by Selena Kitt
He stopped and looked at her. “What if I say the wrong thing?”
“I think that the worst that could happen is that talking to you will cheer him up.”
“But what do I say to him? What should we talk about.”
She looked at him. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t need you, would I? Finding common ground is what you do. I want to see if it makes a difference.”
“So you are going to sit and listen?”
“No. I’d put a damper on things. I want to see if you can engage him, and then learn what happens after. I’ll make the introductions and pretty much leave you to it.”
He considered the idea. “So, I can talk about whatever I want, or whatever he wants?”
“Exactly.”
He shrugged. “Lead on.”
He followed her into a room that held a single bed and Diane went to its taciturn occupant. “Sgt. Sanders, I’d like you to meet someone,” she said. The bandaged-wrapped occupant of the bed didn’t move, not even interested. “This is Captain Trevor Foster.”
The man looked up and his dark expression seemed to clear. “I saw you on television. Aren’t you the fucking hero they’ve been trotting out?”
Trevor moved to the bed. “Yeah, the fucking hero, sarge. The Army made it my current specialty, like sniper.”
The man chuckled. “Oh yeah?”
“You know how that shit goes—the Army says I’m a hero, so I am. They don’t offer explanations about why they picked me. They tell me where to go and who to salute.”
“So you are a reluctant hero?”
“Not exactly that, but a soldier willing to take a ride when he’s offered one.”
“On television you are followed by reporters. Our chat doesn’t rate press coverage?”
“Nope.”
Diane saw interest in Sander’s eyes. “This was my idea.”
“To do what?”
“You won’t talk to me, I asked the Captain to come by. I thought you might talk to him.”
“Really? You thought that?”
“She doesn’t get it, Sarge. How could she?” They stared into each other’s eyes for a moment. “It’s a shrink concept that if you talk about your injuries you get all better. Then she could help you plan your future.”
“My future!”
“Exactly what I mean.”
“And do you think I want to talk to you, Captain? Fucking sir?”
“No reason you would that I know of. Not about that shit. But I was hoping you’d listen to me.”
“Listen?”
“I’m ambulatory but not officially okay yet. The doc says I have to talk to someone about what I went through before she’ll consider letting me go back to active duty. She doesn’t get why there isn’t much I can say to her, or any of them. So when she asked me to come here, I thought, maybe I could talk to this guy. Is that okay?”
“And she takes notes?”
“She goes for coffee.” Trevor looked at her and she nodded. “I’ve scouted the place and figure it will take her about half an hour to get to anywhere that has decent coffee.”
“I can’t drink coffee,” Sanders said. “So they tell me. So bring me a shot of bourbon.”
She laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Trevor grabbed a chair. “Then I can talk to you?”
“I don’t think I’m going anywhere, Captain. They took off my leg.”
“I think you get new ones online these days, Sarge. Probably better than the one you had.”
“Sounds good. The knee was fucked up from football anyway.”
“There you go. I bet you can get free delivery.”
Trevor sat down and Sanders gave him a hard look. “So I get to hear about your heroics?”
“If you want, but I usually reserve that shit for the assholes and the public. I’d like to talk about some other stuff—the things that wake me up at night.” He looked at Diane. “When we’re alone.”
Diane nodded and left. She walked the hallway ashamed that seeing how well Trevor did made her feel hurt and impotent. Trevor had good instincts, and he had pain that he could share with the man. That made for incredibly rapid bonding that there was no way any training could match.
“Hello Di.” She looked up and saw Paul. “How’s your experiment going?” She smiled at him, wondering if his interest was was professional or or just an excuse to see her. At the moment it was just nice to have him to talk to, although his unanswered message, hung dangerously between them.
“I doubt they’ll become fast friends, but Captain Foster established a rapport with him in minutes. It’s amazing.”
Paul took it in stride. “These are guys that the Army has instilled with a strong sense of macho pride. With us they worry about looking weak. We might even discover they did something wrong out there. The guys who’ve been in combat are an ever tighter clique. Hell, as far as they’re considered, a guy like me is just a civilian in uniform, not real Army.”
“I know. We might discover that they were afraid or didn’t do something they should have done. I understand, but that just restates the problem. It isn’t helpful. What can we offer men like that?”
How could she develop a rapport with men who were warriors? She could help the ones that opened up to her. Her skills let her get men who were trying but getting it wrong see how to make adjustments, but she couldn’t get the hard cases, the truly damaged to open up.
