SEAL'd Legacy (Brotherhood of SEAL'd Hearts)

by Gabi Moore

  “You know I don’t want you getting him involved baby. You told me you wouldn’t speak to him on your own. Remember that?” The higher my voice got, the smaller he shrank.

  “Ben, I’m… I’m not mad, baby, I’m just… you need to listen to mommy, OK? Dad can’t help you...”

  “Yes he can!”

  “What did he tell you?” I said and grabbed his shoulders firmly. “Tell me!”

  My blood ran cold. This couldn’t be happening.

  “I didn’t tell him anything mom. I promised you,” he said so quietly it nearly brought tears to my eyes. “Alex said dad would be able to teach those boys a lesson, and Alex said we should call him, but we didn’t, because we knew you said not to,” he pouted. He really did have the most angelic, baby face. I grabbed him and hugged him tight.

  “I don’t mean to get mad, baby, I’m sorry. Just promise me you won’t call your dad, please? That won’t help. I’ll sort out the bullies, OK? You leave it to me. You’re such a good boy,” I said and stroked and kissed his head.

  My kids were too young to understand why I wanted to keep that awful man from them. How could they understand, when barely any adults did? He never beat me, he never cheated. How bad could he be, right? But if I could teach my kids just one thing, it would be that good men don’t solve their problems with violence. That asshole could do nothing for them that I couldn’t.

  I held Ben close for just a little longer. One thing that people don’t tell you about being a single mother is that even if you do the best possible job, you can never be a father. If felt like it was all a big, cruel joke: I had spent the first part of my life trying to avoid violent men, and the next part of it making sure my sons didn’t become those same violent men.

  Ben ran off to his room, leaving his plastic sword to clatter onto the kitchen floor. I stood there alone, staring at the uneaten apple slices. Who was I to talk about violent men, though, when I was two minutes ago having a slutty conversation with a guy that looked like he belonged on the cover of Shooting Illustrated?

  I gobbled a few of the apple slices myself and then, as it always does, the rest of the evening passed away. When you’re a mother, time is so easily eaten up by a million little things, each one overlapping the previous one, till your whole day feels like a conveyor belt of chores and errands and tidying and re-tidying and endless, endless fretting. I’ve passed whole days like this, lost in the tasks and chores and cleaning and cooking, never giving myself a single free second to contemplate who the hell I am and what I’m doing.

  But it was harder to do that today.

  He kept popping into my mind.

  And when I put the boys to sleep at 8, I nervously read through my messages again, replaying that bizarre conversation as though I wasn’t yet convinced it had really happened. Would it be so bad, to have some fun and play along? To send him a damn picture? I checked the time, went into my room and closed the door.

  Everything was silent. The boys were sound asleep. I wanted to leave my boys a legacy that meant something. To raise them with good values and good hearts and an education, to improve all of our lives. But, now that they were fed and bathed and asleep, couldn’t I have some fun for once?

  In silence I opened my bottom drawer and fished around at the very back. My hand found the familiar silky and lacey fabrics stuffed away in the corner: a crumpled but completely unworn clump of lingerie, in shades of black and crimson and purple. I carefully lay a few pieces out on the bed and took a look at them. Dainty, fantasy items belonging to a woman who didn’t exist anymore, and maybe never had. Gorgeous, delicate fabrics with rich embroidery and beading, and swathes of silk that flowed over the bedspread like lava. These belonged to a woman who had a man to see her in them. A woman who felt safe and adored enough to expose herself, not ashamed of her naked flesh, but so proud of it she wanted to put ornaments on it. I wasn’t that woman. But sometimes, I liked to pretend.

  I selected a flimsy but intricate black bra with elaborate lace along the bottom. I stripped and threw my tired jeans and old t-shirt into the corner of the room and carefully threaded my arms into the bra, loving how perfectly the cups molded over my breasts. The matching panties came next, and then I rummaged in the drawer again to find a narrow suspender belt and a pair of glossy knee-high nylons to snap onto it.

