Nevermore Bookstore: Chapter 20

“They call you Fox, but you are not so hard to hunt,” taunted the dusky-faced guard as he tested the pad of his thumb against a wicked blade.

Fox’s heavy limbs strained against his bonds with such animalistic frenzy that his veins felt like ropes beneath skin stretched taut with restrained rage.

He was hard to hunt.

Impossible to find…

They’d been after him and his intel for months. Which meant someone had talked.

But who?

A dead man, that’s who.

“It is permissible to show fear,” continued his captor, a meticulously clean and gentle-voiced man who could have been thirty-five or fifty—it was impossible to tell behind the trendy glasses and traditional garb. His dark eyes held unholy knowledge, and his smile a tinge of genuine admiration. “I’m called the Creature in my language. I’ve ripped open a dozen men. I’ve bathed in their blood and tanned their flesh in the desert sun… I’ve—”

“Fucking please.” Fox snorted, remembering too late his sinuses were already filled with blood from his broken nose. “That supposed to impress me? I kill dozens of you fuck-knuckles before breakfast.” Just to be a dick, he horked up something intense to spit on the Creature’s expensive shoe. “Fact that you have me tied up and still guarded by five…” He threw as much sarcastic disgust into his expression as his broken orbital bone would allow. “I’m gonna call them soldiers? Well, my dude, it shows your ass, is what it does.”

“I do not recognize this idiom. Show my ass? I am quite clothed.”

Fox sighed the sigh of an older brother having to explain the fucking obvious to his naïve sibling. “Your overkill of my incarceration is a testament to your fear of me.”

The flare in his eyes made Fox bare his teeth. It was supposed to be a smile, but whatever—he couldn’t remember the last time his face was such a mess. Maybe never?

Fox didn’t pay attention to fear. He’d been that way since his first slippery, tight-fisted squall. And his rancher mother would have it no other way. If she were here, these bitches would be shitting down their legs before she took away their birthdays.

Oh man, he’d pay to see that.

He’d give just about anything to see his mom.

“Let’s do this,” Fox hissed, clenching several loosened teeth. If he gave in to any thoughts of home, that was when the despair set in. When the fear of loss fought the strength of will. At a time like this—in the hands of the enemy—a man couldn’t be at war with himself. “Untie me and let’s meet, Fox to Creature.”

What he saw in the Creature’s returned smile touched something dark in him he hadn’t known was there.

A twinge of doubt.

This man enjoyed his job. He didn’t hate Fox, as so many enemies did. He didn’t feel anything in particular about him.

Fox had been right. Psychopath.

“I hope you have filled out your advanced directive, Fox, because if you make it out of this alive, you’re going to wish you had not.”

“I mean, after this conversation, I may be in need of some resuscitation.” He faked a yawn that got him kicked in the face. Fox met the ground with bone-jarring force and had to blink several times before he could shove air into his lungs.

“My ‘soldiers’ like you, Fox,” the Creature informed him with a slight smile of anticipation as he crouched over him, still holding the blade as some sort of terror prop. “They want me to leave you alone with them for a while…before I start my own work. Can you give me a reason not to?”

The Creature slid the dagger into the sheath strapped to his calf disappearing into his boot before he stood to look down at Fox like an insect he was about to squish beneath his heel.

Fox needed that knife.

His heart kicked into overdrive. His rib cage became a prison, as he’d been unable to even use his easily disjointed thumb to slip his bonds. Whatever horrific substance covering the concrete floor melded with his cold sweat to create a layer of unthinkable filth. “Which one is your favorite?” Fox asked, spitting out more blood. “I’ll make out with him first.”

I need to get that knife. Or I’m fucked eight ways to midnight.

“Look at the sky, Fox,” his captor implored in a velvet voice. “Feel the sun on your face. Breathe the air rich with desert spices and radiant heat. Give thanks to Allah for this moment, and then make your peace with the dark.”

“I’m not afraid of the dark.” Fox laughed until a soldier’s boot on his neck silenced him.

“You will be.”

A pain in his jaw startled Fox from the dream.

