Uncommon Pleasure (15 page)

“Hey,” Sean said, his voice shifting from disgusted to alert. “Did you see Richards leave? Because his car’s pulling out of the lot.”

Adrenaline shocked Ty to his feet. He scanned the benches
around the lake, then trotted along the path toward the building and around to the loading dock. Richards’s car was gone from the shaded employee parking garage. “I didn’t see it.”
Because I was watching Lauren learn to hate me.
“His car’s gone.”

“Fuck,” Sean muttered. “I’ll call the other team. Maybe they can pick him up.”

“Check and see if the other guys’ cars are still in the garage,” Ty said, his mind racing. He held his phone to his ear, as if he wanted to stand in the shade while conducting a conversation, and angled his body so he could see both the doors into the cafeteria and the garage. Sean’s SUV with borrowed plates prowled through the garage until it reached the top floor, then circled down.

“Both cars are still there. Any chance they left with Richards?”

Ty put his hands on his hips and bent his head. He’d been entirely focused on Lauren. Santa Claus could have come out the cafeteria door with eight tiny fucking reindeer and a merry band of elves, and he would have missed it. “Yeah. There’s a chance.”

Silence, then, “I’ll call it in.”

Fuck the chain of command. It was Ty’s responsibility to report his mistake back to John. Sean knew it. “I’ll do it,” Ty said.

He called John, who said nothing more than a terse
okay
and sent a team out to replace them. Ty skirted the side of an anonymous brick building, left through one of the business park’s side entrances, heading out into the suburban office sprawl. Sean picked him up a couple of blocks away. They drove in silence to John’s office, but Ty didn’t miss the tight clench of Sean’s jaw, the jerky way he handled the car’s gearshift, knew it wasn’t over the egregious, rookie surveillance mistake, but Lauren.

“Look,” he said. “It’s none of your fucking business.”

Sean said nothing, just took the corner into the parking lot at a tire-screeching veer. He got out, slammed his door hard enough to rock the heavy truck, including Ty’s added weight, and strode into
the building. Ty got out of the truck and walked into John’s office. Looked like this was his lucky day. He could end relationships with everyone who cared about him in the span of a couple of hours.

Both the door to John’s office suite and his personal office were flung wide open. Even if they weren’t, Ty would have been able to hear Sean’s outraged bellow through closed doors. “What the fuck is wrong with him? He’s gone from being the guy who held everything together to the guy who fucks it up six ways to Sunday!”

“What happened?” John said mildly when Ty leaned against the doorframe separating the reception area from John’s office, but Ty could see the nerves. He remembered John’s focus on the business that was his future, the diamond glittering on Lucy’s finger that made John’s success her future as well, Sean with thirty days to recover from a deployment and decide what to do next.

The fracture inside him splintered, sending shards of emotion into the numbness.

“Richards left, and I missed it,” he said.

The words hung in the air.

“How?”

The single word was clipped with frustration and disbelief. Ty missed nothing. Nothing. He hesitated for a second, reluctant to bring Lauren into this, because it would mean remembering what he’d said, what he’d done to her.

Like you’re not going to replay that brutal scene every night for the rest of your life.

“He was busy being a fucktard to a woman.”

Sean normally sounded like a walking thesaurus. Ty leveled a look at him. “It’s none of your fucking business.”

“The fuck it’s not my business. You made it my business,” Sean snapped.

Based on Sean’s narrow-eyed glare, he was figuring out exactly what Ty had done Saturday night to all of them. You had to work
pretty hard to sever the bonds of brotherhood formed in the Marine Corps, but he’d almost managed to do that. He wedged a crowbar into the splintered fragments of his soul, spoke words he knew would end everything. “Do you get this emotionally involved every time you fuck a woman? You’ve got a long, hard road ahead of you.”

“The fuck I do,” Sean snapped back. “I know a class act when I see one. Give me a week, and I’ll make her forget you exist.”

The surging acid in his stomach crawled up his throat at the idea. “You’re new to this, so I’ll help you out. Rule number one of fucking in pairs is never take another Marine’s sloppy seconds.”

“Jesus Christ, Ty!” John said, genuinely shocked.

The Academy veneer disappeared from Sean’s face, eerily blank as he surged toward Ty, fists clenched. Ty squared up, ready for the fight, but John put himself between the two of them and shoved them apart. “Step back! Not in my goddamn office!” When they separated, John turned to Ty. “Tell me what’s going on.”

