Chapter Twelve: Ryder
It was nearly midnight by the time my head hit the pillow. I tugged off my clothes and threw them on the floor and collapsed on the bed with a long, heavy sigh, as if all the air was being squeezed from my lungs like a giant hand squeezing a tube of toothpaste.
I switched off the lamp and closed my eyes. I couldn’t remember ever being more mentally and physically exhausted. There literally was no part of my body that didn’t hurt. And my brain, my heart, and my gut all felt like they’d been through a fucking meat grinder.
After I picked Cody up from Hank and Emily’s, he said he was hungry on the way home so we ran through the McDonald’s drive-thru. I tried to sway him toward the Arby’s because they actually had food for grownups, but Cody was firm: it was either a lovely dinner of Chicken McNuggets and time to play on their indoor playground or the screaming fit to end all screaming fits, my choice. I’d witnessed his screaming fits. It was not a difficult choice to make.
When I turned into the lot, Cody beamed at his triumph over his old man. He started bouncing up and down in the car seat, clapping his hands in no particular rhythm, and singing, “Mac-Donald’s! Mac-Donald’s! Mac-Donald’s!”
He stretched his arms over his head like he’d just kicked the winning field goal at the Super Bowl and cackled. I smiled as I watched him in the rearview mirror. He made me want to cheer along. Occasional screaming fit aside, he was an adorable fucking kid. He had his mother’s wide smile, pink pudgy cheeks, and big blue eyes. It broke my heart that I hardly knew him. It would break my heart even more if I added up the number of days I’d actually spent in his life. He was four-years-old and I had been home a total of six or seven months since he had been born. I couldn’t recall ever taking him to the park or to a movie or to a play date or to a McDonald’s…
I decided to ditch the drive-thru and eat there, sitting across the table from my son munching on faux chicken and French fries, talking about all the silly little things silly little boys and their silly old dads talked about. I parked the Rover, lifted Cody out of the seat, and took him inside. He bounced excitedly in my arms and clapped the entire way. It was the first time I’d ever been in a fucking McDonald’s with my son. Silly, I know, but it was a sad testament to my true worth as a father.
I couldn’t tell you the last time I had fast food of any kind, much less the greasy burger and fry variety. The have fast food restaurants (is that an oxymoron?) in Mosul, but you never knew if you were eating a genuine hamburger made of ground-up beef or what was left of a camel or horse the owner butchered out back a few weeks ago. Most of the time I ate on-base or in the hotel restaurant, which served up a decent burger if you didn’t mind the occasional crunch of gristle.
Standing in line with Cody in my arms (I didn’t want to set him down) I realized I was starving. I tried to remember the last time I’d eaten anything, but couldn’t. I could hear my stomach growling. Cody heard it too. It made him laugh. Which made me smile.
Cody scarfed down a couple of nuggets and a few French fries before announcing that he was done and running off to play inside the indoor playground. I sat and watched him as I ate a Big Mac and a large fry, which tasted incredibly good given my point of hunger. I finished off Cody’s meal and washed it all down with a twenty-ounce Coke. Less than a minute after swallowing the last bite, my stomach started churning like a cement mixer. Christ, I have eaten some rank shit in my day (see the aforementioned camel reference), but the grease from that McDonald’s burger and fries worked its way through my system like shit through a goose. I barely had time to grab Cody from the playground, stick on his shoes, jump in the car, and make it home before my stomach literally exploded out my ass.
I sat on the toilet generating all manner of noises and smells while Cody stood in the doorway pinching his little nose and waving his free hand at the aroma that was building in the air like a heavy fog rolling in from a sea of sewage. Every time I’d blow a fart, he’d point at me and giggle.
“Ooooh, daddy fotted! Daddy fotted!” He covered his face with his hands and grinned devilishly through his fingers. “You stink, daddy! You stink!”
“Oh yeah? Well listen to this one!”
As father and son moments go, it was an odd one, but I sure loved the sound of that little boy’s laugh.
As a SEAL, my body, mind, and spirit were tested daily, but that fucking McDonald’s grease-fest almost did me in. Okay, it wasn’t just the McDonald’s, though the bathroom did end up smelling like a grease fire from all the candles I lit to try and kill the stench—a trick I learned from Bethany, who always burned these giant potpourri and flowery scented candles when she took a shit, like she didn’t want me to know that she defecated like every other human on the planet or that her shit stank. I always told her it just smelled like she had shit in a flower bed. Again, funny what passes for good memories in my mind...
No, my exploding stomach was just the last symptom of a virus that had been eating at me ever since I learned that Bethany had died. It was my body reacting to all the shit life that had sent my way over the past couple of days. I was usually pretty good at handling stress, but I’d never faced anything as frightening as this. My wife died carrying another man’s baby. Fine, I could handle that. With everything that had happened between us it really wasn’t that surprising. The thing that was scaring the shit out of me and tying my stomach into knots and blowing them out of my ass was the thing I should have been embracing the most.
