17. Tripoli’s Hard Truth
17
TRIPOLI’S HARD TRUTH
Tripoli
H e sat in the outdoor armchair on his rooftop patio, a crystal-cut glass of bourbon on the rocks in his hand, his head leaned back on the headrest, staring up at the nighttime sky. The only light was the reflection from the streetlights that poked through the landscaped tree line he’d placed to create a sense of privacy along the wall that looked down into the parking lot of the club.
There was a soft ding behind him, signaling someone had arrived by the elevator. Inwardly, he cursed that he hadn’t locked off the rooftop floor so that he could wallow in his mourning alone.
From the corner of his eye, he realized it was Francesca. He wanted nothing more than to pull her into his arms, hold her tight, and sob out his anger and frustrations. For his fallen Raider brothers. For Mila. For Jessa. For Tilly. For her.
She was in front of him now, an expression of concern as she looked from his shadowed face to the bourbon in his hand. “Ethan?”
He continued to stare at the sky, searching for the words he needed to say, and not finding them.
Instantly, she was closer, straddling his stretched-out legs, then hovering over his lap, kneeling with her legs bent on either side of his hips in the chair. The position put her tall above him, and she ran her hands through his hair, trailed her fingertips up his throat along his close-shaven beard, and rested her thumbs at the corner of his mouth. In this position, he could see her eyes surveying his face, making sure he was aware and not out of his mind from flashbacks or drinking. “Not drunk, I promise. Not that I wasn’t trying. Just not working.” Her hands felt so comforting on his skin that he turned his head just enough to kiss the heel of one hand before looking back at her. “You shouldn’t be here.”
Staring at the left corner of his mouth, she leaned down to press a string of kisses along his lips. When she reached the end of the line, her fingers fanned across his cheeks and jaw. She kissed the tip of his nose, the spot between his eyebrows, and the center of his forehead, then trailed her lips down the left side of his face, lowering her body to settle on his lap. Once her lips returned to the place where they had started their exploration, she pulled back from him just an inch. “Why? I think I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, Ethan Ezekiel Evans.”
Her admission made him sit straight up in the chair, like a drowning man finally breaking the surface of the water. His glass crashed to the ground, his arms wound around her waist, and his mouth clung to hers. The kiss was violent and possessive, his tongue thrusting between her lips and teeth, seeking to control her mouth, only to find that she met him just as wildly. Whatever he did, she repeated to him—a stroke along the underside of the muscle, a lick around the edge, a suck on the tip.
Mouths still fused, her hands slid down his face, down his chest and abs, and began to work at unbuckling his belt. He felt the button pull tight, then release, and the zipper loosened, freeing his cock from its confines. Soft hands grasped his raging hot skin, firmly gripped his shaft, and expertly applied pressure, pull, and twist.
He unwound his arms from behind Francesca and slid his own hands to the side zip of her trousers. Before he could even process what was happening, she’d stood from his lap, gave the material a shove down her legs, did the same with her panties, then climbed back into his lap and worked herself down onto his hard length jutting from his pants. Her hands gripped the arms of the chair, using her arm strength to raise and lower herself upon him, and he felt his hips chase hers, every thrust connecting hard and grinding against her.
In the distance, the muted sounds of traffic could be heard, as well as the noise from other businesses close by as people came and went. All he cared about at the moment, though, were the sounds of their breaths mingling with their exertions, the rustle of the clothing still caught between them, and the internal thudding of his heart echoing in his mind. All the memory noises—echoes of his teammates’ screams in the ambush, the nights of holding Tilly while she’d sobbed after nightmares and the hours of tears while she clung to him, Francesca’s imaginary pleas that he’d heard in his head when she’d been taken years earlier—were gone. Her presence quieted all of that.
He heard an exclamation, felt her muscles clench around him, and his body tightened as well. A quick, powerful orgasm had his cum shooting deep inside her body. He heard them both struggling to regain their equilibrium, so out of breath, he was dizzy.
His hands grasped her hips tightly, and she gasped into his mouth. “Fuck, I lost my head. You’re injured. You’ve been on your feet all day. You should be resting. This is the last thing we should have been doing. Our first time together should have been?—”
A finger pressed against his lips.
“Ethan?”
