Rough Edge (The Edge #1)(35)

“You can still sign on for the reserves.”

“No.” I stood up to leave.

“IRR. Individual Ready Reserve,” he said as if I didn’t know what IRR stood for. “You stay home. No training. That’s the last carrot I have.”

“I’m not a root vegetable guy, but thanks.”

Having refused the carrot, I left without considering the stick.



* * *



I was losing her. I saw it happening and I’d stepped right into it.

No one, least of all a psychiatrist, wanted to live with a crazy person. I didn’t want to come home to open heart surgery either.

Yet the more I tried to get a handle on it, the worse it got. And the more I let loose and tried to stop worrying, the faster the Thing came back. It was always there now, and the days between breaking her got fewer and fewer. Sometimes we’d be at it on normal days and I’d get rough and demanding anyway. But unless I was on the edge, the Thing couldn’t see it.

“Did you do the test with Ronin today?” Greyson asked when she came upstairs from her last session. She’d had to take evening hours to accommodate patients with day jobs.

I held her close and kissed her. She tasted of the handful of almonds she’d wolfed down between patients.

“Yeah,” I said.

“What was it?”

“Trigger test. I don’t think I pass muster.”

“Maybe he’s working on something else.” She slid away from me.

Her optimism only highlighted the fact that she was losing hope. I couldn’t shatter it, nor could I bear to hear her ask me if I wanted to enlist in the reserves. I decided right then that I wouldn’t tell her. All her hope would flow there.

“He’s working on sending you every vet he comes across.”

“I have a hard time telling these guys they can’t see me.” She got a jug of OJ from the fridge and gave it a hard shake. “You see the hard time we’re having getting someone for you.”

The fridge clicked on, and I stiffened. I was so sick of hearing a voice in the hum of technology that I got annoyed at the appliances.

“‘Getting someone for me.’” I walked the length of the kitchen for no reason. “I’m a patient now. A run-of-the-mill nutcase with scheduling issues.”

“Caden.” She poured juice into a glass. “Don’t do this.”

“Do what? I’m the guy with a paranoid delusion that something’s watching me.”

Juice in hand, she came close to me, and I didn’t want her to. Not unless she wanted my dick in her ass.

It had been five days.

She didn’t take this seriously. She thought I was a case to be cured. I hadn’t told her everything because I didn’t want to scare her, but maybe that was the problem. She was coming at me, sliding her hand under my jacket, and with her big eyes and her perfume, it was risky. I was dangerous and she was pushing and pushing in ways she couldn’t understand.

Her perfume wasn’t soothing anymore. It boiled every emotion together. I didn’t even know which one I was reacting to anymore.

“Did I tell you this Thing wants to fuck you?”

She stopped the glass halfway to her lips.

I continued. “It’s obsessed with you. It thinks I don’t deserve you.”

“Caden.” She was level and serious, as if she was going to lay down the law. Speak the truth. Get the true fucking facts. “This is your fear that you don’t deserve good things.”

“Oh, is it?”

“This is you punishing yourself.”

What I’d been holding back herniated, popping past the membrane of resistance fully-formed, blood-red and screaming. My Thing bridged days of suppression, begging for release to be the man she needed.

“Punishing myself for what?” I stepped toward her.

She didn’t budge. She wouldn’t. I knew her that well.

“You were overworked.”

Fallujah again. The rows of bodies and the fast decisions.

“I was doing my job. For the hundredth time—”

“You’re driving me away because you think you don’t deserve to be happy.”

“You think I’m making this up because I have guilt?”

“I never said you were making it up. Your experience is real, but denying this is a defense mechanism isn’t helping you.”

She was minimizing it, but she wasn’t. She saw clearly where I didn’t. She was honest and loyal. She was brave. Very brave. Because she knew there was a battle in my soul, yet she still stirred it.

“Greyson.” I put my hand on her throat and slid it back to the base of her silken hair. Her lips loosened and she blinked quickly. Her nipples would be hard, and she’d be most of the way to wet. I could take her right there. I could fuck the courage and honesty right out of her. “You’re a warrior. I don’t deserve you, but not for the reasons you think.”

I released her and walked to the front of the house. I needed air. I needed space. I needed to avoid turning my rawness against her.

A force hit me from behind, slamming me against the couch. I bent over the arm and righted myself, turning toward her. She was red-faced, hair webbed over her eyes, teeth bared, hands up and ready to strike.