Chapter 3 #3
“Nothing. I chose to obey. Somebody up the chain said shut up and stand down and I did. Good little sailor. Never avenged a single one of them.” He taps the table with one thick finger, punctuating.
“It haunts me every day. Every day. I’m going to hell for it.
My brothers are in heaven. I’ll never see them again. ”
I open my mouth to say something. A sentence starts in my mind but doesn’t make it to my lips. It’s not the story, it’s the pain riddled on his face. It’s the strange urge I have to comfort him.
“I’m no SEAL.” He says it flat with finality. “You keep calling me one. Don’t. I’m not worthy of it. A man who lets his brothers burn and calls it following orders.” He shakes his head. “Not a SEAL. Just a coward with good posture.”
Two people at a filthy table, trading the truths we can’t say sober.
“I’m sorry,” I finally tell him, “but you don’t strike me as a coward.”
“What’d I strike you as?” His eyes are so bloodshot, he might as well be bleeding from his sockets. “Hm?”
I have a million honest answers about how he strikes me. All of them too endearing for a man I’m being paid to trick then kill. But before I have to answer…
Thud.
I’m rescued from honesty by his forehead hitting the table.
I ONCE DRAGGED a one-hundred-and-fifty-pound deer carcass through an uneven, rocky mountain pass that didn’t have switchbacks, but should’ve. It was all uphill, and impossible to get footing because it was raining cats and dogs. It was one of the most miserable nights of my life.
And it was honest-to-someone’s-God easier than getting Callen back to my hotel room. Because somehow, defying all laws of physics, an almost-two-hundred-pound man doubles his weight when he’s piss drunk.
But by sheer will, my admittedly stronger-than-average strength for a woman of my size, and honestly, a fucking miracle, I get him back safely to the Granier Hotel. He’s so plastered he doesn’t notice the night reception greet me by yet another alias, Ms. Samantha Wiggins.
Callen makes it to the king-sized bed and can hold himself up no longer.
He goes down face-first across it, one arm flung out, a felled tree of a man in a suit that’s wrinkled, rumpled, ripped and all around, ruined.
Christ. For a second, I think that’s it.
Lights out. Chapter closed. I’ll deal with this mess tomorrow.
But when I sit on the edge of the mattress to pull his shoes off because something strangely domestic in me worries he’ll wreck my nice bedspread and also, it’s uncomfortable to sleep in dress shoes… he comes back to life.
Callen rolls toward me slow and heavy, and his arm comes around my waist, and with strength he shouldn’t have right now, he pulls me until I’m caught in the curl of him. He looks up at me with his stupid warm brown eyes, that have simmered from their angry red.
The eyes. He’s giving me the eyes.
“You win, missy,” he murmurs. “You want me? You can have me. I’m all yours.”
I chuckle at him as I smooth his hair to the side; a sweet, maternal gesture I didn’t know I had in me. “What? You and your whiskey dick?”
“Hey.” He looks wounded, deeply, on behalf of his manhood.
“Still works. Fully operational. Let me show you.” He tightens his arm, but it’s not a grab.
There’s nothing forceful in it, it’s a plea.
Simply a man asking to be held by the one person who was kind to him tonight.
“Stay. I’ll be good. I’ll be so good to you, Kezia. ”
I put my hand against his chest and hold him where he is. “You couldn’t sign your own name right now. You can’t consent.” I pat twice against his chest. It echoes like it’s hollow. Like his heart isn’t big enough to fill the space below all those muscles.
“Consent?” He blinks up at me, and something crosses his face that isn’t drunk at all—surprise, maybe, that the beautiful stranger who chased him into a dive and bought his whiskey is the one drawing the line. “I’ve never heard a woman ask for consent.”
“That’s a shame. More should.”
“You’re not a monster,” he mumbles. “Promise.”
“Yes, I am,” I tell him, honest again, way too many times tonight. “You’ll see.” But I pray he doesn’t heed my warning.
He smiles like he doesn’t believe me, and his arm goes soft around my waist. His eyes lose the fight they were pretending to still be in.
“The only easy day was yesterday,” he murmurs into the pillow, already gone. “Swear to God. Gonna figure it out, brothers. Swear to God.”
“Go to sleep, Callen.” I rise, then fetch a throw blanket from the reading chair across the room.
“…Kezia.”
“Go to sleep,” I say again after covering him. “You’re safe.” For tonight.
And he does. Just like that—between one breath and the next, his body goes still, his face relaxed in a way it hasn’t been all night. Rest finally claiming him.
I sit there long after I should move. Watching him breathe. His back rising and falling into the pillowtop comforter as it slowly melds to his shape.
Not a monster, not a monster.
For the first time in as long as I can remember, I wish it were true. I wish I was what he probably saw me as tonight: kind, comforting, very, very human.
Very much a lie.