by Reiss, CD
The tears came hot and fast, salty as the water I stirred, lost in the scalding vapor. He needed me, and I’d failed him over and over, treating him like an adversary instead of a human soul who needed my unconditional love.
“Grey.” Colin’s voice came from behind me. “Grey!” Closer now.
I wiped my cheeks but not in time.
He leaned over the counter to face me. “Why are you crying?”
* * *
We’d pushed the half-full plates to the center of the kitchen island long ago so we could take the wine more seriously. I’d lost my appetite completely once Colin sat me down. Once I was outed as crying, I buried my face in his coat, blubbering like a fucking baby. He didn’t complain about the streak of snot I left on it. He was a good brother.
“Right before my eyes,” I said as Jenn filled my glass again. “He changed standing there, staring at me. No trigger. Nothing happened. Just bam.” I snapped my fingers. “Like that. Then we had dinner with the board.”
“Did you get the job?”
“The what?”
“The Gibson Unit?”
“If I’m reading the tea leaves…” I put my glass in front of my face to hide my smile. “It looks like I got it.”
“All right!” Colin cheered. “Took long enough.”
We all clinked to my future, which was unsure at best but looking up at worst.
Jenn leaned over Colin to fill his glass, and when he turned his head to thank her, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes a second longer than a blink.
“Thank you,” he said.
She looked down and smiled. You couldn’t see a blush on skin as dark as hers, but the way she tried to not look at him too long but couldn’t help herself at the same time? Well, I’d seen that before.
“And after dinner?” Colin asked, tapping his fingers together as if he was counting something.
“Same until the next morning.” I didn’t tell them about the tone of the sex or how hot it was for me.
“Then he was cold Caden?”
“Yes. Ever since he got back from reserves, he’s been switching.”
I didn’t tell them about the name Damon either. I didn’t want either of them to slip in front of him.
“So.” Jenn sat when her glass was full and the last drops had spilled out of the bottle. “Cold Caden is demanding, possessive, competent, and precise.”
“Dutiful. Honorable. Confident,” I added one for each finger. Naming their traits had been soothing. It forced me to face the differences between the two personalities and hold them both in my mind.
“Warm Caden is emotional, romantic, devoted?” Jenn wasn’t holding a pencil, but I knew she was taking mental notes. “Impulsive.”
“And manipulative,” I added.
“Sounds like him,” Colin said.
“Which one?”
“Both,” Jenn and Colin said at the same time.
I sipped my wine. “I feel like shit for telling you this.”
“You weren’t doing yourself any good holding it in,” Jenn said. “I mean, come on, how many studies do you need? How many ways do you have to hear getting it out is better than keeping it in?”
“You’re a psychiatrist, for fuck’s sake,” Colin mumbled.
“Oh, fuck off.” I kicked him. “I was trying to protect someone I love.”
“And killing yourself in the meantime.” Jenn reached across the island and squeezed my arm. “If it was just about him, I’d say you need to shush it, but it’s eating you alive.”
“It is.” I put my head against the cool stone of the counter. The room was spinning, and my thoughts were butter-thick. “I don’t know what I’m going home to.”
“Depends what time you go home,” Colin said.
I picked up my head too quickly and braced myself against the edge of the island. “What do you mean?”
“It sounds to me, if I heard you right, that he changes at sunup and sundown. Cold Caden is awake in the day. Warm Caden is awake at night. Your dinner probably started just as the sun set.”
“Oh, my God.” I stood. Stumbled.
“He’s a vampire,” Colin added glibly.
“This is not funny!” I shouted, thrusting every ounce of sobriety I had left in his direction. “I’m not living in some movie. This is not a book. This is not a teenage fantasy. This is my life, and it’s not funny. My husband, who I love more than anything… who I gave up everything…” I couldn’t finish the stupid, selfish thought. “He’s not a pop culture monster. He’s sick. And I have to help him.”
I laid my hands on the counter to steady myself, but the counter moved. Jenn got under me before I fell.
* * *
There was a headache, and the headache was the alpha and omega. It hurt when I moved, breathed, or had a thought. I hadn’t had that kind of headache since the morning I left for basic training. My friends had taken me out to a goth club and tried to talk me out of enlisting, but it had already been too late. I was committed, and there was no going back. But I drank to their efforts and went to Fort Jackson with a knockout of a migraine.
I had a bottle of water lodged under me and a bottle of Advil in the hand that fell over the side of the couch onto the hardwood.
I wanted to know what time it was, but more importantly, I had to get the Advil bottle open.
The arrow on the top and the arrow on the rim were already lined up. I popped it off with my thumb then wiggled the bottle from between the cushions and my rib cage. The seal had been cracked.
Jenn was a good friend, but that kind of attention to detail was all Colin. I took three Advil and put my watch in front of my face. Blinked. Arranged my thoughts around the spike in my head. Blinked again.
07:21 hours.
First session was at 09:30.
I could make it.
Jenn came in from the hallway in a yellow robe with a towel on her head. “Good morning, sunshine.”