“Yes?”
“Just for five minutes, stop talking. Stop worrying. Stop protecting. Just be with me.”
His mouth twitched in humor at her throwing his own words back at him, then captured her lips again in a brief touch. Relaxing his grip on her hips, he rewound them around her waist to eliminate the space between them while still lodged deep inside her. She was in no hurry to leave as evidenced by the fact that she wrapped her arms around his neck, tucking his head into the space between her jaw and her shoulder, her fingers playing with his hair. Together they sat in the darkness, allowing their hearts to return to their normal rates.
Eventually, their mouths returned to one another’s, but the pace was less frantic as they spoke between kisses.
“You need to get up?” he asked quietly. “Your knees must be killing you.”
“I’m good. I like feeling you inside me like this.”
He hummed in appreciation.
“I didn’t intend this when I came by,” she confessed. “When I didn’t find you in your apartment or your office, I admit, I panicked for a moment. When I got back in the elevator to try one of the other floors of the club, I saw the roof button and played a hunch you’d be here. One look at your face and my body just took over.”
He laid his head back on the headrest of the chair, his fingertips drawing random patterns on her lower back. “I remember leaving the magic room, but a lot of today is a blur. Mostly just images. I know I called Triumph, but what I said or what he said… yeah, don’t remember any of that.”
“I saw him earlier today. He’s hurting badly, but in a weird way, he seemed resigned.”
Tripoli rushed to defend his friend. “He would never?—”
Again, a finger laid against his lips to silence him. “I know. He doesn’t have an alibi, but there’s no way that man hurt her. I can’t prove it, but I know it. What I’m more concerned about is you. I’ve got my answer on how you’re coping.”
He sucked the tip of her finger into his mouth, laving it with his tongue, then letting it go with a quiet pop. “Everything today is pretty disjointed. I spent the day trying to forget the sight of Tilly in that fucking box, but nothing was working to make the vision go away. Cosmos came by at some point, and I must have been immersed in a pretty bad flashback because when I came to, he was holding my head over the toilet as I puked up my insides.”
“Your last deployment?”
He nodded.
“No need to say more.”
“No, I… I think I want to tell you, but not here. Will you stay?”
“I intended to. If you wanted me to, that is.”
“Sweetheart, at the risk of scaring you completely out of my life, I don’t want you to ever leave. That’s a discussion for when this is all over though.”
Part of him wanted to ask about the day’s events, but most of him needed to forget about it for just a little longer. To ignore the reason for her even being in his life a second time and what was keeping her here. Eventually, it would all be resolved, and then he’d have to worry about where she was going, if she’d be back, and what that all meant for them. Right now, though, he just needed their bubble to remain intact.
He helped her slide off his lap and redress herself so they could head downstairs to his apartment. Standing, he tucked himself away, and he realized he hadn’t used a condom. When she moved to step toward the elevator, he put his hand on her arm. “Francesca, we didn’t use any protection. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Do I need to call and get you something?”
“I’m on birth control,” she assured him. “Again, wasn’t the plan when I came here, but I wasn’t that far gone that I didn’t realize what we were doing.”
“Healing my pain with great sex?” he teased.
“It was good,” she agreed. “But it will be even greater later on.”
She started toward the elevator once again, leaving him stunned for a moment. When the elevator doors opened, it jolted him back into movement. Joining her in the carriage, he threaded his fingers with hers for the one-floor ride to his apartment, then dragged her through the space to the bathroom.
After a quick check of her stitches and a shower, he helped her back into his bed. He lay with his head and shoulders against the headboard, and her body was pulled in tight to his side, their arms around each other. Francesca said nothing, which he appreciated. Deciding to share this part of his life with her was big enough. Actually doing it required a certain amount of mental preparedness that today had not really allowed for, but clearly, his reactions meant that he didn’t have a choice to wait.
“You know the basics of my assignments with the Raiders. The core of our group was together for probably somewhere between ten and twelve years. People floated in and out, but there were nine of us who were incredibly tight. On our last deployment, we lost three guys. We were ambushed in a zone that had supposedly been cleared of rebels. Needless to say, that info was not verified, but our commanding officer sent us in anyway. Someone set off a flash-bang to disorient us, and they tried to pick us off one by one in the confusion.
