by Gabi Moore
And so now, seeing those evil books out in public, in Ally’s house of all places, was more than a little shock to my system. I had left the parachute jumps and sniper missions and raids and strikes behind me. Or so I thought. I wasn’t looking to get involved romantically with anyone, and besides, I wasn’t really attracted to older woman. Or so I thought.
“She… she had a book on her shelf by Bruce Gartman.” This had his attention. He sat up straight in his chair and frowned at me.
“Are you sure?” was all he could say.
“Positive. Plus some other stuff. A lot of other stuff.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“She knows you know? I thought she was aware you were a SEAL.”
“She does. I got mad, but she says they’re not hers.”
“Then whose?”
“Her ex.”
Jack gave me that look again, then sighed, shrugged and shook his head.
“I don’t know, Dave. We’re finished with all of that now.”
I scowled at him.
The September mission had us following FBI leads to take out a white supremacist neo-Nazi group leader who ran a covert publishing house that distributed books like the one I found in Ally’s home. In the old days, nobody gave a shit about some redneck Klanners on home turf, but this new breed of extremists were different. The nasty truth was that American citizens faced more threat from hate groups within their own borders than they did from immigrants or Muslims or Jews or whoever. Ally had that part right, at least. Our group had been tasked with disarming and terminating that threat, and the crackdown would be of a scope beyond the capacity of the ordinary Police force. ‘The National Legacy’ organization didn’t just sit around and spew hate, they orchestrated secret missions to murder innocents, blow up public buildings and assassinate senators. Our job was to ‘nip it in the bud’ before any of that shit happened. Well, that was the theory at least.
“You don’t think it’s worth taking a look into?” I said. He sighed again.
“And then what, son?”
Jack always did cut right to the chase.
“I don’t know then what. I guess I just …it makes me angry that she’s associated with that kind of thing. It could be dangerous. I know it’s gonna sound crazy, but I’ve really grown attached to those kids of hers.”
“She still in contact with him?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
He nodded and looked as though his thoughts were far away.
“Just stay frosty on this, okay? Don’t mention it to the other guys yet.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“And keep an eye on it. You told her anything about your missions?”
“Nothing. She probably thinks I was off shooting terrorists in the desert or something.”
“Good.”
“And Dave? Take care of yourself, okay?”
“Jack, you know I can handle myself, of course I’m gonna—”
“I mean with Ally. Woman like her don’t want to mess around. They need stability. You understand what I’m saying? Just think this one through for a change.”
My cheeks felt hot with embarrassment, but he had a point. It was clearer to me than ever that Ally was never going to be some quick roll in the hay. She was different. I nodded and wondered if I should tell him that I thought I was already falling for her. But I kept my mouth shut.
“Are we the bad guys, Jack?” I said.
He scoffed out loud.
“What kind of a moron question is that?’ he laughed.
“I mean it. It’s just… how are we different from those National Legacy assholes, when all’s said and done?”
“Now you’re talking shit.”
“I’m serious though. What’s the difference? We think our enemies are more legitimate than their enemies?”
“Having terrorists and hate groups as your enemy is pretty natural, David.”
“Is it? I mean, didn’t they believe that they were being persecuted, too?”
“Yeah, but they were wrong.”
“But what if we’re wrong?”
He gave me a long, hard look.
“What’s gotten into you? It’s not like you to talk like this.”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know. Just something Ally said. Made me think.”
Jack pricked his ears.
“Something she said? David is she…?”
“No, don’t worry. She’s not involved, that’s for sure.”
“But she’s sympathetic to their cause? She married a man high enough in the ranks to receive copies of a book by Bruce Gartman?”
“She’s not involved,” I said defiantly.
He slowly nodded his head.
“Dave, do I need to be worried about any of this?” he said at last.
“I got it Jack. Everything’s cool.”
Chapter 9 - Ally
It was like I had come so hard I had unlocked my entire body. It was an outrageously naughty secret I carried around with me everywhere now. Shuddering and jerking on that thick, delicious cock of his? It had turned me on so deeply I felt constantly turned on now. I thought about him in the supermarket. When I took a patient’s vitals. When I brushed my teeth.
It was like I had been hiding some juicier, hornier version of myself just underneath the surface of my skin for years, and now that she was out, I was beginning to wonder if she’d ever go back in again. Or if I wanted her to. I was insatiable. I’d think of him for a split second and my mind would gallop off with the memory of what we did to each other that night. And soon I’d be so hot and bothered I’d have to steal off to the nearest bathroom and furiously rub one out, sometimes coming after just a few seconds of attention to my clit. I touched myself first thing in the morning, remembering what it felt like to have his cock pressing heavy against my naked thigh. I touched myself again in the shower, remembering those hot, angry kisses. I walked past the sofa in the living room and felt a kick inside at the memory of how he’d crammed himself into my quivering body only a few days ago, and how he’d held me down so hard that my wrists still had the faintest shadow of blue on them…
And now I hadn’t heard from him in days.
