Awake and Alive (2 page)

It had been a long time since Max had taken a man inside his body, but though the intrusion stung, everything about it felt right. So right. Like there’d never been anyone else.

He let out a shaky breath and gathered his senses, lifted off Jed and rolled a long, slow circle before easing himself back down. It felt amazing. So he did it again, and again, until Jed’s eyes rolled back and he squeezed the wooden bed frame so hard Max thought it would splinter in his hands.

He slowed his movements even more and leaned down, putting his mouth so close to Jed’s ear that his hair tickled his cheek. “You like that?”

Jed growled. It was a predatory sound, a warning almost, though Max knew it would be a while before Jed would be able to exact his revenge. “You were wrong, you know.”

Max nipped Jed’s neck. “About what?”

“This.” Jed released the bed frame and gripped Max’s hips. “I’d thought of this, I just didn’t think I’d convince you to do it.”

Max let Jed lift him up, down and around, rescinding control of the pace. “Why not?”

Jed shifted, still maneuvering their bodies where they were joined, experimenting, trying out different rhythms, looking for that magical cadence that suited them both. He sucked in a sharp gasp of air before he was able to answer. “Figured you’d be too worried… fuck…’bout hurting me.”

Max grinned at Jed’s lack of coherency. Jed was a cool customer, and it was thrilling to watch him lose his calm control. “I am worried. I’m always worried, but that doesn’t mean I won’t do it anyway. It’s your body. It’s up to you to tell me it hurts.”

He ground the last few words out through clenched teeth. Jed pulled Max down until their faces were an inch apart. “You’re so beautiful like this.”

Max smiled, taking in Jed’s heated gaze and the flush across his strong chest. He considered returning the sentiment… considered opening his mouth and letting all the love he held for this amazing man to roll from his tongue and consume them both. But he didn’t. Articulate, succinct words were Jed’s thing, not his.

Instead, he took Jed’s hand from his face and placed it back on his hip, relaxing his body and letting Jed take his weight in his strong hands. “Show me,” he whispered. “Show me how this makes you feel.”

The time for talk was over. Max leaned forward, steadying himself with one hand, and let Jed manipulate the sensation between them until his mind was devoid of all else. Jed took his time, drawing out every movement, every roll and slide, until they reached the point where need overtook them both.

Max let go of the headboard and leaned back, taking Jed deeper inside him, and took himself in hand, matching Jed’s toe-curling and twisting thrusts. Sweat broke out over his chest. The bed groaned and squeaked, mingling with harsh, breathless groans. Release coiled, hot and wild, deep in Max’s belly, spreading slowly at first, but then like a rampant fire, roaring through his veins until he came with a yell, spilling onto Jed’s chest with a violent jerk.

Jed grimaced, like something hurt, but he clamped his hands down on Max’s hips and held him still when he tried to draw back. “Fuck, don’t stop… oh, God,
Max
.”

Max felt him come. Felt every shudder, jolt, and wince. It hurt, he knew it did, but when he raised his head and met Jed’s eyes, he saw it was the best kind of pain. He kissed Jed’s forehead, his eyelids, and his lips before he pulled off him and collapsed by his side.

He put his chin on Jed’s shoulder and closed his eyes as their breathing slowed and the perspiration on their bodies cooled. Jed twined their hands in a death grip, but when his fingers fell slack, Max knew he’d fallen asleep.

He disentangled himself and slipped away from the bed to fetch a towel. Jed muttered something as he cleaned them both up, but otherwise remained asleep. Max watched him for a while, content to trace lazy patterns on his chest and play with his hair until he woke a little while later.

“How long was I out?”

Jed’s sleepy smile warmed Max’s heart. “An hour? Not long. You all right?”

Jed hummed and shifted, testing his body. His expression was relaxed and lazy, until he suddenly stilled, and his softly pliant form turned to stone.

Max felt the tension rocket up through his body, cutting through the postcoital haze like a sledgehammer. “Jed? What is it? What’s wrong?”

Jed moved his hand to his abdomen, resting it over the surgical wound. “Nothing. I….” He stopped, his expression frozen. “It felt weird for a moment. It’s gone now.”