He almost didn’t believe the sunlight illuminating his reality. Well… daylight, anyhow. The soft patter of a gentle rain fell loud against the flexed roof of his tent, running down the clear plastic of the window, beyond which he could see the forest shrouded in morning mist.

He never slept through dawn.

The dreams always dumped him, fighting or flying, into the dark, where he immediately had to prove to himself that he was not underground. That the pain in his jaw was not another kick to the face. Just the molars he’d ground to dust.

He had a carousel of nightmares to select from, and somehow this was the worst. Because the person he hated in it the most…was himself.

He was such a fucktwat back then. Twenty-seven. Whiz kid. Tall as his six-six father. Tough as his dense-boned, practical black Irish mother. Faster and more efficient than most of his fellow soldiers. Smarter than his commanding officers. Stronger than any challenge he’d stood against. Braver than some battle veterans he knew. Crack shot. Unbeaten grappler. Stone-faced liar. Great with accents, languages, and storing shit in his mind palace for later use.

All that and blessed with a dick that made insecure men pick another shower tree.

The most legendary thing about him?

His ego.

Come to find out, his bones broke first…

His legs involuntarily stretched, and his morning wood ached as it rubbed against the soft skin on the inside of a woman’s thigh.

Cady.

She held him a most willing captive beneath her soft weight. Cheek crushed to his chest, hair tickling his arm.

Never had the nightmares vanished so suddenly, replaced by instant reality.

A reality that, for once, didn’t remind him how cold and alone he had to be.

Remembering the previous night, he lifted his free arm and brushed some of the hair away from her face. She was everything. Just everything. A warrior. A boss. A lover. A survivor. A woman who clutched her compassionate humanity with both hands and refused to let the world turn her bitter.

Not that she didn’t have reason.

I can’t be another thing she has to survive, he thought. I can’t be another burden on her shoulders.

He knew what was right but couldn’t stop touching her. Not even while she slept.

He trailed mischievous fingers over her shoulder, enjoying the goosebumps lifting her fine gold hairs. The hard-earned calluses on the pads of his palm barely caught on skin smooth as hers.

He knew a few women who’d commit murder for the name of whatever demon she’d sold her soul to for her perfect peaches-and-cream complexion.

Fox ran his fingers down her arm to her elbow, then charted a course to her ribs and down the naked waistline, hip, and the thigh she’d thrown over his own.

Stirring against his body, Cady shifted her leg lower, and the warm places where their skin had met missed her instantly.

However, it gave him some room to work with.

Fox smiled in impish victory, as now he could now caress down her belly and tease the line of soft hair on her mons.

“Nooooo,” she moaned grumpily. “Mornings are bullshit, and you can’t have any more.”

A smile touched his lips, and he dropped his head to kiss her hair. He’d had plenty.

He’d never have enough.

“Good morning.” His exhale against her skin warmed his own face as he nuzzled closer.

“No such thing,” she groused, digging her face into his chest to cover a sneeze.

He wiggled the fingers still trapped against her body and she rolled away… Well, the two inches the sleeping bag would allow.

Oh, hey. More access. Score.

“No means noooooo,” she complained with a short bark of laughter. “Besides, I’m all, like…gross from last night, and unwashed, and also I didn’t think I’d be having sex at all, so I’m super not groomed, as you may have noticed. Allow me some dignity.”

“I’m not making a move,” he said in a sleepy voice he’d not heard in a million years from his own throat. Smooth. Relaxed. Sated. “I’m just petting you. I like it.”

Squirming uncomfortably, she covered her eyes. “How can you like it? It’s like I have Colin Kaepernick in a leg lock down there.”

A chuckle escaped as he threaded his fingers closer to the warm inlet of her sex. “It’s soft,” he murmured appreciatively.

“It’s…crispy.”

Fox looked at her askance, brushing his fingers through it. “Nuh-uh,” he argued convincingly.

“Like, crisper than the hair on my head,” she said, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

If she were any more adorable in the morning, his heart might explode. “Well, trust me, compared to most women, yours is soft.”

