by Cherry Kay
“I've been thinking about that as well,” Ted said. “And I'm not sure what to do about it, really. I mean, it sounds like a good idea to try and get the two families together but what if things go catastrophically wrong. Instead of having them warm up to each other over time we could really put them asunder forever. I don't know. I mean, things can't keep going like they are right now.”
“I agree,” Tina said. “It's a little ridiculous that we have to run away from our home state to be happy together.”
“We didn't have to run away for the holiday but we did because we love each other,” Ted said. “I know that sounds a little corny, but sometimes a couple just has to get away from everyone and everything in order to be happy. It isn't like it is for other people, not for us anyway. We have real things dividing our families, not just that one doesn't like the other. Something like racism is hard to get past, so I understand your family not wanting to be around it at all.”
“But at the same time,” Tina said. “They should want to for me and for you.”
“Do they really for sure know that we are a couple yet?” Ted asked.
“Well. I'm sure they do,” Tina said. “How could they not. We've been seeing each other for a while now. I'm not sure how they could remain so ignorant to it. But maybe I haven't set them down and really hammered home that I'm seeing a white guy and his parents are racists. They could be in denial. I mean, look at Decker. Obviously his case is something far apart from what we are dealing with, but he's still in denial.”
“That's no joke,” Ted said. “I hope everything works out between your and my family but I'm not sure if it will and I'm not willing to wait. If neither of them want to come to our wedding, then they can go fuck themselves. We have been through a hell of a lot and we are a great team because of it, we don't need them. Speaking of how great of a team we are, look at today! Look at how we handled a mentally ill person, a cop, and now each other. We are meant to be together, Tina, I really feel that way.”
“Maybe you should ask me to marry you,” Tina said.
“Maybe I should,” Ted said. “But I don't have a ring right now so I'll wait. And maybe I'll change my mind, who knows.”
Ted gave her a wink then pecked her on the forehead.
“Oh yeah?” she said. “You'll change your mind? Well, maybe I will as well. Did that cop leave his name and number because I really would like to see if he's single or not. I mean, he looked handsome enough, didn't he? I'm sure he'd make a great lover once he cut out the coffee and donuts for a while.”
Ted laughed.
“Come on now, he wasn't that fat, was he?” Ted said. “He looked like he was in at least decent shape.”
“Ted,” Tina said. “He was winded from walking twenty feet from the weird thing he was driving to the cabin. Now, I get that the snow is deep and hard to walk through, but it's pretty clear to me that the man needs to drop some weight for his own sake.”
They both laughed at this, not because it was especially funny, but because it broke the tension.
“Well, what should we do?” Tina asked. “Should we barricade the door and stuff like that? Or should we just go to sleep and hope that nothing terrible happens.”
“I don't want to barricade the door,” Ted said. “If we do that and he starts a fire on the cabin roof then we'll be completely fucked. Stuck in here to roast alive.”
Tina's body went stiff.
“You're right,” she said. “Damn, you have given this some thought, haven't you?”
“A little bit,” Ted said. “And I think the best thing to do is just lock the door and try to forget about it. If he shows up looking for trouble we already know what we are going to do, don't we? You spray the fire stuff all over and I club him.”
Tina nodded, then snuggled into Ted's chest.
“I'm scared, Ted,” Tina said. “I know I act like I'm unflappable, but consider me flapped after what has just happened in the last twenty four hours or so.”
They both drifted toward sleep, each of them ready to wake up and fight if need be. Ted was asleep before Tina. He was having nightmares, Tina could tell by his short, ragged breath and the way his body kept jerking around. But Tina didn't want to wake him; Ted needed the sleep. It wasn't long before Tina feel asleep and was having nightmares as well. She woke several times and the sun was still out. But then she fell into a deep sleep.
KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK
Tina sat up in bed. Was someone knocking at the door? She looked over at Ted to find him completely out. She didn't want to wake him up until she was sure what was going on.
The knocking sound happened again. She got out of bed and padded over to the door to look out one of the windows. All she could see outside was even more snow falling. She couldn't believe that they might get stuck out here for another day and night. She hoped and prayed that wasn't the case.
Tina whirled when a thump sounded from the roof in the middle of the cabin.
What could it be? Could it be Decker on the roof? What was going on?
Tina ran over to Ted and shook him awake.
“Something is happening,” she said in a desperate whisper. “I think someone is on the roof.”
A scraping noise came from the roof in the middle of the cabin. At first, Tina didn't know what to think, but when she heard the scraping noise followed by a soft thud outside the cabin she realized that Decker was trying to dig his way in.
“Don't panic,” Ted said. “The roof is fairly sturdy. I don't think he has the tools to break in.”
Ted ran and grabbed a flashlight and stood on the bed so he could shine it through the hole in the false ceiling he had made. The circle of light fell on the roof where it joined in the middle at a V.
“See, I don't think he--”
The long end of a pick ax plunged through the wood and hung suspended in the air for a second before being pulled back up and through. Little bits of snow swirled through the hole. Tina screamed.