Paul held out his hands. “I don’t know.”
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s frustrating.”
“Yet your boy Foster is helping him, maybe they are helping each other? You might be moving toward a new kind of approach guiding them to help each other.”
“We work with groups already. And they have limited success.”
He tilted his head. “So bust the limits. Change it from group to something else. Interaction helps. Other than that, I have nothing new to add. I can be useful in other ways, however. Let me help.”
She grinned evilly. “Are you willing to take a risk?”
“I went for this experiment, didn’t I?”
“This is bigger.”
He made a face. “Well…”
“Foster asked for a decent cup of coffee, and I can manage that, but I think I promised Sanders a shot of bourbon.”
“Bourbon?”
“It’s a patient-client trust issue, boss. I promised. The poor man isn’t allowed coffee.”
“I think we are breaking new ground in situational ethics. That makes me a bit uncomfortable.”
“Think of it as beverage service then. Didn’t you tell me once that you put yourself through grad school tending bar?”
Paul grinned. “I’ll take the risk of breaking hospital rules on the entirely unfair condition that you agree to have dinner with me tonight.”
The idea seemed appealing. With her pleasure at the progress being made, she felt like being with someone she liked. “Agreed.”
“Then I will sacrifice both my tattered ethics and a shot of my best bourbon. I’ll get a test tube and fill it from the bottle in my office while you get the coffee.”
She looked at her watch. “Rendezvous back here in twenty minutes?”
“And for dinner at seven?”
“Done.”
As Paul rushed off, Diane felt better. Paul hadn’t raised the issue of the message and her experiment with Trevor might actually be doing some good. And Paul’s idea looking closer how these men could help each other had merit. She needed to think about it—the process. But there was time for that later. And tonight she would be entertained.
Chapter 8
Trevor came back home feeling confused. The talk with Sanders had lifted a weight and opened some doors in his head that he wasn’t sure hadn’t been better left closed. Time would tell, and he valued shaking things up, but some of the ideas running through his head were going to take time to process.
Sanders had talked too. Nothing surprising, but it seemed to make him
feel good. He wanted Trevor to come back. “I’d like to think about some of this shit and talk again.”
“I’d like that,” he said, and it was true.
“Mornings are best. I’m not filled with drugs yet or worn out by therapy.”
So he’d promised.
His phone rang, bringing him back to the present. Tina.
“Where have you been?”
He didn’t like conversations that started that way. “Out. I was at the hospital.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Better than that.”
“Tell me.”
“Diane asked me to meet with another patient. He’s a sergeant who served the same place I did. He got messed up pretty bad. She was having trouble getting him to talk to her.”
“But he talked to you?”
He had. They’d shared things you couldn’t share with people who didn’t have the tee shirt. That much was clear. “Yeah. I understood where he was coming from.”
“So you are doing her work for her.”
He laughed. “The lady didn’t need to hear him to tell her his problems. She had them figured out pretty good already. She’s one smart lady. No this was more to get him to talk through them for himself.”
“And that worked?”
“I don’t know. It’s early days, but he was smiling when I left.”
“That’s my idea.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s the heart of my proposal. When they put you back on active duty, I said you should go around and talked to the men in veteran’s hospitals, cheer them up.”
“This wasn’t exactly cheery.”
“But think how good it would look good on the local news.”
“You don’t have these kinds of conversations with the cameras rolling, Tina.”
“Well, you could do those too.”
“For prime time? I don’t think so.”
“Wait and see. First we need to get you back on active duty.”
“Have you arranged something Tina? What don’t I know?”
“Nothing.” He heard the lie in her voice.
“Good.” Let her believe he was fooled. It cost him nothing. “Are you coming over?”
“Do you want to see me, or just to fuck me?”
The snap of irritation in her voice amused him. He decided to tease. “Why should I have to choose?”
“I have to do something with my husband tonight. We have plans.” He thought she was a rotten liar.
“Plans can be broken. But it’s up to you, of course. If you don’t want to play, I’ll need to find some other entertainment. It’s tricky this late in the day. So many people plan their lives out in advance, that it can be complicated. But it’s doable.”
“Fuck you, Trevor.” And she hung up.
Her anger pleased him, but he knew he’d screwed himself out of some fun. He could’ve played that to coax her over and played some games with her, enjoyed himself. As it was, the only entertainment he had the energy to chase down came on cable television. A quick look at the listings gave him a choice of a car race, a bunch of dull movies, the porn channel and sitcoms that provided takes on lives he didn’t begin to understand. The porn channel was the least objectionable and even that didn’t hold out much promise.
