Chapter Thirty-Six
Petra
They didn’t feel like going far.
Exhaustion wasn’t enough of a word to explain how her body felt. Neurodivergent burnout didn’t quite cover it either. And she was too tired to find a more appropriate descriptor.
She didn’t want to eat at all, chewing felt like it would take too much energy, but Hawkeye insisted. He also wanted her to sit outside and see the stars so she could calm her mind before she tried to sleep.
So here they were.
With pre-made picnic boxes from the fridge by the front desk, they’d wandered outside and down the wharf where they sat, dangling their feet above the water.
“I’ve always heard of fight, flight, or freeze. But you have fight, flight, or chill. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone respond like you in a crisis before.” Hawkeye pulled his sandwich from the box and unwrapped it.
“Fight, flight, freeze, but for women, there’s a fourth and a fifth, fawning and fine. Women have a human bomb in front of them, tick, tick, ticking. There’s no way to run away or freeze.” She spread her hands wide. “How would that serve?”
“Fawning.” He seemed to be trying on the word for the first time.
“Smiles, laughs, placating language.”
He shook his head.
“When women are near dangerous men, they aren’t smiling because they’re happy. They’re not laughing because they find the situation funny. They’re placating, emotionally petting the man interacting with them—someone known or a stranger. A hurt ego is dangerous. Violence is always possible.”
“So, when I turn to a woman, she’s smiling at me—” Hawkeye said.
“You’re huge and solidly muscled. What chance would a woman have against you even if she were a trained fighter? I’m a trained fighter. I’d never go up against you. I’d fawn.”
“With me? Have you done that?” he asked with a look of shock and disquiet.
“No.” Petra unwrapped her sandwich and lifted the bread to see what textures were underneath. “But I have friends who vouched for you. And our mutual friends would hold you accountable if anything happened to me at your hands.”
His brows came in tight.
“If you’d just stepped into my sphere and started chatting me up, and I knew nothing about you? Yes, I’d fawn out of self-protection. Few women wouldn’t. You’re an unknown quantity.”
He took a bite of his sandwich and thought about that while he chewed. “I’ve heard that before from my female friends that the most dangerous thing in a woman’s life is a man.”
“What do you think is the biggest danger to a man?”
“Stupidity?” He shrugged.
“By that, I think you mean taking irrational chances and pushing things too far?”
“Yes.” He opened his bag of chips and angled them toward her, so she knew she was welcome to share.
“I guess you’re living with that on the daily in your career. But you’re trained to do it. And that’s the difference between danger and stupidity.”
“Fawning,” Hawkeye said again, but this time, it was like he was tumbling the idea around. “So, I can’t trust a woman’s smiles to mean they think they’re having a pleasant exchange. They may be frightened. Wow. That’s difficult to swallow. I mean, if I’m turning to speak to a human being near me, and they happen to be female, how would I know if they thought they were in danger?”
“I doubt you're saying things to a stranger like, ‘You’re beautiful.’ Or ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ Or other smarmy things?”
“I don’t know that I never did that. But usually, I talk to people more conversationally.”
“And if they were saying I’m not interested, I came here to have a quiet meal and read?”
“Obviously, that’s clear communication they don’t want to engage in a conversation with me. ‘Have a nice night.’ Move on.”
“Dog handler,” Petra said, taking a bite from her cheese and veggie sandwich.
“What?”
‘You’re a dog handler.” She held her hand over her mouth so he wouldn’t see her half-chewed food. “No means no when you train your dog.” She swallowed. “You thoroughly understand the concept. Good on you that you can extrapolate that out, and you know that when women say that to you, it’s the same thing.”
“That’s kind of you to say. But at the same time, I don’t think you can apply that as a blanket truism to all dog handlers. Let’s just say when they’re not with their dogs, they might not act as upstanding, and now that I’m pulling up pictures, I’m remembering episodes where I’ve witnessed fawning. I don’t know what to say. It feels like a ‘sorry’ should slide in here, but it doesn’t make any difference to the grand scheme.”
Petra sighed.
“Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, go to the fifth one you said, fine. What’s that one?”
“It’s that it doesn’t occur to you at the moment that there’s a danger where it’s possible that if you acted like there was a danger, it wouldn’t be dangerous.” Petra heard that tumble of words and even she wasn’t sure they made sense.
“Nope,” Hawkeye said. “I’m not going to try and untangle that sentence.”
“I’ll give you an example. I went to Alaska. I had a bucket list item I thought I might try to check off. I wanted to see a mama bear catch a salmon and feed it to her cub.”
“Wow.” He laughed. “That’s oddly specific.”
“I know, right?” Petra smiled. “It got into my imagination that I really wanted to see this happen. When I found an Alaskan cruise on sale for next to nothing and only four days long, I twisted my friend Tamika’s arm, and she came with me for the cruise. She stayed on the boat. I went out on a bear walk. Two hundred dollars, no guarantee that you’d see a bear.”
“Worth it.”
“Absolutely.” Petra took a bite of pickle. “We’re walking down the path, and we see a black bear, fat and happy, getting ready to go into hibernation. He’s off in the distance. We walk a little further, and there’s another black bear waddling her fat bottom in and out of the bushes.”
“You’re down on a path in sight of black bears?”
“There’s a wooden walkway fairly high above the ground,” Petra explained. “There are two bear guides with us, though their depth of bear behavior knowledge was pretty low. Imagine the kind of young man who would bag your groceries. The only reassuring thing about either guy was that they each had a car flare taped to their chest, ready to deploy. Apparently, it’s the smell and not the flame that’s the deterrent.”
“Interesting,” Hawkeye said, then creased his brow.
“What was that thought?” Petra asked.
“We practice in the forests around Northern Virginia, black bear country, as you know.”
Petra nodded. “Easier to get to, but no salmon.”
“True. But we have different ways of dealing with bears if we see them. It mostly means being aware and minding our own business while we sing a song or talk out loud, so the bear is aware of us and knows we’re not looking for a fight.”
“It’s fine , move along,” Petra said.
“Ah. I’m getting it now. So, bears in Alaska…”
“We were walking on the path and spotted a cub lying in the sun, balanced belly-down on the railing. So cute. He was there for a while, and nobody saw his mom. Finally, he gets down, and we see him wander away. I turned around the bend and went to the railing to see down. There I am, face to face—I mean, feel her exhale on my skin kind of face to face—with this mama bear. Her cub is by her side.”
Hawkeye pulled the potato chip away from his mouth. “Shit!”
“Nah. I saw that mama bear and said, ‘Hey, mama, you’re doing a mighty fine job with your cub. I’m so proud of you.’ The mom looks at me like – I agree, thanks for noticing, and she and the cub lumber off.”
He ate the chip. Then another. And a third. “That could have gone so badly.”
“She could have eaten my face. Easily. But I didn’t send off any scared vibes. She didn’t feel any danger from me. We were good. And guess what?”
“No clue.”
“I saw her by the river about fifteen minutes later, and she pulled a salmon from the water and fed it to her cub.”
Hawkeye gave Petra a high five. “Congratulations.” He ate another chip. “I have a question for you. I’m leaping a cavern to a whole new topic.”
“Leap away,” Petra said.
“Actually it’s not such a leap,” Hawkeye corrected. “I was thinking about this because of the fawning topic when I was asking if I could buy a lady a drink.”
“Okay.”
“Is there a scientific way to know if a person is your person?” Hawkeye asked.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a blood test for love? ‘I see, Miss Armstrong, that your blood is saturated in X and Z. Congratulations. May you live happily ever after.’” Petra looked out to sea as she said that.
Her brain was busy.
Hawkeye waited.
“That was flip,” she turned back to him. “You want a real answer.”
“I would, if you don’t mind.”
She nodded. “I think this goes back to the word crush. You used it the other day. Some people have an experience where, because of an emotional connection, life seems bright and shiny. They think, oh, this is what the poets were writing about. This is how it happens in the movies. This is real. And then the light switches off, and you almost hate the other person because the joy you felt feels like it was stolen from you?”
