by Selena Kitt
She could protect herself; she could turn the job over to someone else, tell the boss that she couldn’t work with this man. Now that she’d done the hard work, the planning, selling it to the Army, almost anyone in the agency would love to take over. Her boss hadn’t thought she was right for this job anyway. Not until she came up with her planned and showed him how taking Foster around the country to visit other wounded vets in military hospitals would keep him in the news. Her main theme was to show how the Army took care of its own. She’d outlined the path. They didn’t have to settle for generating a few dollars in billings by dragging him to ribbon cuttings and show and tell visits. Once she laid it out, he’d liked the idea. He’d liked it even more when the Army agreed to her budget.
Getting the chance to execute it had been her reward for her work, but she could easily hand it off to another hungry executive, but she wouldn’t. She was close to making her mark. This was her chance to ensure that she was taken seriously and she might never have such an opportunity again.
This realization sat at the core of her emerging anger. Foster was throwing up an unnecessary complication and now she had to handle his voracious sexual appetite along with the normal things that went with the job. His attitude threatened her chance to make her mark. That she was attracted to him, that his crude seduction did appeal to her, bothered her. It challenged the basis of everything she’d built and challenged her idea of who she was.
She’d chosen Bobby because he was steady. Predictable and steadfast, Bobby would never dream of upsetting the apple cart. He took no for an answer when she wasn’t in the mood to be sex and took her business travel in stride. Her life was arranged, ordered, predictable. When she was with Foster, she came perilously close to turning all that on its head.
Forcing herself to unwrap her arms and put the key in the ignition; disembodied, she watched her trembling hand start the car. The radio came on, blaring some maudlin pop love song that sent daggers through her, and she switched it off. She still shook as she put on her seat belt, trying to focus.
You can be strong. You can stay professional. You can get him to do what’s necessary while keeping him at a distance.
The words, the mantra, reassured her. She stopped shaking, or at least the tremors eased. She took a deep breath and repeated the lies again. And she knew, consciously and viscerally, that they were lies. The truth was that Trevor Foster excited her; this mad, angry warrior aroused her like nothing ever had. If he wanted her, if he pressed her, she didn’t know how long she’d be able to resist him, or even want to.
A picture of Bobby’s face came into her head. For a moment she thought of talking this through with him. He was logical, reasonable. Without mentioning her own feelings, her own desires, she could tell him that Foster was being crude and coming onto her. She could ask his advice. But then she already knew what he’d say. “I trust you sweetheart. You can handle it.” He’d be comforting, not helpful. Bobby, her sweet, sweet comforting husband, whom she loved.
Or did she? The question, coming unbidden, shook her. For the first time she wondered if what they had, what they built their life on was love or comfort.
The truth that had made her tremble uncontrollably as she sat in front of Trevor’s apartment building was that what she felt for Trevor Foster…the pig, the barbarian, shook her (literally) to her core. She’d never felt such powerful desire for Bobby, or any other man.
She put her beloved Audi in gear and gritted her teeth. She had to get away from his apartment; she needed to clear her head. She would go to the office and fill out her time sheets so the agency could bill the Army for her time, and then what… go home? Home. She almost laughed at the sound of the word echoing in her head. She’d never thought about the word before, that odd descriptor for the rented apartment she shared with Bobby. Having a home, making a home with Bobby, had always been a goal and one she thought they’d achieved. Now they cohabited in a perfectly appointed apartment, with everything orderly and neat, everything the way she wanted it. That was her home. For the first time, it bothered her, all that perfection. She’d had her face rubbed in a taste of passion and found it messy, scary—and exciting.
An astonishing clarity let her see why she’d been viewed as a plodder and never been a fast rising star. It was her compulsive neatness and perfection. She planned things thoroughly and executed the plan meticulously. She’d groomed Bobby as her perfect husband to fit her perfect life. A tsunami of change was capsizing all of it. Without doing a damn thing but her job, without any intention to change her life in any way at all, she’d experienced a perceptible and irreparable shift in her awareness. She’d had her eyes opened to an alternate universe where people acted out of nothing but desire and relied on instinct instead of planning. Her world looked entirely different and she saw that power, real power came from acting out of desire.
When Trevor had kissed her she’d been shocked and angered. His presumption, that he would take liberties offended her. But it had also electrified her, made her feel like an exciting and desirable woman for the first time in her life. Sure other men had been aroused by her, let her know they wanted her, but this went right to her core and touched her feral nature.
Simply put: It got her wet.
