Chapter 3
Elliot
Who are you, Elliot Wittier, and what do I have to do to keep you?
It was a question I knew he hadn’t really meant, at least not that last part. It had been him getting caught up in the moment, nothing more.
Because shit like this didn’t happen in real life.
It was the physical chemistry talking. It was the rush of endorphins from finding someone who had some kind of pull on you that you’d never experienced before.
Most, if not all, of what I was feeling was the anticipation – the rush of wondering if it was the real deal, even though deep down I knew it wasn’t.
Because you didn’t meet your other half in a handful of minutes at a Halloween-themed benefit.
Cruz might have liked what he saw in that hotel alcove and again in the doorway of the darkened shop, but it wasn’t real.
I wasn’t that guy. And once he found out who I really was, he’d come up with some excuse to end the evening early and this whole thing would finally be over and I could get back to being boring, uptight, afraid-to-fail Elliot Wittier.
God, why was I even doing this? I needed to be at my computer trying to track down the huge sum of cash that had gone missing from the account of one of the firm’s biggest clients.
I was about to turn and tell Cruz that I needed to go, when we reached the doorway of the small diner and he opened the door for me.
He opened the door for me.
Fuck, it really was a date.
A date in which he’d taken sex off the table so I wouldn’t have to obsess over it anymore.
Which was what I’d been doing.
Because in addition to all my other less than desirable qualities, I wasn’t even a good lay.
“Cruz,” I said as I stepped into the diner, but my words died in my throat when he put his hand at the small of my back and steered me in the direction of a booth near the back of the restaurant.
“Yeah?” he said.
I can’t do this. I should go.
“I’ve never been here before. Is it good?” I asked lamely.
Cruz waited until I’d sat down on one side of the booth before he took the other side. Our legs bumped beneath the table, but when I moved mine out of the way, his followed until his calf was pressed up against one of mine. Jesus, he was killing me.
“First thing you need to know about me,” Cruz said in lieu of answering the question directly, “is that I love breakfast for dinner. Pancakes, cereal, eggs, doesn’t matter. If you offer it to me at the dinner hour, I’m putty in your hands.”
I smiled and said, “Duly noted. What should I make you for breakfast?” Cruz’s mouth pulled into a little smirk and I felt my cheeks heat. “I mean, not actual breakfast, like, at my place or anything. Just in general… what are your breakfast eating habits in general?”
Breakfast eating habits? Jesus, El, shut the fuck up right fucking now!
Cruz’s leg bumped mine under the table and I realized he’d done it to get my attention, because when I looked up from where I’d dropped my eyes to stare at the ugly green Formica tabletop, he sent me what I could only classify as a look of pride.
“I usually work out in the morning, so I typically just have a protein shake. What about you?”
“Oh, well, just coffee. I’m usually out the door pretty early and things are always hectic by the time I get to work.”
The waitress appeared. “What’ll you boys have?” she asked. She was an older woman with silvery hair that was in some kind of weird updo that lent itself to the whole sixties theme the diner had going on.
Cruz ordered a coffee and a breakfast platter that included pancakes, eggs, bacon, and sausage.
“What about you, honey?” the waitress asked me.
I had no clue what possessed me to do it, but I looked at Cruz.
And something happened in that moment.
The same thing that had happened in that alcove.
His eyes held mine for the longest time and I knew this time it would have to be my choice. My mind was telling me not to go there, but deep down in my belly, something began to loosen and unfurl the longer Cruz held my gaze.
It’s okay to let go sometimes, Elliot. To let someone else shoulder the burden. Whether it’s for a few minutes, a few hours, or even a lifetime – it doesn’t make you weak. It doesn’t mean you failed.
What I did next wasn’t about the food. In truth, I didn’t care what I ate. No, it was about something else. It was about giving myself permission to feel something I never had. To give to someone else the things that sometimes became too much for me to hang onto.
Giving it to Cruz was safe because I’d never see him again after tonight.
I knew that in my heart. I wasn’t sure what act of fate had decided to bring us together for the evening, but real life would return soon enough.
I’d go back to getting everything right tomorrow.
Tonight, I’d let Cruz do what he’d offered.
Take some of that burden.
And maybe I’d finally be able to breathe again.
I ignored the way the waitress was tapping her pen on her pad and kept my eyes latched on Cruz’s. When I tilted my head just the slightest bit, he immediately said, “He’ll have the same, but instead of sausage, give him another order of bacon.”
I smiled at that and leaned back against the booth. As soon as the waitress left, I said, “I love bacon.”
“I know,” Cruz responded, his eyes twinkling.
“How?”
He leaned against the table, arms folded, like he was about to tell me a secret. I did the same.
“You have a tell when something excites you, did you know that?”
I shook my head, but before I could say anything, Cruz reached across the table and ran his fingers over one of my hands. I pulled in a breath, then swallowed hard.
“There it is,” he said softly, his eyes on me.
“What? I swallow?” I asked stupidly.
The rough pads of Cruz’s fingers felt so good against my skin that I barely managed to suppress a moan.
“That too,” Cruz said with a chuckle. “But no, it’s your eyes. They light up – like you’re seeing something for the first time.”
“So, I’m like Pavlov’s dog?” I asked with a chuckle. “But instead of responding to the sound of a metronome, I hear the word bacon and I get all hopped up with excitement?”
“A metronome? I thought it was a bell.”
