Page 112 of Enemy of My Enemy
His heart ached, burning like a fresh-picked scab with nothing new underneath.
“Jack,” he tried. His voice was steady, at least. He’d learned how to hide that much. “Jack…” He licked his lips. “What—”
What happens now? What happened back there? What are you thinking? What do you want? What do we do?
What are we now?
“What can I do?” he said instead, turning and looking at Jack. He held his heart in the palm of his hands, an offering to his love. “What can I do for you?”
Jack closed his eyes. He shook his head slowly, back and forth. “Turn back time? Make it so I never abandoned her?”
If you went back in time and stayed with her, we would never be together.
Ice flooded through his veins, collecting and building at all the junctures of his soul, the places where he’d nurtured dreams of him and Jack. His lungs seized again, like he’d jumped into a frozen lake too suddenly, but it wasn’t his body that was turning to ice. It was his soul. Clawing panic rose within him, the desperation of survival.
“You didn’t abandon her—”
“She’s alive, and I’m—” Jack bit off his words with a harsh swallow.
“You thought she was dead. Everyone did. You buried her, Jack—”
“I never got a body,” Jack breathed. His eyes were still closed; he was facing the door, angled away from Ethan. Ethan couldn’t see his whole face, couldn’t even see all of him. Jack wouldn’t turn his way. “I should have pushed harder. Should have… demanded an inquiry. It was so strange, how she died. The report I got. The building she was in, it blew, they said. Vaporized everyone and everything. But there weren’t any other details. No mission report, no copies of orders she’d received. The nameless battle of an exploding building. God, the dates on the death certificate didn’t even match the DOD letter.” A helpless, panicked laugh turned into a sob, and Jack ground his teeth together, struggling through his words. “I thought it was just standard Army bureaucratic mistakes.”
“I would have thought the same thing.” Should he stand? Should he go to Jack? Try to hold him? Could he survive if Jack rebuffed him? “No one ever would imagine that this had happened. It’s not even in the realm of possibility.”
“But it did happen!” Jack snapped. His furious eyes flashed once to Ethan and then away. “Itdidhappen, and I didn’t even try to help her.” A sob caught in Jack’s chest. He breathed deep, half caught in a mourner’s wail. “I didn’t help my wife.”
That word again, grating over Ethan’s soul.
Another choked moan, a restrained wail, and Jack’s shoulders trembled as his hands gripped his desk edge.
Fuck it all.Ethan stood, and his aching heart led him to Jack with open arms.
“Jack.”
He got as far as the desk. Jack shied away from him, jerking away, his eyes squeezed shut.
Ethan’s soul shrieked, that frantic panic back full force. He was losing this conversation, losing Jack, losing everything. It all just kept slipping through his fingers, and he had no idea how to grab hold. Like trying to grasp water in a fist and hold on forever. Instead, he was drowning, sinking beneath the glaciers forming over his heart.
“What do we do?” he whispered. “Jack? What do we do?”
Without opening his eyes, Jack turned away, hiding his face. Silence hung in the air, the sting of it like a serrated blade slicing across Ethan’s heart.
There was noweanymore.
He took a step back, and then another.
Slowly, Jack unclenched, no longer holding himself back from Ethan, on guard against him.
Never, ever, had Jack shied away from him. Tried to escape from him.
It felt like a slap to his soul.
“I, uhh—” Jack swallowed, and he edged around his desk, not looking at Ethan. “I need to be with my wife.” He swallowed a tiny whimper. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “But I need to help her. She’s mywife. And I abandoned her once already. I can’t—”
A weight pressed against Ethan’s thigh, hanging in his pocket. A small box, and within it, a fragile hope. He’d dreamed that one day Jack would call him his, that he would be Jack’s “my husband.”
The glaciers moving over his soul slipped into his heart, covering all the spaces where Jack had lived, where he’d breathed life and love and bright laughter into Ethan. His heart closed, a block of solid ice clenched tight in his chest.
