by Anne Calhoun
A girl’s sleepy voice buzzed from the speaker, asking for their order. “A triple stack combo with bacon, extra large, and a Coke,” Sean said, then turned to Ty. “You want anything?”
“I’m not hungry,” Ty said.
Sean looked at him, but Ty refused to meet his gaze. “Why’d we do that? Why did you let me fuck a woman you care about?”
“I don’t care about her.”
“Great,” Sean said, switching gears without blinking an eye. “If you don’t care we can compare notes. I’ll start, because goddamn, that was the best blow job I’ve ever had. Of course, it’s been almost a year, but objectively speaking, Lauren was incredible. That thing you were talking about…the back of her throat thing…” Sean shook his head. “Nice soundtrack.”
He knew Sean was baiting him. Knew it, because Sean didn’t talk like this, and his face was as red from sheer embarrassment as if he’d run ten miles, but Ty still clenched his jaw against the anger boiling inside him.
“It was probably for the best that Lauren was on top, because even after the blow job my control wasn’t all that great. The whole thing was so fucking hot. Every time you got a little deeper in her ass she’d tighten around me, and when Lauren came—”
If Sean didn’t stop using her name, Ty was going to make him bleed. “Give it a rest, Winthrop.”
Completely unintimidated, Sean just looked at him. “Make up your mind, Hendricks. You either don’t care, or you do. I’ve heard you and John and the other guys after shore leave. Marines fight in pairs, and they fuck in pairs. Girlfriends are off-limits, but you said she’s not your girlfriend, so she’s just a piece of ass, right? An exceptionally talented piece of ass,” he said meditatively. “So go on, tell me what you thought.”
“I think you’re in danger of losing your teeth to my fist.”
Still completely unconcerned Sean said, “How was her ass? Come to think of it, how do you talk a girl into that? You think Lauren would be up for another round, let me get some practice in?”
Ty swung around in the passenger seat, fist balled at the end of his cocked arm before he saw the drive-through girl leaning toward the window, a bag of food in one hand and an extra-large drink in the other. Her eyes were wide, like she’d heard the whole fucking thing.
Sean held his gaze for a long moment. “Don’t care, huh?”
Jesus Christ. “Take your goddamn food before we get arrested for corrupting a minor.”
Sean turned to face the window and hesitated for a split second. Then he reached for the food, set the bag on his lap, and put the drink in the holder between him and Ty. “I know why I was there,” he said conversationally as he dug in the bag, then crammed four french fries into his mouth. Chewed. Swallowed. “Get the LT laid after fifteen months overseas, and in a completely fucked-up, guy bonding way, it was thoughtful. But maybe you should have considered what Lauren meant to you before you did it.”
He tipped his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “She doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said, a lie that he might have been able to pass off as the truth before What Just Happened.
“Bullshit,” Sean said through a mouthful of burger. “Remember that hot little thing about me watching you fuck her, you watching her go down on me? I was there. Watching. You care about her. It was all over your face, in the way you touched her. And in the end, when she lost all control, she turned to you. Not me.”
The absence of engine and tire noise registered, and Ty opened his eyes. Sean was parked outside No Limits. “She just knows me better. Emotions have nothing to do with it,” he said. He reached for the door handle, suddenly bone tired and sick at heart.
“You can keep denying it,” Sean said quietly, “but it won’t change reality. That’s the shitty thing about reality. Doesn’t change just because you want it to.”
He got out and slammed the door, strode across the lot to his truck, and peeled out of the parking lot. Back at his motel, away from Sean’s relentless questions, he cut the engine and let his chin drop to his chest.
What the fuck did you just do?
On one level the night worked. Sean was clearly back in the land of the living, or at least in the land of the sexually active. But his objective with Lauren was to turn her curiosity about him and about sex against her, and there he’d failed. Spectacularly, if she did that because he was there.
Behind the closed door of his hotel room he stripped where he stood, leaving the clothes in a pile by the door, his keys and wallet in his shoes, and turned on the shower. One benefit to showering at two in the morning was an abundance of hot water. He twisted the dial into the red and stepped under the spray. Pain bloomed where the water struck his skin, and rivulets burned down his back and abdomen.
