“How does it feel to breathe, son?” Dad raised his glass with an ecstatic grin.
“Like the three-ton elephant has moved off my chest and now just sits on my feet,” I answered truthfully and toasted him back.
“I bet you do. But really, the ceremonies were the most magnificent feat of organization. Absolutely brilliant show, that. Bravo, I say.” I guess we could all assume my dad had been thoroughly impressed with the opening ceremonies because he couldn’t seem to stop talking about them over our midnight dinner. I just felt immense relief that they had gone off without a hitch.
Even if I was exhausted and longed for my bed with Brynne in my arms, I found I was actually enjoying the celebratory evening tonight at Gladstone’s. Ivan had got us a reservation somehow, despite the insanity of the city, but then everyone loved Lord Ivan, Britain’s golden arrow, with his good looks and celebrity name. It’d had been a long time since we’d gone out for anything nice together and I knew that Dad and Neil and Elaina appreciated his connections even if I could take it or leave it. Brynne looked like she was having fun, and that was enough for me.
The whole city was in celebration mode, as the Games were now underway. I could actually start to see some light at the end of the tunnel for us. We’d made it through another week and the start of the Olympics with no problems, threats or messages. Just regular life.
I brought my hand up Brynne’s back and caressed between her shoulders. “Yeah, the hard part is done. Opening ceremonies went off smoothly. No crazies interrupting the show. The perfect end to all the months of planning. Now it’s just getting the various VIPs to the separate events and venues, but they’re much smaller and easier to manage, plus I have excellent staff to see to most of it.” I nodded to Neil and raised my glass again.
“If we can just keep the psychos back from Ivan, this thing’s a wrap,” Neil said with a smirk.
“Yes, please. I’d very much appreciate a wide berth between the psychos and anything to do with me,” Ivan retorted.
There was still that . . . Some lunatic Korean rival had it out for Ivan over a grudge stemming back three Olympics ago in a judgment dispute that got him disqualified and Ivan the gold. The mess had never gone away. Rather like messes often do. Once you step in shit, it sticks to your shoe for a long, long time, and it’s a wicked bitch to get all traces of it off.
“You look tired, baby,” Brynne said softly, her hand brushing over my arm.
“I feel tired,” I said, glancing at my watch, “just think—if we leave now we can be in bed in half an hour.” I winked at her, thinking all I really needed tonight was her close enough to touch, and a few hours’ sleep. Those two things really would top off this night for me in the most perfect way.
I was teasing about leaving the party, but my girl surprised me, as she often does. “Then what are we waiting for?” she asked in a quiet voice. “I think I could pass out in my soup.”
Looking her over, I could see the signs of fatigue and felt guilty for not noticing earlier. She was pregnant and needed rest for two people. I saw my window of opportunity and grabbed it.
“Goodnight, everyone. Time for us to be off. My woman is begging me to take her to bed.” Brynne gasped and thumped me in the arm. “And seeing as I’m a semi-intelligent bloke, I think it’s best if I let her have her way just now.” I rubbed my arm where she’d busted me and spoke with exaggerated emphasis to the group: “Pregnant women—insatiable all the time.”
I grunted when she kicked me in the foot, but the laughs I’d gotten were worth it.
“You are so dead, Blackstone,” she told me on the way out to the car.
“Hey now, it got us out of there, didn’t it?” I snaked my arm around her and leaned down to steal a kiss. “And everything I said about you was true.”
She turned her lips away to avoid mine and laughed. “You’re an idiot and you won’t be so smug in about five months.”
“What happens in five months?” I asked, confused.
“The insatiable pregnant female thing?” She cocked her head and shook slowly from side to side. “That goes away. Completely.” She made a cutting motion with her hands. “Think no sex. At all. For months.”
Well now, that’s a very unpleasant thought . . . “Wait. Are you joking? You are, aren’t you?”
