The Bible says God is a man of war, and it was easy to believe there. No hammering into plowshares there, no wiping away tears, just torn flesh and burned flesh and whole flesh that nevertheless hid wounds that couldn’t be seen. It was chaos.
But somehow, I managed.
I’d always been popular, charming, loved. I was strong and healthy and athletic—my broad-shouldered, curvy frame helped me thrive in activities like weight-lifting and archery—and with a father who’d been a Marine before he’d been in politics, my youth had been filled with push-ups and squat-thrusts (even if I insisted on doing calisthenics with fingernail polish and a full face of makeup). The male Marines liked me because I was funny and pretty and could sometimes beat them at arm-wrestling, and the women on my Female Engagement Team liked me because . . . well, because I was funny and pretty and sometimes beat the boys at arm-wrestling. And when we got to Musa Qala, my knack for Pashto and my boxes of free maxi pads for the local women made me pretty popular there too.
I wasn’t a hero. I was just good.
I wasn’t undamaged, but I was surviving.
I could have had a normal deployment. I could have came home fucked up from the shit in Marja, tired, broken, sleepless and haunted, but I still would have been Jacey. I still would have been myself.
But God is a man of war and his weapon was Devon.
* * *
Now
Maybe it was stupid to come back to Virginia, but I didn’t know where else to go, and anyway, I steered as far clear from NoVa as possible. I found a nice little bungalow tucked into some nice, anonymous trees outside of Richmond, and I hid like my life depended on it. It probably did.
If you’d asked me ten years ago if I’d ever find a micron of solace living a life of near-monastic solitude, I would have laughed in your face. I’ve always thrived in groups and crowds, fed off the energy that came from being in the thick of things, loved meeting people and talking with them and laughing until my throat was sore.
A fake death puts a neat end to all of that, but what’s more surprising is that I don’t miss it. Maybe it’s that I’ve needed three years of ascetic silence to move through the heartbreak, or maybe Devon’s lessons actually paid off. Maybe I’d somehow transformed into a docile, patient submissive without even knowing it.
Well, docile might be a stretch.
I’m shaking from the rain and from Devon’s note when I finally sit down in my living room. I put the note on the coffee table and stare at it. If Devon says she’s coming, then she’s coming. But why? And how? How does she goddamn know when the only other person who knows is my brother?
Because your brother is her husband, Jace. He must have told her.
I press my knuckles against my eyes, as if I can counter the pressure of the thought. The pressure of being betrayed by Michael. Again.
There’s one other pressure though. The twisting, aching swell as my stomach climbs into my chest, as my heart climbs into my throat. Muscle memory collides with mental memory, and my cunt grows damp inside my panties, remembering. Her tongue. Her fingers. The feeling of her harness chafing against the inside of my thighs. Her teeth on my neck and the crack of her palm on my ass.
I press the knuckles in harder.
Be strong, Jacey, be strong, be strong bestrongbestrongbe—
No. I’ve been strong fucking long enough. So my body still belongs to her, so what? That doesn’t mean she still has claim to my heart, although if I’m already being honest with myself, she was never interested in my heart anyway. She wanted a bigger prize—my soul, my essence. My everything.
I want to eat your light, she told me once right before she bit the skin over my heart. Rejecting the beating organ underneath in favor of something only she could see. I want to eat up all your light for the rest of my life.
I get to my feet, stripping off my wet coat and hopping out of my boots. A shower will help. A nice shower to clear my mind—
A key slides into the door.
I freeze, watching the dented doorknob rattle. Only Michael has an extra key, and he never leaves his Arlington cocoon long enough to come down here. Arguably, he made up for his betrayal by arranging and funding my fake death and anonymous resurrection after the roadside bomb that sent my father and I tumbling in a kettle of metal and flame. But neither of us feels at peace with the other; our very scant contact since my “death” was arranged and I was flown to a private Canadian hospital to recover has been strained and unpleasant. It’s hard to fix something when no one did anything wrong. It’s hard to fix something when I can barely muster the strength to speak his wife’s name aloud.
