3

In the hallowed darkness he came to me, his lips sliding over a curve I had forgotten I had. They were roughened by fire and age, burned by magnesium sun, and ragged tipped. His hands were hard and they rode over my contours and I responded by coming to wakening desire. I was flush in so few instants, that it seemed as if I was a blaze. How quickly this peak came was shocking and striking.

His fingers pinched my nipples without ceremony, but also with a subtle softness. How could such gentle torment by both a pleasure and a pain. My breathing fell to cadences of easy rising and falling. It is the air of other planets that poured forth as tormented soot on the terrible day we met, is that air I swallowed in gulps and gasps as he pressed his arms over me. How is it that a body becomes flesh, a thing that changes from that which is I, to a wavering ripple that is a thing, under some other command, a wave that he, he, he commands. Its resonance flows up into my thoughts and sensations.

I am become sensation. As brusque as that evening’s coupling had been, this was so far different. Me feet felt distance by miles, and I felt as if my wide world was a white room and I was staring down on myself, isolated and offset against a blinding glare that could only be felt, not seen.

I grow dizzy as there is too much to feel, and yet it is like the voice on a distant radio, there are waves from a farther shore.

It is at this moment that I can feel his legs wrapping around mind, sliding forward and backward. I am opening, the taut closure of walking, waking, and all the day softens. A languor flows as if paint poured from high upon a ladder down onto a waiting canvas comes. I spread myself down on to the bed, into the hollows of the mattress. I am not aroused, but yet without resistance, he could take me now, and I would accept the dry rough painful penetration that would come with it that assault as rapturous rape.

But this is not what comes.

Instead there is a pressure of yielding steel, it presses at my midriff, plows through the curls of my other hair, stroking over and over again. Over and over again, pulling at the twinges of my flesh, tugging at the folds and turns of my sex, changing their sullen silence, a forgotten place in my forgotten lands, to a ripening sensitivity.

And that tender violation, of myself against myself, that, that that is all I can think of. Though it is not all I feel.

Finally how finally he places his lips to the lips of my face, and pulls at them. First with his lips alone, and then with this teeth. They barely scrape and then finally grasp my lower lip and separate it from my teeth, his tongue slides within and around it, and finally thrusts within my own. I can feel his hands first grasping and chaining my wrists, and then one free, with the other pinioning, slides up my arm, and down again. He is inside of me in that instant, I did not even know how it occurred.

And then I awaken. It was not like this. My husband never came to me so, my flesh never sang these movements to him. This is only a dream, a wish made into a dream… that some how my love of this moment could have, should have, and in another world, would have been the man for whom I gave my vows.

I am coming from this warm wish into a desiccated consciousness. It is still dark, but it is closer to morning that midnight. Somehow I know that this darkness and our, my lover and I, time has almost come to an end. The dawn will sweep through the room. I can wish that somehow, my husband had, that first night been with me as this, my lover is with me in this night. But he was not, is not, cannot and never was. I was not, am not, and never was in love with Hampton, only infatuated with the fire that had cauterized my eyes, and blinded my heart. It is not that holy day of matrimony that was in the shadow of falling towers, but instead, another morning come, when I must live that first day having pledged in love to this the man, who has finally taken me.

I realized as I woke up that I had been dreaming about how my husband and I had met. But in the dream, yes in the dream, the love making had been not my husband, but my doctor. Alright say the name, the name of the man who I love now: Captain Doctor Mercury West. I Chryssie Rutenberg love Merc West. I love him.

There is brute pounding on the heavy metal door of his motel room. A Spartan and orderly affair, with a bright glowing from outside, it is still something called night.

The pounding continues. It is too brute and blunt for it to be flesh or bone.

I can hear his voice explode out.

“What do you want fuck up?”

There is a clean click of the keys turning and the door opens with cold phosphorescent light pouring in.

“That’s Colonel Fuck Up to you,” and then there is an emphasis on the next word, “Capitan.”