Her snort accompanied a look so wry, it might have been interpreted as exasperation. “Tested the texture of lady pubes the world over, have we, James Bond?”

An aggrieved tinge of warmth burned his skin. “I mean, I’m a hermit, not a Boy Scout,” he muttered. Jesus Christ, when did he learn how to blush?

“Well…I suppose if you prefer a 1970s muff, you’ll be saving me a bunch of money on personal grooming,” she said when a jaw-cracking yawn had died down enough to speak.

“Just wait until you hear my views on the evils of underwire,” he teased.

“What even are you?”

“I’m a creature,” he murmured, a sense of gravity smothering his enjoyment of the moment. He was what the Creature created.

She pushed back from where her head had been cradled in the crook of his arm, her cheek resting on his chest. When she looked down at him, her eyes seemed to touch every part of his face. The scar in his hairline, his twice-broken nose, his tightly drawn mouth.

“What are you?” she repeated, the creases next to her mouth deepening. “I mean it.”

Smothering a yawn with his knuckles, he made a surreptitious sniff to check for morning breath. “You mean, other than a cisgender, straight, masculine-presenting, neurodivergent white man?” He thought that was how he was supposed to say it these days.

She scoffed. “You are this and—survivalist mountain man with Liam Neeson skills and almost no possessions except for a huge pack that looks like the leftovers from John Wick’s basement. What are you, Fox?”

He was nothing to write home about, that was for sure. “I told you, I’m army…was army.”

She rolled her eyes so hard, her lashes fluttered. “I’ve met men in the military. We have a naval base, air base, army base, coast guard, and border patrol offices all within an hour or so. You are something else. Someone special.”

There were many ways to interpret that word, special, and none of them were sexy. Closing his eyes, he pulled her closer, hoping to distract her with a searing kiss.

It worked for a second, sealing their mouths, and his body responded immediately.

“But, like, what were you in the army?” she asked against his lips.

Pulling away, he allowed his boner to die with his hopes of avoiding this conversation. “I was a ranger.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Ohhhh, the bad-ass ones. What was your specialty…survival?” She took time to glance out the mesh window. Whatever she saw out there made her burrow deeper into their shared warmth.

“Oh, bit of everything. Some intelligence. Some coms. Some support missions. Some—uh—tactical resource infiltration and surveillance. Urban warfare. Bunch of EOD.” All killing, all the time.

“EOD?” she queried.

“Explosive ordinance disposal. We worked closely with the Air Force on that one.”

“OMG, bombs? That sounds terrifying! I’m glad you’re okay.” She hugged him closer.

“Bombs, missiles, trip mines, IEDs, and…” She didn’t need context, he realized. “But yeah.”

“Did you disarm them?”

He closed his eyes against the gentle curiosity in her gaze. “No. No, I didn’t disarm them.”

“Oh…” The gentle understanding almost glowed through the conflicting disconcertion in her voice.

“Yeah. I activated, or armed, or aimed,” he confessed. “And then…cleaned up after.”

They were doing this, then. He’d known they’d have to. Especially after last night. A bleak, black chill snaked its way around his spine like the fingers of the devil.

“Where did you…um…serve?” she asked, repeating the question she’d asked Bob what seemed like a lifetime ago.

This time, he felt he owed her the truth. “Officially, Afghanistan. Syria. Supporting allied troops in the Middle East in general. The usual suspects.”

“And unofficially?”

He opened his eyes, confused—relieved—not to find the censure he’d expected in her expression. Much as he and Cady had in common, she didn’t have SUPPORT THE TROOPS stamped anywhere in her insular, academic life.

Why would she?

“Unofficially, I’ve been just about everywhere else. The other usual suspects. Russia. China. Gaza. South America.”

“What did you do…unofficially?”

Suddenly restless, he slid his leg from beneath hers, already regretting he was about to sit up.

She rolled off him and slowly levered at the hips, squirming around until she found a comfortable spot from which to see him and also keep the blanket over her.

Fox mourned the absence of her heat, but this wasn’t a conversation you had while cuddling.

