by Reiss, CD
On the Edge
The Edge - Book 2
CD Reiss
On the Edge
© 2018 Flip City Media Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-942833-53-6
If any person or event in this book seems too real to be true, it’s luck, happy coincidence, or wish-fulfillment on the reader’s part.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I did research. A ton of it. But I also make stuff up for a living.
There are a thousand ways to break something and more than one method of repair. Institutions we think we know from experience have engaged thousands of others in their own, equally valid experiences. What you assume is an error may be something else entirely. Or I might have fucked up.
You can poke me with corrections on any number of subjects and if I can fix an error, I will. I’m wrong a lot.
Also, liberties were taken.
Contents
Newsy News
Part I
Part II
Also by CD Reiss
Newsy News
Did you know there’s a FREE prequel?
It’s called CUTTING EDGE.
You don’t have to read it before reading this book, but you really should pick it up before book 3.
CLICK HERE TO GET IT NOW!
(I’ll remind you again at the end of the book)
Part One
Peacetime
Chapter One
GREYSON
A woman in Sweden was walking with her son in her arms. He was three, and they were having a serious discussion about the shape of the clouds as they crossed the street. In the story, her upturned face was the reason given for why she wasn’t looking where she was going. They got halfway across and stepped up onto the median in the middle of the crosswalk’s length, but the mother did not accurately predict the end of the curb. When her foot dropped six inches she didn’t expect, she tried to keep her balance by taking an extra-big step her arms weren’t prepared for, and in the forward thrust, she lost her grip on her son.
The driver making a left turn had calculated his radius to avoid the woman, but the flying boy was a surprise. The toddler couldn’t be avoided and wound up under the front wheel.
The mother, in an act of what’s called “hysterical strength,” picked up the car enough for the driver—who had exited his vehicle in a panic—to free the boy. He was crying in his mother’s arms within a few seconds. Once her brain registered pain, she found she’d shattered five teeth and fractured her jaw from clenching it as she lifted the car.
The important detail in this story that no one ever misses is that the car was a Volkswagen, but the detail they always miss is that it was an old Beetle with the engine in the back.
There’s only so much a person could do with what they’re given. Could she have lifted the back of the VW? Or a Ford?
I’d like to think she’d have tried. I’d like to think it may have cost her a vertebra or two, but nothing would have kept her from using her body to leverage inhuman weight for her kid.
I reminded myself that my naked husband wasn’t as heavy as a car. I needed to get him out of that cold basement. His eyes were open, but his body was completely slack, as if his cells and blood had lost the will to obey his mind. He recognized me, and I recognized him. He was another person. Not the man I’d married. Not the man who’d fucked me with a distant, commanding voice.
He was the man I saw in my husband’s deepest kindnesses. In the rare moments of confusion. In the broken descriptions of his life with his parents.
This was Damon. I didn’t know what the name meant or where it came from, but I knew who I was talking to.
“Can you walk?” I asked.
He blinked, shutting out the sky for a moment, then looked right through me. Not in the way Caden had in all the time I’d known him—not to pierce, but to caress and comfort. I was more sure than ever that this was not Caden.
“Damon? Is that your name?”
His lips parted. He caught a breath, then closed his lips again to swallow whatever he was going to say.
“It’s cold,” I said. “Can you get up?”
I pulled him toward me. His body was a dead weight.
“Can you move your limbs?” I asked. “Where is the paresis?”
No reply. I lifted his arms and let them drop. His legs were bent but fell to one side when his arms landed. He’d had this before. In Iraq. He’d returned from a medevac and sat on the floor like a rag doll. He’d told me it was nothing. Three surviving wounded, yet his reaction had made him an uncounted casualty.
“Caden? If you’re in there, you’re suffering some kind of semiconscious catatonic state from mental trauma. I think the quadraparesis is temporary. Like last time. I’m going to call someone. Can you wait here?” I leaned down and whispered in his ear, “Damon. Caden. Whoever’s in there. I love you, and I’m going to take care of you.”
I ran out through the speakeasy section of the basement, feeling as though I’d left a part of myself in the bottle room. I’d call for an ambulance, get him a blanket, put on some clothes.
The mental checklist was interrupted by an unintentional glance at myself in the mirror behind the bar. My eyes were bloodshot, and a bruise was blossoming on the side of my neck. I knew my voice was shredded. It was too soon to see if my eyes would get black underneath, but if the paramedics saw any such signs, things would get very complicated, very quickly.
The decision to go back into the bottle room without making a call was burdened with doubts over my lack of doubt.
He’d choked me unconscious, and unlike last time, when my husband had been trying to extend my orgasm, this time he’d been committing violence.
When I got back to the cold, concrete room, he was in the exact position I’d left him in, staring blankly into the middle distance. His beautiful body was rendered still and pale in the room’s flat light. The black hairs on his skin looked like pen marks on a white paper.