“I blew an eardrum in the initial attack. Didn’t feel any pain until everything was done. Adrenaline, I guess. Keys, our drone operator got everything scrambled like eggs inside his head, so he must have been extremely close to a second flashbang’s hit. He was the newest amongst us… barely twenty years old. And Mayhem… he died trying to protect Keys. His death was the worst to take. He had the sweetest fiancée back home—that was a complete and total shitshow situation—and a twin brother twenty feet behind him on the trail, shot but alive.”
“How the hell did twins end up in the same unit? Isn’t family together a no-no?”
“I don’t know all the ins and outs of it. Chaos wasn’t with us all the time. He floated in and out over the years. I had a feeling they said he was a Marine but that he was really something else. We only saw him on a certain type of mission.”
Her arm snaked across his belly and hugged him tighter to her. Her lips pressed against his pec. Other than those two gestures, she lay silently at his side, waiting for him to continue.
“Loud bangs or light flashes bring on flashbacks. I tend not to go in the magic room at Elysium. It’s not that I can’t go in there, but Cosmos usually goes with me, or Michael does, in case I happen to drift away.”
His chin brushed back and forth against her forehead. “Tilly though. Before that box opened, I thought I’d seen the worst humanity could do to another person. It was the swords. Honcho had tripped some sort of horrific booby trap where handmade spears ran his body right through, which is how the arm severed. I don’t know if he bled out from the loss of his arm, or if he died from the trauma of the multiple impalings, and in the long run, I guess it doesn’t really matter. We wouldn’t have been able to save him.
“Anyway, I’d had a couple of other flashbacks during the course of the day. Vomited after two of them. Panic attacks after all three.”
He’d said nothing for the longest time, so Francesca asked the question he knew was coming. “What do you do to come out of them? Are they always that bad?”
“No. I think I’m one of the luckier people. Most of the time, I slip in, they’re momentary, and I slip out. I typically break out into a cold sweat, and my heart ramps up. I can usually wrestle them back down quickly with just deep breathing, but today…”
“Today was too close of a memory. Too much stimuli.”
“Yeah,” he murmured. This part of what he needed to tell her would be the worst. He had no idea how she’d react. “Those three separate panic attacks. Afterward, I walked into the bathroom and opened my medical supply drawer.”
“The one you were in the night I was stabbed?”
“Yup.” He ground his teeth together and refused to apologize. It was just the way things had been. “The first year home? It’s an understatement to say I wasn’t coping well. A lot of military people struggle returning to the civilian world because they no longer have the structure they're used to. I was no different, especially with what happened before I retired. It didn’t take long before I was spiraling badly. The military gave me rules, regulations, procedures, orders. Everything was tightly controlled, and at home? It was a free-for-all.
“Sure, I suffer from PTSD. I sense most military who served in combat zones do. But it wasn’t even the trauma of losing Honcho, Mayhem, and Keys. Yes, I grieved. Yes, I still relive their deaths over and over in flashbacks. I’m sure all of my unit does, to some degree. We were tight, and their deaths hit us hard. As a medic, it was my job to take broken bodies and heal them. It was something I could control. But I felt like I failed my brothers because they were injuries I couldn’t control. I couldn’t reattach an arm in the middle of the jungle. I couldn’t close a hole in a chest that was almost as big as a man’s head. And I couldn’t unscramble the soup someone’s brain became because of a grenade. Fuck… all because some jackwagon had gambling debts. I couldn’t control that either.”
He sighed. “Then I came home to the girlfriend’s issues who thought that marriage and a family would lead to normalcy. The military was trying to convince me to re-up. My family was trying to help me recover, but they had no clue what I was dealing with or how to help, and how could they? It was impossible for them to even begin to understand what I’d seen and done in twenty years. I was being torn in a million directions. No matter what I did, I was hurting someone with my choices, and because I couldn’t control how others felt, I felt even more lost. Being who and how I am, it was killing me that no matter what I did, I was useless to the people I loved, as well as myself.
“To this day, I’m not even sure when the drug use started. Those first months home are such a fog in my memory, I’m not sure I ever will know. Drugs, however, I could control to a certain extent. My medical training allowed me to understand what the effects were. I knew how much I could take. When I felt myself begin to slip into panic or despair, the drugs evened things out. The illusion of control.