It is a voice I know fairly well, It has a flat “military officer with the edges filed down by being groomed for the fast track,” sound to it. And yet you can hear the drawl of north Texas inserted in every possible pause. Col. Beck. Yes, that’s him.

I pull my head, and I am blushing like I am sixteen and caught by my parents. I instinctively draw the sheets up over my chest, over my large breasts, of which I have been increasingly self conscious of as I have grown rounder and softer with being older.

I am looking at a very broad shouldered outline, I appreciate the contours of power, from the bulge of his shoulders and biceps. Down the sides of his barrel chest, down around his holstered pistol. He’s armed, that means he’s here on business. At, glance at the clock has read numbers burn themselves into my eyes, 3:52 AM.

“Captain, I’m here to tell you something that you and Mrs.” he pauses at the irony of that particular word, and continues, “that you and Chryssie have a more than passing interest in. Something she’d already know if you two hadn’t been out here swapping spit.”

Merc was suddenly all business.

“What’s that Colonel?” He was already rolling to a sitting position and pulling on pants.

“You don’t really need to do that.” Pause. Pause. Pause. “You see, her husband had his hand taken off in country.” A smirk is audible even though not really visible. “He stuck it someplace it shouldn’t go. They are lifting back to Ram already.” That’s Ramstein AFB in Germany.

“He’s going to be here?”

“That’s right Captain.”

Merc scratches behind his ear, he has put on his shirt and starts buttoning it up methodically.

The Colonel lifts a hand to his lapel.

“See this bird? I got it by not caring about how subordinates got the job done. You and Ms. Chryssie here are going to have to make some decisions. I don’t care what they are, so long as this thing doesn’t show up as an incident on my personnel report. The last thing I need is some perfumed prince wannabe crawling all over me for not taking care of these things.”

“Well it isn’t exactly as if we’ve been secretive.”

“That’s not my problem. So long as this stays not my problem, I don’t care what y’all decide.”

I pipe up.

“How long?”

“At least a week there, then back to Walter Reed. But I imagine he’s going to request, and going to have granted, the request, to be back here as soon as possible, or have you offered a civilian position close to where he is in PT and recuperation.”

There is a general silence.

The Colonel picks it up.

“I can get you back in country. There is a plane leaving Friday, and it isn’t as if I can’t fill a seat with a top notch medivac surgeon. You’ll be safer in the wastes of Al-Anbar at a FOB than you will be here.” FOB is “Forward Operating Base,” meaning out deep in country.

I reply. “That can’t be true.”

The Colonel steps in, slams the door closed with the back of his boot and turns on the light, figuring correctly that everyone is as decent as they are going to get. The three of us form a triangle, with Merc already unconsciously standing at attention, the Colonel at an easy stance by the green fabric upholstered chair by the door, and me my knees drawn and covered by a film of blankets and sheets.

“Look.” The Colonel begins. “In uniform Hampton is a good man. The kind of man who can always be counted on to put himself in harm’s way and never complain. He’s drawn soft duty, but not for want of trying to get himself in trouble. Out of uniform, pardon to Ms. Chryssie about this, he’s a dick a mile wide and ten miles long.”

Merc nods without humor, but lets the Colonel finish.

“He’s going to want to do one thing when he can, and that is put a shotgun on your underbelly and plaster your balls through your palate.”

“I’d say that’s about right. Yes.” This is a flat agreement from Merc.

“In country is the safest place for you. Unless you want to suddenly declare that you are queer and get booted sky high from the service.” There’s no chuckle, no irony. Yeah, the Colonel could arrange that.

“Then what?”

“You’d run.”

Pause. Pause. Pause.

“You’d run.”

I stare down at my exposed toes, the red nail polish staring back at me. My head is resting on my knees by this point. Who needs me more? My baby, my love, or my husband? I don’t doubt I can’t do anything for my poor lost country by now.

Or me? What do I need? It’s a question that makes me feel a blank black hit on my forehead.

I don’t know.