Tina woke with a start. She'd been dreaming that there had been a knocking sound that Decker had been on the roof and had started to dig his way into the cabin with a pick ax. But it had all been a dream. Next to her Ted slept peacefully, or at least so it seemed. It was hard to tell if he was having a nightmare or not since he always slept so soundly no matter what was going on in his subconscious.
She got out of bed and quietly crept over to where her cell was plugged into a wall outlet, charging. The day before her phone had lost reception during the storm and drained all of its battery trying to pick up a satellite connection. Tina wanted to be able to call home and talk to her parents in a hushed voice that hopefully wouldn't wake up Ted. She usually wasn't the kind of person to want to call her mom and dad, but the events of the last few days had really shook her up, and she felt like what she needed more than anything was for her parents to tell her everything was going to be all right. Tina hadn't decided yet if she was going to tell her parents that there was a crazy man in the mountains with them, someone that Ted had served with when he was in the military. There was a part of her that told her it was a very bad idea to let her parents know what exactly was going on.
“Honey, is everything all right?” Ted asked.
Tina looked over at the bed to find Ted rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He looked tired, like he had been in and out of sleep all night.
“You seemed to be resting peacefully when I woke up,” Tina said. “Were you? Or did you have nightmares all night?”
Ted didn't answer for a minute. Instead he rubbed his temples, then the bridge of his nose.
“I had a bunch of nightmares,” he said. “About the night the Forward Operating Base, me and Decker were stationed at, got over-run.. I don't like to talk about it, and honestly I don't even like to think about it. But talking to that cop yesterday jogged my memory, whether I liked it or not.”
“What happened?” Tina asked as she walked over to the bed and sat down next to Ted.
“Well, nothing good
. We were getting mortared all through the day before, but we never thought that the Taliban could muster enough fighters to actually storm the FOB. That kind of thing was just unheard of at the time where I was. But that's exactly what happened. So a call for General Quarters went out over the intercom and everyone rushed to their battle stations.”
Ted took a deep breath.
“After that, it was like something out a movie. But in a movie they don't show you what it's like when men die. In a movie you don't get to listen to your friend scream for his mother as he bleeds out on the deck beside you. And no matter how many we killed, they just kept coming. I don't know how many waves there were, if they were even organized into waves. I like to think they were, but maybe that's just me trying to grab a hold of what happened that day and turn it into something much more grandiose than it actually was. You see, most of us that made it through, we want it to be something like the Battle of the Bulge, or maybe even a smaller version of D-Day. But it wasn't anything like that.”
“What do you mean?” Tina asked.
Ted shifted in the bed as if to stand, but then settled for sitting up so that his feet rested on the floor. He was tense, so tense it seemed like he was a rubber band stretched so that it vibrated. Tina wondered if it was good for him to be talking about it, but then decided that if he didn't want to talk about it he could just stop. It wasn't like she was making him. And it seemed like something that he had never spoken to anyone about before, or if he had, it was probably just his old war buddies. Maybe it was good for him to get it out to someone who was a third party, even if she was fairly biased, considering.
“It wasn't a big, grand thing,” Ted said. “It wasn't people storming a ship to capture it, or a beach to defeat fascism. What it was a bunch of farmers who had gotten sick of the war. I'm not sure they were even anti U.S. forces. Most of them were starving, with nowhere to turn to. That's what happens when people get pushed to the end of their rope, they jump. But instead of jumping, about two hundred of them stormed the FOB. And it wasn't even really all that complicated, all just poured through the gate after blowing up the guard tower was watching over the main avenue of approach.”
Ted paused for a moment to draw a long breath.
“So, maybe there is nothing to tell. Except that Decker fought like a hero. He was a hero. When other men’s courage broke and they fled to the interior of the FOB, Decker held the line. The last I saw of him he drained an M-16 magazine in the general direction of the stream of insurgents, then fixed his bayonet and ran toward the oncoming enemy fighters.”
“How did he survive?”
“That's a really good question,” Ted said. “One I don't have the answer to. A grenade probably went off so close to him that he must have been knocked unconscious or something like that. Maybe the blast threw him underneath some kind of cover. You know, anything could happen, something like that isn't unheard of. People live through stuff way more extraordinary, like tsunamis and earthquakes and all kinds of crazy shit.”
Tina nodded as she rubbed Ted's back. She wished there was more that she could do to soothe him, but it was hard to console him when it came to stuff like this. She just felt so out of her element, like she was peeking through a window into a place she had no right to be. She knew it was silly to think that, but when it came to military experience she had absolutely none, so there was nothing for her to draw from. She knew better than to believe anything she saw on the movies, besides maybe the bare bones of soldiers walking around the desert, or fighting their way through some city hell scape in the middle of nowhere. But everything was always so dramatized, always so exaggerated. She just wished there was something she could say, something she could do to make it all better.
“But maybe he ran,” Ted said softly. “I didn't see where Decker went, exactly, I just assume that he charged the oncoming enemy. But maybe instead he just beat feet to some hiding spot that he knew of. He was always creeping around the FOB and getting into shit he shouldn't have. So it's not that far out to think that maybe he ran. I don't know. Maybe I'm not being fair to him, but after hearing about what happened to him when he came back, it just makes me think he's weak.”
