Trade It All
Travis
I love Creed’s Lake. I love the people, they’re my family. I love the community, our homes, my career, dreaming about its future and all the possibilities. Yet, I’d trade it all for Wrenly. I know every decision I made in my life led me here, but if I could go back and be a better kid so Wrenly could avoid her pain, I would do it in a heartbeat.
If Tony wouldn’t have died, he eventually would have gotten through to me. The night before he died, he made that promise to me. He said it wasn’t going to be easy, we had a long road ahead of us, but he was tired of playing my parents games. He wanted me as his own kid, he loved me, and he was finally going to make things happen. I was going to have a permanent home, be able to play sports, and have some stability in my life.
Then he was killed, and I thought I might as well go with him. I felt useless and scared, then my parents neglect made it worse. For God sakes, they left me at the fucking funeral home with my dead uncle and the death of his promises. It took me realizing that it didn’t matter how they felt or why they didn’t care. It was time to let go of them in every way possible. I had to learn to live a life where they didn’t exist anymore. All that mattered at that point was how I felt about myself. As I made strides toward getting better, I found pride in myself and that’s what helped the most.
Creed, Magnus, and I had one thing in common that made us good operatives and commanders. I didn’t have it until I cleared my mind of all the things that weighed me down. I discovered it when I joined CAD. All three of us had a way of reading people. We were able to see when a fellow operative wasn’t in the right mind for a mission. We were able to look at a target and somehow know what they were feeling. Sometimes it was regret, but most of the time it was anger that their life of terror was over. Some died with pride, because they were brave and died for their beliefs, they thought they were fucking martyrs.
Magnus and I spoke quite often when we watched Creed fall in love. We knew it before he did, and we also know that Drakos behaves the way he does because he’s battling his demons. He’s stuck in that kitchen where he found his dead parents. It’s like he is stuck at the age of eight and held out hope that his mom would wake up after his dad killed her then himself. He’s still that scared little boy that would hide in the closet when his dad beat the shit out of his mom. He loved the closeness of sex, small doses of relief, but was scared to admit he needed more. He needed to be loved despite his flaws and his trauma. He was scared he would end up like his father because of the anger he held deep down and never wanted to get close enough to a woman that could become prey to that anger.
Axton is angry, and has a rage inside him that may never let him have peace. He’s still dreaming of beating his dad the way his dad beat him.
Wrenly is a different story. She says she’s not afraid to share her past with me, but there’s something about it that holds her back. She lied tonight, I know she’s scared to tell me. Something bad happened and somehow it relates to me. Maybe not directly, but it’s something that she thinks may hurt me when I learn the truth.
It's been a week, and just like every night so far, I can’t sleep. There was no way to prepare myself for what would happen after seeing her again then spending so much time with her. She doesn’t know that for fifteen years, she was on my mind. Every damn day I’d see something that reminded me of her, and I would relive those memories of her over and over again.
I want her so damn bad, it’s insane. There would be nothing better than taking my time as we made love, but it’s more than just sex. It’s experiencing her in every way. To learn everything about her and having her close to me. I don’t just desire her lips against mine, I desire her laugh and the way her eyes light up when she looks at me. The love I had for her as a kid, doesn’t compare to the love I feel for her now. That was like a tiny seed that was planted but waited and waited until one day it shot up quickly and bloomed into something bigger than I’ve ever felt in my life. Something nearly supernatural, it’s power is overwhelming and it laid dormant in me my whole life, like loving her was written in my DNA. I just needed to let go of the pain before it could be released. A week, one week and my life is completely changed. Am I crazy or is this real?
There’s no way I’m not reading her right. She feels it just as strong as me. I see it in her eyes, especially when she’s smiling at me, or laughing at something I said. I feel it when her hand slides into mine, and when I hold her in my arms. Fuck, it’s so strong, it’s even in her voice when we talk. She doesn’t look at anyone in the room the way she looks at me. Mother fuck it reminds me of when her mom died, and she ran into my arms. She had just experienced something horrible, but looked at me for help, and I was only six years old, just like her. It was one of the most memorable moments of my life. I think of Addie, and I just don’t see how a child that young could find that much comfort in another child the same age.
I see the same look in Wrenly’s eyes now that I saw then. Like she needed me to fix all of her hurts. Something is hurting Wrenly far worse than anything else she ever experienced, and I can feel it. I can feel that pain and I can’t fix it unless she talks to me about it. Pushing her too hard could push her away and I had to be patient. Until that time comes, I can’t do anything about how I feel for her.
Earlier, in the pre-mission briefing, I saw how she looked at me and I almost fell back into the wall. It hit me so damn hard. She was looking at me with pride, and I never felt so fucking awesome in my life. Damn I wish that fifteen year old kid knew she would look at him that way someday.
Then she looked at me like she was about to rip my clothes off me. Dammit, for almost eight years I struggled to feel like a whole man, but I’ve had a hard on almost constantly for a week. Dammit, I’m hard now. Fuck!
I tossed and turned then finally fell asleep. My alarm went off at 0200 hours, giving me a whopping hour and a half sleep. I needed her to open up to me soon, or I was probably going to have a stroke or something. I groaned and didn’t have the strength to turn off my alarm. Getting up and into the shower was nearly impossible. By the time I was ready to go, it was still quiet outside. It was dark and all I could hear were crickets, tree frogs, coyotes yipping and howling off in the distance, and every once in a while the horse like whinny of a screech owl protecting his territory.
Wrenly experienced missions over the years, but she was about to experience something the Marines never warned her existed. Our operatives were being sent south to La Rinconada, a gold-mining town in Peru. There were two objectives, which is why we sent two units. One was a contract with an Eastern European diplomat, who started an initiative to find several children taken from an orphanage to South America. We had reason to believe the children, who were young girls, were in Peru and about to be smuggled into China to be forced into sexual slavery. The children were being housed by an adoption agency ran by one woman and her two sons. My second unit was going to Lima, where we had a separate contract with a diplomat from Columbia, to find a woman and teenage girl believed to be enslaved by a Venezuelan national. Both were dangerous missions, small, but dangerous. I had two black hawks already waiting in Peru. Our men would be flown to one destination in our private jet, then taken to the separate towns. The one in Lima was a small compound and a safe extraction of the woman and girl was the goal. My unit going into La Rinconada is to take out three high value targets and safely extract the children. This was the mission that not only came with a contract, but a very hefty reward payable by a Columbian Cartel leader. Yes, we do have a goal of taking out the cartel someday, but until then, we have no problem taking their money in the form of a reward. My best guess is the three high value targets were somehow a threat to the drug cartel. The next twenty four hours were going to be long and grueling.