Watch Point

by Cecilia Tan

  “It’s my ears, not my eyes, that are the problem.” He sits up and chuckles. “You know, if you want to blindfold me, all you have to do is say so.”

  A flutter of nerves comes out in my laugh. Of course. I stick to my course of action, though. “Just try it.”

  “All right.” He lets me tie the cloth around his eyes and then lies down on his pillow. I don’t need to tie him tonight, and part of me misses it a little.

  Maybe I was onto something with my blindfold idea, though. He falls asleep within minutes. I get out a phone to check the weather.

  Snow and wind are both in the forecast. Lots of both. As I look beyond the pat icons in the app, I see it’s a nor’easter bearing down on us. Great.

  I start putting my clothes back on. Aiden can wait. I’ve got things to do before the snow starts coming down.

  Chase lifts his head immediately. “You all right?”

  “Fine. Snowstorm’s on the way. I’m going to secure some stuff outside and bring more wood in here.”

  “I could help.”

  I climb onto the bed and nuzzle his hair. “No. You stay right here. If we get snowed in, I’ll want you well rested for the workout your ass is going to get.”

  He wiggles back against me. A massive snowstorm never sounded so good, eh?

  The wind is serious, whipping and gusting hard enough to nearly knock me off my feet as I move the wood. The rest of the woodpile I try to protect with the tarp, but if a corner works its way loose, a wind like this might carry it all the way to Canada. The first fat, wet flakes start to fall just as I’m refilling our water containers. Wind-driven snow stings my eyes as I make it back inside and shut the door again.

  “Every time you open the door, the heat gets sucked right out by the wind,” Chase says.

  “Let’s try not to open the door too often,” I say. “I’m planning to piss in the old stew cans.”

  He laughs. “If we have to.”

  “Wouldn’t do to have your dick freeze off.” I shed my coat and climb onto the bed with him, kissing the back of his neck and then grazing his ear with my teeth. “I like it too much.”

  He murmurs assent. Before long he’s drifting to sleep again, though, and when his breathing switches to a quiet wheeze, I go to check for a reply from Aiden. I crouch by the lockbox and get out the phone. It takes a while to connect. I wonder if cell phone service is going to be knocked out by the storm.

  The first thing I check is the account where the money should land. My heart begins to hammer as I see the balance. The Bitcoin exchange rate fluctuates some, but there’s no mistaking that nearly two million dollars are now sitting there, waiting for me.

  Two mil sounds like a lot of money. It is, when you consider that it should be enough for me to live off the rest of my life. But it’s not when you consider that it was only half of the cost of the treatments my mother needed.

  He paid. Aiden actually paid. I feel light-headed for a moment. This means he accepted the proof that Chase is alive. Now to negotiate the handover.

  I check the messages. There’s nothing from him. That seems odd, but maybe the money was his message. I send one to him.

  Money received, thank you. This will be my second-to-last communication to you. You have 48 hours to pay the rest. When I receive the amount still due, I will inform you where you can pick him up, whole and healthy. That will be my final communication.

  It takes a while to type out the message because my hands are shaking. This isn’t like me. I’m known for being cool under pressure. I’ve been in plenty of live-fire situations, but I guess none of that compares to delivering the comeuppance to the asshole billionaire who let my mother die.

  I can almost still hear his voice, the way it echoed in the large, empty dining room where he told me. When he gave me orders, it was usually in his study or in one of his vehicles on the way somewhere. This time, though, he called me to the dining room, a huge parlor of a room with ten-foot-high glass French doors every few feet that opened onto an equally large patio. I assume now there was a sniper out there ready to shoot me if I reacted badly. Surely he’d hired my replacement already before firing me, no?

  “Eric, we have a problem,” he said, sitting at the end of the extremely long table in the only chair in the room. “A very big problem.”

  I said nothing, waiting for him to tell me what this was about. I stood across the corner of the table from him, my back to the glass doors.