She felt the tremors start up once again. Recalling the unworldly heat of Trevor’s lips on hers summoned them.The way they made her feel, the uncontrollable emotions, visions they conjured up, frightened her. She remembered the night she lost her virginity—the closest thing to this unease she could remember. She’d been in love with the boy, or thought they were in love at least. In some ways, the actual act, letting him penetrate her, feeling his cock thrusting inside her, had been less frightening, less significant, than getting through the idea of doing it. For months she’d put off his pleas and made him wait. After a time, she weakened but stalled him by jerking him off and then finally sucking his cock. That worked for a time, but he persisted.
Then one night she gave in to his urgent demands and let him take her. She’d thought it would change her and it probably did, but the change had been far less significant than she’d expected. Later he’d gone away; she met Bobby, and life had been fine. Better than fine. Their life had been everything she’d dreamed of… until now, when she suddenly saw how small she had dreamed and that she wanted more. Much more.
This damned war hero wanted her. What and who he was made it hard to resist him. She’d made it clear she was married and found he expected her to happily cuckold her husband with him, to do whatever… it surprised and terrified her was how much the idea excited her. It shook her life to its core.
She hadn’t the strength to resist both his animal passion and her own response to it. Her dilemma was that she didn’t want to resist and feared the chaos that would bring. And the best, the safest, the only reasonable solution, was to quit, walk away from Trevor Foster and never see him again. But that meant giving up on her chance to make her mark.
She turned scenarios over in her head, knowing none of them would be right, that for the first time in her life, she was going to have to truly wrestle with her own demons. Logic was useless. She would have to make a choice and hope for the best—choose among the values offered by her head (to persevere and be a professional, keeping the client at bay), her heart (walk away from this monster and run to Bobby’s arms), and those of her trembling, quivering body.
I bet you’ve never really been fucked.
His words echoed inside her as she drove to the office. It infuriated her that her body tingled at hearing them, that he actually made her wonder if she had been whatever he meant by really fucked. As her body’s reaction clouded her mind she knew that thinking about Trevor, and that marvelous man fucking her, wasn’t productive, not if she wanted a clear head. She tried to let go of the image of his face looming over hers and his naked body between her thighs.
Diane heard Trevor Foster before she saw him. His presence was preceded by his sweet baritone rumbling in the hal
l, greeting people, asking for her office as if the number and her name weren’t on the door. She knew the style, the behavior. Trevor Foster was an extrovert who engaged people, who made them feel noticed. He was the kind of person who could make a person think everything was about them when it all had to do with him. Asking people about themselves invested them in him.
It was skillful manipulation of the people around him, whether they were friends or strangers. Not that he was calculated or sly, or was deceitful, but she could already tell this about him—one reason he projected himself outward was that it prevented others from getting close to the real person inside.
She smelled a challenge.
When he came in her office and she greeted him, when he turned his smile on her, she knew something else—that her attraction to him at the reception hadn’t been simply a product of her own sexual frustration or an overactive imagination. He was an attractive, charismatic man and he appealed to her. One on one, she felt it even more strongly. The reaction was visceral and real.
He recognized her. “You were at that awful thing at the Club.”
She smiled, glad that seeing her had been memorable, not just in her imagination, even if the idea of attraction was fantasy. “I was.”
“You kept your distance.” he seemed pleased. “We weren’t introduced. I saw you though.” He paused, making her wonder what he was thinking. “I even asked someone, I think it was the General’s wife, who you were. She didn’t know or wouldn’t tell me.”
She smiled, remembering seeing Dallas shake her head. “I’m a civilian, therefore invisible and unimportant.”
“Not to me.” His intent look made her shudder. “And what a nice surprise to have the mystery woman revealed.”
“I’m glad that makes your day but I have to bemoan any loss of mystery.”
“Why didn’t you say hello?”
She shook her head. “You had more than enough idol worshipers around you. Even if I could’ve gotten close there wasn’t any point in saying something stupid about being happy to meet you when it would just get lost in the noise level.”
He gave her his bad boy smile. “Oh, I do like you.” When he settled into his seat looking relaxed she decided there was an art to relaxing in someone else’s office; doubly so when you were there to be evaluated. Foster had that ability. She watched him squeezing a yellow tennis ball.
“Do you have a game after our session?”
It took a moment for him to see what she meant, then he laughed. “This is part of my therapy… rebuilding muscles that the surgery messed up. I have to take it almost everywhere and squeeze it.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll have to tell me how we do this… evaluation. I’ve never talked to a shrink before, not on a professional basis, and I don’t have a clue. Do you can stare into my eyes and tell me if my brain is in one piece?”
She stared into his eyes, then laughed. “In a manner of speaking. Actually, your eyes will tell me a great deal. And I learn from other facial markers.”
He screwed up his face for a moment, then laughed. “Okay. I think I’d enjoy staring into your eyes for hours. But what happens if I close my eyes?”