I pulled him flat on his back. He didn’t resist or help. His cock leaned to one side like a useless piece of meat, the power removed like the magic from a talisman.
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” I said. “But in case you can, I’m doing a Ranger roll. Pray I have enough room in here.”
Getting on the floor, I laid my upper back on his chest, placing my body perpendicular to his. I put his thigh over my shoulder and torqued my whole body toward his head. It took a few tries, but I finally got him over my shoulders and my legs under me. I got him out of the room by using my legs for strength, across the basement, and to the bottom of the steps. I sucked air through my teeth.
Go. Go. Go.
I took the first step.
He’d warned me he wanted to kill me. He’d told me he was scared. I put that into the equation. Someone I loved was sick in a way that couldn’t be managed by medication or talk therapy.
Halfway up, I had to turn to make the narrow passage.
Or was he gaslighting me?
Grunting, I got up to the hallway.
If I looked like an abused wife, wasn’t I? Wasn’t my decision part of the cycle of violence? Wasn’t my conviction that I was better than this part of the problem?
Six-foot-one. Hundred eighty. I couldn’t get him up another flight of steps.
My office door was open.
I promised myself I’d alert someone as soon as I understood what was going on. I’d carefully and objectively note the signs of domestic abuse. Then I’d decide.
Bending at the waist, I dropped him on the couch and collapsed on the carpet beside him. At least it was warm in here.
* * *
The pain came less than an hour later, as expected. Caden/D
amon lay under a pile of blankets with a hot water bottle between his feet. I took a hot shower upstairs and took inventory of my body. I hadn’t shattered my teeth, but my jaw ached, and my lower back and knees shot through with pain when I put pressure on them. I took four Advil.
Bright red bled through the whites of my eyes, and dark pink triangles formed on each side of the bridge of my nose. My neck looked okay. He hadn’t put that much pressure because he knew how to cut off my air.
No energy had been wasted.
The surgeon side of my husband.
He’d recognized his name as Damon. That had been clear. What had also become clear was that he had been running headlong into this dissociation for months, and I’d let it happen. A little professional voice told me there was nothing I could have done and, at the same time, that I’d done everything I could. Neither recollection was true.
I’d done everything that pleased me because my body enjoyed it. Guilt twined around the realization like yarn around a stick.
* * *
All night, I sat by him. His head was turned toward the back of the sofa with his eyes open, staring at the upholstery. His vitals were good, so I let him do what I should have been doing. Resting.
My DSM V was in arm’s reach. I knew what was in it, but I looked anyway.
Dissociative Identity Disorder.
DSM-5 300.14 (F44.81)
Trauma based. Correlated with PTSD. Patients suffering with mental trauma compartmentalized it into discrete personalities as a coping mechanism. The therapist had to tell each personality about the other, validate them, work toward integration (an acceptance of the condition), then fusion (merging of personalities) until normalcy was achieved.
I’d had a patient with a traumatic split in Iraq and not since. He’d watched a buddy shoot a three-year-old on purpose. This was a man he’d trusted and respected. When one CO wouldn’t believe him and another didn’t care, it tore the fabric of his belief system. He became Molly Jones, Grosse Point housewife, when the memory was too much to bear. His breakdown made it harder for him to convince Command that the event had happened, and he was sent home.
This couldn’t be happening to Caden.
But it is.
My husband was the King of Detachment. He could lock up his emotions to get the job done.
That’s the problem here.
I’d married a strong man. A rock. A man who didn’t know how to fail.
Say it.
He was the calm eye of a deadly storm, maintaining his composure in the worst of circumstances.
Say it. You’re getting warmer.
I’d married a man who would never come undone. I’d married strong, not weak.
Warmer.
I didn’t marry a crazy person.
Jackpot.
* * *
At nearly dawn, his finger flicked, and a minute later, his hand twitched at the wrist. A swallow. A jerk of his legs under the blankets. Then his hand found mine and covered it. I held on to him, and he turned his head.
I recognized Caden’s face. He looked like the twin brother my husband had never had. All the features were the same, but he was different.
“Hey,” I said.
“Grey.” He squeezed my hand and shifted his body toward me. Paresis done. He had his body back.
I hadn’t realized how tight I was until the muscles holding worry about his body relaxed. “Are you all right?”
“Are you?” His voice was thick and slow, as if he had to remember how to speak.
“I’m fine.” I cupped his jaw tenderly. “What do you remember?”
“He hurt you.”
Third person. Complete dissociation. A break.
“I’m fine,” I said, leaning my lips into his. He smelled like my husband. Freshly ground coffee and cut grass. “One hundred percent fine.”
“Thank God.”
He fell asleep.