“You should see your face right now!” She laughed some more at me, giddy at having had the last word. Yeah, my girl was competitive and she didn’t go down without a fight.
“That bad, huh?” Praying she was indeed winding me up about the dry spell because that would truly be torture.
“Yep,” she said, snaking her hand back around to grab my arse. “And you totally deserved it, even though I love you, Blackstone.”
And what a lucky, lucky bastard am I. “You were baiting me with the five-more-months thing, right?”
She laughed again, looking very smug and sexy as hell, but she never answered my question.
♥
“No, you cocksucker! I said no video! No fucking video!”
Ethan woke me with his shouting. He was dreaming again. No—definitely make that nightmaring.
The stuff he shouted really scared me. He’d said the same sort of thing before on other occasions. The words “no video” over and over in a begging voice. It frightened me because he was so out of himself when he had these nightmares. He became like another person—a complete stranger.
I knew his nightmares were related to something from his time in the war when the Afghans held him prisoner. He would never talk about it with me, though. It was something terribly horrible. That much was clearly evident.
“Ethan, you need to wake up.” I shook him as gently as I could but he was moving erratically all over the place, in another world and very unreachable.
“He’s gone . . . awww Christ! A baby! Just a little fucking baby, you medieval fucks!”
“Ethan?” I shook him again, rubbing harder up his arm and to his neck.
“No! You can’t do this . . . No . . . no . . . no . . . please no . . . don’t—don’t—they can’t see me die in a video—”
“Ethan!” I smacked him a little on the jaw, hoping the sting would bring him out of his nightmare.
His eyes flew open, wild and terrified, and he lunged up in the bed. He hung there bent over, heaving in great breaths of air, his head at his knees. I laid my hand on his back. He flinched from my touch but I left my palm there. His breathing grew more ragged and he didn’t say anything to me. I didn’t know what to say to him.
“Talk to me,” I whispered to his back.
He left the bed and started dressing—throwing on some sweatpants and a shirt.
“What are you doing?”
“I have to go outside now,” he said weakly.
“Outside? But it’s cold out there. Ethan, stay here with me and talk about this. You have to talk to me!” I begged him.
He acted like he didn’t even hear me, but I think he did because he came over to where I was sitting up in the bed and touched my head. Very gently and for just a moment, but I felt him shaking. His hand was shaking violently, and he looked so lost. I reached my hand up to take ahold of his but he pulled it away out of my reach. Then he walked out of the bedroom.
“Ethan!” I called after him. “Where are you going? Come back here and talk to me!”
I got silence.
I laid there for a moment and tried to decide what to do. Part of me wanted to confront him and force him to share with me, but another part of me was scared to death of doing that. What if I caused him more pain and suffering, or made things worse for him? Ethan needed some professional help to deal with this. If he’d been captured and tortured while in the army, then he was most likely suffering from a full-blown post-traumatic stress situation. I should know about that.
I made my decision and dressed myself in some leggings and a sweater to go and find him. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see where he was. He’d told me the truth. He was outside. Smoking his clove cigarettes.
I stood behind the glass and watched him for a moment. Stretched out in the lounger, his bare feet hanging off the end because he was so tall, the curl of smoke twisting and floating above him, the bright city lights in the foreground creating a glow around his body.
The smoking didn’t bother me, really; it never had. I loved the way his brand smelled, and Ethan rarely tasted like cigarettes. He was a fanatic brusher and always tasted minty and good to me, but the spicy scent would cling to him and I could tell when he’d been having a clove. His brand of cigarette wasn’t typical, though—Djarum Black. Clove-spiced tobacco, imported from Indonesia. I still didn’t know even why he smoked cloves. Ethan wouldn’t talk about his smoking much—or his dark place with me.
My Ethan was certainly in his dark place right now, and it utterly broke my heart to see him this way. I slid the door open and stepped outside.
He didn’t acknowledge me until I sat beside him on the other lounger.
“Go back to bed, Brynne.”