  “Some information has come to light recently that disappoints me greatly.” He was speaking in a quiet voice, but with all hard surfaces in that room, every word reverberated slightly.

  I still said nothing. I had no inkling at that point that he was speaking of me. Not until he pushed a folder toward me, across the flawless varnish of that dining table. I flipped it open and the first thing I saw was a photo of Garrett and Cassidy locked in an arm-wrestling battle at a bar in SoCal. I didn’t have to look any further to know that whatever else was in there was a lot worse than arm-wrestling.

  “Your entire squad was kicked out of the Navy,” he said, voice as cold and even as it had been all along. He was wearing a suit but no tie, his shirt partly unbuttoned, his watch and rings glinting in the light of the chandelier overhead. He had let his hair grow a little in the back, going gray but slicked back for an aging man’s vanity.

  “With all due respect, sir,” I said, “it was my fire team, not my squad.” Four men, not eight. I don’t know why I bothered to correct him. I didn’t know where the conversation was going. I thought I knew my boss fairly well by that point. It had been almost two years since I’d saved his life. I knew he was greedy and craven, but I thought taking a bullet for the man meant something to him.

  He was shaking his head slowly, as if in disbelief. Or censure. “‘Mentally unfit’?”

  “Technically the term is ‘medically unfit,’ and it was an honorable discharge.” As if Aiden gave a fuck whether my discharge was honorable or dishonorable. “You knew I was a section eight.”

  He clucked his tongue and took a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. “I knew you were crazy. I didn’t know you were a pervert.”

  The file told him all he needed to know—and more—about just how perverted four men could be. He flipped open the file again and made a show of paging through, then closed it in disgust. “Says here they could’ve got you pervs on everything from fraternization and conduct unbecoming to adultery.” He gave a low, appreciative whistle. “I didn’t even know the military gave a fuck about adultery. Learn something new every day. I guess they really wanted to get rid of you and your buddies.”

  I’ve always wondered, if we’d managed to stay in until the repeal of DADT, would the same fate have awaited us? Oh, probably. After all, Cass, Garrett, Ruiz, and I weren’t merely gay. We were banging each other in various inappropriate situations. And that was just for a start.

  “It’s a high-stress job,” I told him.

  He tapped a cigarette against the table and then flipped open a metal lighter. “Like working for me isn’t?”

  “With all due respect, sir, working for you, I’ve only been shot at once.”

  Again that deep chuckle. I wasn’t feeling too much stress at that moment, not more than usual, though I was a tad nervous. Aiden liked to play games, holding back information until the moment he chose to reveal it to you. He liked to bust people’s balls and yank their chains. It was what he lived for. I tried not to take it personally most of the time. “So. You’re a pervert.”

  “Excuse me, sir?” I always called him sir. It was easier than learning a new habit.

  “Kinky as fuck, if what I’m reading here is at all true.” He raised an eyebrow, daring me to refute it. When I said nothing, he took a drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke in a bluish stream right at me. I’m not a fan of cigarettes and he knew that. “Unbuckle your belt.”

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me.” He leaned back in his chair, as if this were a no
nchalant request.

  “I don’t do that kind of thing anymore, sir.”

  “Do it for me,” he growled, flicking cigarette ash onto the floor.

  Consent is a slippery damn thing sometimes. We were locked in a battle of wills. I wasn’t ashamed of what I’d done in the military, and I wasn’t shy about showing my body. But I didn’t want to do as he said. It felt like if I did, we were about to cross some kind of line. “Sir—”

  “It’s just a little thing, Eric. After all I’ve done for you?”

  He had made sure my mother was seen by the best oncologist in the state, given the best care at the most modern, state-of-the-art facility available. He had unhesitatingly assured me that as long as I was a member of his family, he would take care of her as if she were part of his family, too. I was grateful, but part of me had been wondering if another shoe was going to drop. Maybe this was that shoe.

  Maybe Aiden Milford was a kinky fucker, too, and he’d waited all these years to show it? Waited until he had proof I was twisted, too?

