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“I’m so sorry, Rick.”
Another sarcastic laugh. “Yeah, I’m sure you are.”
Quinn’s gaze dropped guiltily to her ragged fingernails. She felt like a complete loser, tongue-tied with no idea what to say to make things right with him. A beeping sound grabbed her attention. By the time she looked up, the door leading into the gym was closing. Rick was gone.
Just like me, gone without saying goodbye.
Blinking back the imminent tears, Quinn tried unsuccessfully to focus on the stack of papers on her desk.
You knew he’d be pissed, Quinn. Don’t act like you didn’t expect the cold shoulder.
Quinn didn’t expect open arms, but she did expect Rick to at least listen to her explanation. He was hurt more by her actions than she had anticipated.
Quinn finished up with her work at five sharp, slipping into the break room for her purse and sneaking out the front door of the gym like a coward. Once in the safety of her tiny apartment, she shut the door and leaned against it, her heart thumping wildly against her ribcage.
Drained, she kicked off her shoes, making her way to her kitchen to grab a drink. After pulling a half-full bottle of vodka out of the freezer and a glass from the dishwasher, Quinn stopped and changed her mind. She put the glass down and brought the entire bottle into her bedroom. Curled up alone on the bed all night, weeping into her alcohol was Quinn’s only plan, and right now it didn’t sound like such a bad one.
Rick twitched as he sat on the large grey couch that faced the windows of his Midtown condo. The city looked peaceful from up here, lit up and sprawling into the night in every visible direction. Peaceful was about as far as possible as you could get from how Rick felt inside. Agitated, he got up and tossed his icepack into the sink. He knew better than to have gone into the cage when his head wasn’t in the game. It was his own fault that Ben caught him with a mean right hook/upper cut combo the other day, busting up his face.
He had needed to feel grounded to something or someone in that moment or he would have totally gone off the rails and got himself hurt or worse. He went out to all his usual haunts for a hookup, but when a woman would act interested, the thought of being with someone besides Quinn made him sick. He tried to go through the motions, desperately wanting to fuck her from his mind, but he couldn’t do it. Instead of making him forget her, all it did was confirm his belief that Quinn was different, that she was better than any of those women, that he actually fucking missed her.
Now I know I’m really fucked up. I figured I’d be the one to hurt Quinn in the end. It turns out she held all of the power and cut me deeper than I ever thought possible.
His nightmares had been getting worse since Quinn left. More than once he had woken up covered in sweat, the dreams so realistic he swore his leg was hot and he could smell burning flesh.
Needing someone to talk to before he lost his mind, Rick snatched up his phone and scrolled through the contacts. Once he found the one he wanted, he hit send before he could change his mind. Rick impatiently tapped his fingers on the dark marble countertop as it rang.
“Ricochet?”
His entire body relaxed at once. Rick hadn’t realized how tense he was until he heard the voice of his former Recon unit teammate.
“Hey Dash.”
“Holy shit. Never thought I’d hear from you again. At least, not until we both turned eighty and met up at some Vet function for used up old Marines or some sentimental crap like that.” Dash chuckled at his own joke.
“Yeah, I guess I haven’t been great at keeping in touch.”
“No,” his former teammate said flatly, “you haven’t. Not that I blame you.”
“How’s it been?”
Rick still felt an overwhelming sense of guilt for what happened in Iraq two years ago. Bixby had been injured by shrapnel and required surgery to repair an artery. He wasn’t able to return to active duty. Rick himself had needed several surgeries and skin grafts taken from the front of his thigh to heal the burns he suffered on the back of his leg. He took an honorable discharge instead of waiting to be kicked out for poor psych evals.
Rick couldn’t get past what happened that night, how he failed his team. He had known he would never pass evals to go back with his unit and even if he did, he wouldn’t have put his team in danger by leading them while unfit for duty. Starting fresh with Mack and a whole new team was what he needed to be able to work in special ops again.
“The new guys are pretty cool. I got promoted to C.O.”
“Hey Dash, that’s awesome, really. Although, I can’t imagine following your sorry ass into enemy territory.” Rick laughed with his friend, a man he’d known since Recon boot camp where they both toughed it out under Mack’s brutal instruction almost ten years ago.
“Well, I wouldn’t follow me either,” Dash joked. “Seriously man, what’s going on? You wouldn’t call me just to catch up on Recon shit.”
Rick sighed, scratching the back of his head nervously. “Sometimes, I think you know me too well, staff sergeant. I just… fuck. I don’t know, Dash. You heard I’m working for Mack, right?”
There was an uncomfortable moment of silence before Dash replied. “I may have heard something like that.”
Rick didn’t worry about the gossip. It was a well kept secr
et throughout the elite Special Forces units where the private sector jobs were and who they were with. Mack’s operation was the best in the country at what they did, one the military used often.
