, and she wore only her panties and a T-shirt featuring one of the Japanese comic-book characters she was so crazy about. Sleeve tattoos covered slender, muscular arms.
The open door drew the air from inside the apartment toward him, and the rosewater smell came with it, filling him with love and lust simultaneously. Sarah was his wife and mother of his child. Her strength had pushed him through training and the many ops that followed. She was a hundred times smarter than him and good at everything she touched, from word games to musical instruments. It had taken him a long time to accept that someone he admired so much could love him, but he managed it. But everything else aside, she was in her underwear, her tight hips and long thighs exposed. Her small breasts strained against the tight T-shirt.
He went to her.
“You’re home.” Her voice was sleepy as he folded her into his arms, one hand cupping her ass, the other in the small of her back. He held her close, inhaling her scent, steeling himself for the confrontation, trying to just love her for a while. He stiffened in his trousers and tried not to grind it into her. Now wasn’t the time. They had talking to do.
“I’m home,” he said, “and for a while. We’re stood down. Maybe two weeks.”
She relaxed a bit as he buried his face in her neck, kissed his way up to her earlobes, moved to her mouth.
She responded coolly, pushed away. “You’re okay?”
He gestured down at himself. “I’m fine, baby. How’s the P-Train?”
“Sleeping. He made a painting for you.”
“Like his mommy.”
“Is it really two weeks this time?” she asked. She reached down, and his lust surged as he imagined she was reaching for his crotch, but her hand moved past to the cargo pocket on his thigh, where she tapped his ruggedized smartphone through the fabric. He’d been on leave before. They rarely let him go the full length of it without calling him back to action.
He nodded. “Chief’s covering for me. She promised.”
Sarah stepped away from him. “Bullshit.”
“Baby.”
“No, Jim. Give me one good reason why it’ll be different this time.”
He opened his mouth, closed it. He didn’t have a good reason. This op had felt different. It wasn’t the biggest firefight of his career, but it was close. Was it the corpses? The secrecy? Something made him believe that this time, he would get the R&R he deserved.
“I don’t know if I can keep doing this.” The words struck Schweitzer like a blow. He’d known they were coming. He just hadn’t expected them so soon.
“Baby, come on.” He reached for her.
She stepped away. “Jim, you are never, ever here. I get that what you do is special. I get that it’s important. I get that it makes you happy, but I have to be happy, too. Patrick has to be happy.”
“I can make you happy, baby,” Schweitzer said.
“I don’t need you to make me happy. I’m not one of that brood of hens out there.” She gestured out to the rest of the apartment complex, at the invisible host of navy wives, asleep in their beds, a few beside their husbands, most not.
“The show turned into a major commission,” she said. “Bethany wants me to continue exhibiting there. She sold my two biggest pieces, and she’s willing to front me money to keep things running.”
“That’s fantastic!” He tried to keep his voice upbeat. “How much?”
“Depends on sales, but she’s putting up forty large for an advance.”
“Holy shit, baby! That’s amazing! I knew this would happen!” He moved toward her again out of instinct, then checked himself as she tensed.
“Yeah.” She ignored the compliment. “This is my point, though. I can make myself happy. I can take care of myself.”
“I know it, ba . . .” He stopped himself from using the diminutive. You know it, but you’ve got a funny way of showing it. Stop calling her that.
“This is the thing you don’t get, Jim. I don’t need to be with you. I want to be with you. That was always the way, right? That was why it worked.”
Schweitzer’s stomach fell at her use of the past tense. She had the right of it. There were so many shrinking violets in Virginia. Weak women who wanted nothing more than a fighting man to take them away from their lives and give them a role in a household. Church on Sunday, Memorial Day barbecues with the other navy families, bitch-and-stitch sessions while the husbands were away. Schweitzer hated those women. They would go silent on movie dates when he tried to deconstruct the plots with them. Stare blankly when he handed them a book he wanted to read and discuss.
Not Sarah. She was his equal. Everywhere, from the bedroom to the Scrabble board, she kept pace, challenged him. She didn’t need him. She didn’t need anyone.
But she wanted him, and that had always made him feel more special than anything else. More than his special-warfare pin. More than his Bronze Star. More than the knowledge that not twelve hours ago, he had taken on an army of powerful mercenaries, kicked them in the teeth, and survived.
“You have to want to be with me, too,” Sarah said. “I don’t want you to have to choose between the job and me, but . . . that’s what it’s coming to.”
“Sarah.” No more calling her “baby,” you idiot. “I . . .”
“Why do you do it, Jim? What do you get out of it? I mean, apart from the adrenaline rush.”
He thought for a moment and decided to answer honestly. “I’m good at it. Really, really good at it. It’s like you with the painting. You touch it, it’s amazing. You don’t even have to try. I know you do, and damn hard, but that just makes a good thing better.”