  I was transformed.

  Though I had the tanned, slightly lined and worn-looking face of someone who toiled out in the real world, the rest of me, having mostly been hidden away under mom-clothes, was pale and soft. With some satisfaction, I regarded my reflection in the mirror and realized that yes, I sure as hell still had ‘it’. I was still fit. I had a few silvery stretchmarks on my stomach from both pregnancies, and a little slackness in the belly, but it was a shapely, feminine belly.

  The stretchmarks weren’t my only battle scars… my tattoos each told their own tale. Even the inked initials of my ex, as painful as they were to look at some days, were a part of me. I had survived him, why not keep a memento? I used to have a romantic notion of ‘family’, and I thought that the most important thing was to have mom and dad and the kids …no matter how awful the ‘dad’ in the setup was. But my family was still a family. I was still a mom. Life kept going and you never get a clean slate, you just keep adding new pictures to the same canvas.

  I grabbed my phone, took a deep breath and checked the time. Ten minutes to nine. I struck a pose – at an angle, chest lifted, back arched. I took a snap, then examined it amongst my hundreds of other, similar pictures. It was my little secret catalogue of fantasy women, all of them played by me, none of them ever leaving the confines of this room. I parted my lips, looked down low through my eyelashes at my own reflection and thought of something naughty. A lock of hair fell in my face. I snapped another picture. This one was better. I went on, posing this way, that way. In the mirror, I was a siren. My nipples poked through the black lace. I slipped a finger into the top of the suspender belt and tugged it slightly down. I pouted. Took another picture.

  People would never believe how often I did this. Just me, my little hidden drawer of tricks, and my half-naked body. I didn’t get turned on, usually. But this time, with it being so close to 9pm, my poses took on a different quality. I arched my back just a little more. Perhaps, the mirror wouldn’t be the only one to watch me this time. He probably thought I was a dowdy old nobody.

  What if I shocked him with an outrageously sexy picture right now? Just to show him that I wasn’t completely lost to motherhood and that I still knew a thing or two?

  I knelt down on the floor, Geisha-style, and lifted my chin, letting my hair tumble down my back. I half peeled the bra off and cupped the free breast. It was pure centerfold goddess, completely over-the-top and oozing sex appeal, if I did say so myself. I snapped the picture, then, before giving it another thought I sent it to him. It was 9:01. My heart thumped in my chest, I collapsed onto the floor and tried to decide if I had just done something monumentally stupid or incredibly hot.

  The response was almost instant. I clutched my phone and read it over and over again.

  David: You know, I was waiting here and trying to think of something witty to say to you, but I’m speechless. You’re beyond fucking beautiful.

  In that moment, I believed it. I was fucking beautiful. Why shouldn’t a hot guy like him drool over me? In fact, I hope it blew his mind.

  Ally: Did I do it right? Being new at this whole sexting thing, I wasn’t sure…

  David: Oh, you did it perfectly. A natural. But we’re not sexting yet.

  Ally: We aren’t?

  David: Oh no. One hot picture is just the beginning.

  Ally: I see. So what comes next, since you’re the expert?

  David: You know ;)

  All at once, a deep, juicy ache throbbed right between my legs. I did know. Was I actually going to do this? Was I really going to fuck this handsome stranger who just waltzed into my life from nowhere? It felt like we were going from 0 to 100 in ju
st seconds and amazingly, there was nothing and nobody to stop us.

  Ally: Well, whatever thing you’re thinking of, I strongly recommend that you DON’T do it tomorrow evening at 9pm. That would be ridiculous.

  It took him a long time to reply.

  David: Ok. Deal.

  David: Oh, and I wanted to say, those are some impressive battle scars you’ve got.

  My hand instinctively went to my midriff. I sucked in my gut. My stretchmarks? Maybe they weren’t so artfully concealed as I had thought.

