When Tyler came through the back door with more wood the room was empty. Conversation had flagged during dinner, and he'd caught Angie looking a little uncertain as the silence went on when they cleaned up. He went outside and found her sitting on the front porch railing looking down toward the meadow and woods. Leaving the door open so the light from inside spilled out onto the porch, he leaned against the railing next to her, facing the opposite direction.
Angie briefly touched his left hand where it gripped the wood next to her. A couple of glasses of wine had set the wheels turning in her head that usually stayed still, and they were driving thoughts she'd rather have left alone.
"That's where the ring goes," she said, "since we came here it's been impossible to ignore."
She saw more than he'd imagined, so why deny it. "I never wore one."
"You didn't have to." Angie swung one leg over the rail so she was straddling it, facing him. "You don't want to know my story, that's plain enough. I don't ask too many questions because I feel safer finding out on my own, but you know by now I ask when I have to. You don't ask because you don't want to know, and you don't like to answer because… who the hell knows."
Tyler looked her in the eye. "I know what I need to know. And you're here because you want to be, so you must know what you need to know, too. What I wore and didn't wear and where I've been and what I've done, whatever you haven't figured out yet, that's not your business. It doesn't change anything here and now."
"Fine. I've figured out what you said that first day about getting 'that poison' out of your system might have something to do with this," she raised the hand he'd slapped, the wrist he'd grabbed, touched the places on her head and face he'd bruised, more importantly that he'd felt compelled to soothe with kisses, "and why you told me you wouldn't do it again. I didn't have to ask to find out."
"You don't know as much as you think."
But she could tell she'd touched a nerve.
"Yeah, well neither do you. When I asked Chris if I reminded you of somebody he told me I remind you guys of everybody. Well I'm not everybody, I'm just me."
"I know that."
"No, you don't," Angie insisted, "because you don't want to know." Tyler stood abruptly and took a step away but Angie reached out and grabbed his arm. "Stop. Why don't you want to know me?"
He didn't answer, but he didn't walk away. He settled back against the railing again, looking very weary. Angie went on as if in response to a direct question.
"The last time I woke up with a man was the morning of the day I left Boston. David was his name, a college professor, regular at the library, that's how we met. Older than me. He was smart, had been everywhere, had enough degrees to put half the alphabet after his name. And he was quiet, and calm," as she looked hard at Tyler, the "like you" was silent but he could hear it loud and clear, "and married. Two kids. No plans to leave. And I didn't care. I didn't want to know about his life, I only needed to know about what we said and did and thought together. So I left him at my apartment that morning the day after he told his wife for the hundredth time he'd be staying on the couch in his office because he worked late, and when he died the last person he'd been with wasn't his wife. It was me. And when she died, maybe she knew that. Maybe she didn't. But I still didn't care." Now Angie climbed off the railing and stood in front of Tyler as if pleading a case in court. "So now you know why when you call me 'Angel', you're wrong. I'm nobody's angel. I'm nobody's good omen. And the reason I know it's true is that I still don't care." She pointed to his left hand again, "And if you're married, I don't care about that either because like you said I'm here because I want to be, because you're quiet and calm and I need that. And you don't make me explain anything, and I need that too. But some things about me you need to know, so you'll know I'm not 'everybody'. For me to be sure you can tell the difference, maybe there's more I need to know about you, too. Maybe this no questions thing only goes so far."
Still getting no response, Angie thought for a minute and then stepped back. "Well I guess there's another thing we have in common. We both don't care, just about different things."
This time it was Angie who turned to walk away, and Tyler let her. But he followed.
She sat on a rock at the bottom of the slope and just stared. At the trees, at the stars, and the waning moon. It really was a perfect refuge, no matter what your idea of hell was.
"I was married." His voice came from behind, above her. Quiet.
"I told you, I don't care about that."
"I do." Tyler crouched next to where Angie sat. "I was married, a long time ago. Cambodia. One kid, a daughter. Missing, presumed dead." End of story. He paused, then added, "You're not 'everybody' even if you remind me of everybody, sometimes." She didn't answer, so he went on. "You got some of it right, but most of it wrong."