He didn’t care. He didn’t. But whatever it was surging inside him, hot and anguished and sharp-edged, was too much when the point was to feel nothing at all, and like a snake hidden in the back of a hole, anger bloomed at Lauren, curious, stubborn Lauren, who didn’t back down from a challenge. He’d have to go further, he realized. Lauren wasn’t picking up signals she should read clearly, that he didn’t give a good goddamn about her, and that this was over.
Tomorrow he’d make himself crystal fucking clear.
* * *
Somehow she’d known that, come Monday, he’d be on the bench, but when Ty strolled onto the lake path and took up position on the bench just before noon, Lauren’s stomach wound into a hard knot behind her rib cage. She’d watched him often enough over the last two weeks to read his body, his demeanor, and even across the lake and three stories up she could feel the tension humming under his skin. He seemed bigger, broader, somehow spoiling for a fight.
She was going to give him one. She gathered her sunglasses and lunch box. “I’m going to lunch,” she told Danelle.
“You sound like you’re marching off to do battle with the county again,” Danelle said. “Based on the way you’ve been pounding those keys, you need a break. Sit in the sun for an hour. It will improve your mood.”
She had a feeling her mood was going to get worse, not better, but that didn’t stop her. A quick trip through the nearly empty cafeteria for a bottle of water, then she pushed open the door leading to the path, strode past the first five benches, and stopped in front of Ty and his folders of paper. The ends of her pink silk scarf danced in the fall breeze, and she wished she’d worn a sweater. Goose bumps rippled up her arms, and for the first time in Ty’s presence the shivers weren’t accompanied by a little rippling thrill in her belly.
He looked at her for a long moment, unsmiling, his jaw set. Then he gathered the papers he’d just spread on the green slats and made room for her. She unzipped the soft lunch box, her movements brisk, jerky. “You didn’t have to leave. I would have driven you back to the hotel in the morning.”
Her phone buzzed. You were asleep.
“Enough with the texting. I’ll bet my car Sean’s on the other end of that audio feed, and after Saturday, we don’t have any secrets.” A muscle jumped in his jaw, but he put the phone away. “I wasn’t asleep. I was waiting for you. Why did you leave?”
“No reason to stay,” he said.
She huffed out a bitter laugh. “Right. Because that was just about sex.”
“Exactly,” he said easily. “Sean said you were awesome, by the way. Best blow job ever. His exact words. Definitely the most memorable night of his life. But I knew you would be.” He turned and gave her a picture-perfect bad boy smile. “Thanks, darlin’.”
Without a sound, her lungs emptied of air, and a hot flush rose up her neck. When she woke up alone Saturday night she’d expected him to be casual about it Monday, but not vicious. Not cheapening her.
Based on prior experiences on this bench, she knew what she was supposed to say next. To spite him, lash out at him, she’d tell him she thought Sean was awesome, too. A nice guy, and would Ty give her his number? She knew Ty wanted to drive her away as clearly as she could read the
signs of a nearly unbearable tension in him, the veneer micron thin. He looked like he’d been through a forty-eight-hour stomach flu, skin pale and drawn under the tan, grooves pronounced in his cheeks, and suddenly she didn’t have it in her to keep playing games with him. He was following his own instincts, trapped in a dark hole and in a snarling, locked-jaw, torn-flesh fight to the death with himself, and those fighting instincts would take her down, too.
“I’m glad one of us got something good out of what we did,” she said quietly. Struggling for composure, she opened the Tupperware and pulled out half a turkey on whole wheat. Took a bite.
He lifted both arms to spread wide on the back of the bench and let his legs drop open as he glanced casually around the lake. “Sometimes you can’t overcome instincts. Sometimes wounded animals don’t want to be healed. Sometimes in the twenty-first century it doesn’t pay to be curious.”