  Or maybe he just felt he owned me now. Now that he’d spent so much on my mother’s care. My skin prickled as that thought settled. “Sir, I told you, I don’t do that kind of thing anymore.”

  He appraised me coolly, his gaze raking me from knees to chest as he took another slow drag on the cigarette. “Your dick is having other thoughts.” He shifted his own crotch, as if the sight of me had given him a boner. “I can see the bulge from here.”

  He was right. He was tapping into all the reflexes that told my cock to snap to attention when a man in charge said jump. I wasn’t about to let him know that. “With all due respect, sir, my dick gets hard when the wind blows.”

  “And in high-pressure situations, eh? Am I pressuring you, Eric?”

  A direct question requires an answer. I kept my mouth shut, trying to wait him out.

  When he didn’t get his way, he resorted to insults. “Oh, come on. Don’t pull that ‘inscrutable Chinese’ shit with me, Jackie Chan.”

  I knew we’d definitely crossed into new territory of some kind when he said that. He’d never used racial epithets with me before. Never mind that I’m half Japanese (other half Scottish), not Chinese. Insults don’t have to be accurate to burn. I felt my cheeks redden. When was the last time I’d let a racist remark get under my skin like that? Junior high? I counted to ten as I inhaled slowly, trying to force myself to be calm. I was never into humiliation play to begin with; actual humiliation was something I had no idea how to handle.

  “Tell me, Eric,” he said, flicking the metal lighter open again. “Do you like pain?”

  “No, sir,” I said, my eyes on the flame.

  “What would you say if I said I wanted to burn you on the dick?”

  “I would say, ‘No thank you, sir, that isn’t my cup of tea.’”

  “I want to burn you on the dick, pervert.”

  He feinted toward me, and I snapped into a defensive stance faster than he could blink.

  “It’s poetic, you see,” he went on, snapping the lighter shut and then opening it again, “because I’m firing you.”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “You’re fired. I was prepared to believe this so-called report was nothing more than a pornographic fantasy. A manufactured conspiracy against four good men. But it’s obvious it’s true.” He clucked his tongue again as he got to his feet. “Such a shame. I truly thought you were something special, Eric.”

  I didn’t dare take my eyes off him or move.

  “As of this moment, your employment with me is terminated. Unfortunately, with termination, there go your benefits as well. I expect you to be off the property in under fifteen minutes, or I will have you dealt with as a trespasser. It would be a shame to shoot you.”

  At that point he walked out of the room, trailing a blue cloud of smoke as he went. I smacked my idiotic boner, burning with humiliation and tamping down the edge of panic. I knew that by benefits he meant Mom’s treatment. But what could I do? All I could do was leave. I took the file and got out of there before he decided he wanted to exercise his sadism some more.

  Time stamp: 1007 Thursday, Ledge Island

  The morning comes but no dawn, the storm still raging. The sound of the wind is threatening, as raucous as a mob. I concentrate on breathing, on feeling the air move freely in and out of my lungs. Chase is pressed against me. The cabin is chillier than usual for a morning: I can see my breath. Even with the caulk job, there are drafts when the wind is like this.

  Chase lifts his head, and before I can say anything he has sprung into action, stoking the coals in the stove and adding new wood. Then he burrows under the sleeping bag with me once again. “Brrr. Snow in December is usually nice.”

  “The whole White Christmas thing, you mean?”

  “Yeah, you know. If it’s been bitter cold, it usually warms up toward the freezing point to snow.” He puts on a falsetto voice. “And then the snow comes down placid and silent, blanketing the world in peace and beauty.” He snorts at the end and I smile. “Not this time, I guess.”

  “It’s a nor’easter,” I say. “That’s kind of like a snow hurricane.”

  He laughs. “I grew up in New England. I know what a nor’easter is. What about you?”

  “Didn’t I just tell you what it was?”

  “Ha. I mean where’d you grow up.” He settles his head on my shoulder. His hair still smells like spruce.