"That's not my fault."
"I didn't say it was." He motioned for Angie to slide over and sat down next to her. "You want to know about poison… I was full of it. You can't blame it on any one thing because in Nam, in the Company's special ops, there were too many like Chris who didn't have it to blame it on the war. The ones of us who did, to us it wasn't poison, not then, it was a drug, with a rush better than anything. The spoils, we were entitled. So there was always a reason, always an excuse. Win a battle, take down a Cong cell, there were always women left alive to burn off the adrenalin. Lose a mission or a buddy, we could burn off the anger the same way. Later on, you're getting better at it and moving up the ladder, it was the same thing only the hooches were hotel rooms and the women could be operatives, could be hookers, could be anybody who slowed down long enough to let you buy them a drink." His voice got cold. "Hey, it was a perk of the job. No names, no faces. No stories. After awhile the whole thing makes you sick, like any drug will, and you don't get the kick you used to. And I got there fast, and I got there young. By the time I met Mai Linh I was burnt out and ready to play at being civilized. I didn't expect that quiet sober part of me was still around, waiting for its chance, but there it was, and it busted out like it was dying for air. Of course most people think that losing people can kill the good and leave the bad to do its thing, and that's how they see me. That suits me fine, because in my line of work it doesn't do to have people look too close. It's not as simple as that, though…I just didn't find a reason to tap into it for a good long time, but I remembered how sick that poison made me feel so I left that behind. That's something Reno taught me, that all this 'soft side/hard side/dark side/light side' bullshit is just that, bullshit. We all have all of it in us, we just store it differently and you have to learn to balance it. And to balance it, you gotta stand still, be quiet..."
"And breathe."
Tyler had been staring off into the woods as Angie had been, and now he looked at her as if she'd just arrived. "Like I said, you got some of it right." He motioned behind them toward the cabin. "So Chris and Reno helped me put this place together, because as I got better at what I did there was less and less time and space to get the balance back."
"And here is the place you can just breathe." No question mark.
"Good a way as any to put it."
"But why did you bring me?" She just wanted to know she was more than a cure for "everybody".
He cocked his head, and looked her over in that methodical way he'd done a short while ago. "Because I thought you'd fit here, and you could use a little refuge from hell. Because you have a name, and a face. Because something is dying for air again, and it's been too long since it had the chance to breathe."
Angie wasn't sure she understood all of it. "I'm not an antidote, Tyler."
"No, you're not. This is," he reached an arm around her and kissed the side of her face, holding her there for a moment. "Easy, quiet. That's the antidote." He let her go and stood up to face her. "And that's as much as you need to know. You wanna go back to L.A. now?"
Back to plan A, he suggested that first night we arrived when he kissed me and I was too surprised to kiss back.
"Nope."
"You never disappoint me, Angel." He predicted her protest and headed it off. "If I say you're a good omen, you're a good omen. You can live with that."
"Okay."
When they got back to the cabin, after he laid more wood on the fire, Tyler walked to the bed and turned to Angie, making a beckoning motion with both hands.
"C'mere."
She went to him and hooked her fingers in his belt. "When are you gonna give up that lame line?"
"When it stops working."
Half an hour later Angie lay tangled with Tyler, overwhelmed. He'd worked her clothes off, inches at a time – "I wanna unwrap you very carefully, like a case of nitro" – while she'd managed to peel off only his shirt, and even that was hard work. He was completely absorbed in touching, kissing, tasting, every inch of her, as if thoroughly mapping her through his hands and mouth and face, every sound he drew from her answered by the smiles she could feel against her skin.
"Nice," he breathed against her shoulder, her neck, "nice…" he was covering her neck and breasts with lazy licking kisses, surrounding then sucking in hardening nipples, tracing goose bumps with sensitive fingertips. When she tried to pull at his clothes, give him as good as he gave (as if it were possible, she was beginning to wonder…) he'd distract her by triggering another bundle of nerve endings in the most amazing places, inside her elbow, between her fingers.
"Tyler," she managed between sighs and whimpers, "Tyler," and tugged at his shoulder. He stopped (the shock almost killed her) and brought his face near hers.
