Battlescars (9 page)

She stopped and looked at him with sudden suspicion. “How do you know I take a heavy course load and get good grades?”

“Because you’re in Intermediate Accounting, which means that you have to have passed the intro class with a good grade. If you’re in that class, that means that you are serious about your studies. Am I right?”

She nodded slowly. “You’re very perceptive.”

Dyson shrugged. “I notice things.”

“You seem to notice an awful lot.”

Dyson didn’t respond. He was suddenly thinking about Iraq, about the fact that he had to be on his guard at all times, that being able to notice every little thing could make the difference between life and death. He was sure that he wasn’t unique in that regard. Anyone who had felt the heat of a bullet whizzing past his head had surely acquired the ability to notice detail with speed and accuracy.

But telling her those things would mean opening up more than he wanted to right now, and she certainly didn’t need the military sob story to deal with when she was on a bit of a bender.

“Your head’s going to hurt in the morning,” he said, and she nodded.

“To be expected,” she said, and then leaned heavily against him as they walked. “You sure you don’t want to stay over? You can sleep on the couch if you’re feeling like a knight.”

Dyson shook his head. “You’re going to be embarrassed in the morning, too.”

“I think I’m starting to get embarrassed already.” She put her hand to her head. “My God, I am acting like a total slut.”

“No!” Dyson stopped on the sidewalk and took her arms in his. “No, Kayla. You’re not acting that way. You’re acting like a girl who has had one too many, that’s all.”

She looked up at him with eyes that actually seemed a bit clearer than they had ten minutes ago. “You really might be a knight in shining armor, you know that?”

He leaned down to kiss her. She pressed her body against him, pulling him back against the wall of some building there next to the sidewalk. This time he gave in and pressed his full length against her, kissing her passionately, his hands in her hair and his body moving in the way he wished he could in private.

He was instantly hard and this time he didn’t try to hide it. He knew she felt it because he felt the change in her, the way she strained against him as if she wanted him to enter her right through her clothes. It built so fast that it would have been very easy to let passion overtake reason. Dyson was walking that fine line. He knew he wouldn’t go further, but there was a little voice in his head that told him this was okay, it was fine, it was expected and hot and he wanted so much more…

When he felt her gasp underneath him, he immediately let her go and stepped back. But she stared up at him with wild eyes that said anything but the word ‘no.’

“Why did you stop?” she panted.

Dyson groaned. He pressed his forehead against hers and tried to calm his breathing.

“I was thinking about the couple on the balcony,” she whispered. “Ever since then I have been wishing that I had the courage to watch the whole thing. I wanted to see all of it.”

“I wanted to watch them too.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I’m a gentleman, and a gentleman doesn’t watch porn when a lady he admires is anywhere in the vicinity.”

“You admire me?”

Dyson laughed. “Honestly, Kayla, I fucking adore you. I think everything about you is amazing. The more I know, the more I want to know.”

This time she blushed scarlet, seemingly more embarrassed by his words of affection than by anything their bodies had been doing just a moment go. She seemed to think about his words for a moment, turning them over in her head, and then she grinned. “Well, now you know something else about me. I would have liked to watch the live porn show.”

Dyson took her hand firmly in his. “And on that note, I need to get you home before we both lose our better judgment and have sex on the sidewalk.”

“I’ve never done that before,” she teased, and he grinned at the visions running through his head.

“I haven’t either,” he admitted, and she squeezed his hand harder.

The final walk to her place seemed to go by within seconds. The closer they got, the less he wanted to leave her. But by the time they reached her place she had regained some sobriety, and she looked at him with regret as she pulled away from him and stood on the bottom step of her apartment building.

“I know I invited you up…” she started, and Dyson smiled and waved a hand.

“I have to get home. I have things to do.”

“No you don’t.”

“No, I don’t, but we both know it’s not a good idea for me to come up, don’t we?”

She blushed under the harsh white security lights. “No, not a good idea.”

“But if you want to give me your phone number, I will be more than happy to talk you out of bad ideas in the future.”

Kayla laughed, and Dyson smiled as she reached into her pocket for a piece of paper. Finding nothing, she looked at him helplessly. He handed her his cell phone. “Type it in here…if you are sober enough, of course.”

She fiddled with it for a moment and started to get frustrated. Dyson took it gently from her hands. “Let me. What’s your number?”

She gave it to him and he typed it into his phone and saved it with the push of a button. Then he stepped forward and looked right into her eyes. It was time to go before either one of them changed their minds. “Goodnight, Kayla,” he whispered.

“Goodnight,” she said, and then her lips were an inch away from his, and then a breath away, and then she was kissing him again. This time was even better, because Dyson knew she was sober enough to know what she was doing. She put her arms around his shoulders and Dyson swept his tongue into her mouth. Soon she was pulling on his shoulders as if she wanted him closer. Dyson broke the kiss and instead dropped his lips to her shoulder, where he drew the cotton blouse back just a bit so he could reach her soft skin.

He pressed his lips to her shoulder and waited, seeing what she would do. When she drove her hands into his hair and held him closer, he knew he had the green light. He let his tongue gently trail her collarbone to the center, then back up the other side, nipping from time to time as he went. By the time he was done he could feel the little goose bumps on her skin as he kissed his way up her neck. She sighed and pulled him closer, and he could feel the way her body seemed to melt into his, a permission to come upstairs, to do whatever he wanted, to make them both feel good.