I wanted to be offended. I wanted to conclude that he was just an immature asshole after all and that of course he’d bolt now that he’d gotten what he wanted from me. But that just wasn’t the truth. He seemed …scared. Hell, I was scared. I didn’t know what the hell we were doing. Not only had I not been on the dating market for years, I also happened to choose some baby faced bad boy? It was too much.
And the sex was… strange. Electrical. I just stopped thinking for those few moments. The offending books had been stashed away in a box in the spare room by now. He hadn’t texted me for days. The boys were asking about him, and all I could say was that he was busy. Maybe I’d win Most Shit Mother of the Year award after all.
There were still a few minutes before I had to go and pick the boys up at school. I went to tidy their room quickly while I had a spare moment – and what I found gave me pause. A book. Hadn’t I put all of these away already? I picked it up out of the pile of toys strewn on the floor and examined it. The hairs prickled on the back of my neck. I hadn’t seen this book before. It was new. I had no idea where it came from.
I quickly turned the pages, not quite believing what I was seeing. It was a cheaply printed children’s book, one where only two different colors were clumsily printed over black line drawings. The book was called A Home for Everyone and depicted a different nationality on each page. Every illustration had a wildly offensive cartoon caricatures of that country. “The Middle East is for the Arabs, Europe is for the Europeans, America is for the Americans. There’s a home for everyone!” I turned the page. Ugly sketches of slanty-eyed Asians. Big gollywog faced people with grass skirts. I frowned. What the actual fuck?
I’ve never thrown something in the trash so quickly before. I felt dirty for even having held
it. Obviously one of the boys must have gone rummaging through the box I packed away and taken it assuming it was just a normal kid’s book. The thing was, I would have remembered this one. And I didn’t. I grabbed my bag and stepped outside, and then froze as another thought came to me: Andrew.
What would he say if he could see me now, pining after a Jewish ex SEAL who was built like a lean tank and had made me feel things he never did? It was a sick little thrill, I know, but I couldn’t help it. Andrew hadn’t always been what he was now. In fact, when we met, he was just a shy nerd, kind of misunderstood. He was smart, and edgy, and seemed to know so many things about so many different topics. I couldn’t say when exactly changed. It happened slowly, which will sound crazy.
How did a woman like me end up with a man like him? Well, the thing I don’t ever tell other people is: there’s not such a big difference.
You think those people on the fringes of society with extreme beliefs are like another breed of person entirely. You think you could never understand them, could never be like them. But the truth is, there is no ‘them’. It’s easy to hate people who come with big taboo labels on them like ‘neo-Naz’ and ‘white supremacist’, but the hate you feel for them is just the same as the hate that drives them to do what they do. Deep down, Andrew wasn’t all that different from other people. Because I loved him once, when I was young and stupid, I guess it took me longer to see just how much of a bad guy everyone else thought he really was. I knew his interests were embarrassing. They were pretty backward and on his worse days, outright repugnant. I knew that. But when he disappeared and the authorities began questioning me, I started to wonder if I had been living in denial. Was he really so bad? Was he really guilty of all those evil plans they told me about?
After a while I just didn’t care. I was done with the politics and the drama and the fear and the shame. I just wanted to raise my two little boys in peace. I didn’t care about the details, I just wanted to get every violent, opinionated man out of my life for good so I could take care of my family. That was the theory anyway. Now I felt like I was right back at square one, daydreaming about David and worse, finding that …thing in my house.
I picked the kids up and we drove back home, both of them chattering happily in the back seat. I waited for a pause in the conversation and then tried, as causally as I could, to broach the topic.
“Boys, I found a book in your room this morning,” I said, and waited. They said nothing.
“I know I didn’t buy that book for you, and I don’t think it comes from the school. So I was wondering where it came from,” I said, and waited again. The boys’ silence confirmed my worst suspicions.
“Boys, I want you to tell me everything, right now. I’m not going to be mad, just tell me,” I said. I glanced in the rearview mirror to see them exchanging worried looks.
“It’s from dad,” said Ben in a mouse voice.
“I know it’s from dad. How did you get it? Did he come to the house?”
It took every shred of self-control not to show them how upset I was. I had made them promise. I had begged them. He would only have hurt them. Andrew loved them, but he was never going to be anyone’s father. We had all decided that a clean break was for the best. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that Andrew didn’t even want to be involved in their parenting since he moved out and moved on. But now this.
“I’m sorry, mama,” Ben said.
“I asked you a question, baby.”
“He came to the school. He gave me and Alex a present.”
“It’s Ben’s fault. He called him.”
“Shut up!”
“Boys, quiet. Ben, is this true?”
Ben was silent.
“Baby, I told you I’m not mad. But we can’t keep secrets in this house, remember? You need to tell me exactly what happened. All of it.”
To my surprise Ben burst into tears.
“They were picking on me, mom. And nobody cared. I found his number in your phone. I called him when you were in the shower. He said he was going to help me,” he bawled.