Could I raise this little boy all on my own, without his mother to show me the way? Honestly, I had no fucking idea.
I also had no idea how many motherfuckers I had maimed or killed over my career as a SEAL, or how many had tried to maim or kill me. I’d slept on the frozen ground in the winter time, in muddy ditches during the summer, in trees, in caves and in bombed-out buildings. I’d crawled over dead bodies and jumped out of airplanes into total darkness without knowing what waited for me on the ground below and trudged through swamps with murky water up to my eyeballs. None of that shit ever phased me, not even close. But the past two days had kicked my ass: lock, stock and barrel.
And the worst of it came just a few hours ago when I did the one thing I never thought I would ever have to do: I told my young son that his mommy was dead.
“Mommy’s in Heaven,” I said, sitting in my old recliner with an exhausted Cody in my lap, his head resting against my chest, his little fingers twisting in the collar of my t-shirt. “She’s not coming home.”
“You mean mommy’s with Cheeses?” he asked, so innocent and naïve.
I smiled with big tears in my eyes. “Yes, Cody, mommy is with Cheeses.”
“Cheeses will take care of mommy,” he said, sitting up and turning to face me. He put his little hands on my cheeks and gave them a pat. “Don’t worry, daddy. I will take care you.”
“I know you will, buddy,” I said, pulling him close so he couldn’t see the tears streaming down my cheeks. “I know you will.”
It was at that moment that I knew eventually, everything would be okay.
The four-year-old mind was an amazingly resilient thing. It absorbed life like a sponge, wrung out the excess knowledge and emotions it didn’t understand or didn’t need, stored away what mattered in its memory banks until it knew what to do with it, and then quickly moved on. Fast and efficient handling of emotions was the key. That’s why you often see a toddler pitching a fit one minute, then perfectly calm the next. So unlike the adult mind, which had the tendency to dwell on the least little thing until it drove its owner and everyone around them fucking mad.
Cody cried for a few minutes, then got still in my lap and fell asleep against me. I wrapped my arms around him and rested my cheek on the top of his head. I closed my eyes and listened to him breath. I knew there would be lots of “I miss mommy moments!!” in the months and years ahead, but thank God, he wouldn’t have to fully process his grief now because he couldn’t fully comprehend the truth. And time would lessen the blow of losing his mommy. Unfortunately, time would also fade her memory from his young mind, but that was the tradeoff. He wouldn’t remember much about her, but he also wouldn’t remember the pain and grief he felt as a young child. They say God only gives you what you can handle. Most four year olds couldn’t handle losing their mommy if they were fully aware like adults, so it was better that they don’t fully grasp what was going on.
Mommy was with Cheeses.
That’s all he needed to know for it to be okay.
I put Cody to bed and sat in his room in the dark for nearly an hour, just watching him sleep, listening to him breath, holding a blue teddy bear that Bethany always said was his favorite. Teddy Blue, was its name. I had no idea when Cody got Teddy Blue, why it was his favorite, or even where it had come from. Like most things in this house, my wife and son included, Teddy Blue was a mystery to me.
What a fuck I was for missing all these years with my son. I couldn’t help but wonder how different all our lives might have turned out if I had been a better husband to Bethany and father to Cody. It was too easy to blame it on the SEALs and say the time apart caused the rift between us. That was bullshit and I knew it. I knew lots of SEALS that had strong marriages and happy homes.
“It’s not the time away from home that matters, son,” an older SEAL named Sandusky once told me as we sat on a hilltop overlooking a stretch of dusty highway, waiting to ambush an Al Qaida convoy that was supposed to come by. “It’s what you do with the time you have at home that matters.”
The issues between Bethany and I might have been acerbated by my extended absences, but they certainly were not the cause of our marriage breaking up. That was on me. All on me.
I dozed off for a few minutes. When I woke up I was curled into a ball on the floor, clutching Teddy Blue to my chest, a line of drool running down my cheek. I pushed myself up off the floor, checked on Cody, who had not moved a muscle since I put him down, then set Teddy Blue on the bed and quietly left the room.
I didn’t bother with the lights when I went into the bathroom to make sure the Big Mac was through doing its damage. I sat for a moment without assaulting the poor toilet any further, then took a leak and got up to wash my hands. I dried my hands on a clean towel that was hanging over the rack. I held the towel to my nose for a moment and inhaled deeply. It just smelled like detergent with no trace of my dead wife’s scent. I draped the towel over the rack and started out of the room when a thought hit me.