He fixed a frozen dinner that was supposed to be turkey and tasted like cardboard. Washing it down with scotch improved the flavor and his disposition immensely. A second glass promised to help it even more, but before he could pour it, someone knocked on his door.
“Evening, neighbor.” It was Frieda. He let her in, loving the way her hips brushed against him as she came in. “I was feeling real sociable this evening, but Dot is in a real bad mood. I have no idea what fucked up her day, but I wasn’t going to ask. I thought I’d find out if you would be better company.
He came up behind her, smelling her heady perfume, letting his hands outline those hips through her slinky dress as he kissed her neck and looked down her dress at those magnificent breasts. “I definitely am in the mood for company.”
She backed up against him, rubbing her ass over his crotch. “Are you prepared to make my night real interesting?”
“Interesting for me, sure.”
“Keep it macho. Be an alpha male animal. I had to work up to the decision to come over here. Now that I’m here, I don’t want to have to make any more decisions.”
Trevor ran his hands up to squeeze her breasts through the silky material. “You won’t have to think at all. I’ll try to keep that hot brain of yours focused on the things I’m doing to your body.”
She sighed. “You do know how to talk to a girl, you goddamn romantic war hero.”
A girl like Frieda wasn’t big on talk and Trevor felt a happy shiver run through her when he unzipped her dress, pulling it slowly down her back, bending over and following it with his tongue to the place where it stopped at the small of her back, enticingly close to her round ass. As he slipped her dress off her shoulders, watched it drop to the floor, he reached for her red bikini panties and tucked his hand inside. “I’m going to start here,” he said. “I’m going to fuck this sweet ass.” The words made her trembled pleasantly.
Expecting to have a good time staying home with Bobby had been stupid. Bobby had no sense of a good time, not what she considered a good time any more. She wanted to turn him on, getting him so hot that he fucked her good. But when she started getting sexy, it just seemed to stress him out.
Of course partly she’d turned down Trevor’s offer because it hurt to hear him going on about that therapist of his. He didn’t even know he was in love with her, but Tina could see it. At least a bit. She hoped it would pass.
She had a couple of drinks with Bobby, sitting uncomfortably in the living room. “I’m going to bed early,” he said finally.
“Fine.” Not that it was. Not at all. She was horny. Maybe she was just catching up on lost time, but ever since Trevor tossed her on her back and fucked her, her libido had been in high gear. At first she thought that might work out fine, having Bobby screw her when he got the urge, and Trevor other times. But just being out of sight of Trevor got her thinking of all the things he did that excited her, even the things she told him she didn’t like. She wasn’t in love with Trevor, and a lot of the time she was quite sure she hated him, but she needed him doing the things he did to her. Her life had come down to that. She needed him for her career and for sex. He was her partner and she dreamed of them going on the tour she’d set up, having every night together.
What she really needed was to make that damn therapist sign off on his evaluation. Once that happened, Trevor would get his orders, and would see that he was stuck with her. She couldn’t imagine why the woman was stalling, and that’s all it could be. It didn’t take a genius to see that Trevor Foster was as fit as anyone.
The only reason for not signing was to keep Trevor around. Of course, that had to be it. Tina saw that now—the woman wanted him for herself. Her mind raced. She’s smelled another woman’s perfume in Trevor’s apartment, but hadn’t thought much about it. But he’d said he’d find someone else if Tina wouldn’t come over and now she knew who it was. The bitch was sleeping with Trevor. Nothing else made sense. If she signed the papers Trevor would be reassigned, and out of her reach.
The therapist might even knew about her relationship with Trevor. She didn’t care. The whole world would know sooner or later. That would only boost her own career, but it wouldn’t be good for shrink to have people know she fucked her patients.
Just thinking about the future, of being with Trevor all the time, got her aroused. She thought about playing with herself. She could sit in her living room, with her husband in the bedroom, and play with herself the way Trevor liked to see her do it, and make herself come.
Better than that, she could go surprise him. She still had a key from when she’d been setting up his apartment. She could let herself in and slip into his bed, take his cock in her mouth and wa
ke him, getting him hard and sucking him until he came.
The more she thought about that plan, the hotter she got and the better it sounded. His cock grew hard in her mind and she grew wet sitting on her couch. Finally she got up, picked up her purse and made certain she had the key. Then she went out to her sweet Audi and drove to Trevor’s apartment building.