“I have to go.” I got up. No, I didn’t. A sledgehammer hit my head, and I sat back down.
“Take it easy. Have coffee and let the Advil do their thing.”
“I can’t believe everything I told you last night. You’re never going to be able to look Caden in the eye again.”
“I just did.” She handed me a cup.
“What?”
“He’s waiting outside.”
“How—?”
“You think I’m going to put you on my couch for the night and not tell your husband where you are? I will not be party to breaking you guys up.”
“But you think we should?”
“No. No, no, no.” She sat on the edge of the couch. “Don’t put words in my mouth. I never said that, and I never thought it. He loves you. He’s fucked up from the war, and he loves you.”
“Not just the war.” The coffee scalded my tongue, but I drank it anyway. I didn’t think I’d told them about the bottle room, but I wanted to make sure.
Jenn shook her head and looked into the middle distance, holding her cup with both hands like a safety blanket. “Yeah, well, it’s rarely just the war. Anyway. Listen. If I had someone to send you to, would he go?”
“What’s the specialty?”
“Dissociative disorder.”
“It’s not that. Not textbook at least.”
“I’m not pressuring you. Just tell me if you want the referral.”
“What’s with you and Colin?” I changed the subject.
“What do you mean?”
“Are you obfuscating?” I managed to sit up. “Or do you really not know what I’m talking about?”
She shrugged. “I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Did he—”
“No. Not Colin. He’s fine. And no. There’s nothing. We’re friends.”
That was a bald lie, and the twist of her mouth after she said the word friends proved it.
“And you don’t want to talk about it?”
“Right.”
“Didn’t you spend
all of last night raking me over the coals for keeping things in?”
“I did. And it was fun. But you have a husband downstairs waiting for you, and he’s the cold and possessive one. So, for him to give you enough distance to wait out there instead of in here? You gotta respect that by moving your ass off my couch.”
She slapped my leg and held her hand out to help me up.
* * *
I was born in May of 1974, the middle of three. The only girl. My father was twenty and in Vietnam when my mother had me in a base hospital. When she cried out in labor, the nurse snapped and told her she was disturbing everyone. It was time to stop crying like a baby and grow up.
She did both.
My father didn’t hear about the nurse until I was eighteen months old and my mother mentioned it in passing. He was home from the war, but he’d brought the war back with him. We were still living on base, which meant my dad could grab his rifle and storm to the hospital maternity ward where, before the era of viral clusters of mass shootings, there were no guards.
He didn’t point the rifle at anyone and he didn’t find the exact nurse who’d said the exact thing, but he gave the entire staff a good talking to before he was hauled away to spend six months in a white room “getting better.”
I had to break my wrist to consider a career in mental health. Maybe it was avoidance. Maybe I had to shed a crust of ideas about what being a soldier meant. But really, it should have been obvious I knew the effects of a war on a man’s soul.
One night, while studying in the med school library, exhaustion twisted a menstrual cramp from an uncomfortable ache to a stabbing agony. As I laid my head on the carrel desk, trying to breathe through it, I told myself to stop crying like a baby. It was time to grow up. For the first time in years, I thought of that nurse and wondered if she’d been in Vietnam. I wondered if my mother’s cries had triggered a memory or flashback. I wondered if she’d actually given the best care and advice she could have under the circumstances.
* * *
Even though the Advil swathed the sharp wedge in my head with cotton and gauze, moving exacerbated the pain. Freshly showered and wearing my best friend’s clothes, I took the stairs slowly to find Caden on the sidewalk, waiting.
“Morning,” I said at a volume designed to maintain equilibrium.
“Good morning.” He laid his hand on my lower back and guided me to the Ferrari parked at a hydrant, its hazards flashing.
“Sorry I made you wait.”
“I don’t mind.” He opened the door. “I’m sorry about this stupid car.”
He helped me lower myself into the asphalt-scraping seat, shut the door, and got into the driver’s side, stopping before he turned on the ignition.
“What happened to your hand?” I pointed at his left wrist, which was wrapped in an Ace bandage.
“Sprain. I fell on it. It’s nothing.” The car roared when he gently pulled out of the spot. “Please tell me he bought this without telling you.”
“He bought this without telling me.”
He looked at me as if asking whether I was honoring his request or telling the truth.
“Seriously. You just showed up with it.”
“Are there any other large expenditures I should know about?” he asked.
“A ring.”
“A ring?” He held out his fingers. Nothing but the wedding band half-covered in bandage.
“For me.” I held out my hands. Nothing but the wedding band. “An engagement ring. It’s home.”
The car jerked when the light turned green. “Is it nice?”
“Very nice.”
“Do you like it?”
“I love it, but I don’t need it.”
“No, you do,” he said matter-of-factly. “I should have taken care of that a long time ago.”
The car roared like a stallion chomping at a bit, protesting any kind of safe driving.
“It goes really fast when you open it up.”
“It’s rush hour.” The car rumbled over the Williamsburg Bridge.
“In New York,” I agreed.
“What a dolt,” he mumbled.
