Rough Edge (The Edge #1)(42)

It was getting harder to pull back.

I had control over what I did to her, but without love to set boundaries or guilt to govern my impulses, when would I start to ask myself what I could get away with?

Without the wherewithal to feel fear, I had to ask myself if I should be afraid.

By the time I left the OR in the morning, one thing had become very clear.

The absolutes were unsustainable.

Not my pattern of madness or her constant patience.

Not my unquestionable demands or her total acquiescence.

The calculation was made to my own detriment, but even in the hardest part of my heart, where the long-term decision happened, the truth of it was the single constant.

This had to end.



* * *



Early morning on September 13th, 2001, I stopped working and started looking for my parents.

At one point, I realized they were never coming back from their morning appointment with their financial advisor. Dad hadn’t been with the first responders doing triage or patching the immediately patchable. He hadn’t made it to a hospital to offer or receive services. My mother wasn’t in a recovery room or wandering around with amnesia.

The flyer I stapled to poles and subway walls had a recent photo of them at a hospital fundraiser. Mom was smiling. When I’d offered to take her away from Dad, she laughed at me. She loved him. She’d never leave him.

I loved him too. I didn’t want to love him. He deserved to be despised, but I couldn’t. I was a surgeon. And an adult. But all I wanted was to earn his approval.

It was a week before I could stomach the September eleventh videos, and that was when the narrative formed. The jumpers were falling like dried buds off an old Valentine’s bouquet, dropping petals of shredded fabric, too fast to identify. Too blurred.

There was a couple holding hands on the way down. They could have been strangers. Friends. Lovers. Married. We’d never know.

The acceleration of gravity is 9.81 seconds per second. They fell for six to eight seconds, depending on wind shear, hitting a velocity of 132 miles per hour. They must have been conscious in freefall. Capable of thought and fear. Capable of peace. Capable of making a decision.

The couple holding hands wasn’t Mom and Dad, because I decided that in the end, my mother would have come to peace and realized she was better than the way he treated her.

And Dad? Was he sorry?

Between the place where I trusted Mom had rejected him and the place where I loved my father enough to wish atonement for him, I hoped he’d died proud of me.

Which was pathetic.

I didn’t find peace. I found impotence and rage. On October first, after hanging on to hope for three weeks, I signed up for the war to keep as many soldiers as possible from dying for my father, and to avenge my mother, who never got to avenge her years of abuse.

We weren’t anything like Greyson’s family. We didn’t have a history of military service. My great-grandfather served as an army doctor in World War II and Korea. That was the extent of it.

The country was doing something. We were taking out the bases where the men who’d killed my parents trained. Even if it was too late, it was something. I wouldn’t watch vengeance on television.

If I’d had a sense of duty before, it had been hidden. My girlfriend at the time was shocked. She’d thought I was crazy. Rich surgeons didn’t sign up for the military. That was for white trash and brown people.

Needless to say, that relationship went down in a sputtering flame from a hundred and ten stories above.

I never looked back.



* * *



In the dark living room, with the streetlights casting edges in blue, I waited for Greyson to come home. We had much to discuss.

The tricky part was explaining things to her as the man she’d married, not the monster I was.

I knew my face was somehow different to her when I was like this.

So I unscrewed the bulb from the front hall.

I knew my voice sounded different, because I could hear the hardness as well as she could.

So I wouldn’t speak.

Damon swirled desperately in the shadows, so real I was sure I could touch him, but I didn’t move. Not when she came up the stoop, carrying a binder, or when she opened the door. Not when she flicked the light for nothing or when she pulled off her coat and dropped her stuff on the chair to try the light again.

I stood.

When she turned and saw my silhouette, she jumped like a colt, then smiled when she realized it was me. “The light’s busted.”

I took her hand and put it over my lips. She let it linger there, and I slid my mouth to the inside of her wrist and kissed the soft flesh, letting my lips linger over the throb of her pulse.

“You’re not mad,” she said.

I shook my head to say no and ran my tongue over the inside of her arm, pushing away the sleeve of her blue dress.

“Good. We should talk.”

“You talk.” The words left my mouth like frozen stones. I wanted control, but I’d spent too much time talking. Too many words gave her space to hear the voice of a man disentangled from his love.

“I’m not sorry about last night,” she said. “I wish I could be there for you every time, but sometimes I just can’t.”

“Mm-hm.” I nodded into her skin. My lips ran up her arm to her shoulder, her neck, kissing the curve of her jaw. A wet sigh drifted from her, and her body lost its rigidity.