It could get ugly.

“Same thing I did officially—Cady, I killed people.”

She blinked, but her expression didn’t waver—she kept it carefully blank.

Which meant she was falling apart on the inside.

So it began.

“People who would have killed you?” she asked.

He shook his head, his gaze steady. “Yes. And people I was ordered to kill. Sometimes in open battle. Sometimes alone. Sometimes with explosives. Or firearms. Knives. Shoelaces. My bare hands. Fucking name it.”

A gentle hand rested over the knuckles of the fist he’d buried in their covers. “I’m not trying to bring up painful triggers. I-I want to understand you better. I’ve learned we all have a few skeletons in our closets, and I think yours take up more room than most. Maybe they keep you from joining the rest of us?”

Her sweetness threatened to unstitch the fibers of his makeup until he was as unraveled as one of Gemma’s discarded balls of yarn.

“I don’t have skeletons in my closet. I have mountains of bodies. Do you understand? I’ve done things…things that would disgust and repel you, and I don’t want to give you any of that to chew on. To imagine. Because the reality is something I would sell my left nut to forget. Look, if you run into a soldier that is telling war stories, he’s either a psycho or a liar. The things we had to do, the things done to us… It’s part of what we sign up for. What we sacrifice. Our ability to be as human as everyone else. Because at one point or another, they had to deprogram our humanity a little so we could survive what they asked us to do.”

“I’m sorry that was done to you.” She ran her fingers up his arm, tracing the latticework of veins, her face a mask of sorrow on his behalf. “Is it a sense of…of guilt that keeps you from being inside for long?”

He shook his head, fighting back down the plethora of anxiety, anguish, anger, and agony that accompanied this subject. It made him wild.

Not untamed.

Unhinged.

“I was undercover in Kandahar as a mercenary arms dealer playing both sides. A Taliban warlord employed a caliphate leader named Makhlooq. Technically, The Creature. He’d been hunting me since a previous deployment, and I was taken before I could complete the objective.”

“Taken? Like…as in…prisoner?” Her eyes were wide as an owl’s.

He nodded, his jaw working over some overwhelming emotion.

Nostrils flaring, Fox reminded himself not to gulp air. He was free. Outside… Even if this tent were to collapse, he could rip it open at the seams. Cut it with his knife.

He wouldn’t be trapped.

Staring into the middle distance, he allowed the shape of her face to distort and blur, focusing on the sounds of her breath. The quiet rain.

So he wouldn’t hear the yawning silence of the void inside of him.

“Three months.” He remembered. “Three months in a sandpit beneath an old temple so deep, there was no way out.”

“Holy…” She couldn’t seem to land on an expletive, and he didn’t help.

He didn’t even look at her.

“I put myself there,” he confessed. “Me and my big mouth. I thought I was king shit of fuck mountain, and I pissed in the wrong psychopath’s Cheerios.”

“Oh, Fox. I can’t even imagine…” The pity in her voice stung, but she’d work through it…get to the disgust and disappointment eventually. “Were you there all alone?”

“Eventually. It was like a hundred-and-six-degree human litter box with little to no ventilation. Four other men started down there with me. Other prisoners. None of them spoke English. One by one, they’d be summoned out with a rope ladder, and climb out.” He had to stop for a moment to swallow the bile threatening to climb the back of his esophagus.

“And…you never saw them again?”

“I wish I could say that…but it was my job to bury them. When they put the ladder down the pit for me, I didn’t know if it was for my execution, or just because I was the strongest man to dig another grave.”

She gave a suspicious sniff, and if he saw her tears now, he’d be lost.

“So they left you there for three months? You never knew if you’d see the daylight again?”

“I was beaten a few times. Interrogated for information on strategic points. They liked to make me think a diplomatic exchange was being discussed. That tomorrow I would be released. Or the day after that. Once they bathed, shaved, and dressed me in my own uniform—only to march me in a mile-long circle of tunnels and dump me back in my cell to laugh at my rage.”

His breath had become so harsh that he had to stop talking and focus on slowing it down.

