by Reiss, CD
Damon hadn’t seemed threatening until that moment.
“How will you stop it?”
“I can keep him from coming back.”
“What if you fail?”
“He already warned you. He’s going to kill you.”
He wouldn’t. If he’d released Damon to protect me, then something inside him didn’t want to hurt me. But the man in our living room wouldn’t be convinced. His whole existence depended on believing I was in danger from Caden.
“I’ll take the room across the hall from ours,” he said, putting his hand on my cheek. I pulled away. “Tomorrow, we can both sleep in. You can use it.”
* * *
In the space under the bedroom door, the light from the bedroom across the hall went out. He’d waited for me to turn my lights out first, but he had no way of knowing if I was sleeping, and he had to realize how impossible that was. I crouched at the head of the bed and listened to the night sounds of the city. People passing by, talking. Cars inching toward Amsterdam Avenue in the constant traffic that was Manhattan.
I had to talk to someone.
I couldn’t do this myself.
I loved him, and turning him into a patient rankled that love. He was mine. We’d made promises. Vows. We were a unit. His secrets were sacrosanct.
Me.
Caden.
And now, a third uninvited person who held the same love in the same heart.
I loved him. I loved what we had together. I had to be the one to get it back.
Standing at the window in an army T-shirt and underwear, lost in thought, I watched New Yorkers do what they did best. Cross in the middle of the street, barely looking both ways as if they were protected by an invisible force field.
What if he tried again to kill me?
He couldn’t. Not if I didn’t give him the opportunity. I was the one who had spent a decade in military training. He was a surgeon. A well-built surgeon with a military fitness regimen but still just a doctor. I could take him in a fight as long as I was mentally prepared.
Jenn would know what to do, but she’d tell me to get out of the house. I wasn’t giving up that easily. Not on my marriage. Not on Caden.
I fooled myself into thinking there was some quick solution that would bring us back to the way it had been. Some trick I could implement and boom, life would go back to normal. We’d be back on track in no time. But if I went through channels, brought in other people, spent weeks on an official diagnosis, there would be no going back.
Even as I convinced myself that was possible, I knew it wasn’t. I was con man and mark. Thief and victim. A willing dupe in my own web of lies.
A yellow taxi narrowly missed a canoodling couple, honking and getting flipped the bird in response. The shock of the noise opened my defenses enough to let in a thought I’d been holding back.
I wanted Damon. I wanted his touch. I wanted him to stay long enough to convince me he was my husband by another name. Which he was. At least as much as the detached monster who fucked like an animal.
One more day, then he was on call Sunday. If they called him in, I’d block the door, and by Monday, I’d know if he could do his job safely.
I’d let it go one more day, then decide.
Chapter Four
DAMON
Caden put up a fight at dawn, trying to wrestle past the room he’d given me, but I got away. All I had to do—and this should have been obvious from the start—was bring to mind Greyson motionless on the couch while he spurted cum down his leg.
When I showered, I couldn’t help but feel the firmness of this body I’d taken. It wasn’t just the realness that fascinated me, but the way the desires I’d felt through Caden didn’t float free but were connected to the body. Hunger was in the stomach. Thirst was in the mouth. Wakefulness in the mind. Anxiety in the chest. Lust was deep in the balls.
Last night, I’d smelled how much she wanted me. The apples he’d always tasted on her skin went fermented with arousal, soured by hormones and the wetness I sensed between her legs. When I’d touched her ankle, her nipples had hardened under the tank top, and my tongue had gotten fat in my mouth with the need to suck them.
Stroking the erection that appeared, I let out a relieved breath. I could finally make love to her. Taste her for myself. Enter her slowly. Savor her groans. Guide her to orgasm after orgasm. Keep her safe while I came inside her.
The release weakened my knees. I knew the mind emptied with his orgasms, but the physical sensation was more than I expected. It had direction. Forwardness. It was a barrier shattered with a battering ram.
“Wow,” I said, jerking out the last drops. Doing this inside her would be more than pleasurable. More than a release. It would be a culmination.
As I dried off by the bed, I heard her leave her room. I waited for her to knock. Instead, the stairs creaked when she walked down them.
I knew how to do it. I’d watched him love her, felt a facet of what he’d felt, noted her reactions. I could give her so much more than he could—and without pain or control.
The man in the mirror was hers. He’d always done his hair with quick, efficient precision. I ran my fingers through it and went downstairs to convince my wife she was mine.
* * *
Greyson was standing at the counter, a hand on each side of the gurgling coffee maker.
“Good morning,” I said.
“How did you sleep?” She didn’t turn to look at me but reached into the cabinet for two cups.
“Not great.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I was thinking about how shocking this must be for you.”
“I can handle it.” She poured the coffee. “I’m just worried about you.”
A cup in each hand, she faced me for the first time that morning. She froze for a second, as if seeing me for the first time, then dropped her gaze to the island counter, where she put the cups.
“I’ve never been better,” I said. “Honestly.”
