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Suz

11:15 p.m. Sunday, February 13th

Suburban Hospital, Bethesda Maryland

 

 

Suz perched on the edge of her vinyl-cushioned hospital chair to study Jack’s face. He was pale beneath his tan. His bruised and unshaven skin lay slack over the chiseled angles of his jaw and cheek bones. His mouth hung slightly to the left, following the tilt of his head as his lips slid open and hung loose.

Balanced on one hip, a good two feet from his face, Suz could smell smoke clinging to the black ebony of his hair. She brushed her hand down Jack’s bare arm, stopping to dance her thumb lightly over the IV and tape.

“Here you are again,” she whispered. “Here we are again.” She lifted her gaze and let her focus take in his little corner of the post-op. They were the only ones there. It must have been a slow night for the emergency surgeons. They were probably in a back room somewhere, sipping coffee and playing Angry Birds, waiting for the next car accident, or gang beatings, or special operative who felt compelled to jump off a building. . .

Her eyes scanned over the room with its beeping machines and bright lights. It hadn’t been bad this time. Well, not life threatening. Something to do with the meniscus in Jack’s knee. When the surgeon tried to explain about the cartilage tearing from a massive impact and twist, he pointed to the images on his tablet. Suz’s stomach jumped at the sight. With a sour face, she shook her head, pushing the photos away. She didn’t need to know the details. She didn’t want to know them. Deep down, in a place that she hadn’t yet acknowledged, Suz understood that these kinds of details weren’t going to be her burden to carry anymore.

The two points that got through her resistance were that Jack was going to be okay, and there was a three to four-month recovery time.

She laced her fingers into Jack’s and while she squeezed to hold him tightly, his fingers hung unaware. Three to four months. Jack would turn that into a week maybe two. He couldn’t sit still. He certainly couldn’t lay still in a hospital.

Suz’s mind drifted back to just a short time ago when he was fighting for his life after being shot in the thigh and through his chest, collapsing a lung. A covert mission that had gone very badly, jeopardizing his whole team. No one had come out of that one unscathed except for Blaze, their communications officer. She remembered how she had waited for the surgeon’s report, waited for the “I’m sorry. We did everything we could. . .” She had pulled herself into the fetal position on the hard, plastic, waiting room chair. Her head rested in Jack’s teammate’s lap as she sobbed, and Blaze offered up what comfort an alpha male could offer up — which meant he pet her like she was a puppy and dropped a brotherly kiss onto her hair every once in a while. Jack and his friends were much more comfortable fast-roping into the fray than dealing with emotions.

“How in the world did we end up together, Jack?” It was the ubiquitous question that she had been asking herself since they started dating almost four years ago.

Jack mumbled something as if in response. Suz had been in this position too many times, watching him come out of his medicated stupor, to pay much attention. His work as an Iniquus special operative assigned to Strike Force put him in constant danger. And he loved it. Loved the adrenaline rush.

Suz preferred yoga and meditative quietude. Adrenaline was something she tried to avoid. She looked down at her hand so small against his bear paw. She was five-foot-two, and he was six-foot-five from his bare feet to top of his tight military haircut. She weighed in at a hundred and ten pounds, and he doubled her without an ounce of fat, just pure heart and muscle. A mountain of muscles. Unconquerable. Unless of course it’s your job to jump off of three-story buildings as they exploded somewhere in the far reaches of the world. He’d have to be more robot than human to be able to do that and not end up here in the surgical wing.

Suz knew little other than what he had texted her from the ambulance. Apparently, as he flew off the top of some building — somewhere that required a plane to evacuate him and eighteen hours of airtime — he landed on the roof of a car which collapsed, absorbing the impact of the fall, and he walked away – hobbled away.

His last text said: I’m home for a once over at Suburban Hospital.

That text struck her as the nail in their coffin. She couldn’t. She couldn’t keep doing this. For someone who sought to be peaceful and centered, Jack brought life-or-death energy to their relationship on a daily basis. He loved it. She hated it.

“Jack be nimble,” Jack mumbled. “. . .quick.”

Suz leaned in, her ear hovering just above his mouth, trying to catch his words. “What? What are you saying, Jack?”

“Jack jump over. . . candlestick.” Suz made that up. She thought it might be what he said – but nursery rhymes? Could be. People said awfully weird things while sedated.

“Thank you, Lynx. . .”

That last one was clear, and it hurt. Lynx’s name was on his lips, not hers.

Lynx was Strike Force’s newest teammate, Lexi Sobado. She was fun, kind, unduly attractive, as smart as they come, and Trouble with a capital T. Lynx had a way of magnetizing the bad guys to her, and then the Strike Force team of good guys would have to save her life, time and again.

Lynx was supposed to work in the office doing their intelligence and wasn’t supposed to be a field operative like the others. Yes, for sure, where Lynx went, trouble followed. Suz scowled. That was really unfair of her to think. And not any more true for Lynx than the other team members. Jack had been in danger since before Suz and he started dating back when he was still a SEAL in California. His life had been on the line long before Lynx had shown up. This is a stupid thought process. Suz twisted her copper colored curls into a make-do braid. She was just looking for a bad guy – someone to blame for Jack’s wounds and her misery.