She nodded. She did know. She was the only person who did. “I know you don’t want to work a desk job. I know you want to do something exciting that makes a difference. I can even handle the danger, Jim. Even with Patrick, I can handle that. I know you’re not made to sit in an office. Hell, that’d drive me crazy. I get it.
“It’s the being gone that’s killing us. It’s the never being able to tell me where you’re going, or when you’ll be back. It’s me having to second-guess every person with a foreign accent who says hi to me in the grocery store. It’s this . . . scrutiny.”
The art world had made Sarah many foreign contacts: Russian dealers, Chinese collectors, Middle-Eastern high-rolling buyers. The governm
ent didn’t take kindly to SEALs interacting with foreign nationals off the job. Every time Schweitzer joined his wife for a dinner with them, he spent the next day filling out forms for his security officer.
“That’s the life, Sarah,” was all he could say. “That’s what you have to put up with to get to do this.”
“No, Jim. That’s what you have to put up with. I don’t have to put up with anything. I am choosing to put up with it, which is the part I think you’re not getting.”
Frustration boiled over. He glanced at the door to Patrick’s room and kept his voice low with a will. “Sarah, damn it. I love you. I can’t be without you. What do you want me to do?”
Her expression softened, she took a step toward him, her dark eyes reflecting his own, the love there plain to see. “I love you, too. I love you too much to change you, honey. You want to save the world? You want to drive fast cars and sling a gun? Do it. Become an EMT. Join a police force. Hell, join a SWAT team. Open up a firing range or a gun shop. Become a fireman. Anything. Find the most dangerous thing you can possibly do that keeps. You. Home.”
“There’s also . . . Pete,” Schweitzer added, unable to meet her eyes. His brother, at rest in Arlington Cemetery, the naval special-warfare pin and the Congressional Medal of Honor engraved on his headstone. A hero the likes of which Schweitzer could only hope to match. Pete had been so proud that little Jimmy Schweitzer had joined up, had made it through training, had pinned on as a SEAL.
How could he turn his back on that memory?
“Pete’s dead,” Sarah said. “We’re alive. Patrick and I are alive.”
He knew that. He knew it keenly. But it didn’t banish his brother’s memory, the expectation that had hung in the air since Pete’s final op had gone sour.
She looked down at the hardwood floor. Dirty by Schweitzer’s standards, but Sarah wasn’t the clean freak in the relationship, and he was never home to tidy up. A maid was beyond their modest means, though maybe, with Sarah’s new commission, that would change.
If he could keep her.
Schweitzer’s heart surged with love for her, terror at the thought of losing her and Patrick. But above it all hovered fear over leaving the navy. If Schweitzer wasn’t a SEAL, then what made him matter in the world? Pete’s ghost hovered in his mind’s eye.
Sarah looked up at him from under the neon pink of her dyed bangs.
He went to her, and she didn’t resist him this time, folded into his arms, moaning softly as he crushed her to him, running kisses along her neck, the line of her jaw. “I’m sorry, baby,” he said, not caring if the term slighted her. “I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it. Contract is up in a year. I won’t reenlist.” Even as the words came out in a rush, he knew they were wrong.
But he still heard himself saying, “A year’s not so long.” Yet he knew that it was long, and was glad of it, because it would give him time to think. He couldn’t lose Sarah. He’d scoffed at the idea of “the one” until he’d found her, and now he couldn’t let her go.
But his job wasn’t a small thing either.
She met his kisses now, sucking hungrily on his lips. Aggressive where other women were timid, knowing where other women let him take the lead. She thrust one hand down the front of his trousers, squeezing the base of his cock, pulsing her hand low enough down to be tantalizing, high enough up not to hurt him, touching him with a familiarity that spoke of the years they’d spent together, learning one another’s bodies.
“I love you,” she husked, as he slid one hand over her ass, sliding his fingers behind her underwear, pushing it down her thigh, finding the edge of her sex and running his fingers over it. She moaned again, crushing into him. Schweitzer nearly wept with relief. For now at least, she was here. For now, she had forgiven him.
Patrick would sleep through a rocket attack, but it felt wrong to do this so close to him. “Come on,” Schweitzer whispered in her ear, taking her by the wrist to haul her up the stairs. Sarah stood rooted to the spot, one hand still pumping him, the other sliding up under his shirt, over the ridges of his stomach and over his chest. “Uh-uh.” She bit her lip, shook her head.
Schweitzer smiled, reached down around her waist and scooped her up over his shoulder. She squirmed, kissing his neck as Schweitzer crested the landing and tossed her onto the bed.
