CHAPTER 1
HE NEEDED TO FUCK.
Sleep.
Eat.
In that order.
Once his feet landed on US soil, his dick no longer welcomed the idea of his trusty ol’ hand bringing him release.
He’d been gone a year on a tour of duty in the Middle East, and he had no means of sexual outlet but through his hands and old porn clips saved on his phone. Those clips got old a long time ago.
Pussy.
His cock wanted pussy. A soft, warm cocoon of female flesh wrapped around his length as he pounded away to nothingness. A tight, wet tunnel of paradise sucking him in deeper, milking him of a year’s worth of accumulated blood lust, expelling everything out, out, out!
Out of his battered system.
He needed this release badly to be able to function well in his next tour.
He dropped his duffel bag on the granite floor.
He scanned the vastness of his very modern apartment situated in one of the posh addresses in Miami.
His instincts, sharpened by years of dwelling in dangerous territories immediately noticed something that wasn’t there before he left for his tour months ago. The place smelled different.
Pine wood.
And—
What the hell…?!
A tall vase full of fresh flowers stood at the counter top bisecting the dining area and the state of the art kitchen. It was the only soft spot in the middle of the stark austerity of the apartment’s interior.
Stark.
Austere.
Rigid.
Empty.
That was him.
Whatever was left inside him were the last threads of hope holding his sanity together. Little threads desperately trying to mend his wounds that would never heal.
Aside from the damn daisies and the pine wood scent, everything in his apartment was exactly the way he’d left it. He liked his personal space to be in perfect order. Any sign of disarray would trigger some shit in his head, driving him back to his natural habitat— the desert.
The hostile deserts of the Middle East to be exact.
The housekeeper Bella had hired to keep this place clean did a great job. Except for the damn flowers. He hated flowers. They reminded him of goodness. Of innocence. Of peace and tranquility. Of life.
A sub-human like him didn’t deserve to see or smell flowers anymore. Too hard on his almost non-existent soul.
His apartment was huge. He blew seven million dollars on it, a small percentage from his trust fund which came into his control when he turned twenty-one. That was forever ago. He was thirty-three now, going on eighty.
He felt ancient. Beat to the bone.
War could do that. Wear you down to your barest minimum.
America was always a strange place to come back to after spending months in that desolate place reeking of gunpowder and decimated populace. He would have withdrawal syndrome every time, unused to the calm and quiet. Peace was no longer a comfort zone. His comfort zone was inside his fighter plane flying over the endless, barren sand dunes breathing with insurgents ravenous for his blood, and he was equally hungry for theirs.
He wondered why they weren’t able to shoot him down yet. He’d been waiting for it for almost a decade now. That one shot that would blow him back to the time when he was but a dream in some woman’s love struck heart. He would disintegrate up there in the sky and he would fall down to the ground in tiny little pieces.
Maybe into the sea. Best into the sea.
Then he would be free.
Free to be himself again.
He cringed at his thoughts. That scent was making him feel like a fucking yellow-ass pansy.
He was last seen roaming the skies of Syria. His last tour had been eventful, to say the least. He couldn’t complain of the action. He couldn’t wait to get back into the thick of it.
Since the middle of last year, the US Air Force had been busy trying to destroy the ISIL stronghold in Raqqa. But not even 3,000 air strikes from the combined fire power of the coalition forces of the US, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates could completely decimate the ISIL stronghold in Syria. They’d even expanded their territory a few months ago, taking the city of Mosul in Northern Iraq and made it their second headquarters. Mosul had not been recovered yet.
He removed his battered leather jacket and black shirt, then his boots. He padded barefoot and topless to the kitchen and opened the ref. It was stocked with his favorite beer as he had instructed Bella to do. Liquor was a rare indulgence for pilots, but during vacation, spirits were purging agents, like sex. They helped dull whatever was hurting inside of him.