I put my hand on his knee. He was the dolt, and he wasn’t. “Thanks for picking me up. I needed a night without… you know. It.”
“This has got to be stressful for you.”
“It’s fine.”
“I’m sorry I’m doing this to you.”
I gave his leg a squeeze, but he didn’t look at me. He looked straight ahead with his right hand on the bottom of the steering wheel, left arm bent against the window.
“Goes fast, huh?” he said as we coasted along the off-ramp. Space opened up in front of us.
“Gets quieter the faster it goes.”
He let the car slow even more. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
The light turned red up ahead, but the three cars ahead of us ran it to make a left.
Caden hit the gas and the car took off quickly and smoothly. I screamed. Half a block of pure inertia-defying, door-clutching, back-against-the-seat acceleration. He slammed on the brakes for a red light. Tire smoke surrounded us, and my heart pounded like a jackhammer.
Then I laughed. “You asshole!”
For the first time as Caden, he laughed too. “That’s fucking fast!”
We were in hysterics all the way home.
* * *
The headache subsided, but the cloud of guilt over having a ring I hadn’t told him about clung to me. Even though he was him and he knew… but didn’t.
After work, I went upstairs. On the way to our bedroom, I passed him in his little office on the second floor.
“Hey,” he said, standing by the desk and slashing open an envelope. “I’m stopping Blackthorne.” He flipped the paper open, scanned it, tossed it onto the desk, and picked up another.
“Why?”
“It’s not working, obviously.” Slash.
I went into his office. “I went there the other day when you couldn’t make your appointment.”
“Oh, yeah?” He blew open the envelope. “What did you think?”
“It was fun but had the distinct odor of bullshit.”
He let out a short laugh and pulled out the letter. Tossed it. “Yeah.”
“We need to see a specialist.”
“We, huh?” He continued through the mail. Slash. Blow. Open. Toss. Slash. Blow. Open. Toss.
“You can go yourself. But we can’t do nothing.”
“Anything else you’d like to prescribe?”
“I mentioned leaving this house.”
“Was that his idea?”
“No.”
“No. Just the ring was his.”
“He said it was your idea.”
“I’d like to see it before I let him get away with that.”
I went to the bedroom and returned to the office with a box the size of a fist.
“Tiffany,” he said when I handed it to him.
“Open it.”
He opened it.
“Is it what you envisioned?” I asked when he took out the ring.
“Close. Why aren’t you wearing it?”
“I didn’t know what you’d remember. I thought you’d freak out. I don’t know.”
He placed the ring back in the box and put it on the desk. “You know how much I love you.” He tapped the desk surface in front of the open box. “When you were too close to that mortar and you started to fall… the thought that you might be dead… it lifted me out of myself. I wasn’t important without you. I didn’t even exist if you didn’t. When I opened you up to take that shrapnel out…” He touched the left side of my sternum, the scar under the fabric, as if he was so intimate with its placement he didn’t need to see it to know where it was. “You’re the beating heart of my life. You’re the blood in my veins.”
“I love y—”
“Did he fuck you after he bought it?” He cut me off as if the last question was the whole point of the previous speech.
He kept his eyes on the emerald, pushing his jaw forward as if he could hold back his rage only so long. I put my hands on his, pressing down until the box snapped closed.
“God dammit, Greyson.” He pulled away, body rigid as if he had to hold back from hitting something.
“You cannot be jealous!”
“It wasn’t me.” His growl came from the deepest part of his chest.
“It was!”
With his good hand, he took me by the jaw and squeezed just enough to keep me still. “Did you like it? Did he make you come?”
Cold Caden was detached except when laughing about speeding to a red light or demanding I not fuck him when he wasn’t him. Cold Caden was Hot Caden when he was mad, and my body went limp with desire.
“Yes, you did,” I spit, unable to get my mouth to move around his hand.
“How many times?”
Did he want the play-by-play? Was I supposed to write it down and have it notarized? Because fuck him. Fuck this. I had two unpredictable halves of a single sane husband. Nothing was what it was supposed to be. I hadn’t signed on for any of this.
“So. Many. Times.” Giving in to my impulse to egg him on was the only satisfying thing I’d done in weeks. The power of my agency was a drug. Pushing him and myself made my blood hot with challenge.
He raged with betrayal, and the fact was I raged for the same reason. He pushed me back until my spine ground against the edge of the desk. He could hurt me, and the realization didn’t frighten me as much as it thrilled me. His power… unleashed on my body.
“I don’t want you fucking me when I’m that way,” he said an inch from my face. “Did I say that with the right words?”
I pushed his hand off my jaw. “I heard you.” I shoved him back by the shoulders. “And I’ll fuck you any time I want.”
Now. Now would be a good time.
A conflict flickered across his face. He didn’t know what to do.
“Don’t test me,” he whispered.
“Pick up your pencils, class. Question one: who can your wife fuck any time? Answer: her husband.”
“I don’t want to hurt you!”
“Yes, you do!”
My agreement was permission, and he knew it, grabbing a fistful of hair and pulling me close. “Tell me to stop.”
