Page 106 of Bad Enough

She gripped the front of his shirt so tightly he was likely to have wrinkles from her stretching it. “Just start,” she whispered. “I’ll listen. I’m smart. I’ll figure it out.”

He smiled sadly at her, his fingers squeezing hers. “You are. And you will. I just—” He swallowed a huge lump in his throat and looked down at their hands. “I don’t think an apology could ever be enough. And what I have to tell you isn’t an excuse for my behavior.”

He lowered his face to hers, brushing her forehead with his lips, her eyes fluttering closed at his touch. Foreheads touching, the sun coming in through the glass windows, she felt heat surrounding them, but he felt freezing cold despite the warm summer’s day.

He’d kept himself from her. But… she had known he was. In a way, she had no right to be mad about that because she had kept herself from him, too. And he hadn’t known her secrets. He hadn’t known what drove her to bury her past. If she’d just told him, none of this probably would have happened.

But she also knew she wasn’t entirely to blame. At least she had been honest with herself that she was keeping him in the dark. TB was so immersed in his false self-identity, he hadn’t even consciously known what he was doing.

As he made his confession, his lips remained close to her skin, skimming down to the corner of her eye, to her cheek, and to the corner of her mouth. As if he worried that if they no longer touched her, the words wouldn’t be believed.

“There is no excuse for this morning other than Nemo being right on all counts, princess. I’m afraid. Beyond afraid, actually. More like terrified. I haven’t been this frightened since I was seven years old.” He pulled her tighter to him, his arms banding around her as if afraid she’d run away. “People leave. They don’t always mean to, but they do. Sometimes, the reasons why make no sense. You weren’t even born yet when it happened. When I was seven, my parents were killed in front of me. Hamas suicide bomber while we were at breakfast. It was a huge story in the news back then.

“Most of that time is a blur. But I remember, even as I held my dead mother’s hand, I was alone. Utterly. I was so scared. We had no family. We lived in an over-crowded, near condemnable apartment building where people kept to themselves because it was safer that way. There was no one to come look for me when they died because no one really knew I existed. I doubt it even registered to anyone a family, let alone a child, from the building was no longer around.

“There was a policeman who finally found me. He took me home a few nights to stay with his family. But they lived in a small apartment and didn’t have the room for another child, so he left me at an orphanage, hoping, I’m sure, that some family members would eventually come forward and claim me.

“The orphanage was a terrible place. With next to no staff, we basically ran wild. We had to fight for everything, sometimes literally, in order to stay alive. Anything you managed to get ahold of that could be considered your own was a weapon to be used against you. Something to take and use as a bargaining chip. Kids are cruel, but not surprising when you’re just trying to survive in a hostile world. I had nothing when I went into the orphanage except the clothes on my body. So I had nothing to take. Therefore, I was isolated from the other kids. I wasn’t worth bothering with.

“When I was eighteen, I left and joined the army. Not out of some sense of patriotic duty. It’s compulsory for all citizens, but to me, it represented a chance at a family that I’d been missing all those years. I’d find my place again. But that also was taken away.

“Once our initial training was complete, just as I’d begun to feel like I had others I could trust again, I was ripped away from them. Apparently, psychologically, I was the perfect match for the Intelligence Division. A nice way of saying interrogator, which is a professional way of saying torturer. My ability to divorce myself from whatever was going on around me externally made me the perfect choice. And I was oh-so-good at compartmentalizing after eleven years in the orphanage. I felt nothing when working over a suspect.

“I became disillusioned. It was like my heart turned off. Guilt or innocence didn’t matter. Only gaining the confession mattered. Motivations, fears, neither of those mattered. Only the result mattered. It was eating away what little humanity remained.

“So one day, I got up and left. Didn’t resign. Didn’t wait for my tour to be finished. I just disappeared into the desert. Micah Ewen existed no more.”

He pulled back just slightly, so she opened her eyes, wanting him to know that she saw him. She understood. Their lives had paralleled each other so closely, except that for her, it had been drugs that stole her parents from her, and for him, it had been a religious and political zealot. Both of them had been abandoned due to forces out of their control. Both had been taught that their lives were worth only what they could bring to other people.

“On my own,” he continued, “I became a private contractor. I told you about some of that on your porch. What I didn’t tell you was that I was on a self-created path to destruction. I didn’t care what jobs I took. I didn’t care how dangerous they were. I didn’t care if I lived to collect my fee. I was just putting myself in situation after situation, trying to get the world to abandon me altogether. And the worse the job appeared, the more likely I was to take it because perhaps I’d finally be punished for doing something I shouldn’t have been doing rather than punishing myself for something I had no control over.

“Waters found me when I had hit the lowest I’d ever been. He hired me to kidnap him. Told me some story about ransoming an American soldier for leverage against the United States and a whole bunch of other stuff I don’t even remember. Instead of kidnapping him, I ended up caught in his snare. Took my breath away when I realized he was offering me a job. A way out. A way to rebalance the scales and start over. I don’t know that I ever really will. But today, listening to you finally let all that blackness out? I guess it was the wake-up call I needed.

“I have no right to your forgiveness. I have no right to claim any of your goodness as my own. I am still a total bastard for being selfish enough to want you anyway. Cruel enough to do whatever it takes to have you. Sadistic enough to make someone else hurt if it means I can have what I want. And what I want is you. All of you. Every piece.”

His forehead touched hers again, and a tortured plea came out. “Please don’t take yourself away from me, Flame. I need your light. I need your warmth. They’re the only things keeping me tethered to this Earth. The only thing keeping me from completely disappearing.”

This beautiful man. Tortured soul that he was, she loved him. It wasn’t a choice. She just did.

“TB, I’ve been yours since the day we met. No matter how infuriating you are, there’s no letting you go. We both made terrible decisions by not talking to one another truthfully. If I don’t forgive you for being honest, then I can’t ever forgive myself for not stepping forward sooner with my part in these women’s disappearances. So yes, I forgive you. But only if you forgive yourself.”

“That’s going to be difficult.”

“I’ll help you,” she promised.

Something shifted in the room. She wasn’t sure what happened, but suddenly, the weight on her shoulders lifted off just slightly. She could breathe again. Everything felt closer to normal, but she needed something from him to show her he was willing to let her in. She desperately wanted him to kiss her until she moaned. Touch her skin until she shivered. Love her until she promised him anything.

He smiled softly and murmured, “Princess, we’re at my work. You need to not look at me that way, or I just might stop caring about all the cameras in this room and lay you down on this table right here and now.”

Her heartbeat sped up at being caught with her thoughts so obvious despite her best efforts. “How do you always know what I’m thinking?”

“Your eyes hide nothing from me. And it doesn’t hurt that your pupils are blown wide open,” he admitted. “That’s always a sure sign of what my little Flame wants.”

His hand had let go of her braid, so her head naturally tilted back down to his sternum. Her fingers played with the wrinkles in his T-shirt. Looking at him actually hurt; she loved him so much.

Be brave, Sylvan. You can’t even begin to be what he needs if you can’t tell him what you want.

With every ounce of courage she possessed, she returned her face to his gaze. “Then take me home, TB. I need to be yours. Only yours.”

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