MARY
“Hello, young lady.”
That voice slices through time, hits my nervous system like a drug. My thoughts halt. My fingers stop. I freeze like a rabbit, and for a few seconds - far too long, I do nothing at all.
Lifting my head is the hardest thing, but I do. And I see those eyes. The face of the man I thought I’d never see again. The only man on Earth who knows my secrets. My pain. The only man to ever see my scars. He’s sitting in front of me, broad shouldered and faintly smiling.
“Hello.” I force the word out as my heart starts to race in my chest. We’re a million miles away from where he found me, but his presence brings it all rushing back.
He is the reason I’m alive. I never had a chance to thank him. I have a sudden impulse to throw myself into his arms, but I refrain. There’s a table in the way anyway.
“Come and talk to me,” he says, rising from the bench. He’s so goddamn handsome. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to appreciate his physical attributes when we last met. Now its different. My gaze roams over the expanse of his chest, his tall, muscled physique, the way he holds himself erect. Underneath that shirt, I’m sure his torso is as hard as his face. And oh my god what a face he has. That jaw. Those cheekbones. All hard and rugged and exposed to the elements. There’s very little soft about him. He’s built for pure action - and not just any action. There are athletes who are attractive, but not in the way he is. He is built to bring death.
Everything about Ken is extraordinary. The five o’clock shadow on his jaw, those bicolor eyes which are calm, but can be so damn fierce, the rugged brows and hair just long enough to be tousled with sweat and dirt. He’s been out the field. There are a few faint smears of what I’m sure is blood on his shirt and pants. Someone else might not notice it, but I know what he looks like covered in the sanguine secretions of his enemies. I remember everything. I remember him.
I follow him to a corner between two shipping containers outside the mess, not exactly secluded, but a little more private. I don’t want people overhearing what he has to say anymore than he wants to say it in front of others.
“So, what are you doing here?” He quirks a brow at me as if I’ve done something wrong. “I would have thought you’d have had your fill of excitement.”
“Have you?”
“Have I what?”
I’ve confused him. I guess I have to explain. “You’re running around in war zones, so why wouldn’t I be doing the same?” I lift my chin a little, defying him to bring up what he knows. I’ve worked too hard for too long to leave that horror behind me. I’ve thrown myself into my work, and I’m not going to let one nightmare stop me from ever sleeping again.
I guess he expected me to run back stateside and cower for the rest of my life. Hell no. What I went through won’t define me. Not ever. And I won’t let him define me by it.
“I didn’t go through what you went through,” he says.
“You didn’t,” I agree. “I went through it. I decide how much it affects my life. Not you. And I decide who knows, not you.”
Both brows go up. “So you’re telling me that you haven’t disclosed your… prior experiences to command here.”
“No. I haven’t. And I haven’t disclosed the boo boo I got on my knee when I was six either,” I say, pushing the limits of sarcasm. “It’s nobody’s business but mine.”
He opens his mouth, but before he can piss me off more, someone even more obnoxious interrupts us.
“Good, you’ve found each other,” a man with the swagger of a commanding officer strolls by, claps him on the shoulder and points at me.
“She’s going to be embedded with you.”
“We’re not doing the kind of work suitable for journalists,” he says, instantly trying to get rid of me. I don’t blame him. There hasn’t been a single officer in this country who has wanted me as a tag along. Afghanistan is no place for people who can’t pull their weight, and embeds aren’t allowed to.
“Nobody here is doing work suitable for journalists,” the guy says. I should know his name, but I’ve already mentally dubbed him General Douchebag and I can’t store endless names for every asshole I meet along the way.
I have press credentials, and I have a right to be here. The same right the rest of them have. Not that General Douchebag cares about that. There’s only one way to earn a man like that’s respect, and I fucked that up long ago by being born without a penis.