Max was unconvinced, and neither man moved a muscle. Max’s mind began to race, picturing the worst-case scenarios, listing the people he would need to call if Jed needed help. It would have to be Carla, or Dan, or even Dr. Howarth. Or 911 if Jed couldn’t make it to a car by himself….

Jed laughed. Max jumped a mile. “
What
? What is it?”

Jed took his hand and laid it where his own had been moments before. “Feel that?”

Max waited, wound so tight he thought he’d explode, until he felt a strange bubbling sensation somewhere below the palm of his hand. “Bloody hell. Did your belly just growl?”

Jed nodded, his gaze as wide and awed as Max felt. It had been a long time since Jed had last felt the physical effects of a real appetite.

“Are you hungry?”

“Guess I must be.”

Max grinned. Grinned so hard his cheeks hurt. Jed smiled back, and the words he’d repressed earlier came rushing back. “I bloody love you. You know that, right?”

Jed’s gaze softened. It was almost imperceptible, but the single tear on his cheek gave him away. “I do, and I love you too. More than you know. Now let’s go make dinner.”

A
FEW
weeks later, Jed found himself in a new version of his own personal hell, staring at a broken kid curled up in a ball beside him. He was young—younger than Max—but his face was old. Old and weathered by life, like he’d seen the worst the world had to offer, over and over again.

And perhaps he had.
Veteran
. Jed turned the word over in his mind with a strange, muted sense of disgust. The kid—Brady—was twenty-two years old.
Twenty-two
. How the fuck was he a veteran of
anything?

He glanced around. It had been an hour or so since Carla had duped him into accompanying her to the VA center and abandoned him in the psych department. She’d claimed she needed help with something, but he knew better. Women were something of a mystery to him, but he knew an attempt at cunning when he saw one, and that chick was definitely up to something. Why else would she have dumped him here, of all places?

Beside him, Brady muttered something. Jed leaned closer, recognizing the melodic lilt of Arabic. “No one’s going to hurt you here, kid.”

Brady turned glazed eyes on him and stared. Jed had been sitting beside him a while now, but it was the first time either of them had spoken. “You speak Arabic?”

“I’ve heard that phrase before. Where did you hear it?”

“Abu Ghraib.”

“Do you know what it means?”

The young soldier nodded. “The interpreter told us.”

Jed absorbed the information with a bitter smile. The atrocities committed at the notorious Baghdad prison had swept through the war-torn country like a plague, alienating the population from the invading coalition even more than they’d been before. “How long were you there?”

“I don’t know. We went there to deliver a prisoner. I feel like I never left.” Brady hugged his knees closer to his chest, and for the first time Jed saw the dark, ominous bruises on his neck. Self-inflicted bruises from a noose or ligature.

Jed glanced around him again, taking in the blank, hollow stares of the other men, the lost, helpless faces of their loved ones, and the oppressive silence of the unit. He’d heard about places like this, and seen signs of PTSD in himself, but he’d never seen it on this scale before. The unit was like another world, like the worst kind of hell he’d never thought to imagine.

His gaze fell on a table loaded with blank paper and wax crayons. It seemed out of place—like it belonged in a kindergarten—but he supposed pencils and pens weren’t a good idea in a unit full of resourceful, suicidal men.

He got to his feet, waited a moment for the dizziness that never came, and crossed the room to the table. He wasn’t used to his renewed sense of balance. The tiny robot in his belly had changed his life, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, standing up was no longer a game of Russian roulette.

He selected a black crayon and a few sheets of paper. Brady hadn’t moved when he returned to his spot beside him. Jed regarded him for a moment. “What other Arabic do you know?”

Brady shook his head. “Don’t know nothin’.”

Jed set the pile of paper between them and sketched out a short phrase of flowing Arabic script. He set it aside and drew another, then another and another. He taught Brady the translations to little effect until he came to the last one. The phrase came to him from a poem he’d once seen sprayed on the wall of a holy building in Jerusalem. He’d altered the translation to suit his purpose, but the sentiment was the same.

“I laugh in the dark,” Brady repeated dully. “I like that one.”

Jed folded the paper into a small square and held it out. “Live by it, then. If you don’t laugh, you’ve really got nothing.”