Bella was the executor of his business affairs while he was on tour. His money was being managed by a reputed investment company. Everything had been set up by his old man before he died, the only indication that the old fart loved him, after all. But Lewis could have done better. He would have appreciated it better if his father had attended his baseball games when he was a kid. But Lewis loved spending more time with the stock market than with his only child.
His eyes went back to the flowers. They seemed to mock him, their natural beauty making the ugliness inside him worse.
He grabbed the vase and threw it in the trash.
He was here in the US to visit his half-sister, Bella, a successful fiction writer living with her husband and their two children in Fort Lauderdale. Bella’s husband ran a winery there. It was their pact that he should come see her and his twin nieces every tour break. Bella was terrified he would never come back every time he'd leave for some war-torn country.
He would call Tommy in a while. The dude was a businessman who owned several high-end bars and the closest friend he had. They’d known each other from the Academy but Tommy didn’t have the discipline required to be a pilot. He quit and became a businessman instead. Their friendship remained through the years.
His social life was as good as dead since he became a combat pilot. Women became merely a source of momentary physical pleasures as he had no time to build any semblance of relationship. Even during tour breaks, a soldier was never really off duty outside the base. Currently, he flew with the 494th Fighter Squadron headquartered in RAF Lakenheath, England. He was on call, anywhere he was. Uncle Sam’s number was a 24-hour bitch of a hotline.
During his breaks here when he wanted to bang pussy, he’d just call Tommy who had a black book of all the doable babes in the city. He liked fast women. No pressure. Not much effort. No drama. He was with them for only one reason, to bang the shit out of them.
Come and go. That was his usual deal. Fast women wanted the same. They liked to wear his monster down. A big challenge as he was an insatiable fuck after his tour. It was mostly them who called time out.
Tommy invited him to come to his new swanky club downtown but he declined. He really was not ready to mingle with the charmed, frivolous mortals who worried about their latest flashy toys day in day out. The scent of the desert and all its abominable secrets were perpetually stuck on his skin. He would be hell around normal people.
He’d just ask Tommy to send him two or three babes for tonight. Hopefully, their beautiful bodies would make him forget, even just for a while the body count he’d left somewhere in Fallujah. Fuck, that was a long time ago and it was one of his earliest missions, but that place and what happened there was unforgettable. And not in a good way.
Finishing the beer, he walked towards the master’s bedroom, removing his pants as he took the hallway. Naked, he opened the door. The room was cast in shadows but illuminated by the lights pouring in from the neighboring buildings through the tall panoramic windows lining two sides of the expansive bedroom. He liked the shadowy ambiance, a relative comfort to his tortured senses.
Without turning the lights on, he padded straight into the en suite. He switched the lights on and stepped into the glass shower cubicle.
Seconds later, warm water cascaded all over him, drenching him. He felt his muscles relax.
This was nice. After spending months sharing common bathrooms with dozens of comrades, he’d missed the luxury of privacy.
He scrubbed his body with soap and spent a few minutes under the warm spray, languishing in its natural healing power. If only it would cleanse away all his sins, too.
Shut. The fuck. Up.
Once in a while, when he was in a very quiet place, his conscience would act up, trying to convince him he was still redeemable. Wishful thinking. Remnants of long forgotten innocence.
He turned off the tap and grabbed a towel, drying himself off.
He walked back to the bedroom.
Only then did he become aware of something. He was a soldier and his senses were sharp, his instincts even sharper. But he failed to sense this one immediately.
Fuck.
Quietly stepping back into the walk-in-closet, he groped under a cabinet ledge and closed his hand on a 45.
Something was up in the air.
Someone was inside the apartment. But it was not a hostile element as his built-in radar failed to pick up the signals right away. Weak signals.
He entered the bedroom again.
His senses were on high alert and he smelled something now. It was very subtle but there it was.
Sweet.
Fresh.
Clean.
Like this place.
But this was different.
A woman.
A woman was inside his apartment.
In his bedroom.