“You can’t cheat in this game. Closing your eyes makes an eloquent statement.”
“So this is just about how my face responds?”
“No. I evaluate the whole of Captain Foster. Words and actions too. It’s just that your body language often says things the mouth won’t.”
“Okay. So what do you look for?”
This time she laughed. “Gold? Maybe peace in our time, or the meaning of existence. Or nothing in particular. There are right or wrong twitches. It isn’t that frowning suggests depression, although it could. We don’t train with flash cards and memorize what specific postures or gestures mean. Everything is in context.”
“So, it’s pretty open ended.”
“No more than a combat mission would be. We have a goal, an objective. We attempt to achieve it. Once we’ve managed that, regardless of the number of attempts it takes, then we look around and pick the next.”
He liked the concept. “Fair enough. But conceptually combat is a matter of moving men and material around the chess board. Even if the reality is different there are definite processes involved. I have to imagine, if our metaphor is to hold water, that you have those too, and I was trying to understand them. How do we proceed? Do I take tests… put puzzles together or look at ink blots?”
“If you’d like. I’d have to order some.”
He laughed. “Then what do you usually do?”
It was time to establish the rules. “I’ll cut through the bullshit, Captain. There is no ‘usually’ about any of this. Nothing usual happened to you, there is no usual response, no usual procedure, and no usual cure. We will talk. I’ll ask you about things, about what they mean to you, or don’t mean, and you’ll answer as flippantly or seriously as you choose. Whether you cooperate or not, over time I’ll get a sense of who you are, and that will let me know if you have any problems.”
“Problems?”
“Let me clarify that. From a shrink point of view, as you call it, everyone has problems, or at least unresolved issues. I don’t give a rat’s ass if you loved your mother, or hated your father, or if you lost your faith, or found a new one. If I were treating you those might matter, but I’m only concerned determining if something related to the stress of combat, losing comrades or getting wounded, might have diminished your ability to cope. I don’t even actually care how you feel about those things, just how you are coping with your feelings. Our coping mechanisms adapt and change constantly, and a sudden bump in the road that is as life altering as yours, sometimes derails them. I need to see if that’s the case with you.”
She noted that his gaze never altered as she laid it out for him. “Pretty serious stuff.”
“Yup.”
“And you said a couple of spooky words: ‘over time’, I think they were.”
“Right again.”
“How long are we talking about?”
“I have no idea. Although we don’t have a schedule, the objective is to do it as quickly as possible. There’s nothing to be gained by dragging it out. But how long does it take to fill a bucket? If you don’t know how large the bucket is, how fast the water is flowing, you can’t come up with a realistic answer. We have to take a close look at your bucket and measure the water flow. Of course it will depend quite a bit on how hard you make me work in trying to find out what makes Captain Trevor Foster tick.”
“I’ll be glad to help. I’d like to get this over with.”
“I’m sure you would. I’m even reasonably sure you mean that sincerely, but it isn’t so simple. We all put up barriers. I’ll need to get past yours. Often we don’t even know they are there, because we erected them to protect ourselves. You can help the most by being honest about your feelings. That isn’t always easy. It can be hard enough to be honest with yourself without spilling your guts to a stranger.” He looked sullen. “I know you just got out of the hospital and just arrived in town. The Army has a full schedule for you, which is helpful because it will keep you from sitting and twiddling your thumbs, except for therapy, and worrying about all this.”
“So you don’t think I’m nuts yet?”
“Give me time.”
“And that’s it?”
“For today. Next time we’ll start the heavy work, turning over rocks and see what we find.”
He seemed a bit deflated. “I thought we could map this process out somehow. Can’t you give me a clue about what we will do? Not knowing where we are, how long it will take…” he shook his head.
“You feel like you wasted this session. You are eager to move along.”
“Yes.”
She held up a finger. “Careful. Seeing how you deal with the uncertainty of this process is something I want to watch. This wasn’t a waste of time. Consider it reconnaissance—I’ve started mapping out the terrain. Ma
ybe we find no hostiles and I can send you on your way quickly. More likely we might find a few things for us both to think and talk about. Your next appointment is Wednesday morning. Come in rested and we will sit down for an hour and see how far we get.”
As he stood, she noticed how he favored the left side, clearly there was pain. His therapy involved more than strengthening muscles. She also saw that Captain Foster didn’t like what he was hearing from her. Not that she could blame him. She’d made it clear that the time was open ended and that he would have to pass a test without knowing what it was. When you wanted to move forward with your life, being in limbo was hard. But there wasn’t much more she could tell him. Not for the first time, she wished she had a way to watch him without interfering, or to interact with him without him knowing he was being evaluated, but that wasn’t possible. She was all out of mazes large enough for a war hero to roam around in.