He left Brady to his staring and searched out Carla. He found her on a bench in the corridor, watching Brady with a speculative look on her face. He trailed to a stop beside her with a heavy sigh. His patience with her games was wearing thin. “Spill.”

“I think you should volunteer here.”

“That’s nice.”

Carla narrowed her eyes. “Don’t be a dick. I’m serious.”

Jed tore his gaze away from Brady and leaned against the big blank wall of the newly refurbished corridor. “Care to explain?”

“I think it would be good for you.”

“Why?”

Carla shrugged, but Jed wasn’t buying it. She’d obviously heard or seen something to make her think he needed to be here… here amongst other wounded soldiers and veterans. “What did Max tell you?”

“What makes you think he told me anything?”

“Cut the crap. You need to be honest if you want me to take you seriously. Don’t throw some bullshit theory at me and expect me to jump.”

Carla sighed. “Don’t get pissy with him, okay? He’s trying to understand.”

Jed waited, aware that Max had trouble dealing with all the crap he threw his way, and who could blame him? It was Max who woke him up when he was thrashing around with nightmares. Max who took his hand when he forgot where he was. Max who brought home an abandoned puppy when Jed hadn’t spoken a word in days.

“Glenn told me you all have PTSD in some form or another, even him. That you’d be robots if you didn’t. He said the best therapy for
you
is teaching someone else to get over it.”

“Glenn says a lot of things.”

Carla smiled, and Jed resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He’d noticed the spark between Carla and Glenn, and he wondered if Glenn had put her up to dragging him to the VA center in the first place. Carla was an intuitive chick, but her rhetoric sounded like something Jed had heard a thousand times over in a place far, far away….

“
J
LIKES
poetry, man. Ask him.”

Jed glanced up, distracted for a moment from the strategic conversation he was having with a helicopter pilot. It was a distraction he didn’t have time for, but the humor in Paul’s tone was addictive. “Ask me what?”

Paul jumped down from the back of the truck. The annoying journalist who’d been on base for the past few days followed, hot on his heels. “Ross wants to know how educated we are. I told him you’re a nerd. He doesn’t believe me.”

Jed passed a disinterested gaze over the reporter. The guy was older than all of them except Glenn, but he didn’t seem to know shit about shit. And he wasn’t allowed to ask much, at least not from Jed’s crew. No cameras, no recorders. Just a notebook and a pencil, and some heavy-assed censorship from the powers above.

Still, his question seemed pretty benign. Jed figured he’d throw him a bone. “If I am a nerd, I’m an uneducated nerd. None of us went to college.”

“Not even Glenn?”

Jed inclined his head to where Glenn was counting out morphine rations. “Ask him yourself.”

“I will, later.” Ross edged his way closer to where Jed and the pilot had spread their maps out on the hood of the truck. He wanted to look, Jed could tell, but he didn’t. “Paul said you wrote a poem on his bunk once. What was it?”

Jed shot a glare at Paul, feigning hurt. “You don’t remember?”

Paul shrugged. “Maybe. I was pretty drunk. Was it the Russian one?”

Jed didn’t answer. Paul was good at playing the dumbass jock, but there was far more to him than that. Far more to all of them than that. Paul frowned. In Jed’s peripheral vision, he saw Glenn drift closer, his amusement clear.

“I know it,” Luke spoke up from the back of the truck. “It’s the one with women cutting shit up, right?”

“Shut your mouth. I know it.” Paul seemed annoyed, and that shit was fucking hilarious. Jed waited, and sure enough, Paul managed to recall the first three lines of the poem. He said them slowly, like he knew something was missing.

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come to cut up what remains… um… just roll to your rifle and blow up your brains. That’s it, right?”

Jed rolled his eyes. “Something like that.”

“Who wrote that? Some Russian tsar, or something?”

Jed cut his gaze at the reporter. What the fuck? What kind of writer was this dude? “It’s Kipling.”

“Oh.”

Jed suppressed a sigh and turned his attention back to the waiting pilot.

Glenn snorted and thumped Ross’s back. “Don’t sweat it, man. Jed’s smarter than all of us. If he doesn’t get dead in this dumbass war, you’ll find him growing old in some dusty library at the end of the world, reading books to the masses.”