“You’ve never actually been.” She put sugar and a pitcher of cream near my cup and took her own, sipping it black. The dark patches under her eyes were mostly gone.
“Do you have plans today?” I asked.
“A little follow-up work.” Waiting for something, she watched my hand resting on the cup. “Transcribing notes. Prepping for the meeting with the Mt. Sinai board. Should be done by lunch. Your coffee’s getting cold.”
Right. I hovered over the cream and sugar.
Both? Either?
Why couldn’t I remember how I drank my coffee?
Had she set me up?
“Is this how it’s going to be?” I said, taking neither sweetener nor cream.
“How what’s going to be?”
“Testing me? Would Caden wear this belt with these pants? Brush his hair like this? Does he like it light and sweet or black and bitter?”
“Milk, no sugar.” She put her mug to her lips with both hands. “Straight black on deployment.” Her face disappeared behind the tilt of her cup.
I flipped the top off the sugar, dropped a teaspoonful into the black coffee, and replaced the lid with a clack.
“I have an idea,” I said. “Let’s do something fun this afternoon.”
I took a big gulp. It tasted as sweet as spite.
* * *
My strategy was to act sane. I knew that didn’t sound like much of a plan, but she needed to imagine herself with a man who was exactly the same as her husband, but different. Better. For one, I didn’t want to kill her. I wasn’t a simpering child encased in a rock-hard ego.
His phone rang.
No.
I had to stop pretending he still mattered.
My phone rang. It was Danny. I flipped it open slowly, trying to recall my history with him. Nothing came to me.
“Hello,” I said.
“I’m going to be ten minutes late,” he said. “You can warm up.”
Late. He was going to be late. It was Saturday. What did he do on Sa
turday morning?
Shit.
“I don’t think I can make it,” I said. “I’m taking Greyson out to lunch.”
“Yeah. With me and Shari at the club. We switched it to today. Did you get the email?”
Suddenly, I knew the password. I hadn’t even wondered about it a second earlier. “Where were we meeting again?”
“We’re playing the blue ball at eleven, and the girls are coming for lunch at the club at noon-thirty.”
Blue ball.
Racquetball.
The club. Got it.
“Yes. Right. I’m sorry. It’s been a little busy around here.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeppers!”
“Yeppers? You sure you’re all right?”
Every word was a damn minefield.
“I have to go. See you there.” I hung up before I had the chance to screw up good-bye.
* * *
Danny’s lateness had given me a chance to both brush up on racquetball rules and remind Greyson she was meeting us for lunch. She knew already. She was a worthy adversary, and she’d be a worthier partner once I convinced her I was permanent.
As far as racquetball went, what my mind didn’t know, my body remembered enough to pass.
“God, you suck today,” Danny said when I missed the final shot of the final match.
“Tired.” I wiped my face with the white towel I’d found in the gym bag.
“Maybe it’s finally getting to you.” He clapped my back as if this was an old joke he shared with my body.
* * *
Lunch was at a round table in the center of the room. Shari had dark hair and brown eyes. She laughed a lot and smiled like a kid on Christmas when Greyson asked to see her ring.
“He picked the perfect cut,” she said.
“It’s gorgeous,” my wife replied. The room was hot, and she’d stripped down to her camisole. Her skin was going to drive me wild.
“When are you getting your wife a rock?” Danny pointed his water glass at me.
“It’s not a priority,” Greyson said before my surprise could register. I didn’t know if she was covering for me or the husband who hadn’t gotten her a ring.
Danny turned to his fiancée. “Apparently they don’t have diamond rings on the front lines, and when they came home on leave for the wedding, they didn’t have time to get to Tiffany.”
Greyson stabbed her lettuce. I couldn’t tell how she felt about it, but I knew how I felt about it.
It was unacceptable.
“That’s interesting.” Shari tucked her hand in her lap. “Hey!” She brightened. “I heard you’re a candidate for the new mental health division the hospital’s putting in?”
“The Gibson Post-Trauma Mental Health Center,” Greyson recited the long name as if it was a joke, but she was beaming just enough.
I put my arm across the back of her chair. I ran my thumb along the skin between her shoulder blades. Her eyelids fluttered at my touch.
Danny kicked me. “You didn’t tell me.”
“I’m one of two,” Greyson said. “The board has my proposal. We’ll see.”
“I have something planned,” I said to her profile.
She faced me. “Really?”
“To celebrate. I didn’t want to blow it, but it was this afternoon anyway.”
“Well, well,” Danny said with a smile. “You do have a romantic side.”
“I do.” Though my words answered my friend, I said them to my wife.
* * *
“If a diamond ring was important, I’d have one.”
She sat so far against the other side of the cab she was almost out the door. A sheet of plexiglass separated the back seat from the front, where the driver patiently navigated the miseries of Manhattan traffic.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter to you, but it matters to me.”
She held up her hand so I could see the gold band. “This is all that matters.”
