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Now Indy gasped as her body reminded her of what still lay unfinished, like a story whose ending had been snatched away in that steam-filled shower. She gulped back a throatful of thick guilt, blinked away the wave of arousal that was thelastthing she wanted to feel right now, the last thing sheshouldfeel right now, just when this man was opening up about pardoning turkeys but never forgiving his parents, how that Thanksgiving trip had been a one-way ticket to his own version of hell, how he’d left home forever that night, turned his back on his parents in disgust, returning only when they were dying—dying from what a hidden part of Ice believed might be physical manifestations of psychic wounds, that his law-of-attraction-loving parents had never gotten over their son’s back-turning, transforming their own guilt at hurting him into tumors that hurt themselves, ate them up inside like monstrous manifestations of a self-inflicted vengeance.
And sending Ice spiraling into a psychic hell where his rational mind promised that emotions didn’t cause cancer but something in his heart whispered that maybe his parents were on to something, saw something he didn’t see.
Saw something he couldn’t allow himself to see.
And so all those years Ice had buried that dilemma, that crisis, that chasm between the man he wanted to be and the son he couldn’t help being. It was a psychic wound, one Ice had never really acknowledged in his waking mind, a festering pit of dark emotion sealed in psychological scar-tissue and stored away someplace far and deep.
Wait, Indy thought suddenly as her head rushed and her heart thumped and her vision sparkled with vivid clarity: Maybe shehadbeen listening after all!
Not to his words but to something deeper, like this strange effect of interchangeable sights and sounds and scents was giving her access toallof him, a direct perception of multi-dimensional reality that simply wasn’t possible in a normal state of consciousness where the physical senses were filters on the greater reality.
And suddenly Indy was burrowing into Ice’s broad chest, wrapping her arms tight around his back, squeezing as hard as she could, trying to crawl inside his big warm body, get all the way to his thundering heart and tell him that she’d heard him, she’d felt him, she knew him, she . . . shelovedhim!
Her heart filled and overflowed with warm liquidy love. Now she was certain that somehow those little word-clouds from Ice’s blurry lips had penetrated her brain and body, had been heard through some other mechanism of the mind, the heart, the soul.
It reminded Indy of something she’d read about how the physical body stored not just the memories of physical trauma but the imprints of emotional violence too. Sort of like muscle memory—which meant not all psychological trauma was stored in the brain. Some of it was stored in the body, in the muscles and tissues, the bones and sinews.
Maybe it wasallstored in the body. All the earliest or darkest memories which couldn’t be accessed by the brain because they weren’t stored in the brain but the body.
Like maybe “science” had been looking in the wrong place.
Now Indy hugged him tighter, pressed her ear against his chest, feeling the vibrations come through as Ice kept talking about that Thanksgiving night. She could still feel that expansive wholeness enveloping his emotionally charged words, and the dominant emotion right now felt distinctly appropriate for a Thanksgiving memory:
Gratitude.
“I see it so clearly now,” Ice muttered into her hair as he held her close against his body, like he knew the sound of his words were being picked up as vibrations by Indy’s thumping heart, that they could only communicate this way now, with bodies pressed together, hearts beating together, cells pulsing with the same cosmic inner light that illuminates stars and galaxies. “Couldn’t see it then, but maybe I wasn’t prepared to see it then. At the time I thought my mind was breaking because I hadn’t come to terms with what I’d done on that first Delta mission, was losing my shit because I’d killed for the first time, taken a human life, done something that was universally acknowledged as unnatural and wrong.” He exhaled heavily into her, then raised his head and took a sharp breath. “But now I think it wasn’t so much that I couldn’t face myself. It was that I couldn’t facethem. There’s this unshakeable childish need to make your parents proud, you know? And shit, theywereproud of what I’d accomplished through discipline and hard work.” He shook his head. “But there was still something in me that whispered I wasn’t the son they hoped for. I just couldn’t square my parents’ foolishly idealistic view of the world with what I’d learned about how thingsreallyworked—or at least howIreally worked.” He sighed out an exhale, his warm breath swirling the open strands of her hair, his heart beating in rhythm with hers like their interlocked bodies formed some strange musical instrument being played by the universe. “I realized I was a killer, Indy. That it was in me as sure as blood in my veins. The real trauma wasn’t so much that I had taken another human life, but that I had done it with . . . with a strangesatisfaction. Like the pride a craftsman takes in his work. It wasn’tpleasure—it didn’t bring mejoyto kill that sonofabitch bombmaker in Somalia. It was more a feeling that shit, I candothis, I’m fuckinggoodat this—and for the world to be peaceful and safe,someoneneeds to be good at this.”