“That second part I’ve never experienced. I’m referring to the first part.”
“Yes,” Petra said, “that’s just chemistry.”
“Literal chemistry—not like the phrase ‘we just had good chemistry.’”
“Is there a difference?” Petra asked.
“I don’t know.” Hawkeye rubbed his thumb along his jaw. “I feel like we might be in an odd loop here.”
“Okay, let me take a stab at answering you, and then you tell me if I’m off the mark. I’m approaching this first part from the perspective that one person in the relationship is either a psychopath, a sociopath, or someone who survived a high-trauma childhood. When you’re with this person, and you feel seen and appreciated and cared for, you feel safe. The conversation flows. You are glowing.”
“Okay.”
“Now, walk away. The new love went home. You’re left standing in your living room alone. How do you feel in the following minutes, hours, and days? What do you feel after you’ve had some space from this person? Are you depleted? Do things seem grayer? Do you relive your time together and have bad feelings about how things went? Places where you felt unease? You see, a manipulator will have figured you out. They are experts at it—cult leaders reign supreme in this way. What they’re giving you chemically is dopamine.”
“Dopamine, okay.”
“It’s one of the reasons why, in a cult,” Petra said, “you need to be kept away from others, kept close, and continually fed the dopamine so you constantly glow.”
“They know they're doing this?”
“Some do. Cult leaders do,” Petra said. “Survivors of childhood trauma aren’t as aware. Their goal is to keep things calm and stay on the good side. It’s a safety measure, not malevolence. Think of it this way: there are people who kill for a living—you did, I have to assume. People who kill without moral impetus are psychopaths. People who kill for the greater good—the security and protection of their clan—are warriors. The reason for the kill is defined by whether we, as a society, think of them as good or bad.”
“Got it.” He took a swig from his water bottle and then set it down on the rough wood. “Psychopaths are bad. Survivors get our sympathy. Security gets our gratitude.”
“What happens if you walk away from the dopamine rush?” Petra asked with her hand over her mouth to hide the bite she’d taken from her sandwich. “You crash. You feel bad. If you want the dopamine back, you seek out that person again.”
“Like an addiction.” He leaned forward. “Cooper, leave it,” Hawkeye said as a fish jumped from the water and Cooper pushed up to a crouch.
Petra grinned at Cooper, then reached for a potato chip in Hawkeye’s bag. “It can very much be like an addiction. Again, the cults want you to need that hit, so you do what’s necessary to feel good. Now, on the other hand, you walk away, and when you think back on your time together, you still feel warm and fuzzy.”
“You think back, not only was it good then, but you feel positive and happy in the now,” Hawkeye said. “Life feels good.”
“That’s oxytocin and serotonin—those are the connection chemicals.”
“The tell is that you shouldn’t feel desperate to get back to them.” He chucked the last bite of his sandwich toward a gull, pecking along the rocks.
“Be a little careful with that last sentence. You can miss someone and look forward to seeing them soon. It’s more that you’re not—"
“Depleted and looking for a refill. Not an addict looking for a high. There’s no crash between.”
“It’s a good indicator,” Petra agreed. “It’s not a litmus test. But to answer your original question, ‘Is there a scientific way to know if a person is your person?’ That’s the best answer I have.”
“Check the chemical reaction. I like it.” He smiled and brushed the hair from her face, gently tucking it behind her ear before he bent in to kiss her. Holding there, he whispered. “And I like you—the serotonin oxytocin kind of like.” He sat up to see her reaction.
Her reaction was joy.
“That’s one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard.” She scooted closer, tucking into his arm. “Thank you. I serotonin oxytocin like you, too.” Petra cuddled into him, his warmth radiating into her. Then she reached over to play with his fingers, resting on his opposite thigh. “Do you want a significant relationship in your life, or are you good?” She ventured.
“I’ve always considered myself a man who should be a husband.”
“That’s an interesting way to phrase it. You seem to be a man who sets a goal and reaches it—Green Beret, Cerberus Tactical. Of course, personal and professional aren’t the same. So how is it you’re not married?”