I’d spent hours trying to understand what consciousness was and when mine began. I’d had to do it without a single human reference. If this had happened to anyone before, I had no access to them to ask how I should feel or what I should think. I had no way of knowing if I was my own person or another man’s setback. In moments like this, when I had to define the indefinable, I was the loneliest man on the planet.
The traffic on Fifth Avenue was almost sadistic in the accuracy of its obstruction.
“I wish I could marry you in that church right there.” I pointed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
She looked, folded hands pressed between her knees. “Why?”
“It’s the richest, most beautiful cathedral in the country.”
“I bet plenty of people who got married in there are divorced by now.”
“Before Caden opened the bag, I could sense some of the things he wanted or knew. He wanted to marry you in that church, but there was a two-year wait list, and he thought he’d lose you if he waited.”
Her head snapped back to me, eyes on fire, formidable. “Why would he think that?”
She said “he,” but she meant “you.”
“He took you away from your family. Away from the military. He didn’t know if he’d do something to push you too far. He was afraid of losing you every minute of every day.”
“That’s ridiculous. If I didn’t want to be here, I wouldn’t have come.”
“I know, but he worried. In any case, one of the other things I knew, or sensed, was an emptiness around the idea of your finger. Then the notion kind of coalesced into a ring of a certain color, which I’m debating about.”
“I’m confused. I don’t have a preference. I’m not a jewelry person.”
“He knows, but he thought a ring was important. He had a very clear idea in mind, which is probably why I could see it. Color. Cut. Size. What I’m debating about is doing anything he wants after what he almost did to you. On the other hand… it’s perfect, and you should have it. Not on your anniversary. Now.”
“You were going to give it to me on our anniversary?”
She said “you” this time, instead of implying it, and I had to look away. I didn’t want her to see my reaction or notice her therapist’s curiosity parsing my expression. In doing so, I saw a dim reflection of my face in the plexiglass. Not my face. His face. Which was my face. I didn’t have another.
How could she not think I was him? I looked exactly the same.
I was the face of the love of her life.
Maybe I should accept that.
Maybe I could use it to give her everything, including her peace of mind.
“I was going to give it to you on our anniversary,” I said, taking apart her reaction to the pronoun.
She wore full therapist detachment.
Like I said. Formidable.
“I’m not a creative man,” I continued. “I was a little stuck on the setting. But yes, the situation with the ring was getting fixed. I just think now is better than later. It’s been a rough few months.”
I pulled her hands out from between her legs. She accepted, folding her palms over my hand.
“It has been rough,” she said. “But we’re going to get through it.”
“I know.”
“No. You don’t. You don’t have to buy me things to keep me. You don’t have to worry that I’m ever, ever, ever going to leave you.” She squeezed my hand. “The man I married is honorable, strong, brilliant, loving. He has a sense of duty that was never drilled into him. It’s just a part of who he is, and I admire it so much that sometimes it hurts to think about. He’s out of my league. If anyone should worry, it should be me.”
I could only shake my head. How could such a perceptive woman not see her own perfection? How was she not the person she measured everyone else against? It couldn’t be false modesty, because nothing about her was false.
“Fifth and 57th!” the cabbie called, stopping. The meter ticked out a curled paper tongue of a receipt.
I sh
oved a fifty into the slot in the plexiglass. He could keep the tip. The cab ride had been worth more than even a rich man could pay.
Chapter Five
GREYSON
Caden had talked about a ring sometimes, asking me how I felt about huge stones or special settings. I usually replied that I preferred his huge cock, which was true, and he did nothing to talk up the idea of a ring. But apparently it had bothered him enough to seep into Damon’s consciousness.
I’d never been inside Tiffany. The store was as quiet as a church, with lighting that made everything sparkle.
The sales staff knew their jobs. They pinpointed us as big spenders inside five minutes and brought us to a lounge in the back. The velvet couches were robin’s egg blue, and the walls were papered in a textured off-white. They offered mimosas and water from Antarctic glaciers in crystal glasses. Amy, our saleswoman, was a white woman in her middle years with straight, black hair and sensible makeup. The man occupying my husband’s body consulted with her out of earshot.
When Caden had first promised a ring, I shrugged it off. They looked silly with camo, and they distracted patients. The simple gold band was more than enough for me. My husband was the prize. Not the ring.
Damon didn’t stand like Caden. His posture was more relaxed. Still confident, less rigid. The way he moved his hands was more expressive, and when Amy spoke to him, he looked at her as if he was listening fully, not formulating an answer before she was done.
Same perfect body. Same sky-colored eyes. Same full lips.
But different.
When he’d touched me at lunch, it was the same casually possessive stroke as Caden’s but with a consideration, as if he was giving me the touch, not taking it.
I liked the Damon in Caden. I had to remind myself that when the illness was peeled back, they were the same person, and he needed help.
Amy went to the back. I sipped my water as Damon came to the couch.
“I told her I want you to have it now,” he said with Caden’s mouth. “Unless you want something custom?”