It’s just better we don’t see one another, and Michael seems to agree.
So it’s not my brother at the door. I stand there barefoot, in damp jeans and a thin sweater, wondering what to do. Where to go.
I know.
I’m coming.
It has to be her. It has to be Devon, and yet I can’t make myself think past that to figure out what to do. How to feel. Do I stay? Do I run? Do I wrench open the door myself and strike her across the face? Scream until my screams pierce the gray veils of rain and reverberate through the woods?
I can’t choose, can’t decide. I’ve left her twice before, I’ve chosen pain after pain because they seemed like better choices than agreeing to still yet more pain, and I can’t choose it a third time, I just can’t. I don’t have the strength, and I’m tired of being the only one who gives a shit about what happens to me, and I don’t want to do it anymore, whatever it means. Living alone, crying tears into the dark, fucking my own hand like it’s hers.
I’m not going to run. I’m not even going to scream.
Instead the door flies open, and I drop to my knees.
* * *
Then
There was stretch of road outside Lashkar Gah that chewed up soldiers and spat out bodies.
It wasn’t a narrow pass or a bridge with vulnerable supports, nothing that obvious. Just a flat open road in flat open land, a path of compressed dirt and rock limned with fields of nodding poppies, green and pink and white and red. It seemed sleepy, like the middle of nowhere, a place where nothing should happen, where nothing ever would happen.
And yet.
IEDs were sown in the rutted track the way the poppies were sown in the fields next to it, and the harvest was sheared metal and blood. Sometimes the dogs would catch them, sometimes they’d detonate too early or too late and make for nothing more than an interesting show, but often enough they blowed us the fuck up.
The other FETs called the road Goliath. Big road, little Marines. And there we were, toddling up to death with our doggies and our grim prayers, and it was sometimes reassuring to think of us like David from the Old Testament, courageously approaching death with certain faith in God. But only sometimes.
Devon was driving a truck to Marja to drop off more FETs when it happened. Boom.
The bomb went off under the truck’s back wheel, killing two female Marines and cracking Devon’s head against the doorframe. She stumbled out, bleeding and disoriented, to a world of suspended moon dust and black smoke and bullets; death waited among the poppies, which were waist-high, thick, and perfect for hiding men with guns. They were far enough away from the other trucks in the convoy that Devon knew she was her own rescue, not that it probably fazed her in the least. She’d been born for this.
It didn’t matter she was pinned down next to a truck of unconscious, injured Marines who needed saving, it didn’t matter she couldn’t see or hear, because heroes don’t need those things. All she needed was breath in her lungs and God in her veins, and she would prevail. She did prevail. She saved everyone except for the two who died in the initial explosion, and she became a legend.
I finally met the David to our Goliath two days later when she moved into the flimsy tent-and-hut base we called home. She walked into the room I shared with four other women, set down her bag, and then look
ed down at me where I sat on my bed, trying to untangle my wet hair.
I looked up at her and suddenly couldn’t breathe, because breathing felt almost heretical in the presence of someone so obviously loved by God.
I closed my eyes for a long beat, trying to etch the full mouth and the olive skin and the curling coffee-colored hair to memory. The tall frame with pert, high breasts that even her cammie shirt and her no-nonsense sports bra couldn’t hide. She looked like an Athena—war and untouchable sex—and she was so beautiful that I ached. Everywhere.
“Are you Jacey?” she asked, stepping closer. Her pants brushed against my blanket, and it felt so intimate, like she was touching me in all the places only my blanket touched me these days.
I opened my eyes. Yes, it still hurt to look at her, but I forced myself to look anyway. Forced myself to breathe, even though it felt as if she’d stolen my breath along with everything else.
I saw her, and I was taken by her. Not taken with her, you understand, I don’t mean that I saw her and my heart fluttered and I felt some kind of emotional curiosity about this sultry, pout-mouthed newcomer.
No, I mean she took me. I looked at her and then she decided I was hers, and she took me. I belonged to her before I even said hello.