  Ally: Oh, I’ve been waiting for those things to fade for years. Just pretend you didn’t see them :)

  David: What? No way. I’m glad I saw them. Hope I haven’t made you uncomfortable?

  Actually, I did feel uncomfortable all of a sudden. Like an awkward, fat heifer wearing borrowed finery and unable to hide what she really was: used up.

  David: If it makes you feel any better, I have a bunch of scars, too!

  The delicious little pulse I felt right at the center of my clit had all but vanished and now I only felt cold and a little stupid. I let the phone screen go dim and changed into my pajamas and tied my hair back into a rough ponytail. Sure. He had his bad boy fighting scars from playing shoot-em-up on deployment. Like that was at all the same as pregnancy stretchmarks.

  I was about to put my phone face-down onto the night stand and forget about all of it when the screen flashed again with his name. But this time he had sent a picture.

  Oh god.

  A picture.

  Of his cock no doubt.

  With trembling fingers I took the phone and felt myself on the precipice. A picture like that would change everything. It had all just been flirting till now, but a picture like that would take us deeper in …and I wasn’t sure if I was up to whatever lay down that path.

  I opened the picture and for a second couldn’t understand what I was looking at. I tilted the phone and realized it was his … arm. And a tattoo, on his arm. I had caught a glimpse of it before – a strange, mangled-looking eye with wings on it or something – but couldn’t understand why he would send me a picture of this. Was he …making a joke?

  David: See? My battle scars

  I searched the picture again and finally noticed the faintest outlines underneath it. I enlarged the picture and found something that shocked me a little. It wasn’t a single scar, but several finer scars, all in parallel lines, like spider web etchings under his flesh, hiding behind that gaudy tattoo.

  Ally: Did you get that on deployment?

  He took a long time to reply.

  David: I got that before deployment. I’m my own biggest enemy, as they say. Haha.

  I looked at the picture again.

  Ally: You did that to yourself?

  This time he didn’t answer at all, and went offline. I stared and stared at the picture. Now that I thought of it, they looked so obvious: self-harm scars. How had I not noticed them before? It seemed outrageous. And more outrageous than that, was the unmistakable sensation that I was turned on.

  I took my pajamas back off again and tucked myself into the covers, in the dark. I let my hand trail down my naked belly, over my navel and down between my legs. I spread my thighs and sunk my middle finger secretly into the slippery folds, sending a sweet thrill through my body. Then, I imagined in perfect vivid detail how I planned to fuck his brains out soon.

  Chapter 6 - David

  What does a kid do when he’s filled with fury and unable to hurt the people he hates most in this world?

  He hurts himself.

  Lame, I know.

  The first time I was caught doing it and sent to the school counsellor, she gave me one look and said, “you really don’t fit the profile of a cutter”, which meant, I was soon to learn, that I wasn’t ‘that kind of guy’.

  Everyone knew I was rebellious and out of control. Everyone knew I’d act up somehow. But they were expecting drugs or motorcycle accidents or getting my nose broken in street fights. Not sitting quietly on my own and slicing through my skin with a bare razor blade, waiting for the blood to ooze out and carry with it all the pent-up rage I wasn’t allowed to put down anywhere.

  So, I cut myself like a teenage girl in a fucking Lifetime movie and after the first time my folks freaked out about it, I never let anyone else know about it again. I moved the cuts from the inside of my bicep to my inner thigh, way up high where nobody would see them. And the scars? I wanted to join the military and, well, what would help me get taken seriously as one of the boys and cover up those crappy scars better than a tattoo? The funny thing was, I started out thinking tattoos were kind of stupid, but after that first one, I stopped cutting and just went to a professional to get my demons punctured out of me. It worked, and nobody cared. That’s a little something the military shrinks would never admit to: as long as a soldier’s mental illness takes a form that’s beneficial to his chain of command, then nobody gives a damn.

  Anyway, I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I only wondered what the fuck possessed me to share any of it with her. She seemed into it, truly. We chatted all day, I had her eating out of my hand, it was perfect. And then I had to ruin it all by baring my guts to the poor woman.

