Hard Beat(83)

But memories are a bitch sometimes. They haunt you in the middle of the night when nightmares jar you awake with her name on your lips because you didn’t get there fast enough. They sit in a trash can you refuse to empty because if you do, that means she wasn’t real and therefore your feelings weren’t either.

And just when I thought I was getting a handle on it all, on the deception and the heartache because yes, call me a sap, but there’s no other word for that burning pain in my chest that feels like it’s eating me apart, I got the call from the hotel staff about her room. The one place that I refused to venture because if I did go in there and snoop around, I just might find something that would mess me up further: a love note to her husband or a journal entry about how much she loves me.

Not worth the goddamn risk when I’m trying to get her the f*ck out of my head. And of course the minute I walked into her room, where her perfume was still haunting the stale air and her bed was unmade from when I’d propped the pillows under her hips as we’d had sex, was like a cruel assault on my senses from every possible angle.

The funny thing was, I thought I didn’t want confirmation that she was madly in love with her husband, but now seeing all of her equipment gone – laptops, cameras, lenses – it’s almost as if I need to know. To the hotel staffer who supposedly stole the items, the equipment had a monetary value, something they could sell. To me it was the intangibility of her absence, when something – possible e-mails or photos from back home – could exist, something that could answer my questions.

“Tanner? Tanner?” Rafe’s words break through the disbelief that’s deafening me and draw me back to the present.

“Yeah?”

“We’ll deal with the stuff in her room in a minute, okay? For right now, though, I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen. Capisce?”

And here comes the lecture. Probably similar to the one Pauly gave me last night. I lie back on the bed and the damn mattress springs squeak in a bittersweet sound that makes me want to jump off the bed and at the same time shift my body so that I can hear it again. One more thing to solidify in my mind that what we had was real.

And since we didn’t tell anyone, it’s not like I can admit to Rafe his assumption is true. Everyone here thinks I’m moping around because I’m upset that I couldn’t protect her from the IED and that the déjà vu of not being able to get to Stella in time has f*cked with my head even more than they thought.

Too bad my head is fine. It’s my heart that hurts like a son of a bitch.

“I can’t wait to hear your words of infinite wisdom,” I say, not really caring that I’m pushing the boundaries with my boss. “Lay it on me, Rafe.”

“We’re on a strict don’t ask, don’t tell policy right now. I’m not going to ask and you’re not going to confirm what I’m asking without asking because it’s none of my business and one hundred percent my business all at the same time. You guys built a bond as partners, she got hurt, so now the bond is stronger. So strong in fact that you caused a serious scene at Landstuhl, risking your security clearance. There’s only one reason in my mind why you’d react so strongly, call me up and ask me questions about Beaux’s marital status, and then get pissed when I don’t give you answers… but that’s all supposition from the outside looking in. That and the fact that I’ve never seen you act like this before, even after…” His words trail off, the implication of after Stella died left hanging on the line like a goddamn white elephant, and I bite back every smart-assed comment on my tongue because it’s just not worth it.

The only response I give him is a low “Mmm-hmm.”

“So you hoof it back to your assignment, and have been there for what, a week? And you’re still desk jockeying the shit out of recycled material instead of following up on the story. Can you tell me what’s wrong with this picture?”

The buzz is gone, I almost say but catch myself. I got back here and I had no desire to get back in the game. Zilch. Zero. I had no desire to contact Omid or to get on an embed mission with Sarge despite his calling me about exactly that to assuage his own unfounded guilt over the blast. Nothing. That live by the sword, die by the sword buzz I’ve used for over ten years to propel me to become the top foreign war correspondent is nowhere in sight.

“There’s most definitely not a picture, Rafe. None whatsoever, considering I don’t have a photographer to take one until she comes back,” I state evenly to try to hide from the fact that he’s absolutely f*cking right.

“Is that what this is? Are you waiting for her to come back, Tanner?” He sounds so much like my father giving my teenage self a lecture that it’s comical. “Screw her stuff that was stolen. It’s insured, and I’ll have the hotel staff pack up what’s left. She isn’t coming back.”

The breath I didn’t even realize I was holding whooshes out in a deceptively even draw as the wind is knocked out of me. There goes that stupid little thread of hope that I had held on to for some reason that she’d come back, see me, and we’d be good again. It shatters me.

“She’s not?” I ask, making sure my voice is calm although my insides are screaming.

“No. Her condition is improving. She just needs some more monitoring and to take it easy, so she was moved stateside.”