by Anne Calhoun
His screwup today could end Langley Security’s bid for a bigger piece of the corporate espionage pie.
Lauren saw right through his posturing bullshit and came back for more.
This is not who you are. That’s why it doesn’t feel right. Try all you want. This is not who you are.
Caring too much, getting too involved, had torn him apart. The sound of children wailing in terror never, ever went away. Not caring was worse. It shredded his soul, and everyone’s around him.
John had the weirdest expression on his face. Sean’s eyes widened as he took a step toward Ty, and then Ty found himself looking up at the two of them because he was on his ass, back to the wall, and someone with his voice was saying I can’t do this. I can’t. I can’t.
“Get some water,” John barked. Sean bolted for the cooler in the empty receptionist’s office. “Hey,” John said, hunkering down in front of him. “Hey. It’s okay.”
“It’s actually not okay,” Ty said. His voice shook. “Life is a fucked-up nightmare.”
“Well, sure,” John said sagely, his forearms on his knees. “But it’s what people say in this situation. It’s okay.”
Ty laughed, a hard, sharp crack of laughter that sent the thick wedges of pain through his ribs, into the tense air in the office, and buried his face in arms. He took two deep breaths, surprised in some dispassionate part of his brain that he could breathe around this spear of pain, then accepted the cup of water from Sean.
“Is this about the village?” John said quietly. “Because that wasn’t your fault. That was nobody’s fault.”
“Oh, Christ,” Sean said as he spun away, shoved his hands over his hair. “Last night I told her…I didn’t think…”
Ty cut Sean off. “Fuck that, John,” he said flatly. “Fuck. That. Twelve people died. We killed women and orphaned children. It was our road, our territory, our bombs. Somebody has to be at fault. I made them feel safe. I told them they could trust us. And they died.”
A special ops team was under fire, pinned down in the mountains, calling for air support, and somewhere the communication flurry of e-mails, video from drones, text messaging, and calls someone got the air strike coordinates wrong. It was a mistake, a miscommunication, but that was an excuse, not an answer. He’d talked to the extended families that comprised this village, sat with them, drunk their tea, eaten their bread, told them they could trust Americans, that they would be protected. He’d believed in their mission, wanted their trust, spent months offering his and earning theirs. Then he’d walked through the stink of burned flesh and mortar rounds into the rubble of their homes, heard the wails of children, watched them shrink back from him.
“Who’d you talk to about this?” John asked.
He shrugged.
“No one? Jesus, Ty, I thought…”
Ty hated the self-recrimination on his face. “I’m not your responsibility.”
“The fuck you’re not. If I’m yours, you’re mine. That’s how this works.” In a softer tone, he added, “There are people you can talk to. Good people.”
“You didn’t talk to anyone,” Ty scoffed. “We all saw crazy bad shit. I can handle it.”
“You’re fetal on my office floor, you’ve pissed off Winthrop, and from what I can piece together, you’ve been an asshole to a woman you liked enough to fuck more than once. You think you’re handling it?”
Ty considered flattening him, but Sean brought him a second cup of water, this time holding it out like a peace offering, so he drank that instead. Then he balled up the paper cone and chucked it at the trash can. He knew what to say. He’d heard guys say it a thousand times. “Goddamn it. I eat. I sleep. I don’t drink when I’m offshore. I am fine.”
He knew when guys were lying, too, and he’d go back again and again, listening until they talked. Personnel issues were his specialty, in that other life the bombs destroyed as thoroughly as they’d flattened the village.
“Sure you’re fine,” John said easily, “if that’s all you want out of life.”
He wished it was all he wanted out of life. The problem was, acting like he didn’t want anyone or anything to matter to him didn’t seem to stop people and events from mattering to him. “It’s supposed to be enough.” He looked up. “Jesus, Sean, stop looking at me like I’ve got a gun in my mouth and my finger on the trigger.”
“Then do something about this.”
Sean’s voice, all officer, cracked into the room, and apparently Ty was still a United States Marine because his spine straightened at the tone.
