Between Here and the Horizon (25 page)

“I know how to work one, sure. However, I don’t
own
one.”

“Who the hell doesn’t own a microwave?”

“
Who the hell doesn’t watch porn
?” He was enjoying this far too much. I never thought I’d see the day Sully Fletcher smiled, and yet here I was, witnessing the miracle with my own two eyes. His whole face changed. The severity lifted from his features, and everything all at once seemed…
light
. It was like looking at another man, a stranger I hadn’t met yet.
 

“Glad to see you’re still capable of laughing at my expense, despite the blood loss,” I informed him. I was smiling, too, though. Just a little. Just enough to fuel him on.

“I could be laid out on my death bed and I still wouldn’t be sick enough to resist taking a pot shot at you, Lang.”

“I’m honored. And why does sparring with me bring you such immense joy, I wonder?” I was only half joking when I asked this; his constant need to be baiting me, cajoling me, or just being downright rude to me seemed to be his only goal when we were around one another.
 

Sully’s smile shrank. It went from a blazing level ten, to a much more somber level four. It still lingered at the corners of his mouth and around his eyes, though, like a fire that wouldn’t go out. “It
does
bring me immense joy. And you know all too well why I do it, Lang.”

“I don’t.”

“Now that
is
bullshit.”

I shook my head, folding my arms across my chest, and Sully sighed. He looked resigned. “Why does any little boy pull a girl’s pigtails in the school yard? Why does any teenaged guy with hormones pretend to ignore the prettiest girl in school?”

“You do
not
have a crush on me.”

“Sure I do.”

“You’re playing with me.”

“I’m not.”

“The way a cat toys with a mouse, you asshole.”

“If it’s safer for you to believe that, then okay, Lang. I’m playing with you.”

“It’s not safer. It’s the
truth
.”

Sully didn’t open his mouth again. He simply stared at me with that little half smile on his face, taunting me. Or at least I thought he was. Damn it! Things were crystal clear before—Sully Fletcher hated me— and now they were so muddied, I had no idea what was going on.

Sully smirked, obviously enjoying the fact that I was squirming. “So. Are you gonna stitch me up or what?” he asked.
 

“Absolutely not. I’m not doing that. Are you crazy?”

“Well, I can’t do it myself. I tried to last time, and look how that turned out.”
 

Why was it no surprise that he’d taken a needle and thread to himself? I could almost imagine the conversation he’d had with the doctors on the mainland, when he’d told them all to go to hell.

“I can always superglue myself back together if you’re squeamish,” he continued. “I have some
Gorilla Glue
around here somewhere.”

“You can’t!”

“That’s how we patch people up out in the field. It’s the most effective method there is to prevent blood loss.”

I wondered if he realized he wasn’t in the field anymore, and that there were other, safer ways of doing things. “How about some food instead?”

He sighed, resigned. “Sure.”

He allowed me to pass when I tried to enter the kitchen this time. He didn’t follow after me. I put the chicken casserole in the fridge and went about heating up the bolognese sauce, rifling through his cupboards once more, hunting for dried pasta. When I couldn’t find any, I stuck my head back into the living room to ask Sully where it was kept and nearly screamed when I found him naked, standing in the middle of the room. Thankfully his back was to me—I got his ass instead of anything more…well,
more
.
 

Sully didn’t turn around, but I could see his shoulders were shaking. He was laughing. The bastard was laughing! “You can help me get dressed if you like?” he offered. “I’m having trouble with the bending part. If you could hold my boxers out, it’d make it a hell of a lot easier to step into them.” I saw then that he was holding a clean t-shirt in one hand, a pair of rolled up boxer briefs in the other.
 

“I think I’ll pass. Uhh, where do you keep your pasta?”
 

Sully must have been all too aware that I was still staring at his ass, because he flexed, making his left cheek jump not once but twice. Slowly, he angled his body, almost turning around, at which point I studiously glared at the kitchen tile at my feet.
 

“I don’t have spaghetti,” he said. “There are pasta shells on top of the fridge, though.” He was trying not to laugh, but not very hard by the sounds of things.
 

I disappeared back in the kitchen, shaking my head, trying to dislodge the image of Sully’s ass that had burned itself into my retinas. It wasn’t all that easy, though. I got the feeling I could bleach my eyeballs and the sight would still be there every time I blinked.
 

When I took the steaming hot food back into the living room, clattering and banging and making enough noise to wake the dead, just to make sure he heard me coming this time, Sully was sprawled out on the couch, fully dressed (thank god) and he had my cell phone in his hand.
 

I stopped dead. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He tapped something into the phone, and then looked up at me. “Don’t panic, Lang. I wasn’t reading your texts.”

“Then what were you doing?”

“Prank calling myself so I have your number. Next time you bring food over, I want to be able to make requests.”

“Who says I’ll be bringing anything over ever again?” I placed the plates of food down on the small coffee table in front of him, scowling. “No one ever tell you it’s rude to mess with another person’s phone?”

“I thought we’d already established that I
am
rude. Aren’t you crazy to expect anything else from me? Look, if it’s bothering you, here. Have my phone. Do whatever the hell you want with it. Look at my texts. You can go through my photos. Read my email. I don’t give a shit.” He tossed his cell up in the air, expecting me to catch it, but I let it land on the carpet at my feet with a heavy thud.
 

“No, thank you.”

Sully peered over the edge of the table, presumably to check if his phone was broken. He groaned as he strained his stomach, then sank back into his seat when he saw the iPhone was fine. “Probably for the best. There’s some fucked up shit in there. You’re quite the conundrum, Lang. Do you know that?”