Ty shook his head. Sean hauled in a breath and jammed his fisted hands onto his hips. “Tell him, or I will. All of it.”

Ty folded his arms across his chest, trying to ease the pain from the splinters digging into his lungs. “I met a woman on the rig. We hooked up a couple of times. She works in the same business park, and when I saw her today I ended it. Winthrop got some action with her, and now he thinks he’s her big brother or something.”

The words landed in the room with the splat of a flat basketball hitting concrete, and the moment Ty heard them, pain that had been physical drove into his psyche. John didn’t move, just kept his gaze focused on Ty. Sean fisted his hands on his hips and turned away, but neither of them matched Lauren’s poise when she cut him dead. She wasn’t just a woman he met on the rig. They hadn’t hooked up. It had been so much more than that, and every time he tried to make it small and cheap and ugly, he shattered inside. But he was so lost in his interior wasteland that it never occurred to him that
his drive to sever ties would hurt the people around him more than he could bear.

John and Sean trusted him with their lives.

His screwup today could end Langley Security’s bid for a bigger piece of the corporate espionage pie.

Lauren saw right through his posturing bullshit and came back for more.

This is not who you are. That’s why it doesn’t feel right. Try all you want. This is not who you are.

Caring too much, getting too involved, had torn him apart. The sound of children wailing in terror never, ever went away. Not caring was worse. It shredded his soul, and everyone’s around him.

John had the weirdest expression on his face. Sean’s eyes widened as he took a step toward Ty, and then Ty found himself looking up at the two of them because he was on his ass, back to the wall, and someone with his voice was saying
I can’t do this
.
I can’t. I can’t
.

“Get some water,” John barked. Sean bolted for the cooler in the empty receptionist’s office. “Hey,” John said, hunkering down in front of him. “Hey. It’s okay.”

“It’s actually not okay,” Ty said. His voice shook. “Life is a fucked-up nightmare.”

“Well, sure,” John said sagely, his forearms on his knees. “But it’s what people say in this situation.
It’s okay
.”

Ty laughed, a hard, sharp crack of laughter that sent the thick wedges of pain through his ribs, into the tense air in the office, and buried his face in arms. He took two deep breaths, surprised in some dispassionate part of his brain that he could breathe around this spear of pain, then accepted the cup of water from Sean.

“Is this about the village?” John said quietly. “Because that wasn’t your fault. That was nobody’s fault.”

“Oh, Christ,” Sean said as he spun away, shoved his hands over his hair. “Last night I told her…I didn’t think…”

Ty cut Sean off. “Fuck that, John,” he said flatly. “Fuck. That. Twelve people died. We killed women and orphaned children. It was our road, our territory, our bombs. Somebody has to be at fault. I made them feel safe. I told them they could trust us. And they died.”

A special ops team was under fire, pinned down in the mountains, calling for air support, and somewhere the communication flurry of e-mails, video from drones, text messaging, and calls someone got the air strike coordinates wrong. It was a mistake, a miscommunication, but that was an excuse, not an answer. He’d talked to the extended families that comprised this village, sat with them, drunk their tea, eaten their bread, told them they could trust Americans, that they would be protected. He’d believed in their mission, wanted their trust, spent months offering his and earning theirs. Then he’d walked through the stink of burned flesh and mortar rounds into the rubble of their homes, heard the wails of children, watched them shrink back from him.

“Who’d you talk to about this?” John asked.

He shrugged.

“No one? Jesus, Ty, I thought…”

Ty hated the self-recrimination on his face. “I’m not your responsibility.”

“The fuck you’re not. If I’m yours, you’re mine. That’s how this works.” In a softer tone, he added, “There are people you can talk to. Good people.”

“You didn’t talk to anyone,” Ty scoffed. “We all saw crazy bad shit. I can handle it.”

“You’re fetal on my office floor, you’ve pissed off Winthrop, and from what I can piece together, you’ve been an asshole to a woman you liked enough to fuck more than once. You think you’re handling it?”

Ty considered flattening him, but Sean brought him a second
cup of water, this time holding it out like a peace offering, so he drank that instead. Then he balled up the paper cone and chucked it at the trash can. He knew what to say. He’d heard guys say it a thousand times. “Goddamn it. I eat. I sleep. I don’t drink when I’m offshore. I am fine.”