“But I want to be with you.”
“No. Go back in the house. The smoke isn’t good for you or the baby.” His voice was eerily detached and scared the shit out of me.
“It’s not good for you either,” I said firmly. “If you won’t let me be here with you, then put out the cigarette and come back inside and talk to me. We need to talk about this, Ethan.”
“No.” He shook his head in denial and took another deep drag on his clove.
A cord snapped inside me and I got angry, but I needed to do something to get a reaction out of him, he was so separated from me right now. “This is such bullshit, Ethan! You need some help with these nightmares. Look what it’s doing to you!”
He didn’t say anything, and the silence between us screamed out against the city’s night sounds.
“If you won’t talk to me about it, then you need to find a therapist or a group or something to get you some help in dealing with this.” No reaction, just more smoking. The red tip of the black cigarette burned in the dark and still I got nothing back from Ethan.
“Why won’t you answer me? I love you, and I’m here for you and you won’t even tell me why you smoke cloves, let alone what they did to you in Afghanistan.” I leaned closer to him. “What happened to you over there, Ethan?”
I could hear the panic in my voice and knew I was close to another crying spell. His behavior hurt me terribly and made me feel like I wasn’t important enough to share in working through his biggest fear. Ethan knew all my deep shit and said none of it mattered to him. Didn’t he know I’d walk through fire for him? I’d do anything to help him when he needed me.
He carefully stubbed out the cigarette he’d been smoking, using the ashtray next to the lounger. He folded his hands in his lap and stared out at the city. He never looked at me once as he started to speak in a soft voice.
“I smoke them because all my guards had cloves. Hand-rolleds of spiced tobacco that smelled so fucking good I nearly lost my mind. I craved to have one. I nearly went insane with craving them.”
I froze in the chilled night air, listening to Ethan, my heart breaking with each word he gave me.
“Then . . . on—on th-the day they were going to execute me, a miracle happened . . . and I was spared. I lived. Their wicked blade did not find my neck.” His voice cracked.
“Blade?” I had an idea where this was going, but was afraid to even think about what Ethan might be trying to explain to me.
“Yeah. They were going to videotape my beheading and show it all over the world,” he spoke so softly but the words were brutally loud.
Jesus Christ! No wonder he had nightmares. I couldn’t even imagine what he’d endured physically as they tortured him, but the emotional torture of believing what they would do to him must have been worse. I couldn’t hold back the gasp that escaped, wanting so badly to hold him, but he continued speaking.
“You want to know what the first thing was that I asked for?”
“Tell me.”
“I walked out of my prison, not completely sure if I was really alive, or dead in hell. A U.S. marine got to me, shocked I’d walked out of the rubble still breathing. He asked me if I was okay. I told him I wanted a clove cigarette.”
“Oh, baby . . .”
“I was alive, you see. I lived and was finally able to smoke one of those lovely clove hand-rolleds I’d gone mad over for weeks. I smoke them now . . . because . . . I guess it helps me to know I’m really alive that way.” He swallowed hard. “It’s such a load of shit . . .”
“Oh, Ethan . . .” I moved up from the lounger and over to put my arms around him but he held me back.
“No,” he said, holding his hand up to keep me at a distance. He seemed so very distant from me right now—unreachable. I wanted to cry, but I knew that would just make it harder on him, and I didn’t want to cause him any more stress than he already had.
“Go back inside, Brynne. I don’t want you out here with me right now. It’s bad for you. I’m not . . . good . . . to be around. I need to be alone.”
“You’re sending me away?”
He slowly lit up another clove, the flame of his lighter glowing bright as the tobacco ignited. “Just go back to bed, baby. I love you, but I need some time by myself right now.”
I felt something from him. I couldn’t believe it, but I could swear I was reading him correctly. Ethan was terrified of doing something to harm me somehow and that was the reason he asked me to leave him alone.
I granted Ethan his wish even though it broke my heart to do it.