“Yes, I’m Jacey,” I croaked out. I might as well have said, please fuck me, because those rosy lips curled up in a smirk that I presumed was usually given over cocktails or from the other side of a pillow.
“I’m Devon,” she said, and I expected her to stick out her hand for a handshake, but she didn’t. Rather, she put her hand on my shoulder in a way that could have been friendly . . . until she let her fingertips graze the back of my neck. “They told me you’d show me around.”
I could. I would. I showed everyone around.
I was Jacey Benjamin, after all. Legacy girl. Fun girl. Popular girl.
I sucked in a breath and tried to pretend I hadn’t just surrendered all that to a hero with a heart-shaped mouth. I would be fun and friendly and all the things I was best at.
“Sure. How’d you end up here, Devon?” I asked so I could have a way to introduce her—so I could say, here’s Devon fresh from the Kabubble, or Devon just finished in Nawzad, ladies, so she’s used to the noise. Friendly, cheerful shit like that.
But Devon just looked at me with those hero eyes and said, “God wants me to be here.”
“He told you that, huh?”
She smiled at me then, a small, esoteric smile—the smile of someone who knows secrets as old as the dust currently filtering through the air around us.
“Maybe,” she said.
And there was no way to tell if the shiver working its way down my spine was unease . . . or awe.
* * *
Now
She has the same mouth now. The same slender stretch of a body and the same dark eyes.
Her hair is no longer a lush cascade of curls—she’s sliced it at the chin and styled it into a fall of sleek espresso. And there’s the clothes, which are no longer the utility cammies and boots of our youth, but an impeccably tailored pair of black cigarette pants and a fitted white blouse that probably cost more than I made in a month as a Marine. Her feet are encased in delicately pointed heels—also black—and the thin ankle strap kisses places I used to kiss. The top of her foot. The inside of her ankle. The narrow ridge of tendon above her heel.
If I weren’t already on my knees, I would have fallen there by now.
Devon stands at the threshold, her eyes glittering in the storm-soaked shadows of my living room, the rain itself behind her like a stage curtain. I should lower my eyes now, if I were really indulging in this facsimile of what we used to have, but I can’t, I can’t tear my gaze away from her, my warrior princess, my cruel queen.
“I still couldn’t make myself believe it,” she whispers. I can barely hear her over the rain. “Even when I saw you at the cemetery. I still thought it was a trick, or that I’d lost my mind . . .”
She stops, and I can see how hard she’s breathing. That expensive shirt hugs the cups of her breasts and the narrow cage of her ribs, revealing her agitation, her anger, her . . . excitement?
She shuts the door behind her, as if only just now remembering it exists, and takes an uncertain step closer. “Why?” she asks. Begs. Her voice is throaty and balled full of hurt. “How could you leave me like that? Leave me to mourn? To grieve you?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” I say, and I have a lot of pride in my tone for a woman who’s on her knees, but I don’t give a shit. I’m suddenly feeling every feeling it’s possible to feel—angry and sad and horny and happy and just so, so fucking tired.
She hardens, soft emotion turning into sharp, cutting intensity. “Excuse me?”
“You left me first, Devon. For him.”
Him leaves my mouth in a scalding, septic wave, a wave I can see break across her face like the ocean breaks on rocks. Him is an evil word between us, because it doesn’t just mean male and man, but it also means blood and brother. It was a stab that I’d been left for a man, sure, but Devon had never pretended to be anything other than bisexual. But for that man to be my best friend and brother and heir apparent to my father’s business and political legacy . . .
That was more than a stab. That was twisting the knife.
“I watched you put on a silk gown and walk down the aisle to him. I watched you put a ring on his finger and kiss—” I break off, unable to push the words off my tongue. Instead I say, “I watched, Devon. Every second of it. Because I naïvely thought there was still a chance, still a tiny chance, that you’d look into Michael’s eyes and know it was supposed to be me.”
“I didn’t think I had a choice,” she says, but she doesn’t sound like she believes that.