Her hands bracketed his face, and finally he brought himself to look at her azure gaze.

What he saw glowing there had nothing to do with tears. It was something deeper. Longer.

Possibly eternal.

It terrified him the most.

“You survived.” Her tender expression was tinged with a bit of awe. “You made it back.”

“That’s where you’re mistaken.” He retreated from her touch. “I died in that pit. Parts of me that I’ll never get back were cut out. I tried the meds. The techniques. The self-help books. PTSD isn’t some disease. It’s learned behavior and reaction to stimuli. It’s knitted into your DNA and is almost impossible to root out.”

Lifting to her knees, Cady moved closer, not allowing him to withdraw. “Thank you for telling me. I understand better now, and Fox, I’m glad.” Both her hands clutched his. “I’m glad because this means we can work on it together, you and me. You don’t have to be better—you can just be. Be here. And I’ll come to you.”

Drawing his brows down, he shook his head violently. “That’s not sustainable in your condition, and you know that.”

“Pssh. Not here, but we could figure something out. Some place that gives you plenty of open sky and escape routes, and gives us a place to spend time together. You seemed to take to the bookshop okay, so long as all the windows and doors were open all the time.”

“You’re not hearing me, Cady,” he snapped. “I’m not safe for human consumption. I’m reactive. Prone to temper. Violence. I live with the morality of the wild. Kill or be killed. How am I going to live life alongside normal people like Myrtle and Gemma?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I wouldn’t call Myrtle and Gemma norm—”

“The fucking point is, I can’t come back with you. You’re going back down this mountain, and that’s the end of things.”

“Things?” She flinched as if he’d slapped her. “You mean…us?”

“There is no us.” It killed him to say the words. Literally stopped his heart several times. “There never was, and there never will be.”

Normal people.

Of all the things Fox had said, that was somehow the most insulting. As if she, Gemma, and Myrtle belonged to some homogenous group of negligible extras in the disaster movie where he was the flawed but rugged hero.

No, the villain.

That was clearly the role he was attempting to cast himself in. The initial shock of what he’d revealed had already begun to burn away, replaced by a small blue pilot light of anger. Even after what they’d shared last night, Fox was still attempting to talk himself out of this. Only, the talking had stopped as well. Having dismissed her with his dramatic pronouncement, he’d apparently resorted to chopping wood at her continued presence.

Still stiff from the sleeping arrangements and sore from the sex, Cady was too pissed off to care.

“You’re full of shit, you know that?”

Whack.

The squat log fell in two perfect halves on either side of the blade-scarred stump where Fox had placed it.

“There is an us. And you had a direct hand in helping build it from the ground up.”

Fox bent at the waist to retrieve one of the logs and place it back on the block for further refining.

Whack.

“You were the one who called my store. And you’re the one who called back a second week, and a third. On the same day, at the same time. Almost like you wanted it to become a pattern.”

Whack.

“You were the one who came down from the mountain. You were the one who came up with this insane idea of disguising yourself as a drifter so you could stick around and keep an eye on me.”

Whack.

“You were the one who watched me through the window—”

Whack.

“The one who spouted poetry—”

Whack.

“Made love to my mind—”

Whack.

“The one who protected me—”

Whack.

“Kissed me—”

Whack.

“Fucked me—”

Whack.

“Left me.”

Whack.

“You made sure there was an us, and now you want to pretend like it’s fiction and that I’m the author.” She took a step toward the stump, doing her level best not to notice the way his gray thermal darkened with sweat in a ring below the powerful cords of his neck. “At every single step, you’ve been the one driving the narrative. You just don’t like that the best ending to this story is the two of us ending up together.”

Fox kept his eyes on the growing pile at his feet. His entire body radiated hostility like a blast furnace. Cady could see the man he had been, could imagine how terrifying it was to end up on the wrong side of his hands or weapon.

His jaw flexed as he gave her his brutal profile. “No.”