John continued in a more reasonable tone of voice. “Ty, you were the guy who united us as a platoon in boot camp, the one who listened when guys got dumped because they were gone, the one who carried water and batteries when other guys couldn’t. You kept the most boot Marines walking for each other. Jesus, did you think you could stop yourself from caring about people? That wasn’t you before. It’s really not going to be enough for you after. What we saw, what we did, it changes us. It’s how you know you are okay. If it didn’t…life would be a fucked-up nightmare.”
Ty said nothing.
“If the positions were reversed, what would you tell me?” John asked.
A bitter laugh. “You fucker. I’d tell you to talk to someone.”
“Good advice. Take it.” As if that settled things, John stood up and held out his hand.
Maybe it did.
Ty let his breath seep from between his lips, then took the proffered hand. John, his friend, his brother-in-arms pulled him to his feet. He pushed his hair back, settled his hands on his hips, and looked at John. “I’m sorry about today. It’s on me, and it won’t happen again.”
“Team two picked them up a mile from Richards’s house. The time frame’s right for him to have driven straight there from work. Forget about it.”
Relief swamped him, and when it receded he felt a little cleaner inside, as if the ecosystem of his soul was healing, new growth emerging from a year of self-imposed solitude and sorrow and guilt. “Yeah. Okay, good.”
“Make an appointment.”
“I will.” Eventually.
“Make an appointment and tell me when it is so I can take you,” John amended.
The stubborn son of a bitch reminded him of Lauren. “I can go by myself.”
“You can, but I’m going to go with you,” John said amiably. “Or Sean will, until he makes up his mind what he’s doing with his life. You’re not in this alone.”
“Damn straight,” Sean said. He was leaning against John’s desk, arms folded across his chest.
Ty swallowed hard against the thick lump in his throat. Blinked. His friends just watched while he turned away and got himself under control.
“Call Lauren,” Sean said unexpectedly, and shrugged when John and Ty both looked at him. “I don’t know her that well, but somehow I don’t think she’ll break when you tell her the bad shit.”
He thought about that for a long moment, what he’d said, her face when he’d taken her trust and thrown it away like a dirty piece of trash. He owed her an apology and an explanation, but he didn’t have a Marine Corps-strength relationship forged into steel with her. Whatever you could call what they had, it bloomed as fast and potent and velvety-soft as a hothouse flower, and as fragile.
“I fucked that up but good,” he said quietly.
An awkward silence settled into the room. “One thing at a time,” John said.
Ty nodded. “One thing at a time.”
Chapter Twelve
Two weeks later Ty settled onto his bench for his surveillance shift. It was one in the afternoon, and the humidity from a late fall hot spell trapped the sun’s light and rays like a wet blanket. Shards of light reflected off ripples in the lake as the ducks paddled listlessly from the island in the center to the edge. He snugged his wraparound glasses against the bridge of his nose, pulled his A&M ball cap lower on his head, and waited for Lauren to appear.
Sean’s low voice resonated in
his ear. “What’s with the A&M cap? I thought you were a Texas fan.”
“Switching up my look.”
“You want to switch up your look, get a haircut.”
Ty waited until two women gossiping about a coworker passed him before he responded, but Lauren’s appearance in the door leading to the cafeteria stopped the words in his throat. While she no longer sought him out, she still ate her lunch outside. She emerged from the dining area on the building’s first floor, found a spot at random, sometimes passing him in search of a bench, ate, and went back inside. She never rushed her meal, never looked even remotely uncomfortable, never looked his way. Sometimes she brought an e-reader with her, holding it in one hand while she ate. The birds always got her crumbs.
He got nothing, exactly what he deserved.
Today she didn’t have an e-reader with her. Today she had a man.