I finally avert my eyes, not out of deference, but out of anger, and that launches her into action. She stalks toward me with five decisive clicks of those sexy heels, and grabs my chin, forcing my face back up to hers. She searches me.
“It hurt you so much you’d rather pretend to be dead?” she demands. “It hurt so much you needed to hurt me back? Nothing had to change, Jacey, nothing at all, we could have kept everything and gained so much!”
“Fuck you,” I hiss. “I wasn’t going to be your mistress. Not when I knew you’d go back home to fuck my brother.”
Her eyes are pure fire now. “I never lied to you, Jacey.”
It’s true; she never did lie. She wanted what my father had—the defense contracting business coupled with a career in politics—hell, she wanted to be president someday, a queen in truth, with an empire of money spread around an empire of power. The moment she learned Jacey Benjamin was Saul Benjamin’s daughter, she told me her plans. To be mentored by my father, to become my father. To become part of the family.
The only mistake I made was believing she wanted to become part of the family through me.
I see her run her tongue over her teeth, which only emphasizes that perfect cupid’s bow mouth, currently painted a shade of red designed to make cunts wet and dicks hard. “Michael and I are getting divorced,” she finally concedes. There’s defeat and defiance in her tone. “I asked him even before I knew you were alive. I couldn’t—dammit, Jacey, I couldn’t pretend any more. You’re it for me. You’re the only one.”
I’ve wanted those words for so long they’re in my marrow. My bones ache as she says them.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I won’t make excuses and I can’t anyway, because I was wrong, so fucking wrong. I’m sorry for everything, Jacey. I shouldn’t have—well, there’s so many things I fucked up—but I never should have hurt you.”
“It’s too late,” I say, and try to get to my feet.
Unsurprisingly, she doesn’t let me rise, but what is surprising is she gets to her knees too, digging her hands into my hair and pressing her forehead to mine. “Let me stay,” she begs, rolling her forehead against mine. I realize she’s crying. �
��Let me atone.”
“You can’t,” I tell her. Shit, I’ve waited three years to tell her that.
Tears sparkle in her eyes, and I nearly cave. She’s too fucking beautiful.
But I make myself repeat it. “You can’t. It’s too late.”
* * *
Then
Nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened.
For days. Weeks.
Nothing.
We’d walk to the tent that was our makeshift DFAC, and I could hardly think over the sound of the wind whipping around her deceptively delicate frame. We’d be on patrol, and I could barely concentrate on anything other than the sun dancing in the depths of her eyes. And at night? As we slept on cots not two feet apart?
I couldn’t inhale, exhale, rustle or stretch for fear I’d miss the sound of her breathing.
She often looked at me like I’d signed a contract I’d forgotten about, like I was disappointing her in some subtle, unknowable way, but I didn’t mind. Having her look at me at all was a gift. Privacy is a joke on a FOB and this was pre-DADT repeal, and anyway, it was still one of the worst years of the fucking war. We were busy, dirty, crowded, celibate. So God knew that Devon’s stern looks were the closest thing to pussy I was getting those days.
I needed release. I needed it as bad as any man.
Salvation came when a handful of us were picked to head back to Bagram to report on the progress the FETs had made with the local female population. We’d be at a real base, staying in rooms with real walls and doors, and I couldn’t fucking wait. The whole flight there, I kept thinking about what I’d do first, if I’d slowly tease my clit until it went hard and needy or if I’d simply ball up a pillow between my legs and grind one out, fast and hard. And there I’d be on my bench seat, wet and squirming with anticipation, and Devon would look up and meet my gaze, and I could have sworn she knew exactly what I was thinking about. And me, Jacey, the girl who’d gotten laid at least three times a week before deployment, blushed.
I blushed. And when I looked back at Devon, her expression had completely changed. Gone was the vague disapproval for some sin I didn’t know I committed, gone was the disappointment. In its place was pure, ferocious hunger, the face of a starving woman whose only food was the blood-rich cheeks of a young woman.
Mixtape: A Love Song Anthology Page 11