Tina couldn't bite her tongue on this one.
“But you know, that's silly to think. Just because someone comes back and doesn't adjust well, that doesn't make them weak. War is a very traumatizing thing, and I'm proud of you for how well you've handled it. But even if you hadn't of handled it that well, I wouldn't have thought any less of you for it.”
Tina hoped that was true as she said it. She knew it was easy to say things like that, but what if Ted had come back and been a wreck. Would they even have met to hit it off and fall in love? What if Ted had been a bad drunk who spent the rest of his life drifting in and out of prison? What if he'd killed someone in a bar fight and spent the rest of his time on earth in a cage? There were an infinite amount of things that could have happened that would have kept them apart, but none of them did because Ted was a great guy with a good head on his shoulders.
“It's easy to say that,” Ted said. “But think about it for a second. What if I'd come back from overseas and had such a huge burden of guilt on my shoulders that my mind broke and I started to have delusions that everyone was against me? What if things had gone really wrong, the kind of wrong that can't be fixed with a few phone calls and a trip to a shrink?”
Tina rested her head on Ted's shoulder as she caressed his back. She was sure it must be hard for him to feel so alone. She wondered if all veterans felt so alone. Tina wanted to console Ted, to let him know that no matter what happened everything was going to be all right between them. She put a finger underneath Ted's chin and tilted his head toward her.
“I just want you to know that I love you,” she said.
Ted kissed her, his lips trembling. Tina could feel herself shaking slightly as well, the moment was so emotionally charged. Ted's hand caressed her knee, then slid up her thigh. Tina spread her legs and felt her loins aching for him. All she wanted was to feel Ted inside of her, so when his fingers slipped into her panties and slowly pressed their way into her pussy, she was already wet. Tina's back arched involuntarily so that her sex was thrust forward off the bed a little bit, but not so much that her ass slipped off the mattress. Ted's tongue wrestled with hers as his fingers searched for and found her G spot. The pads of his fingers gently stimulated the erogenous zone.
“Oh God, you make me feel so good! Ted, you make me feel so good!” Tina said.
She couldn't help but squirm as Ted's finger did an expert job of arousing her body. She was loving every second of it, and couldn't wait to have Ted's cock deep inside of her. While he made her pussy light up with the white fire of G spot pleasure she reached over between his legs and tugged on his dick. She wondered what it was like to be a guy and have to be so intimately familiar with the female body to be any good at sex. As a woman she considered herself pretty lucky to not have to know any other spots or place, all she had to know was how to stimulate his dick, make it hard, then ride it or suck it. And she was really good at all of those things.
“Fucking play with my dick,” Ted said. “You know how I like it. Jerk on it just like that. Fucking right.”
Ted pushed her back on the bed and mounted her. With one smooth thrust he was deep inside of her as he bit down lightly on her nipples. Tina couldn't believe how good it felt to have Ted deep inside of her again. It was always so good. She couldn't remember a time that sex had been bad with Ted, and since he didn't drink very much she couldn't even think of a time that he'd had whiskey dick or something like that. She was so lucky to have Ted, she realized as she felt his rock hard member move in and out of her. He was such a considerate lover and caring guy. So many women looked their entire lives for someone like Ted and never found them. But here he was, on top of her, making her feel like she was the only person in the entire world.
“Fuck me harder, Ted,” she said. “Oh baby, please fuck me harder. I
need you to fuck me harder. Really give it to me. Just like that. Yes. Just like that.”
Ted had both of his hands on Tina's shoulders as he sat up on his knees and slammed his cock in and out of her. Every time he would thrust in, he pulled her toward him so that their bodies collided with a slapping sound that filled the room. Tina could hear snow being knocked off the roof by the vibrations of their fucking and landing outside the windows with a splat. She loved how into it Ted got when she asked him to fuck her hard. Tina was one of those girls who liked to be fucked really hard sometimes, while other times she liked to be made love to. This was not one of the times that she wanted Ted to make sweet love to her. This was one of the times that she wanted Ted to try to knock her bottom out; she wanted Ted to fuck her so hard that she saw stars; she wanted Ted to give her every ounce of push and pull that he had in him, and then when he got tired she wanted to jump on him and ride him for all that he was worth.
Ted let go of her shoulders and grabbed on to both of her wrists so he could really pull her toward him with each thrust. His dick was so hard that Tina thought that he might come soon, but really, really, hoped that he would be able to hold out for at least ten more minutes. While the sexual experience had been good so far she hadn't gotten off yet, and she knew that if she wasn't brought to orgasm she would be cranky the rest of the day. She was sure that Ted was aware of this as well as he bit down on his lip to distract himself from what was going on. She'd asked him before what he thought about during sex when things were really intense and he'd given her mixed answers. He said that sometimes he thought about baseball, but often times thinking about baseball was so boring that it killed his boner. So he alternated between thinking about baseball and trying to imagine a prairie so empty and virginal that all he could feel was his teeth pinching his lip between them. He claimed that this could give him the ability to have really intense sex for twenty minutes or more before getting off. Tina hoped that today was one of the days it worked.