  Did I do that to myself?

  I sure did, lady, and you don’t know the half of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not depressed. But sometimes? I don’t know… sometimes I don’t know what else to do with myself. Some men drink. Some men kill a few hours gaming. Or golfing. I hurt myself until the pain I really can’t face fades away and then all is well. Twisted, I know. But it’s damn near the best strat I’ve found yet and until anybody has a better solution for me, well then, fuck it, that’s just how it is.

  In any case, maybe it was for the best.

  Ally was hot, sure, but she had two kids and a kind of no-bullshit demeanor that made guys like me nervous. What did I have to offer her anyway? A dwindling hazard payout I got from an organization the American people weren’t even supposed to know about? A shitty apartment downtown? SEALs don’t boast about the nature of their work. We don’t seek recognition for our actions and we certainly don’t play heroes. But that means that when you leave, no matter how tightly knit the brotherhood of SEALs is and no matter how much they look out for you, well, you have nothing to show for your life.

  We were ST9, on operation Blue Cord, and we were the first of our kind – first and only. They just didn’t know what to do with us after September. There wasn’t a protocol for what happened to my men out there. And so they pulled the plug on the mission, threw cash at us, gave us a bullshit ceremony and made us sign more paperwork than you can imagine. It was put to the record how we were honorably relieved of duty and cordially asked to maintain civilian lives with ongoing integration assistance from them. End of story. I think they would have preferred we all died out there, but now that we were all scattered around middle America, patching together mediocre new lives for ourselves, dead is more or less what we were.

  How could I tell a woman as perfect as her about all that? Where did I even start?

  “David,” Ben said. “Did you have to shoot people when you were in Iraq?”

  “I was never in Iraq, buddy, who told you that?”

  I looked at him, struggling with his tent peg, all his weight not even close to enough to press it down into the earth and anchor the cable.

  “Oh. But you did shoot people, though?”

  I sighed and took a look at the tent. Ally had been so grateful that I splashed out on a cute little tent and sleeping bags for the boys. But it was nothing. To see the looks on their faces when I told them we were going camping in the backyard was more than worth it. They were all right. For kids.

  “Well, you see, some missions are classified. That means I can’t say what exactly I did.” I went over, grabbed him under his arms, lifted him up and put my own foot on the tent peg. He put his little shoe on top of mine and pressed down. Under my weight, the peg sunk in easily, and he smiled.

  “But w
hy, David?”

  “Well, that’s just the way it is. Let’s just say we don’t want everybody blabbing about our top-secret plans to the wrong people, do we?” I could sense his disappointment. The ripped superheroes in his favorite TV programs never did classified work – they beat up the bad guys in plain sight of the towns’ people. Anyway, kids have to learn one way or another that life ain’t ever that simple.

  “Did anybody ever shoot you?” Alex said. It was strange, but I could almost see pieces of Ally in him. Something in the way he crinkled his eyes up when he smiled reminded me of her. It made me feel …strange. I laughed.

  “Shoot at me? Oh yeah, all the time.”

  “Really? But you ran away.”

  “He didn’t run away, Ben. He had a bullet-proof vest on. You did, didn’t you, David?”

  “Sure did.”

  “And did you ever, like, jump out an airplane, and, like, shoot the bad guys from up in the air, like pew pew pew!” Ben said and mimed his question with an invisible gun he aimed straight at his brother.

  “Cut it out!” Alex said. “He said it was top secret. That means only the government knows.”

  “That’s right.”

  Alex jumped into the newly set up tent and rooted around inside to lay the ground sheet flat. Ben traced his little hand outside along the green tent fabric and then pressed his ear up to it.

  “The government is trying to protect everyone from the towelheads, right David?”

  I nearly dropped the sleeping bag I was holding.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “The army has to help keep all the towelheads away, so everyone can be safe,” Ben said again, and this time, I knew my ears weren’t deceiving me.