I couldn’t resist taking a quick peek out the window at the neighbor’s pool. It was nearly midnight, but she might be down there, I thought, taking a midnight swim in the nude, all hot and bothered, heating up the water with her flowing juices, waiting for me to pull back the curtains to watch her playing with herself in the moonlight. The blue lights of the pool shone bright in the dark night, but the girl wasn’t there. It was probably a good thing. I was literally too pooped to pop. How fucking pathetic was that?
* * *
I felt like I was floating in a warm bath.
My eyes were closed.
My arms and legs outstretched.
My lips were open. I could hear myself breathing with my ears beneath the surface of the water.
Floating.
Peaceful.
Not a care in the world.
I sensed that I wasn’t alone.
I slowly opened my eyes.
Black sky above.
No moon.
Stars twinkling.
Floating.
She’s here with me.
I can feel her presence as clearly as I can feel the warm breeze on my skin.
The little hairs on my arms and legs stand up.
I feel my cock twitch in the muggy night air.
She whispers in my ear. Her breath tickles, it makes me smile.
She says my name softly.
Ryder…
Yes…
She tells me it’s all going to be all right.
She tells me she is going to make the pain go away.
I open my eyes and see her standing at the edge of the pool.
She’s naked.
Beautiful.
Young.
Natural.
Supple.
I breath in deeply, slowly, sniffing the air like a wolf sensing prey.
I can smell her sex; pungent, salty.
I can taste her on the tip of my tongue.
Delicious.
I raise my head to look up at her.
The water drips from my face and ears.
Her long blonde hair is pushed back over her tanned shoulders.
Her eyes smile warmly at me.
She cups her round breasts in her palms and offers them to me with her lips pursed.
“Is this what you want, Ryder?” she asks in a voice only I can hear.
“Yes,” I said. “I want to feel your tits… suck your hard nipples…”
She puts her fingers on her blonde pubes and pulls them back so I can see the long pink hood of her clit.
“And this? What will you do with this?”
“I want to rub your clit with my fingers… take it between my lips… roll it beneath my tongue… I want to suck your clit while you suck my cock…”
She spread her legs so I could see her pink pussy, the lips perfect, her hole glistening with moisture. She slowly slid her fingers over her pussy and sighed as a wave of pleasure shuddered through her.
“And this, Ryder… What would you do with this…”
“I want to suck your pussy lips… lick your hole… shove my tongue deep inside you…”
I close my eyes, then open them slowly. She was in the water with me now, standing beside me as I floated on my back. My cock was rock hard, standing tall and proud, thick and veiny. She wrapped her wet fingers around the shaft and slowly moved her hand up and down, sliding the skin over the rigid muscle.
“And this…” she said. “What would you do to me with your big cock?”
“I would fuck you with my big cock… I would bend you over and ram my cock into your tight, young pussy until you begged me to stop… I would fuck your pussy and then your ass… I’d make you cum over and over and over…
Her hand moved up and down on my cock. I got harder as she squeezed. I could feel the vein’s filling with blood. The head was round and purple. Drops of juice oozed from the slit.
“You want me, Ryder?” she asked, lowering her lips to mine. She traced her tongue across my lips.
“Yes… I want you…”
My balls tightened as her hand worked its magic.
“Tell me what you want me to do to you, Ryder.”
“I want you to pump my cock… I want you suck it… Put the head in your sweet mouth and suck me dry…”
“Mmmm…” she cooed, her hand moving faster. “What else?
“I want you to take my big cock in your mouth… I want to shove it down your throat… I want you to squeeze my balls and finger my asshole while you suck my… big… cock…”
“Mmmm… my pleasure…” She held my cock steady and pressed her lips to the tip. She swirled her tongue around the slit to lap up my juices and teased the little bundle of nerves beneath the head. She took the head into her mouth and sucked it as she worked her hand up and down the shaft, milking me, pumping me, making me cum.
“Fuck, baby… yes… I’m going to… explode… make me cum… fuck… you fucking beautiful bitch… yes… right there… faster… faster…”
I exploded in her hand, sending thick milky ropes of cum high in the moist night air. She hummed as she pumped my cock faster, shooting jizz all over my stomach and her hand, milking me until there was nothing left to give.
I startled myself awake. I was in my bed, on my back, my hand wrapped around my stiff cock. My hand and stomach were covered with jizz.
“Fuck me,” I sighed.
“No, fuck me,” a voice whispered in my ear. It sounded so real I sat up to look around. I wasn’t sure how, but I knew it was the voice of the girl at the pool.
She was telling me to fuck her.
She wanted me to fuck her.
I was destined to fuck her.
I went into the bathroom to clean myself off, then crawled back into bed and willed myself to fall asleep, hoping that I could resume the wonderful dream and find the girl next door waiting for me there.
I didn’t know how and I didn’t know when, but soon—soon—the girl next door would be in my bed, making my dreams come true.