He was about her height, wore a nice pair of slacks, a button-down shirt, and a blazer, in this heat, for fuck’s sake, and he did all the right things. He held the door open and let her walk through it first, gave her the seat with more shade, made sure she had room for her lunch box as they went through the ritual of opening sacks and arranging food for consumption. She crossed her legs at the ankle but tilted her knees toward him, a listening posture, her head cocked as she chewed. He spoke for a while, then asked a question and listened just as attentively as Lauren talked, her hair neatly restrained at the nape of her neck with two sticks that gleamed in the sunlight. He nodded, offered her a french fry from a foam box, gave her a napkin when mustard oozed out of her sandwich onto the bench.
Ty wanted to hurt him. Slowly. Painfully. Permanently.
“You haven’t talked to her yet, have you?”
Sean again. After Ty missed Richards leaving they rearranged the surveillance positions. Now the guy in the truck parked at the edge of the lot where he could watch the lake and the cars. “You’re like my fairy fucking godmother, Winthrop,” he said.
“Bippity boppity boo,” Sean said, startling a huff of laughter from Ty. “Don’t be a pussy, or you’ll lose her forever. She’s strong. Trust her.”
She was steel-like, sunlight glinting in her ash-brown hair, reflecting off the silver ring she wore on her right hand. He was back in where he felt comfortable, with John and Sean and a few other guys in the area. He’d found a veterans’ group, gone to the first meeting wary and walled off, and to his surprise helping other guys helped him, too. But asking for Lauren’s forgiveness, laying himself open to her, involved a depth of vulnerability he wasn’t sure he could take. He’d charged enemy positions without a second thought, but after what he’d said to her on this very bench, he couldn’t bring himself to sit down next to her at lunch.
He sat and watched them finish their meal. Watched her split her cupcake with him. Watched them get up and go back inside. She’d never glanced his way. Not a taunting look, or a curious one, or a sly, sneaky one. He’d wanted nothing, and he’d gotten nothing.
The hard knock of his heart against his sternum told him the uncomfortable truth. Sex couldn’t heal him, but Lauren’s strength and confidence, her roots, and the way she saw him pulled him back from the edge. Lauren wouldn’t let him get away with being anything less than whole and himself.
Maybe you don’t want to be let off that hook.
He didn’t. If he had, he would have cut ties rather than making himself hateful and difficult. He’d pushed and shoved, lashed out inexcusably, but he couldn’t move good people. John and Sean were the brothers he never had, would be until the day he died. Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance Lauren would put him back on the hook, hold him to the standards of honor and decency until he could hold himself there.
He finished out the shift, rode back to John’s office with Sean, gave a routine summary of a routine day. Got in his truck and went back to the hotel to take a shower. Dressed. Sat in front of the TV without seeing it, until the sunlight shifted enough to tell him it was evening. Got back in his truck. Drove to Lauren’s place. He wasn’t thinking much. All the while he paid attention to that quiet space inside, his sixth sense, his radar, listening for the ping that told him to walk away.
The driveway and street in front of her house were empty, so it wasn’t likely she had a guest. He parked on the street and walked up her front steps and knocked on the door.
An indistinct babble of words preceded her as she flew at the door and hauled it open. She had her car keys in one hand, and behind her a bowl of peaches sat in the middle of her dining room table. Mrs. Kennedy’s peaches, waiting to ripen and be turned into pie. Roots. A house, a dog, neighbors she helped and who helped her. Her jeans were muddy to the knee, and the skin covering her shoulders and collarbone, exposed by her low-cut tank top, gleamed with sweat. Desperate expectation widened her eyes, then melted into despair when she saw him. She lifted the back of her hand to her forehead. “Ty, I can’t—”
“How long has she been gone?”
At the words a strong ping registered on his internal radar, but not one of warning. Instead, the vibrations reverberating through him affirmed what he’d always known and tried to ignore. This is who you are. So he tried again. More bluntly and emphatically, using words of one syllable and his NCO voice. “I want to help you find her. Let me help.”
Lauren looked at him, as if trying to decide whether he was worth a second chance. “I was in the garden, pulling weeds. I…I got distracted. It was warm and sunny and a really nice evening and for the first time since…”
He could fill in the since himself, knew this wasn’t a second chance. She’d just tabled the discussion until after they found Gretchen.