“Jack jump. Jack. . . candlestick.” Jack breathed out.

“What candlestick?”

“Jump.”

“Jack, did you jump over a candlestick?” Was that code for something? Maybe the dynamite that blew up the building as he stood on the roof? Not that she actually knew why the building had blown up.

He lifted his free hand inches off the mattress and made a gesture that she read as jumping over.

“Why did you jump?”

“Lynx,” he said.

Frustration painted over Suz. Jack never gave her a straight answer about his missions. It was as if he lived a parallel life. It was one of the things Suz hadn’t been able to work through. She stared at the engagement ring glittering on her right ring finger – the “thinking spot” until she made up her mind to say yes. Or to hand it back.

Could she marry someone and not know what happened during most of his life? Their only reality as a couple turned out to be the short, sporadic bursts of time they were together. That just didn’t sit well with her.

She had heard the soldiers laughing back in California “Are you married?” “Not overseas I’m not.” Jack wasn’t like that. She trusted Jack because he deserved her trust – but that many secrets wore at a relationship. Made it threadbare and fragile. And then it ripped, leaving ragged edges, that were all but impossible to mend.

In that moment, Suz needed an answer. Just one clear answer. “Lynx told you to jump. And you did. You jumped off a building. And then it exploded. Lynx was on this assignment with you? I thought she was here in DC.”

Nothing.

Suz tried again. “You jumped, and you’re alive because Lynx told you to.”

Nothing.

“Come on Jack. I need to know this. How would Lynx know the building was going to explode? She was in Washington, and you were. . .” Suz had no idea where Jack had been. She frequently didn’t even know he was leaving. They needed him – he ran toward the enemy. There were plenty of bad guys out there. Plenty of hostages that needed rescuing. Plenty of CIA or FBI or DHS or any other government agency who signed private contracts, preferring to use mercenaries over their own folks, especially in politically delicate areas of the world. Yes, there was plenty of extremely lucrative work for the operatives at Iniquus. Suz hated that money. She’d rather Jack were poor and home. And safe.

“Jack?” Suz shook his shoulder. “How did Lynx know you needed to jump off the building before it exploded?”

Jack pulled his hand towards his head and tapped a finger to his temple.

“She figured it out?”

“Psychic,” Jack said. Maybe. Suz wasn’t sure; he had barely mumbled. He had merely twitched his lips.

Suz plopped her bottom back in the chair. She felt as if she had just opened the door on a stranger using the bathroom, and she wanted to shut it as quickly as she could. If it were true, it wasn’t something she was supposed to have seen. Suz shook her head and convinced herself that Jack was out of his mind on drugs, and she didn’t really know what he was muttering.

“Jack be quick! Jack jump!” His body jerked and his hand landed on the brace that locked his leg out straight.

The hum of the ice water pump that cooled Jack’s angry surgical site filled the sudden silence.

A wash of cold doused Suz’s body, leaving her trembling and sweat-covered – because this time, Suz had heard the voice of someone leaping to their probable death. If Jack had missed the car roof, if it weren’t engineered to absorb impact energy, he’d be dead.

She couldn’t do this.

She lived in terror. All the time. Terrified. Every single time her phone buzzed, she was sure it was the call. Jack was dead. Or worse, Jack was injured to the point that he wished he were dead and now would live in a broken body with no adrenaline surges to electrify and power his system.

Jack scraped his teeth over his lips and Suz reached for the moistened washcloth that she had been using to dab his mouth. “My world is so vivid, Suz.” He had tried to explain. “You can’t imagine how bright the colors are, how meaningful every nanosecond is when you’re in survival mode.” He tried to help her see why he did what he did. Even when she felt willfully blind to the pictures he tried to paint, Jack was always patient with her. She couldn’t imagine him ever raising his voice or his hand to anyone. There was nothing about Jack that was violent. She knew intellectually that he had killed people. But it didn’t make sense to her. Jack was a gentle giant. A reader. A thinker. A devoted would-be fiancé, waiting patiently for her to decide to say yes.

Suz bit her bottom lip to stop its trembling. She was tired of crying. Bone tired. Wrung completely dry. She didn’t understand why Jack chased those adrenaline highs. Her system didn’t brighten with fear; her system crashed under heavy cotton-filled emotions, buffering her from the moment, keeping her hidden inside of her body. Her limbs became dull and heavy. Her thoughts slowed. She vibrated with anxiety and inability like she was doing now. And this was no way to live.

Suz disentangled her fingers from his – when she tucked her fingers up into the web of Jack’s hand, her joints stretched too far apart as the distance splayed her palm. The difference between them was physically painful. They didn’t fit comfortably together.

She lay her forehead on the cool sheet by his elbow. “I love you. Oh my god, I so desperately love you.” Her words tumbled out in sobs. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t, Jack. I’m so sorry.”