“Thank God Cosmos was paying attention. He’d been my best friend all through high school, and we kept in touch my entire military career. We spent time together during my leaves. The first time he found me on the brink of an overdose, he made it his mission in life to extract my head from my ass and offered me a chance to learn to regain control. He introduced me to BDSM as a means to show me that I did still have control. I’d only suppressed how to master it. People within that community have needs. Needs I could help them meet. It gave me a sense of purpose again. A direction that allowed me to once again help people. The Library helped me turn that helpless feeling back into a sense of control so that I could come back to myself.”
He shook his head. “Some might say I replaced one addiction with a different form of crutch, but it wasn’t that. I hadn’t done a scene with anyone at the club in months before you arrived. I didn’t need it. When I felt like something was out of control, I was able to call on what I learned through BDSM and apply it to whatever I needed to. The club had become merely a social circle I enjoyed, so I never left.
“I promise you. I haven’t touched any drugs since over a year before I met you, other than to put them in that drawer. I just… I need to have them there though. Not really sure why,” he admitted.
“It’s like a test of your strength. Avoiding it is how you remind yourself you’re stronger than you were before. Like an alcoholic who keeps a sealed bottle in a cupboard.”
“It sucks knowing I was that weak at one time.”
“I wouldn’t call it weak. You said it yourself. It was a coping mechanism, as unhealthy as it might have been, but it’s understandable why you would see it that way.”
“You’re not pissed?”
“Oh yeah, I’m pissed. Pissed that you were hurting so bad. Never pissed at you or condemn you for doing it. Just glad you’re here to tell the tale. I get a sense that the drawer isn’t the real issue today though.”
“Nope. The gun safe was.”
He knew she tried to keep her reaction inside, but she didn’t quite cover up the sharp inhale at what he was telling her. “That’s when you went to the roof,” she guessed.
“Yup.”
“Did you open the safe?”
“Nope. The day you were taken when we had no clue where you were? That’s been the darkest I’ve been in a long while. Today, though, was the first time since you were taken that I was even tempted to open my gun safe, and I wasn’t planning on going hunting for anyone today. I stood in front of it for a long time before I finally caught myself. Went to the bar, fixed a drink, and threw it back. Fixed and drank a second. Fixed and took the third upstairs with me. Then you found me.”
“You didn’t open the safe though. You walked away, Ethan.”
He felt a chill start to pass over him, and Francesca also must have felt it because she reached for him, urging him down further into the bed to be beside her. When she couldn’t move him, she grabbed the comforter on the bed and pulled it up over the top of them, cocooning them under the lightweight material. He couldn’t see her, but it was dark and warm, and it seemed to hold the memories at bay because the dim shapes in the bedroom were no longer morphing into the jungle or the magic room mixed together.
Inside the impromptu tent, she whispered to him, “Promise me something.”
“What’s that?”
“If you ever feel like taking anything out of that drawer… or opening that safe… no matter what happens between us after today, you call me. I’ll come running. No matter what. Whether I’m in the middle of an undercover assignment or I’m just down the hall… I’ll come running.”
Time stopped. The earth stopped turning. There was a great conjunction of planets. He didn’t know. Those words from Francesca were the balm to the wound. “I promise.”
“I mean it, Ethan. Even if I storm out of this apartment so pissed at you that I never want to see or speak to you again, you call me. I. Will. Come. Running.”
He hugged her close. “I promise. I’ll call.”
She nestled in tight. He felt his body temperature regulate. In fact, now it was heating up and taking notice of a very beautiful, very naked Francesca next to him. “I’m sorry I worried you, sweetheart.”
“We’re even after the scare I gave you the other night.” She surprised him yet again when she rolled on top of him, then sat astride him with the comforter falling off her back and bunching around her hips. “Sooo… it’s later.”
He looked at his blank wrist with a mock expression of surprise. “Why, look at that!” He showed her the imaginary watch on his wrist. “I think you’re right. I wonder what that means?”
“It means that I’m going to like you some more today.”
“More than a mile?” he teased.
“Mm-hmm,” she agreed with a wicked smile. “Eight or so inches more.”