“You never told me that,” said Alex, shocked.
“Help you do what, baby?” I said, scanning the road for somewhere to pull over.
“The boys at school were picking on me. He said he would make it stop.”
I swallowed hard and tried to think.
There’s a reason that men like Andrew like talking about the apocalypse. There’s a reason they love imagining all the people who are out to get them, all the boogey men who could come and kill them in their homes at night …the reason is because it would give them an excuse to do everything they always wanted.
Fight.
I saw the conversation between him and my child unfolding as though I had overheard it myself. How many times had Andrew lectured me about the various threats the oblivious American people were under? About how big government and backward liberal apologists were going to offer up the country to marauding outsiders? And now there was a chance he had done that to Ben, too.
“What did he tell you?”
“He gave me a present,” said Ben, still hiccupping and sobbing.
“The book? He gave you a book?”
“And a… a knife.”
It took me only a few seconds to find an open shoulder on the road for me to pull over onto, screeching the tires. I cut the engine and spun around to look at both of their terrified faces.
“Where is it? Give it to me,” I said. They must have known by the look on my face that I wasn’t playing around. To my horror Ben, my darling child, my good boy, my fucking five-year-old, rummaged in his bag to produce a medium sized knife that looked like it belonged in a hunter’s backpack. I snatched it from him, reached over to undo his seatbelt and gestured for him to come and sit up front with me. He was crying again.
He was so light in my arms as I cradled him, and he cried just like he was a toddler again, it broke my heart into a thousand pieces.
“He gave that to you, baby? Shhh, it’s ok, I’m not angry,” I said again and again as I stroked his brow.
“Have you hurt anyone with this, Ben? Does anybody know you have it?”
“No,” he pouted, and I kissed his brow. I didn’t know what else to say, what else to do but keep rocking him in my lap. Alex sat in the back, looking distraught. When Ben had calmed down a little I dried his tears on my scarf and looked him straight in the eye.
“Ok, let’s get home now and get you both some lunch. It’s okay. Your dad is not going to do that again. You shouldn’t have called him, Ben, that was wrong. And we don’t take knives to school, ever. But we’ll talk about this more tonight. He’s not coming to the school again. Once is enough.”
“But mom, he came to the school all the time,” Alex said from the back. I bit my tongue and we drove on. In a daze I parked, helped them unpack their bags, got them through lunch and started on their homework. But the moment I could, I slipped outside with my phone and dialed the only number I could think of.
“Hey, David. It’s me…”
Chapter 10 - David
“Hey, Ally,” I said.
I had been waiting for this call. I didn’t exactly want to avoid her after that evening at her place, but I couldn’t bring myself to get in touch again, and now it had been days and it was just a matter of time before she called, wondering why I’d disappeared on her. I wasn’t proud of it. I hated that that stupid stereotype applied to me. But fuck, I was a commitment-shy man and if life had taught me anything, it was that sleeping with a woman made them think you owed them something forever after. I hated that shit. I was the last person on earth that knew what to do to keep a woman happy, so I guess I figured I’d hightail it out of there before she even started demanding it. I’m an asshole, I know. But the least I could do I was answer her call and take it like a man.
“Hey, I hope I’m not interrupting anything…”
“No, not at all,” I said. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to call you these last few
days, I know we left things a little weird, but I’ve just been really busy.” I didn’t like to think of how much of me she had seen the other night. I had let go with her in a way I didn’t think decent people could. But I played it cool.
“Yeah, don’t worry about the other night, it doesn’t matter,” she said.
“It …doesn’t?”
“Well, I’m actually calling because I need your help with something.”
“My help? What’s wrong?”
I heard her take a deep breath.
“David, it’s my ex. He’s… well, he doesn’t actually have any custody over the kids and we agreed a long time ago that he wasn’t going to be part of their lives, and maybe I was stupid for believing him on that, but Ben came home with a fucking knife, David, and I don’t know what to do—”
“Ally, slow down…”
“The thing is he’s sneaking around and meeting the kids behind my back, and he’s crazy, David. He’s literally insane. I have no idea what bullshit he’s teaching them, but I’m afraid, and just the thought of even seeing him again makes me feel sick to my stoma—”
“Wait, Ally, a knife?”
“Yeah, he’s given Ben a knife, because Ben’s being bullied at school and we haven’t been able to get to the bottom of it because dammit, you know Ben, he won’t tell us who it is and so he turned to Andrew, but you can imagine what that will mean…”
“Ally, what do you need me to do?”
I heard her take another breath.
“Remember you said that people like him were dangerous? Well, it’s worse than you know, David. I’m afraid. I can’t tell anyone, either. My parents actually loved him, do you know that? He was so charming. And the kids don’t understand why I don’t want them to speak to him. I try to talk to them, to explain, god knows I’m trying to raise them properly, but somehow I always end up being the bad guy…”
“I understand, Ally. Tell me you want me to do about it, though.”