He twisted her words, used her flirtatious, life’s-an-adventure attitude to backhand her with his contemptuous tone, and despite her best efforts, the verbal blow generated an involuntary flinch. “Did you mean to teach me a lesson, Ty?” she asked, only a slight tremor in her voice.
A second passed, stretched into a moment while she met his gaze. Maybe the question was so obvious he wouldn’t bother to respond. Maybe he had the good sense not to respond at all. Either way he just looked at her, mouth in a grim line, eyes hidden.
“It worked,” she said quietly. “I no longer care to know another thing about you.”
It was a lie. She’d always be curious about him, the facets and depths she’d barely begun to explore, but she wasn’t a masochist. Drawing a deep breath, she sat back. The slats on the back of the bench bit into her shoulder blades as she took another bite of her sandwich. Swallowed it dry and sipped from the water bottle to get it down her throat. Ate a carrot stick. Stared fixedly at the lake. She would not run, so she continued on to her treat, a cupcake, slowly peeling the paper back from the bottom, separating the frosted top from the cake bottom, eating both, then brushing the crumbs onto the ground. A robin fought the ever-present sparrows for the crumbs while she snapped the lids back on the plastic containers holding her sandwich and carrots, zipped them into the soft cooler, got to her feet, and walked away.
No backward glance, no regret in her steps. An expert in standoffishness taught her the walk, tall and proud, shoulders back, stride loose and even. She walked away from him, knowing he’d won. He wanted to destroy himself, and he meant to do it.
Alone.
* * *
Ty watched her go, tall and slender in her gray wrap dress and pretty pink scarf, and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. A faint crackle in his earpiece, then Sean’s shocked, disbelieving voice. “Jesus Christ, Hendricks, that was cruel. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
This was who he was now, so he said nothing, because there was nothing wrong with him. Nothing at all. He’d wanted this, and he’d gotten it. She’d been under his skin a little, sure, but actually, he owed her, because now he knew exactly how far he had to go to drive good people away. The casual ones left after a month or two of ignored texts and phone calls. People like John and Sean and Lauren, he had to work harder to move them.
Now he knew exactly how hard. Push a boulder up a mountain hard. Right. Fine. He could do this. “There’s nothing wrong with me. After Saturday I’m done with her. She needed to move on.”
Move on she would, based on the way hurt shifted behind her eyes, pushed at the muscles of her face, but never quite settled or broke free. He saw plain as day the moment when she decided there was nothing more to be curious about. A spike of pain drove straight through his ribs when her expression closed off. He’d known her two weeks, and it hurt that bad. Worse was coming. John and Sean were brothers, the bonds formed under fire in Afghanistan. He hoped the end would come quickly. He dreaded the pain.
“Hey,” Sean said, his voice shifting from disgusted to alert. “Did you see Richards leave? Because his car’s pulling out of the lot.”
Adrenaline shocked Ty to his feet. He scanned the benches around the lake, then trotted along the path toward the building and around to the loading dock. Richards’s car was gone from the shaded employee parking garage. “I didn’t see it.” Because I was watching Lauren learn to hate me. “His car’s gone.”
“Fuck,” Sean muttered. “I’ll call the other team. Maybe they can pick him up.”
“Check and see if the other guys’ cars are still in the garage,” Ty said, his mind racing. He held his phone to his ear, as if he wanted to stand in the shade while conducting a conversation, and angled his body so he could see both the doors into the cafeteria and the garage. Sean’s SUV with borrowed plates prowled through the garage until it reached the top floor, then circled down.
“Both cars are still there. Any chance they left with Richards?”
Ty put his hands on his hips and bent his head. He’d been entirely focused on Lauren. Santa Claus could have come out the cafeteria door with eight tiny fucking reindeer and a merry band of elves, and he would have missed it. “Yeah. There’s a chance.”
Silence, then, “I’ll call it in.”
Fuck the chain of command. It was Ty’s responsibility to report his mistake back to John. Sean knew it. “I’ll do it,” Ty said.