What did Sully Fletcher consider fucked up shit? I was four parts intrigued and six parts worried. It certainly didn’t make me want to search through his cell phone like a crazy jealous girlfriend, though. Even when I suspected something was going on with Will, when he was working late all the time and getting strange texts at two o’clock in the morning, I never stooped that low. I wasn’t going to do it now, even with Sully’s permission. “I’m hardly a conundrum,” I told him, planting a container of Parmesan cheese down in front of him. “I just don’t like people taking liberties.”

“None taken. Yet,” he said, smirking. “But feel free to overstep as many boundaries as you like when you’re in bed later, all hot and bothered, staring at my number in your phone, wondering if you should message me.”

“You think pretty highly of yourself, don’t you?”

He nodded sagely. “I have to. No one else is gonna bother.”

That struck me as a sad thought. Rose was right; she’d painted a pretty lonely picture of Sully’s personal life in order to get me to go visit him at the medical center, but it had all been true. He really didn’t have anybody. His parents were dead. Now his brother. He refused to let anyone else close enough to care about him.
 

“Don’t look too maudlin, Lang,” he said, scratching at his throat, still smiling. “Believe me. I prefer it this way.”

I did believe him. He’d designed this life for himself, where he didn’t have to work with anyone, speak to anyone, see anyone if he didn’t want to. The lonely man in the lighthouse. The tormented man living by the sea. It was strange that he would have come back here after leaving the Causeway for so long, training in the military and being deployed. After all of the chaos and madness of Afghanistan, wouldn’t he have wanted to live in a big city somewhere? Or at least a little closer to civilization. I’d heard enough about ex-soldiers who’d come back from war, and found “normal” life on the mainland too slow paced. Life, as far as I could tell, had practically ground to a halt on the island.
 

“Shall we eat?” Sully said, breaking the tension between us. Or at least putting it to one side for a moment. Patting the sofa next to him, he gestured for me to come take a seat. I would have preferred to sit in the armchair, well away from his broad frame and his strangely intoxicating smell, but I knew what would happen if I made a point of sitting anywhere other than beside him now. He would mock me, endlessly, and I didn’t know if I could take much more teasing right now. Better just to sit down and deal with the close proximity.
 

Sully seemed bemused as we started to eat. Minutes passed by while we enjoyed the food without a word spoken between us. His plate was nearly clear when he broke the silence. “I don’t hate them, you know. I know they’re not to blame for anything that happened between Ronan and me. And
Magda
,” he said, in a much smaller voice. I knew precisely who he was talking about. I was just stunned to the core that he’d brought them up. He had made me promise not to discuss them yesterday, and yet he’d been the one to break that rule. Here he was, breaking it again.
 

When I didn’t say anything, he continued. “The thought of even seeing them makes me crazy, though. Magda always told me she didn’t want to have kids. And then a handful of years and three ruined lives later, she popped two out, just like that. Like it was nothing. Like she’d been meaning to her whole life.”

It made sense that he’d be resentful to the children. When he put it like that, I could understand. It was futile to be holding grudges against minors though. Like he’d said only a moment earlier, it really wasn’t their fault.
 

“I’m sorry, Sully. You must have loved Magda very much. It must hurt like hell to know her children are so close now.”

He put down his fork, staring at the mess of sauce and pasta that remained on his plate—I had the sneaking suspicion he’d suddenly lost his appetite. “It doesn’t, though. It doesn’t hurt at all. I’ve been numb for a very long time, Lang. Nothing touches me anymore. A nuclear bomb would have to detonate inside my chest cavity to stir even the faintest of responses from the lump of flesh that pumps my blood around my body.”

“I sure that’s an intentional def—”

“Do
not
say defense mechanism. I’m done defending myself from things. I decided
assault
was the only way forward a long time ago. Facing things head on, tackling the things that scare me without blinking. That’s how I’ve dealt with my problems since Afghanistan.”

“I can see that.”

“Can you, now?” he looked amused. “Well, there’s an interesting thought.”

“Why so?”

“Because I work my hide off to make sure no one sees me at all, most days, Miss Ophelia Lang from California. I’ve been told in the past that trying to get a clear read on me is like trying to see a clear picture through a kaleidoscope. And a fucked up, broken kaleidoscope at that.”

I laughed, imagining who might have told him such a thing. Some poor, heartbroken local? Some young, doe-eyed tourist, hoping to turn a holiday romance into something a little more concrete? Sully was the kind of man to ruin a vacation, and all vacations for the rest of time, the moment you laid eyes on him.
 

“I guess the question is, do you
want
anyone to see you clearly, Sully?” I made sure my tone was light, the question clearly rhetorical. Keeping my head down, I ate while Sully sat next to me, stewing. I could feel him struggling to figure out what he wanted to say. I half expected him to snap and tell me to mind my own damn business, but he didn’t. After a long, long dip in the conversation, Sully finally picked up his fork and considered it. Quietly, under his breath, he spoke. “You said just now that I must have loved Magda very much. It took me a long time to realize it, but I never loved her. You can’t love something that isn’t real. Someone that exists only in your head. She was beautiful, and she was kind in her own way, but she floated along, being whatever she thought everyone else needed her to be. And in the end, she didn’t have a personality of her own. She was a mirror, reflecting back at you what you wanted to see. That’s it. That’s all. An empty, sad shell of a person, waiting to be filled up by someone else. So, no,
 
I didn’t love her very much. I loved the idea of her. The reality was grossly underwhelming.” He stabbed at his shells, spiking the pasta onto the tines, scooping up the meat, and he ate. He didn’t say another word on the matter.
 

I cleaned up the plates and I left, telling him I’d be back again the same time tomorrow. Hours later, in bed, too tired to sleep and too awake to dream, my cell phone buzzed on my nightstand, lighting up the room.
 

It was from Sully. Or, as he’d apparently named himself in my phone, the hottest guy in the world.