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“Will you take me home?” she asked.
“Fuck that,” Maverick snarled. “I will fuckingkillyou.”
Dex wasn’t afraid of Maverick. He could defend himself. But he respected him as Kelsey’s father and his VP. More than that, he agreed with him about this. He had no right to touch Maverick’s daughter.
There was little in the world he wanted right now the way he wanted to be alone with her, to take her home and maybe be asked in, to have the luxury of time to kiss her more, to touch her, to feel her. But he was wrong for her. Wrong for anyone, but especially someone like her.
He shook his head. “You should go home with your folks.”
It was obvious that his answer hurt her, but he didn’t know what to do about that. He looked away.
Kelsey sighed softly and stood. “I’ll get my things.”
She walked away. Her mother followed after her.
Still burning in the heat of her father’s rage, Dex rolled to his feet. “I’ll go now.”
Maverick glared. “The ring. Tomorrow. And if you ever touch her again, if you fuckinglookat her, it’s not my fist that will open your head. I will fucking end you.”
“I believe you,” Dex said and walked away.
~oOo~
Dex stood shirtless before his bathroom mirror and tied off the final stitch. He finished the knot and snipped the ends of the dental floss he’d used as suturing thread. Five stitches, pretty even. Not bad.
Charlie and Ripper stood side-by-side in the doorway, watching him intently. They’d scented the blood, and, as both dogs had been trained to kill, they understood blood in a different way. Blood was a command—either to kill or protect. Dex’s blood had them worried.
Smears, drips, and pools of blood soiled the white porcelain of the basin and stained his chest and beard. Finished closing the wound, Dex put most of the supplies in the medicine cabinet, dropped the needle and scissors into a bowl of rubbing alcohol he’d prepared for the purpose, and rinsed out the sink. Then he filled it and washed himself, scrubbing away crusting rivulets of dried blood on his chest, soaping and rinsing his beard, his neck, his face, his hands. He’d take a shower in the morning; the wound was too fresh for that tonight.
And Maverick would no doubt open said wound in the ring tomorrow. He would have closed it with butterflies for that reason, but he couldn’t get the blood to stop until the stitches were in.
When everything was clean and returned to its proper place, Dex reached up to switch off the fluorescent light above the medicine cabinet. He caught sight of his reflection and paused.
His left eye was swollen and would be darkly bruised by morning. The gash on his cheekbone was red and angry from the abuse of being stitched, but that wasn’t what Dex saw.
Dex saw his reflection and fell into a memory.
It was just flashes; during engagements like that, the brain was so juiced and hyperfocused that the memories of anything that wasn’t critically important evaporated quickly, at least in his mind. Over time, the most poignant details got remembered so often they seemed to smooth out somehow, like a lucky stone or coin kept in the pocket and rubbed over and over until it was still all that it had ever been and yet defeatured.
The acrid taste of adrenaline; he’d never forget that. In fact, that was a sensation refreshed so often it wasn’t even a memory.
The nearly silent, yet thundering sound of a squad of booted feet hustling into ambush position.
The shape of his M4 in his arms. The smell of gun oil. The weight of his ballistic vest.
Charlie at his side, on full alert, wearing his own vest.
The go order. Charlie charging forward, leaping at the target, bringing him down.
The kid running up, AK raised, shouting and firing wildly. The apian whine of a bullet zinging past Dex’s face. The burn of the wound it had left.
Dex aiming to stop, not to kill.
And what came next.
That part of the memory was so intense it activated some kind of kill switch in his head, and Dex came out of his fugue with a jolt. When he focused on his reflection again, his arm, still raised and paused in the act of turning off the light, had gone completely numb. He lowered it and shook it out.
“Okay, boys,” he said to Charlie and Ripper, still standing guard at the bathroom door. “Let’s go to bed.”