“…I wasn’t thinking about anything but what I was doing. Pulling weeds. I kept an eye on her for a while, but she was curled up in the sun by the deck, and I just…I got distracted, and when I remembered and turned around, she was gone.”
“How long ago?”
“A couple of hours.”
“Okay,” he said. “We’ve got this. You have treats?”
“I’ve been all over the neighborhood,” she said. “I’m out of hot dogs. I was just about to go to the store when I thought I should call some of the people who live farther away to find out if they’ve seen her. I don’t want to call and search at the same time. I’ll be distracted, and it’s getting dark. It will be easy to miss her.”
He pulled his keys from his pocket. “I’ll go. Call your neighbors.”
He made it to and from the store in record time, and when he came back, Lauren was waiting on the porch, her cell phone in hand, two empty plastic bags, a flashlight, and a pair of scissors beside her. He flung himself out of the truck but she still met him by the hood, scissors at the ready when he opened the grocery sack.
She peered inside, then said, “How many hot dogs did you buy?”
“Every package they had,” he said. “You’re getting your dog back.”
They hunkered down in the driveway, and Ty pulled out his pocketknife and sliced into a package. While he used the knife to slice and chop right on the cement she wielded the scissors, and in a minute they had a mound of cut-up hot dogs. Lauren divided them between the two bags, and wiped her hand on her jeans. Ty got his Maglite from the toolbox on his truck.
“I’ve already looked everywhere,” Lauren said. “I called six people in a four-block radius. No one’s seen her.”
Her despairing tone sliced into his heart. “She’s mobile. Curious. She could have retraced her steps, found a different hiding place. Hey,” he said, and tipped up her chin with his knuckles to avoid smearing her with hot dog grease. “We’ll find her.”
They set off in opposite directions down the block. Eventually the deepening twilight made every shift of leaves into a small, barrel-chested dark brown dog with floppy ears and a whip of a tail who never materialized. When Ty’s phone vibrated he was standing on the corner, his bag still full of hot dogs. The streetlight buzzed on as he pulled the phone from his pocket to see
a message from Lauren.
No luck. Do you have her?
The text was full of hope, and he hated to disappoint her. No. I’m sorry.
It’s okay.
But it wasn’t. She loved Gretchen, would never give up on that dog, and he couldn’t bear to think of her heart breaking again. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he heard the rustle of leaves, the sound slightly out of rhythm with the wind. A moment later came the slightest movement under Mr. Minnillo’s rosebushes. Keeping his body entirely still, he turned his head and looked more closely at the nearest bush. Two round, dark eyes gleamed in the streetlight’s glare, and as his eyes adjusted to the contours of the shadows, he could make out Gretchen’s round body.
“You little shit,” he said, crooning like he’d heard Lauren do. “I’ve been by this house four times in the last hour. But you weren’t coming out, were you?”
Moving slow and easy he approached the rosebush. Gretchen shrank back, so he stopped one bush before the one she cowered under, and began to lay a trail of warm, disgusting hot dogs from the bush down the path, placing piles of them a couple of body lengths apart, through the gardens, to the sidewalk. Then he sat down on the last step and blew out his breath.
“Why do you keep running?” he asked. “You don’t know how good you have it, you dumb dog.” He dangled his hands from his knees, and laughed at himself. “Sometimes you have to fight your instincts, Gretchen.”
Behind him the door opened. “Can I help you, young man?”
“Just waiting for a dog to come out from under your bushes, sir,” he said. “Sorry about the hot dogs.”
“Oh, that’s quite all right. You’re a friend of Lauren’s?”
He hoped to hell he still had that chance. “Yes, sir,” he said. “But Gretchen’s still making up her mind about me.”
A soft chuckle. “Good luck. You tell Lauren I said hello.”
“I will, sir. Thank you.”
Behind him the bushes rustled, but he didn’t turn around, not even when he heard the first pile of hot dogs devoured in a couple of slurps, or the click of her nails on the cement as, after a moment, she trotted up to the second pile of meat and licked it up.