He knew when guys were lying, too, and he’d go back again and again, listening until they talked. Personnel issues were his specialty, in that other life the bombs destroyed as thoroughly as they’d flattened the village.

“Sure you’re fine,” John said easily, “if that’s all you want out of life.”

He wished it was all he wanted out of life. The problem was, acting like he didn’t want anyone or anything to matter to him didn’t seem to stop people and events from mattering to him. “It’s supposed to be enough.” He looked up. “Jesus, Sean, stop looking at me like I’ve got a gun in my mouth and my finger on the trigger.”

“Then do something about this.”

Sean’s voice, all officer, cracked into the room, and apparently Ty was still a United States Marine because his spine straightened at the tone.

John continued in a more reasonable tone of voice. “Ty, you were the guy who united us as a platoon in boot camp, the one who listened when guys got dumped because they were gone, the one who carried water and batteries when other guys couldn’t. You kept the most boot Marines walking for each other. Jesus, did you think you could stop yourself from caring about people? That wasn’t you before. It’s really not going to be enough for you after. What we saw, what we did, it changes us. It’s how you know you are okay. If it didn’t…life would be a fucked-up nightmare.”

Ty said nothing.

“If the positions were reversed, what would you tell me?” John asked.

A bitter laugh. “You fucker. I’d tell you to talk to someone.”

“Good advice. Take it.” As if that settled things, John stood up and held out his hand.

Maybe it did.

Ty let his breath seep from between his lips, then took the proffered hand. John, his friend, his brother-in-arms pulled him to his feet. He pushed his hair back, settled his hands on his hips, and looked at John. “I’m sorry about today. It’s on me, and it won’t happen again.”

“Team two picked them up a mile from Richards’s house. The time frame’s right for him to have driven straight there from work. Forget about it.”

Relief swamped him, and when it receded he felt a little cleaner inside, as if the ecosystem of his soul was healing, new growth emerging from a year of self-imposed solitude and sorrow and guilt. “Yeah. Okay, good.”

“Make an appointment.”

“I will.”
Eventually.

“Make an appointment and tell me when it is so I can take you,” John amended.

The stubborn son of a bitch reminded him of Lauren. “I can go by myself.”

“You can, but I’m going to go with you,” John said amiably. “Or Sean will, until he makes up his mind what he’s doing with his life. You’re not in this alone.”

“Damn straight,” Sean said. He was leaning against John’s desk, arms folded across his chest.

Ty swallowed hard against the thick lump in his throat. Blinked. His friends just watched while he turned away and got himself under control.

“Call Lauren,” Sean said unexpectedly, and shrugged when John
and Ty both looked at him. “I don’t know her that well, but somehow I don’t think she’ll break when you tell her the bad shit.”

He thought about that for a long moment, what he’d said, her face when he’d taken her trust and thrown it away like a dirty piece of trash. He owed her an apology and an explanation, but he didn’t have a Marine Corps-strength relationship forged into steel with her. Whatever you could call what they had, it bloomed as fast and potent and velvety-soft as a hothouse flower, and as fragile.

“I fucked that up but good,” he said quietly.

An awkward silence settled into the room. “One thing at a time,” John said.

Ty nodded. “One thing at a time.”

Two weeks later Ty settled onto his bench for his surveillance
shift. It was one in the afternoon, and the humidity from a late fall hot spell trapped the sun’s light and rays like a wet blanket. Shards of light reflected off ripples in the lake as the ducks paddled listlessly from the island in the center to the edge. He snugged his wraparound glasses against the bridge of his nose, pulled his A&M ball cap lower on his head, and waited for Lauren to appear.

Sean’s low voice resonated in his ear. “What’s with the A&M cap? I thought you were a Texas fan.”

“Switching up my look.”

“You want to switch up your look, get a haircut.”

Ty waited until two women gossiping about a coworker passed him before he responded, but Lauren’s appearance in the door leading to the cafeteria stopped the words in his throat. While she no longer sought him out, she still ate her lunch outside. She emerged from the dining area on the building’s first floor, found a spot at random, sometimes passing him in search of a bench, ate, and went
back inside. She never rushed her meal, never looked even remotely uncomfortable, never looked his way. Sometimes she brought an e-reader with her, holding it in one hand while she ate. The birds always got her crumbs.