“I’m going to leave you two to talk about things. But I’m will tell you that if you go to Walter Reed, Chryssie, there isn’t anything I can do to protect you.”

“Protect me?”

Merc supplies the punch line.

“From your husband. Hampton is going to break whatever is in reach.”

The light stays on, but the Colonel turns and opens the door, looks back over his shoulder. “I wasn’t here. You didn’t here this Captain. And Chryssie, check by home every day from now on. Hampton is going to feel very funny if he gets to Ram and there isn’t a message waiting for him as soon as the morphine clears his brain.”

I whistle out.

“Yeah. OK. That would be bad.”

Sudden my husband is a patient that I have to puff the pillows for, regardless of exactly how I am doing it.

Two days are eaten away in preparation. He leaves in the morning. I avoid thinking about it. I draw extra duty one day, and stay late the next. Every moment in uniform. The show must go on. Even though I am all empty places, my head pounds, even though I know there is nothing wrong.

I can feel the second hand with each weighty tick on the old analog clocks. The bang and stop, I keep looking up, wishing that they would pass faster, but that there would be more of them. Through all of this, drawing syringes, distributing meds, the host of small actions that make up a shift of someone who is well underutilized.

But even with this, my smile stays plastered in. It is a trick I learned from a Georgia girl, she told me that it was expected of women there. “Just dig your dimples, hun.” If you can feel those two points just beyond your lips, and dig them in, you stay smiling. No matter what.

I look at the clock. It giggles back at me blankly. At the last moment late at night, I leave and trail out to the parking lot, my head hanging down. There are a scattering of other vehicles, mostly the SUVs and trucks that are polished and painted. The kind that have never see the grooves by the side of the road, much less actual dirt.

There is a car with an engine running. I don’t recognize it, but it swoops out of its waiting spot. My heart jumps and I am frozen, but with a smooth swerve the passenger’s side arrives at the exact distance. I can see my doctor through the window, and I calm down. He’s rented a car. It takes me only a moment to settle into the grey cloth interior. The seat belt is across me almost before we are moving again, my bag down between my knees.

“Our time is running out.” His voice is flat and yet emphatic in the way he punches his words.

“It has gotten away from us. He is going to need me.”

“Don’t lie to yourself.”

There is an uncomfortable pause. I want to talk about it. I want to explain why I have to go back to Hampton. If only I can repeat it enough times, maybe it will start to feel more true. But this must be what he means about how he is quiet. No, he is Quiet. I feel the quiet stifle my ability to talk, chatter or even do more than pant out shallow breaths.

His finger on my cheek as he drives with one hand along the interstate. We pass the exit where his motel was. We are going deeper into the night. Our love must die.

The lights flicker on the yellow stripes that form a heartbeat of travel. I want to just stare out the window with fatigue and boredom, as I am being driven home. But the dryness behind my eyes eats at me, too much coffee and too many cans of coke have left my mouth sticky, and my head… I stop focusing on my aches and pains and try to rekindle the conversation.

“Where are we going?”

For a moment I drop into the land of fear again, as if he might be taking us nowhere. He’d once said something about not wanting to live any more with out the love of his life. He’d had a very dark countenance that day. I’d never seen him like it, drunk or sober, since.

I looked over at him next to me, seeking that same face. Instead his jaw was clenched in the same tight determined look I had seen him in when sewing someone’s thumb back on to his hand. It was not Merc the desiccated, but Merc the man on a mission. I didn’t know if I wanted that one, some vulnerability might have been more comforting.

“I love you.”

He turned towards me, and that hard face melted.

“I know. But I know that doesn’t mean anything.”

I feel a punch in my stomach, and I feel like I am going to throw up. It’s not the pregnant wretch, and it isn’t the losing the baby wretch. I know both of them.

I need to cry, my eyes bunch, but no tears come. My throat opens, but I can’t force any air out. I double forward, but not because I am in pain. Finally sobbing comes, and with it a few brief words from closed eyes and mouth.

“But I love you.”

The car drives on, oblivious to the heaves coming up from my diaphragm.