“Here’s how I saw it,” He rubbed a finger under his nose, looking up as he formed his thoughts. “The person I could devote myself to was out there, just not ‘out there.’” He chuckled. “Not out there as in woo-woo. I think the kind of person I wanted to be with isn’t in the places where people meet for the dating scene.”
“Apps,” Petra said, slipping Cooper a bit of cheese.
“Apps. Bars. Dance halls. I’m not into the party scene. I always thought that my person was probably at home playing with her animals, doing her hobbies, having friends over, going out hiking on the weekends.” He turned and captured her chin in his fingers as he smiled at her.
Petra liked the warmth in his eyes and the genuineness of the crinkles at the corners.
“See I was right. And, of course, I needed Cooper with me so he could give his stamp of approval. The universe needed to put me in the right place at the right time.”
“So that was the universe at play, the whole thing on the plane?” Petra asked.
“I imagine as an FBI special agent, you’re not putting all your deets out for the public to see. The universe took some time to figure out how to put us in the same place, under the right circumstances that we got a chance to know each other a bit.”
“Good of the universe to finally get the job done. I used to think of myself as a woman who should be a wife. I was even married for a while back in my twenties.”
Petra always struggled with the idea of timing. Her brain was able to figure out early on if a person was someone she liked and enjoyed. Unfortunately, she acted that way. It seemed off-putting, even overwhelming to neurotypical people who seemed to know the dance steps that she did not.
But Petra wasn’t going to mask. She’d promised herself to be genuine with Hawkeye. If she was going to scare him off, earlier was better.
“Yesterday,” she said, “you talked to me about the importance of preserving significant firsts for a time when they could be savored. This weekend has been desperate, scary, painful, miserable, and sad. But through that, I’m stuck on significant firsts. Through all that, what’s going on between us feels like a significant first to me. I haven’t felt this settled and comfortable amidst all the discomforts before. I feel like this time together has been important.”
“Absolutely. Yes. I’m looking forward to getting home and —” Hawkeye stopped when his phone buzzed. He pulled it out from his thigh pocket. “Go for Hawkeye.” He paused. “I have Petra here with me. I’m putting you on speaker. No one else is in our area to overhear.”
“Petra? Reaper here.”
“Hi?” She leaned forward to speak over the phone as Hawkeye held it out.
“I’m looking for information you might have about the girl from today’s search. She’s in the hospital and had a seizure. She remains uncommunicative. The hospital is seeking information that might help them to understand her medical situation. When you saw the family at the tidepool, was anything mentioned about her health? Did you see any medications?”
“No. Nothing. I can tell you that I never saw anyone say anything to her, and she didn’t talk to anyone. She seemed in a bad mood, and they let her have her storm cloud at a distance. That’s her brothers, too. They didn’t try to get her to join in as they played. Also, they were staying here in the hotel. Is it possible for the manager to go into their room? I know they were leaving the island, but it’s possible that a bottle was missed, or a pill fell onto the floor with identifiable markings.”
“We already looked,” Reaper said.
“The girl,” Petra said, feeling the warmth and joy of the conversation she was having with Hawkeye recede into the distance, replaced with fear. “Is she in imminent danger?”
“I can’t say. That they were calling and asking for any possible information is a big red flag. They have to be worried. They couldn’t go into her case much more than to ask for information specifically around what might have caused the seizure.”
“Okay. I’m going to think about all this and see what I can come up with. Off the top of my head, I have nothing.”
“Thanks, Petra. Out.”
Hawkeye’s body had changed. He sat up straighter as he expanded his muscles. The word that came to Petra was that he was “primed.” His focus was hard on her. “I don’t know you very well yet, but I know you,” he said.
Petra blinked at him.
“You have a plan to get that information, and it’s not a safe one. When you said you were going to see what you could come up with, what you meant was that you were about to go find out why that child is in a medical crisis.”
Petra paused. “Yes. You’re right.”
“All right. Cooper and I are in.” Hawkeye stood, gathering the last of his food and balling it up to shove into the trash. “What’s the plan?”