“Take her out, send her back when she shits her pants,” Douchebag says. He walks off without so much as a word to me. Rude. I try not to give a fuck about rude. I’m out here for the stories they don’t want me to get. Of course, the thing about stories that people don’t want you to get, is that they try to stop you from getting them.
There are a lot of ways for officers to obstruct journalists. First, they usually try to bore you, drive you around until you get tired of dirt and sand. I’ve been on the Afghanistan equivalent of a tea cup ride for many weeks. Then, if that doesn’t work, they try to scare you. I don’t scare easily, so that hasn’t worked. Now we’re entering phase three: put you somewhere you might actually die and kind of sort of hope you do. Most people tend to get out at that point. Not me.
There’s no need for the military to be paranoid about embedded journalists. The number of people who care about war journalism has dwindled since Vietnam. Most people don’t care about the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, or Kazakstan. Any of the stans, for that matter. They hang around on social media, waiting for a meme to tell them what they should be outraged at that week. A disinterested populace with a ten second attention span is not exactly a lucrative market for journalistic rigor. Most of what I do ends up back in military hands, in their publications and journals. A lot of it never sees the light of day. Maybe one day I’ll write a book about all this. Make it fiction.
If I do, fictional me will be sexier. She won’t sweat as much as I do. She won’t always wear long sleeves and pants to hide the scars inflicted by her captors. She’ll throw her head back and she’ll laugh at the foibles of the world instead of steaming with fury at every insult.
She won’t secretly be terrified of everything. She won’t insist on putting herself into dangerous situation after dangerous situation just to feel like she’s alive, because every time she tries to live a normal life she’s swamped by terror that only goes away when bullets start flying. She’ll do it because she’s driven by things like purpose and bravery.
And she’ll be respected by the men, who of course, all want to marry her. Not bang her and discard her, treat her like a notch on their belt, but who aspire to have her in their lives for as long as they both shall live.
Unfortunately, real me falls far short of fictional me. Real me is shorter, fatter, frizzier. Real me is motivated by anger that keeps the fear at bay. Real me is itching to see what goes on in the clandestine corners of this war that isn’t a war, and real me doesn’t really care what my personal outcome is.
I could write something based in reality, I suppose, but nobody wants to read about some barren victim being scorned by men and sometimes women who think they’re better than her by merit of their service. Hell, they probably are. I might be in harm’s way almost as often as them, but mine isn’t a noble sacrifice. It’s ignoble in the extreme, truth be told.
“I guess I’m stuck with ya,” Ken says. He doesn’t seem as upset by that as I thought he would be. Maybe he just likes to follow orders. Or maybe he likes me, as unlikely as that seems. I’m not used to being liked by men. I usually go out of my way not to be liked. But he’s different. He’s the one who saved me. He is my… what was it… oh yes… Alpha Protector.
“You are,” I agree. “Stuck with me, I mean?”
“Where’s your equipment?”
“You’re looking at it.”
He gives me a critical once over. “I mean where’s your change of clothes, your bedding, your gear?”
“I have a pack,” I say. “Don’t worry, you don’t need to babysit me. This isn’t my first time and it won’t be my last.”
It’s strange, because I don’t know him at all, but he knows more about me than anyone else on the planet. He knows the secret I have kept hidden since they day I escaped that facility. The downside to that is the fact that when he looks at me I know he sees the broken woman in the hospital bed, and I hate that.
“When will you be moving out?”
“Tomorrow morning,” he says. “0300.”
I nod. It’s early, but that’s common in the military. Getting up before the cock crows is just how they do things. It’s probably even a little on the late side for him.
“Alright then, I’ll be there.”
“Wait a minute.” He holds his hand up, stops me before I can leave. “Before I take you anywhere, we need to talk. I mean, properly talk.”
“No, we don’t,” I cut him off abruptly.
“How did you get credentials to get back into danger?”
So many goddamn questions. I wish he’d just shut up and accept that I’m here. “You won’t believe this, but I got them off the back of a cereal packet.”