Total pages in book: 165
Estimated words: 154925 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 775(@200wpm)___ 620(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154925 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 775(@200wpm)___ 620(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
“Because you were the reason your friend died?” MaeBe asked quietly.
His stomach took a deep dive, but he had to talk to her. About everything. If there was one truth his mother had pointed out it was the fact that they couldn’t be a couple if he held back from her.
“I don’t talk about it a lot. We were stuck in the car together for…” It had felt like forever. At night he could still hear the way Ken had labored to breathe. “I think it was about twenty minutes before they got us out. He wasn’t dead on impact. He died from blood loss, and he blamed me the whole time. I know that he was in pain and angry because I was supposed to drive. It should have been me, but no I had to have a couple of drinks so I would feel confident enough to talk to this woman I liked.”
It was getting easier to talk, almost pleasant in a way. Like a slow letting off of steam that had pressurized his life for so long.
Those hours spent with Angie had done something to him, had opened up some part of himself he’d long denied. A little piece of the Kyle he’d been.
A glimpse of the Kyle he wanted to be.
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“And yet in a way it was,” Kyle said. “Like my father. I didn’t mean to get sick in the middle of the night during a bad storm. I didn’t mean to have a fever that sent my dad out when no one should have been driving. But I did.”
“And I’m sure your mom thinks if only she’d made sure she had Ibuprofen,” MaeBe argued, sympathy plain in her voice.
“Probably,” he admitted. “She told me later on that it wasn’t my fault but it’s buried deep inside me. It’s a weed that grew when Kenny died. A weed that started to strangle me. I went into the military because the people around me worried that if I didn’t find something to center and focus me, I would end up in a very bad way. I was self-destructive.”
“But the Navy didn’t work the way they wanted it to, did it?” MaeBe asked, but she probably already knew the answer.
“I think if I’d stayed strictly in the Navy, it might have. But I didn’t. I went Special Forces, and within two years I was working intelligence and I met Ms. White.”
“Julia?”
He nodded. It wasn’t a surprise that MaeBe knew about the Agency use of what he thought of as Crayon names. He’d been Mr. Black, Mr. White, Mr. Brown. Julia had preferred Ms. White. “I think one of the reasons I’ve never told you this story is the fact that I don’t exactly come out of it looking great. Or stable. I didn’t find my stability until I came home and started working here.”
She sat back, her expression softening. “You don’t have to tell me about it now.”
He knew later wouldn’t make the situation better. “Do you want to hear it?”
“Will you be honest?”
“With you? Absolutely. With myself? I don’t know. I don’t know where I am with that.”
She paused, staring at him as though making a decision. “Did you love her?”
He let a moment pass before he answered, thinking about the question carefully so he could give the woman he did love as much truth as possible. “I thought I did. What she was excellent at doing was making me forget who I was, who I wanted to be. When I was with Julia, I was someone else. Especially in the beginning. I was freaking James Bond, and I didn’t have to worry about anything but the next mission. I liked intelligence work so much more than running ops in the Navy. When we were in the field, we were in charge. We made decisions. We treated the people around us like chess pieces, and it was great because I didn’t have to care about a chess piece. In a lot of ways, I didn’t have to care about Julia.”
“What is that supposed to mean? You asked the woman to marry you. You intended to bring her home to your family.”
“Did I?” It was hard to think about himself during those crazy days. “She was dangerous. She lived on the knife’s edge, and it was intoxicating. It was more about the adrenaline high I got from being around her. There were no normal days between Julia and I. There weren’t game nights and movie watching. Life was one long and deadly game, and for a time I enjoyed playing it. I didn’t have to think about my family or the ghosts that seemed to chase me during those days. They all faded away because the mission was all that mattered. Sex with her was different than anything I’d had in my life before. It was intense and sometimes almost violent, and I hated it in the end. I hated how there was nothing soft about it. I asked her to marry me because she pushed me to do it. By that time I was thoroughly invested in my job, and I didn’t see a way out. I didn’t think. She said it was time and I didn’t want to fight. Because the fights… I hated who I became in those days.”