He climbed on top of her, surrounded by her paintings; haunting watercolor marshscapes of the land rolling around their home, populated with sunbursts and puffs of flame that hinted at serene intelligence. The big bay windows let in the moonlight, limning her body in silver, making her nipples into stars, her eyes into wave tops.
He paused, holding still as she pawed at him. At long last she stopped and they stared at one another. Schweitzer willed his emotions through his face, hoping she could feel them, see them written on him.
“I love you,” he said again, just in case the look wasn’t enough.
She smiled, her brows drawing together, her eyes sad but reconciled. She nodded, and he knew it had been enough after all.
So he fell on her, making her wet, making her cry out, making her understand how much she meant to him.
The line between the two of them blurred, until Schweitzer forgot where he left off, and she began, and they were one thing, sweating and moving and drowning in love.
—
He woke in the darkness, suddenly alert, rising through all the layers of drowsiness to heightened vigilance, as if he hadn’t been asleep just moments before. The moonlight still filtered through the bay window, turning the dust motes in the air to dancing silver, making Sarah’s skin an alabaster wonderland. She slept, her head propped on her arm, snoring lightly.
The digital clock on the nightstand told Schweitzer he’d only slept for two hours. He flopped back onto his pillow, the scent of Sarah’s hair wafting up from the bedcovers, calming him.
Calming him, but not nearly enough. Schweitzer had dealt with this since he’d first joined the teams. The sudden bursts of hypervigilance, the screaming certitude that he was not safe. When it overtook him in public, he’d find a corner to put his back in and wait it out, taking deep breaths, hoping against hope that no one would try to talk to him.
When it happened at home, especially at night, there was no hope of sleep. The wizard had prescribed him pills for that (and confided that most of the guys took them), but they were in the bathroom, and he didn’t feel like getting out of bed right now.
Schweitzer had rolled on scores of targets since he’d earned his pin. When they’d integrated with the Coast Guard to run ops against domestic targets with a nexus to terrorism, he’d seen some bizarre and disturbing things. A tipoff on a shipping container supposedly harboring an antiaircraft missile system and its crew turned out to be packed with Korean sex slaves. The women had been at sea for weeks without food, drinking rainwater from their bundled clothes, soaking the stuff up where it leaked in through the container’s cracks. When that ran out, they started drinking their own urine. By the time Schweitzer got to them, they’d begun eating one another.
The sight haunted him, but less than the images flashing through his head of the refrigerated corpses, lying in silent rows on those stainless-steel racks, as if they were patiently awaiting something. As if a shouted command or the touch of a button could make them spring into action. That weird moment, when the darkness had come alive . . . that was just a flash of nerves.
But it had felt so real.
Schweitzer shrugged the thought off. If they weren’t supposed to talk about it, then thinking about it wasn’t going to help any. He turned back to Sarah, reached out, and touched her hair. He’d told himself he’d fix this, but all he’d done was bought himself time. Sarah wasn’t the type to make idle threats. When she said, “I don’t know if I can keep doing this,” she meant that she couldn’t keep doing this.
Her or the navy. Exactly the choice he’d dreaded as th
e realities of the life he’d chosen had crystallized.
It would have to be her. Schweitzer knew that in his bones. The thought filled him with a fear so powerful that he shook. He wracked his brain, going over the career choices she’d laid out for him, adding a few of his own. What could he do? Who could he be?
In training, he’d learned that to look too far into the distance was to lose focus on what lay right before you. On an op, that was as good as suicide.
Cops were a dime a dozen. Even the best blended into the background of workaday slogging. Schweitzer had found a way to be special. How could Sarah love him without that? How could Patrick admire him?
And Pete. Always Pete, pinning on his crows when he’d graduated. Proud of you, bro.
Stop it! Schweitzer told himself. You’re going to put work over your own family. What the hell is wrong with you? Fuck the navy.
But the questions wouldn’t quit.
He stared at the ceiling and fought the question, trying to calm his spiking pulse, to push back the rising knot in his stomach. This was a thing he couldn’t shoot, couldn’t kill. There was only the hard call, consequences any way he turned. You ran ops by the numbers. There was a right way and a wrong way. Here? Nothing but choices.
A shadow danced past the window, blotting out a section of the starlight, leaving Sarah shrouded in shadow. He heard a faint patter, as of raindrops, but more regular. He brushed Sarah’s hair from her face again, waiting for the cloud to pass.
It didn’t. The shadow hung, motionless. The patter was steady, distant. He sat up, his anxiety banished by the sudden calm that came over him when a firefight was imminent. His heart slowed, steadied. He froze, listening carefully.
The patter. Rotors.
It was four in the morning. His apartment wasn’t on any aviation route he knew. In all his years of living here, he’d never seen or heard a helicopter go by, especially so late. He supposed a military helicopter could be doing a training run, but they always ran in pairs. This was a single bird.