“Yes,” she insisted. “What you did for me last night? You know how many men would be capable of not only understanding that kind of pain, but also what the hell to do about it? You think there are men lining up to sign on for a lifetime of a partner with my difficulties?” She dared take a step closer. “They’re not, Fox. So, this imaginary life you’ve created for me with this imaginary man who’s going to give me all these amazing things you can’t, whatever it is you’re telling yourself to make you feel better about running away, you don’t get to keep that. You don’t get to tell yourself you’re doing the right thing. You’re doing the scared thing. Because it’s easier to wall yourself off than face the truth.”

Fox shouldered his axe and bored the full force of his gaze into her. “And what is the truth?”

“The truth is, I fell for you before I ever saw your face, and you know it.”

A raven’s harsh, hectoring call broke the silence of the still morning.

Fox’s knuckles whitened around the axe handle. His nostrils flared on quickening breaths.

“You already know it, but you’re afraid you’re going to hurt me like you hurt them.”

“Cady—”

“Let me spoil it for you right now,” Cady continued, afraid she would lose her nerve if she stopped now. “You have hurt me, Fox. You’re going to again. I’m going to hurt you, too. But you can’t hurt me any worse than my own body does. You can’t hurt me any worse than life already has. I’m not afraid of pain. I’m afraid of letting it keep me from living.”

Tears stood in her eyes, blurring the tree line into an inky smudge.

“This is the only way I know how to live, Cady. That isn’t going to change.”

“Neither is the way I feel,” she said. “And I’m not going to make it easier on you by pretending it will.” She was close enough to smell the mix of sweat and soap rising from his heated skin, cementing it in her memory against the ache already waking in her chest.

“After everything I’ve done—”

Cady reached up and put her fingers on his lips. “My mom is in prison, Fox. At the Topeka Correctional Facility. That’s why I came to live with Aunt Fern.”

She watched the shock roll over his stormy features like thunderheads.

“My father left when I was still in diapers, and she had a string of terrible boyfriends. One of them stole a car from the auto shop where he was working, and my mom hid it for him at our trailer park. She was charged as an accessory and sentenced to eight years.”

It had been so long since Cady let herself think of those days that the memories were as weak as watercolors.

“I didn’t even know I had an aunt until a social worker told me because my mom had alienated everyone by the time, she became pregnant with me. And you know what happened after I moved in with Aunt Fern?”

Fox’s eyes burned a hole into the chopping stump.

“Aunt Fern reconciled with my mom, and helped me forgive her too. I talk to her twice a month now. She hurt me, she made terrible decisions, but we’ve learned how to move on from that together.”

Cady stepped in closer, feeling the heat baking from his skin.

“You once told me that if I knew you better, it would matter to me where you’d been and what you’d done. You’re still wrong. Just like you were wrong in thinking that I’d run screaming down the mountain after you told me. I think what you really were hoping is that this wouldn’t have to be your choice.” She dropped her hands, carrying the ghost of his kiss there. “This is your choice, Fox. That weight is yours to carry. So, if you decide to stay up here, you’re going to do it knowing that you could be down there, with me. You’re going to do it knowing that my door is always open and that I’ll be waiting.”

She made herself turn away and retrieve her pack, lest she give in to the overwhelming urge to wrap her arms around him and never let go.

“I brought you a book,” she said, opening the flap and handing him what she’d unearthed in her aunt’s closet.

Fox stared down at the couple dramatically embracing on the vintage dust jacket. The raven-haired woman spilling out of a foamy gown, her gloved hand cupping the head of her bronzed, shirtless, sandy-haired lover. Cady had spent a considerable stretch of her hike up wondering if the physical resemblance to Ethan’s father and Aunt Fern had had any bearing on why he selected it as a gift.

“I know it isn’t your usual genre, but I thought you might like it,” Cady said.

Fox took the book and lifted his eyes to her after a long, slow exhale.

Cady shrugged her pack on her back and wiggled the straps into place with her thumbs.

“Maybe you’ll call me, and we’ll talk about it. Maybe you’ll understand why happily ever after isn’t always the point.”

Alone, she set off toward the trail, grateful her tears held until her sneakers pointed down the mountain.