He called John, who said nothing more than a terse okay and sent a team out to replace them. Ty skirted the side of an anonymous brick building, left through one of the business park’s side entrances, heading out into the suburban office sprawl. Sean picked him up a couple of blocks away. They drove in silence to John’s office, but Ty didn’t miss the tight clench of Sean’s jaw, the jerky way he handled the car’s gearshift, knew it wasn’t over the egregious, rookie surveillance mistake, but Lauren.
“Look,” he said. “It’s none of your fucking business.”
Sean said nothing, just took the corner into the parking lot at a tire-screeching veer. He got out, slammed his door hard enough to rock the heavy truck, including Ty’s added weight, and strode into the building. Ty got out of the truck and walked into John’s office. Looked like this was his lucky day. He could end relationships with everyone who cared about him in the span of a couple of hours.
Both the door to John’s office suite and his personal office were flung wide open. Even if they weren’t, Ty would have been able to hear Sean’s outraged bellow through closed doors. “What the fuck is wrong with him? He’s gone from being the guy who held everything together to the guy who fucks it up six ways to Sunday!”
“What happened?” John said mildly when Ty leaned against the doorframe separating the reception area from John’s office, but Ty could see the nerves. He remembered John’s focus on the business that was his future, the diamond glittering on Lucy’s finger that made John’s success her future as well, Sean with thirty days to recover from a deployment and decide what to do next.
The fracture inside him splintered, sending shards of emotion into the numbness.
“Richards left, and I missed it,” he said.
The words hung in the air.
“How?”
The single word was clipped with frustration and disbelief. Ty missed nothing. Nothing. He hesitated for a second, reluctant to bring Lauren into this, because it would mean remembering what he’d said, what he’d done to her.
Like you’re not going to replay that brutal scene every night for the rest of your life.
“He was busy being a fucktard to a woman.”
Sean normally sounded like a walking thesaurus. Ty leveled a look at him. “It’s none of your fucking business.”
“The fuck it’s not my business. You made it my business,” Sean snapped.
Based on Sean’s narrow-eyed glare, he was figuring out exactly what Ty had done Saturday night to all of them. You had to work pretty hard to sever the bonds of brotherhood formed in the Marine Corps, but he’d almost managed to do that. He wedged a crowbar into the splintered fragments of his soul, spoke w
ords he knew would end everything. “Do you get this emotionally involved every time you fuck a woman? You’ve got a long, hard road ahead of you.”
“The fuck I do,” Sean snapped back. “I know a class act when I see one. Give me a week, and I’ll make her forget you exist.”
The surging acid in his stomach crawled up his throat at the idea. “You’re new to this, so I’ll help you out. Rule number one of fucking in pairs is never take another Marine’s sloppy seconds.”
“Jesus Christ, Ty!” John said, genuinely shocked.
The Academy veneer disappeared from Sean’s face, eerily blank as he surged toward Ty, fists clenched. Ty squared up, ready for the fight, but John put himself between the two of them and shoved them apart. “Step back! Not in my goddamn office!” When they separated, John turned to Ty. “Tell me what’s going on.”
Ty shook his head. Sean hauled in a breath and jammed his fisted hands onto his hips. “Tell him, or I will. All of it.”
Ty folded his arms across his chest, trying to ease the pain from the splinters digging into his lungs. “I met a woman on the rig. We hooked up a couple of times. She works in the same business park, and when I saw her today I ended it. Winthrop got some action with her, and now he thinks he’s her big brother or something.”
The words landed in the room with the splat of a flat basketball hitting concrete, and the moment Ty heard them, pain that had been physical drove into his psyche. John didn’t move, just kept his gaze focused on Ty. Sean fisted his hands on his hips and turned away, but neither of them matched Lauren’s poise when she cut him dead. She wasn’t just a woman he met on the rig. They hadn’t hooked up. It had been so much more than that, and every time he tried to make it small and cheap and ugly, he shattered inside. But he was so lost in his interior wasteland that it never occurred to him that his drive to sever ties would hurt the people around him more than he could bear.
John and Sean trusted him with their lives.