* * *
As a fan of Siouxie and the Banshees and the Dead Kennedys, who wore thick eyeliner and shapeless black clothes, my social group hadn’t required I play a sport. Nor had my family. Basketball, however, had its advantages. I had been athletic enough to play varsity in a few sports, but the constant motion of basketball ran me ragged, and I liked that. Besides, when Dad was around, we played in the driveway.
Colin shot up when he was thirteen, surpassing my height by the time I turned fifteen. Dad beamed at his son’s new manhood and refused to acknowledge my entrance into womanhood. I understood why, but that didn’t diminish my hunger for his approval.
“You know why she got the jump? Because she pushes.” Dad bounced the ball with his left hand and pointed at Colin with his right. The pointing meant he was serious, and Colin, bent over his knees and panting after I’d stripped the ball from him to score, turned off the adolescent backtalk long enough to listen. “This little girl here will beat you every time because she has tenacity. When she decides she’s taking what you have, she’s going to work you until you’re standing there wondering what happened.”
He passed me the ball. I beamed with the compliment, eager to prove I could be the person he thought I was. Even though I was being used as a tool to inspire his precious son, it was the encouragement I got, so it was the encouragement I cherished.
“Push, Colin! Push!” Dad shouted as my brother covered me. “She’s getting away!”
My brother avoided organized sports. I was the one on varsity. I was the one with skin in the game, but Colin was pushed to do more, be better, while I was an obstacle to overcome.
I swung low and jumped, making one off the rim. Colin caught the ball on the way down and flipped it back to Dad.
“Nice work, Grey. You…” He pointed at Colin again. “You’re getting beat by a girl.”
Colin’s hair flopped in front of his face. He was skipping the awkward part of adolescence and going right to heartthrob.
“Yeah, Colin,” I said. “I’m going to tell all the freshmen girls.”
“I don’t date freshmen.”
“You’re going to be dating a senior named Steve if you don’t win the next point,” Dad joked.
The fact that Colin was into girls didn’t make the joke funny. Nothing would have made it funny. But we were young, and I played hard to beat him just to prove I was as good as he was.
* * *
With Damon/Caden resting on my office couch, I made a few decisions. Then remade them. Then I accepted my inability to change anything outside my own actions and decided between what I could choose and what I couldn’t control.
I could decide to stay with my husband no matter what.
So, I would do that.
I could decide to respect him as a man, not a part of my caseload.
So, I would do that.
I could decide to accept this problem, whatever it was, while simultaneously helping him get better.
Acceptance was an amorphous goal. But I could commit to the process.
I was human, fallible and imperfect, but I was dedicated. All I had to do was commit to him as fully now as I had in my parents’ backyard on the day I married him. With my dog tags (something old) dangling over the lace of my wedding gown and shiny army boots (something new) under the train, I’d sworn my life to him. In my mother’s headpiece (something borrowed) and sky-colored socks under the boots (something blue), I’d submitted myself to a life tied to a man I loved for the qualities I’d been raised to admire.
In my frailty and humanity, I’d vowed to make a superhuman effort.
I hadn’t been ready for this man.
There’s freedom in being fully human. Once I admitted my own prejudices, I knew who I was dealing with. I feared my weakness. I was concerned about my sanity. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to handle Caden and myself if he was in this kind of trouble.
I had come face-to-face with the fact that my husband had limits, but though I knew they existed, I couldn’t see their outline without knowing what had driven him to them.
Maybe it was the house. This priceless, coveted property had been the scene of his mother’s abuse. He’d insisted he was fine, that he’d stripped it of every memory. Moved the kitchen, the bedrooms, redone every detail until he couldn’t recollect a single scene. But he couldn’t change the outside, and walking through the door twice a day must have brought something back for him.
We could move.
We should move.
We could sell it and move to a smaller place. Stay in Manhattan. Maybe Brooklyn. I could take him back to San Diego.
I put my head on the desk, making constant decisions, tossing them aside, making others, justifying them in my mind to Caden, then Damon, who I didn’t know. I realized there was no chance of a change as long as my husband was in this state. What one personality said, the other could undo.
There was freedom in being fully human, and there was also confinement.
Chapter Two
CADEN
I woke up naked on the couch in her office, my legs bent and leaning on the back so I’d fit. Something damp and yielding rippled between my feet. I reached under the blankets and pulled it out.
A pale-water bottle. I didn’t know how I’d gotten into the office, under the covers, or naked, much less why I’d needed a water bottle.
Greyson sat behind her desk with her head on her folded arms, sleeping in yoga pants and a ribbed tank. Her pink lips were parted, gravity pulling them slightly toward the center of the earth. She had patches of burst capillaries under her eyes. That was from losing air. I’d carefully cut her off to extend her orgasm, but I didn’t think it had gone far enough to cause the darkness at the tops of her cheeks.
My primary feeling at seeing her was desire. Not normal sexual desire, but utter filth. I wanted her to wake up as I was coming on her face, then wipe it all off her with my dick so I could make her lick me clean.