It was harder than ever to pull away from her this time.

“I have to go,” he whispered, even as they were both breathing hard.

“I know.”

“I will call you tomorrow. I promise. I will let you sleep in some, though. You’re going to have a killer headache, you know that?”

“I think I already do,” she murmured.

“Then get inside and go to bed.”

“And dream of you?”

Dyson grinned and kissed her on the nose. “I love the way you think,” he said, and stepped away from her. He watched as she fished for the key in her jeans pocket, then stood there waiting as she opened the door and let herself in. After she waved goodbye he backed away until he stood in the street, looking up at the windows, wondering which one was hers. After a moment a light came on in the upper right, and he smiled.

“Goodnight, Kayla,” he said, and started the walk back to his car.

T
he sun was hell bent on torturing her. Kayla opened her eyes, was blinded by the glare, and immediately closed her eyes again. She rolled over to get away from sun, but the moment she moved, the pounding began – a deep and relentless pain that gnawed from the base of her skull. Her stomach roiled with the motion, and that made her head hurt even worse. It was the kind of feeling that meant only one thing: too much alcohol.

“Holy shit, holy smokes, holy everything,” she moaned, pushing her head hard into the pillow. The counter pressure actually felt good, so she stayed there for a while, trying not to think. Thinking about anything hurt far too much. Her mind would only stay blank for so long, and then it started moving again, whether she wanted it to or not.

She tried to remember the last time she had been drunk. Fortunately, she was the kind of drinker who remembered everything and stopped drinking before she blacked out. She counted herself lucky on that front, because she never wound up in the compromising situations that other women her age encountered. She could remember both the good feelings and the embarrassments.

She recalled once getting so drunk at a frat party that she threw up in the bathroom, without locking or even bothering to close the door. Her shame as the whole place heard her retching had been mortifying, and Kayla had never been that intoxicated since that night. It was safe to say she didn’t get any action that evening – not that she had been looking for it, but the feeling of having made a sloppy fool of herself in front of a whole frat house was not one she had ever wanted to experience again.

She also remembered waking up at a foster home several years ago after having used her fake id to get into a redneck bar with one of her foster brothers. She’d thought they were hanging out in a companionable, brother-sister way until she’d woken up the next morning to find her foster brother taking pictures of her topless, wearing nothing but her bikini underwear. She’d felt violated and dirty, and she’d had a fuzzy recollection about the events of the night before.

That particular hangover had been worse than usual, and she realized that she didn’t remember falling asleep. She had almost all of it in her head, all the memories, but could not recall taking her clothes off and getting into bed. Kayla had always wondered what had happened to her as she slept. She suspected that she had been given some drug, something slipped into her drink, and she hated to think about what that “brother” might have done to her before he took those pictures. She tried her hardest to extinguish the memory.

Kayla groaned. These were the kind of memories that always came back in the light of day, and she hated that they did. She wished she could be like her friends, who seemed to drink the night away and even sleep around with strangers but had no problem with getting over it the next day. They just needed an aspirin and a few hours’ sleep to get it out of their system.

Kayla felt like she needed therapy every time she drank.

And last night. Wow. What was up with that? She remembered throwing herself at Dyson like a little tramp, and she couldn’t forget the chivalrous way he had stopped her advances. That wasn’t like her at all. She wasn’t aggressive in the least, and preferred to let the man make the first move. But last night was an anomaly, a moment that she would never be able to explain. Dyson had tried not to make her feel bad, but he didn’t have to – she was feeling terrible enough that nothing he said or did could have helped. Somehow, knowing that Dyson had been concerned about how she felt made the evening not seem quite so awful.

She wondered if he would call today. She wouldn’t be surprised at all if he didn’t.

She sat up, taking her sweet time, sure that any fast movement would make her head explode. She cautiously moved to the bathroom, where she found no aspirin, but decided that the ibuprofen would do. She swallowed two of them, looked at the bottle, and swallowed another two. Counting the minutes before the ibuprofen would start to dull the pain, she went to the kitchen – avoiding the harsh sunlight by closing her eyes halfway – and poured a tall glass of water. She gulped it down, trying to remember what really caused hangovers. Dehydration plus alcohol? That sounded right. So she drank down another glass of water, and then drew a third from the tap before heading back to her bedroom and collapsing on the bed.

She lay there sprawled out, wearing nothing but a t-shirt and underwear – her typical nightclothes. It was the kind of attire she would have gone to sleep in the night she’d gone out with her foster brother, and she had never figured out where her favorite t-shirt had gone. All she knew for sure was that she’d awoken to the young man lying next to her in bed, camera flashing. She remembered trying to cover herself with her bare arms because all of the blankets had been thrown to the floor, and she remembered him telling her how good she looked and how good she would feel if she would only let him take the single piece of clothing she still had on.

Kayla’d had to fight hard to get away from him, and it wasn’t until she’d screamed so loud that her foster parents burst into the room that she’d been able to get him out of the room. The boy had sworn that he’d deleted the pictures, but Kayla had suspected that he still had them.

She had packed her bags and fled that morning, with her head still pounding from the alcohol or the roofies or whatever the hell else was in her system. Her heart hurt even worse. She had gone to the police station and asked them to call her caseworker, but hadn’t said another word to anyone about the way she’d been violated. Kayla had been transferred to another home that very day, and she’d never looked back.

After that, she took to sleeping with a knife under her mattress.