I shook my head. “Classic mistake. He used a metronome.” I flushed and said, “Sorry, I’m full of useless facts like that. In case you missed it, I’m a bit of a nerd.”
Cruz began playing with one of my hands. His finger stroked up and down the length of each one of mine over and over.
“I’m finding I’ve got a serious thing for nerds… well, one nerd in particular,” he said huskily.
I had no clue how long we sat there like that for before the waitress returned with our coffee. The interruption forced us apart and I leaned back in my seat until she left, then began preparing my coffee.
“So besides being able to kick my ass at trivia and your excellent costume selection choices, tell me what makes you tick.”
I smiled. “Not even going to ease me in, huh?” I asked.
“If you haven’t noticed, I’m not real good on easing anything,” he said with a self-deprecating smile.
Thank God for that.
“Well, um, I guess you already know about the foundation, since you were at the benefit. What were you doing there, by the way? I don’t recognize your name.”
“Afraid I crashed it?” Cruz asked.
I chuckled. “No, it’s just, in my line of work I tend to know who’s who.” I paused and let my eyes rake over him, finally feeling a little more confident as I took in his dark beauty. “Believe me, I would have remembered someone like you.”
“I got my ticket from my employer. He and his wife couldn’t attend, so they offered the tickets up to the first takers at work.”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“Construction.”
I nodded, but didn’t comment.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Nuh-uh, Elliot. Doesn’t work like that. Not tonight, anyway.”
I sighed. “You don’t look like you work in construction. If I had to guess, I would have said you were a soldier… or a cop.”
“What makes you say that?”
I forced my eyes up from where I’d been toying with my coffee cup.
“You act relaxed, but I can tell you’re aware of everything that’s happening around us.
When we came in, you picked this booth, even though there were some closer to the door.
It’s near the back exit, right? And you took that side so you could see anyone coming through the front door. ”
Cruz studied me for a long moment, his already dark eyes going even darker. “I was a soldier,” he finally said.
Since I could tell Cruz wasn’t much older than my own twenty-five years, I couldn’t help but wonder why someone in his prime wasn’t still in that line of work. But it wasn’t any of my business.
“I received a medical discharge and never went back.”
It shouldn’t have surprised me that he knew what I’d been thinking. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s none of my business.”
“Yes, it is,” he said. “Trust goes two ways, Elliot. I can’t expect you to hand over pieces of yourself and not give back the things that make me who I am.”
My heart swelled at that, but I tried to quell the emotion. There was no way he was feeling what I was. Not yet.
Probably not ever.
I forced the self-doubt away and said, “What happened?”
Despite Cruz being someone who was always aware of his surroundings, he hadn’t yet looked tense.
Now, though, it was hard to miss. His shoulders straightened and I saw him raise his hand to his head before slowly pulling it back.
The move was odd – like he was trying to break himself of a habit.
He leaned forward in the booth again and said, “I was in Germany. We’d just finished a mission and were preparing to head home after our debriefing. I was in Special Forces.”
I didn’t pressure him to continue when he fell silent. But I did reach across the table to cover his hand with mine. His skin was cold, so I automatically gathered his hand up into mine and began rubbing. His other hand was buried in his lap, so I couldn’t give it the same treatment.
“I was with some of the members of my unit at this bar, but I was tired so I decided to call it a night. I was heading back to my hotel when I was jumped in the alley behind this abandoned building nearby. There were too many of them to fight. I was in and out of consciousness from the beating, but they made sure I was awake when they shot me the first time… and the second.”
If I hadn’t been holding his hand between mine, I would have covered my mouth as the horror trickled through me.
“I was unconscious for the third shot. The kill shot. But the fuckers were drunk, so they missed,” Cruz said as he pulled my hand up and pressed one of my fingers against his head. I could feel the scar that was just above his temple and hidden by his hair.
“Who?” I whispered in horror. “Why?”
“My own men.”
“What?” I gasped in disbelief. “Why? Why would they do this?” I asked as I caressed the scar. In my mind, I knew he wasn’t in any danger anymore, but in my heart, it was like it had just happened.
“It was to get back at someone else. Someone I loved and someone who loved me.”
“Who?”
“My brother, Matias.”
“You have a brother?”
Cruz nodded. “He’s ten years older than me.
He was the team leader. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’d discovered that several of the guys on the team had sexually assaulted several village women and girls while on our mission.
He’d already started the process of having them court-martialed.
They were to be arrested as soon as we got back to the States.
Somehow, they found out and came after me.
They knew Matias would come looking for me, so they laid in wait for him, then jumped him.
But their drunk asses weren’t any match for him.
He killed three of them, put three more in the hospital and the rest got away, only to be picked up later by the MPs. ”
I must have looked confused because he clarified, “Military Police.”
“What happened to the survivors?”
“Prison for most of them. One of them, the ringleader, managed to get away. Probably had help.”
“And you recovered,” I said.
“Fit as a fiddle,” he said with a smile, though for the first time since I’d met him, it didn’t reach his eyes. He might have recovered physically, but I doubted he’d gotten past the betrayal, because I could see the darkness that lingered in his gaze.
“They betrayed you,” I whispered.
“Yes,” he said simply.
My nerves felt scraped raw by his story. The simple solution would have been to just remain silent, but I couldn’t. It was like what he’d said earlier – what he’d given me was a gift.
One that I wasn’t about to squander.
So, before I knew it, I was giving him another piece of myself when I admitted something only a few people in my life knew. “It happened to my father too, but he didn’t walk away from it.”