  “My dad was in the Navy, so we moved around when I was little. Hawaii, Florida, Texas. After he died, we moved to New Jersey. I guess to get away from where he died or some shit like that.” I’m suddenly restless and start thinking about finding a can to piss in.

  “I thought you said he was killed in action?”

  Can’t sneak anything past this kid. “In a training exercise, actually.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago.” The wound feels fresh for the first time in decades, though. My fists clench and I try to force myself to relax. It’s been so long since I thought about this, but as I lie here with him, there’s nothing blocking the memories from flowing. “My dad’s swim buddy came to the house to console my mother. She’d gotten the news while I was at kindergarten and she hadn’t told me yet. I answered the door and the second I saw his face, I knew.”

  “Oh, man.” Chase’s hand on my chest is soothing.

  I can still remember being barefoot and running on the stone tile of the foyer, my feet slapping noisily as I hurried to the door, thinking it was my father coming home. Wrong. “He was a big dude. Even bigger than my dad. I remember punching him in the chest with my little fists, I was so angry that my dad was being taken away.” Tears sting in the corners of my eyes, and I can’t believe I can still feel that pain so many years later. I blink to clear them.

  “He let you beat on him like that?”

  “Like I said, big dude. Probably didn’t even feel it.” Or maybe he did. “When he got sick of it, though, he caught both my hands in one of his—that’s how big he was.” I remembered the feeling of his huge palm, warm and a little damp, and the mixed scents of alcohol and cigarette smoke from his breath when he spoke to me. “‘Save your rage for your enemies, little buddy,’ he told me. ‘Save your rage for your enemies.’”

  Chase’s voice is gentle, even if his questions probe deep. “Is that when you decided to become a SEAL?”

  “Probably? I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a SEAL.” I stretch my shoulders. If I don’t get up soon, I’m going to go nuts. “Thirteen years later I was doing the exercise that killed him.”

  “Wait, thirteen years later? Weren’t you five?”

  “I enlisted at seventeen.” The Navy knew my story. Recruiters were supportive of my ambition, even if my mother was ambivalent.

  His voice rises in disbelief. “You could do all the crazy shit like two hundred push-ups a minute at age seventeen?”

  “A hundred in two minutes. Don’t exaggerate.” It
’s like I told him. All it takes is time. I got an early start. “You don’t become a SEAL overnight. It takes a while.” Being focused helped me do it faster than the average Navy recruit, though. “A lot of the time they want you to go to college first, but they liked what they saw in me.”

  “How old are you now?”

  Too young to have both parents dead. “Twenty-nine.”

  “Seriously?” He heaves himself up so that both his hands are flat on my chest, and he rests his chin on them. “You’re not just saying that because every thirtysomething wishes they were—”

  “I’ll be thirty in February,” I say evenly. “You know how I feel about lying.”

  “That means we’re only seven years apart.” He blinks, assimilating this information. “That’s . . . cool.”

  I can’t help but smile. We’re closer to eight years apart than seven, but it seems impossible we’re that close in age. It’s like time travel. The first time I saw him he was a scrawny, underdeveloped kid. I was a veteran of two combat tours, starting my first bodyguard job. I glimpsed him a few times that year, but then almost never after that. Aiden kept his family very separate from his business. We’d been worlds apart.

  “The older I get,” I say, “the shorter seven years seems.”

  “No kidding.” He chuckles and seems determined to lighten the mood. “So what are we going to do today? Fuck, I hope?”

  That’s a change of subject I can get behind. “I thought you were sore?”

  “The time off did wonders for me. I was fine last night, especially with no condom.” He wags his tail like a puppy, then stills as his voice turns serious again. “You weren’t really mad at me for running off, were you?”

  I stroke a hand down his back. “It was a fun game for a while,” I say, trying to pick my words carefully. “But I like you better right here.”

  He nods, his chin digging into my chest as he does it. “I thought I was going to love being a brat and being forced. That’s what all my fantasies were about. I mean, I did love it. But I didn’t expect I was going to find something I liked even better.”