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“Of course it won’t happen again. I mean, it was obviously planned this time. I’m sure you can control it in the future. ”
“Marguerite—”
“Tyler, shut up. I mean it. ” She dug her fingers into him. “We’ve been to this doorway before and you keep leaving me in the cold. I’ve beaten the hell out of you, tried to stab you, tried every conceivable way to shut you out and yet that’s okay. But you won’t even tell me what’s going on in this one moment, where you’re obviously a greater danger to yourself than me. ”
“I’m fine,” he snapped. “I just have to get away from it. ”
“No, you’re trying to get away from me. ” She walked in to him, surprised him by putting her head down and bracing her arms, backing him like a tug pushing a freighter many times its
size toward dockside, only she was pushing him back toward the bench.
“Marguerite, what are you—”
“Sit. ” She sat down next to him, took his hand, put her shoulder against his. “Tyler, I need you to tell me what just happened. ”
He started to rise. Seizing his shirt collar, she jerked so that he lost his balance and sat back down, not expecting the rough movement. She put her hands on either side of his neck, drew his gaze to her fiery one. “I’m not going to run because you’re not invincible every moment of every fucking day. And guess what? I’m a pretty smart woman. I know what post-traumatic stress syndrome is. So why don’t you tell me what triggered it. ”
She swore at his indecision and cupped his face, pressed her lips to his, opened his mouth, explored him, tangled with his tongue until his hands were at her hips, gripping her with strength, his lust rising as she deliberately stoked it, drawing the animal up in him, giving him back his pride. She drew back, not surprised when his hands tightened, holding her fast, his amber eyes roused. “Any sacrifice to help,” she repeated his own words, gently teasing now. “You’re frightening me. You’re shutting me out, not trusting me to be strong enough to take it. To help. To listen. ” Relief, sudden and strong, flooded her chest at the rueful curve of his lips.
“Marguerite, I think of the two of us, I’m the least courageous. ”
“Hush,” she reproved. “Tell me about clay. ”
He turned, leaned forward to run a hand behind his neck. She caught it there, tangling their fingers together on the back of his shoulder. She heard him sigh.
“We were in Panama with the right intentions, but so many things went wrong.
And then there was this day… You find yourself doing so many things you never think of doing. Standing there, watching bodies be bulldozed into a mass grave because there are so many of them that they can’t be properly buried before they’ll rot, creating disease.
“Then I see this boy walking through a pile of bodies that hasn’t yet been scooped up. Looking for something he could barter. He’d been in blood so long he didn’t notice it dried on his feet. Over his toes, his ankles…” He reached down, passed his hand over her foot, as if reassuring himself it was clean and pale, cool to his touch. “This kid was wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. We surround ourselves with all these things that are civilized to make us feel safe. A rock band T-shirt, linoleum for our kitchens…and yet we’re not civilized. Just like you said that very first night at Tea Leaves. We never have been.
“I had to chase him off from stealing a watch. I don’t know why it mattered. But I looked at his feet and remembered walking on the banks of the river in Georgia, near where I was born. ” The shadows moved behind his eyes and he turned his gaze back to the pond. “Now I have these dreams of it, walking in Georgia, but the mud becomes blood and the bodies come out of the river toward me like some horrific zombie film, only so real. ”
A quiver ran through the muscles under her fingers. “Sometimes Nina is dancing among them, on top of the bodies, standing on their backs, walking on her toes. Tears of blood are running down her face. She tries to kiss me and I smell all those corpses on her breath. When I have that dream, it makes me never want to sleep again. ”
“What happened, Tyler?” She trailed her fingers on his nape, soothing, stroking, keeping her other hand linked with his. “Why did you leave the CIA? You said you couldn’t refuse me anything. I need to know. ”
Tyler knew he was going to have to answer her, to say the words. The pregnant silence, the strength of what lay between them now demanded it. He could not turn away from it unless he wished to turn away from her. But it might turn her from him.
He rose, squeezed her hand and took two steps away. She didn’t stop him this time.
“There are things you do to keep your country safe that no one wants to talk about.
That we all know happen, deep in the shadows of our soul. Those of us that do it know that people are not all basically good, as many sheltered souls like to believe. That there are places where there are not shades of gray, where it comes down to good and evil, places that are so far from our idealism that those who spout about political correctness and peace can’t even comprehend the high price of having the freedom to speak their opinions. And those of us who are immersed in violence for that high price, who try to do the right thing in such an immoral world, know that they’re right about one thing.
Violence eats your soul. Eventually you become what you fight in order to destroy it, in order that there may be people and places untouched by either your filth or your enemy’s. All those movies about the soldiers being taken to another planet, where their barbaric natures, which protected the people, can’t be turned against them…”
“Tyler. ” There was love in her soft voice, so much he just wanted to fall on his knees and let it cover him like a blanket tucked around a child’s shoulders by his mother’s hands. A shudder ran through him.
“Information. ” He spat out the word harshly. “When you know lives are on the line, information is extracted, no matter the cost. You learn to detach, to watch every subtle nuance of your enemy’s psyche, to know just how much they can take. And I was very good at it. I’ve been a sexual Dominant since I was twenty-one years old and the same talents that can be applied to pleasure can be applied to torture. ” When he turned to face her, Marguerite saw his expression was hard, almost monstrous, the darkness there for her to see.
“Torture is about psychological regression. You break the subject down until they lose their grasp on all their learned personality traits. They can’t handle complex tasks, deal with complicated or stressful situations. It’s all about stripping away the shields.
Sensory deprivation, unbalancing them with the unexpected, over and over, removing their anchor on reality by confusing them, making them think it’s night when it should be day, day when it should be night. Sound familiar?”
“Tyler. ” She said it again, pain in her voice. Pain for him. He turned away from it, stared at the ducks.
“During the Gulf War, we knew a bomb had been planted and we needed to know where. We caught the lover of the bomber. She was on the inside and knew what we needed to know. And we had to know fast. We didn’t have time for those types of methods. ” He crumpled her head covering in his fist and Marguerite saw the muscles bunch in his shoulders as if he were preparing for a physical fight. “Ten years of intense, pretty much back-to-back operations, yet somehow I’d never had to use severe interrogation techniques on a woman. I removed nine of her nails, broke seven of her fingers before she told us. Fingers are one of the worst pains there are because the nerves are so dense there, even though people are more psychologically cowed by threats to genitalia, nipples. She was small-boned, like my wife. Delicate hands, like yours.