“Yes, someone needs to be good at killing. But not just that.” Indy hugged him as tight as she could without breaking in two, then looked up into his handsome face, his shaded eyes masking nothing, letting everything through like there was no separation, no barrier, no obstacle, nothing but the two of them in all of space, through all of time. “Someonegoodneeds to be good at it. And youaregood, Ice. You’re a good man.”
He smiled down at her as the morning sun smiled down on them both. She couldn’t hug him hard enough without breaking them both, couldn’t get closer to his body without crawling inside, couldn’t get any more of this richly overwhelming warmth into her heart without exploding.
“You’re a good man, Ice,” she mumbled again into his chest. “You’d have to be a good man to do what you’ve done and not lose your mind, not lose your balance, to not spin off into some permanent dark place. You’re a good man. I mean it.”
Ice held her tight in that warm embrace of pure goodness. Then his left eyebrow perked up. “I seem to remember you calling me a good man yesterday at that safe-house when I had you by the hair—and you sure as hell didnotmean it then.”
Indy giggled as Ice’s fingers dug into her back, his palms sliding dangerously close to her ass. He raised his left palm and gave her a quick smack on her hip, making her gasp and glare at him.
She was about to object, but then Indy remembered their interchange when Ice was the big bad interrogator and she was trying to match his mind-games with her own powers of persuasion, doing her best to trigger something chivalrous and sentimental in that stoic soldier, that menacing monster.
“Well, I mean it this time.” She burrowed into him again, smiling when she felt his big palms resting comfortably on her lower back, just above her ass—which, she now recalled with a rush, Ice had labelled asnot-so-delicate.
“Wait, so you admit that you didn’t mean it the last time?” Ice smacked the side of her hip again, then suddenly moved his palms down over her ass and squeezed hard before quickly drawing his hands back. “Oh, shit, I didn’t mean to do that.”
Indy almost blacked out from the rush of arousal manifesting as purple shockwaves rocking her body, roiling her soul, boiling her blood, blistering her brain. She swooned against his body, her senses so heightened she could easily tell Ice was getting hard in his pants like she was getting wet in her panties, their bodies refusing to fall in line with what should have been a heavy conversation about childhood trauma, the prodigal son, sins of the father, mercies of the mother, something lost and something regained, something stuck and something released, darkness turning to light, drama turning to madness, blah-blah-blah turning to laa-dee-dah, something-something-something turning to nothing-nothing-nothing, get-your-hands-off-my-ass turning to shut-the-hell-up-and-kiss-me, kiss me now, please now, right fucking now.
Kiss me, Ice.
Damn it, just kiss me.
And as if those urgent words bypassed sound again and jumped from her mind to his, her heart to his, her soul to his, Ice smacked his hands back down on her not-so-delicate ass, leaned down towards her upturned face, and with their clumsy sunglasses clashing like cosmic gongs, kissed her full on the lips, hard and clean, firm and furious.
He kissed her.
By the Grape Gods of Cosmic Kool-Aid, he kissed her.
31
He kissed her grape-flavored gummy-worm lips as the world around them turned into sweltering swirls of laughing colors and giggling goo. Somewhere in the squirming coils of his mind Ice seemed to recall an extraordinary heaviness being lifted, like something had reached into him and yanked out a dark dense blob of sticky sickness, excised a tentacled tumor of thought-energy, tossed it aside like it was nothing, just an imagined heaviness, a bogeyman in the shadows that evaporated when someone turned on the lights.