"D'you think," he muttered, trailing more kisses against her face until he reached her ear, "under the circumstances… you could remember my first name?"
"Ham," she gulped, "what about you... what do you want..."
He never let up for a second, but paused to mumble in her ear before filling it with a wet kiss, "this is what I want, and this," he moved on to the hollow of her throat, "and this," her head twisted and she gasped as his fingers crept lower to stroke and tease her, "and this," he continued to make a slow, endless "tour" of her with his mouth while his hands did things that shut her brain off entirely.
He hadn't told her all of it, he'd decided not to frighten her with more than she needed to know... she'd been right in a way, he thought as he explored her inch by delicious inch and smiled at the sounds she made, she was the antidote or part of it anyway. He knew what he'd been, and it was more than he'd told her. He'd been a rapist pure and simple; the power rush was the drug that made him sick in the end. The rush had been turning "no" into a moot point and leaving his spoils where he'd found them, to prove they didn't matter and he was in charge. Killing couldn't do it, no decent power rush there because it was over and done with the last heartbeat. The power he could hold over someone left alive, now that was something he could hold onto. He'd told the truth about it making him sick in the end, and this was the antidote, but he couldn't make it work on his own, he needed…
…to be welcomed by someone, quiet and calm and willing, that was the new drug that wiped out the old, and the more welcome he could make himself the better he liked it, and the pleasure was directly linked to the length of time he could take to experience it... lovemaking slow and endless because it was the opposite of what he used to be, fast and hard and brutal... the cosmic payback life had given him had been that once he'd come out of that poisoned fog that there was nobody anywhere who would welcome him that calm quiet way, not until he met his wife, and after he lost her he'd learned to do without this kind of progressive healing he felt when he could touch and taste and hold a woman and make up for everything he'd done and everything he'd discovered so late that he'd missed, I might just make this last all night, he thought, god it had been so long, when for so long the women who said they wanted him were just turned on by the leather and firepower and didn't know or want him, but someone to live up to their movie/magazine fantasies (Soldier of Fortune... he laughed at that, and because he was tasting and exploring hot and sweet between Angie's legs he had to catch her hand when she cried out and grabbed for his thinning hair)... and there were those times when the leftover adrenaline from any given job left him with that ache in his balls that demanded attention, so he'd given them what they wanted and pounded into them until they screamed the way they wanted to, with no satisfaction for himself besides killing the ache, it couldn't even be called relief... he'd leave them still catching their breath, pull on his clothes and get the hell out trying not to look at them because the only difference between the way they looked lying there and the ones he'd left lying there in the past was the absence of bruises and blood... yeah, this was what he wanted, as he ran tongue-kisses along Angie's hip and into the palm of the hand he still held, slow and warm and welcome, feeling every second and using every sense to be here and now, leaving then and there dead in the past... Angie knew him, even if she thought she didn't, every time she made him listen, every time she listened to him he was more sure... it wasn't that he didn't want to know her story; he knew now he just didn't need to know what she decided not to tell, everything he'd seen since she fell onto his path made him surer of it…
Now he felt her reaching for him, to pull him up to where she could hold and touch him and he thought
okay, let it be her turn, I've paid as much penance as she'll let me for now.
He moved up to the pillows and rolled onto his side; Angie's brow furrowed as she looked at him. Those doors that hadn't been flung wide open in either one of them that first night in L.A. just kind of... disappeared.
Angie could tell there was damage being undone here, so there was something else she needed him to know. She was flushed and breathless and now wasn't the time, but she needed him to know.
"Ham, it's okay."
When he lay back and smiled, every doubt disappeared.
"Yup."
The expression he saw on her face as she leaned over him then was something entirely new; Jesus, she's eyeing me like a Catholic on the last day of Lent... and I'm the dessert buffet.
"C'mere," he invited unnecessarily, laughing as she fell down to devour him, "Be gentle, will you, I still need my strength for when we go back."
When she stopped cold and stared at him with haunted eyes he offered a wry smile as he drew her mouth to his.
"Sorry, Angel, I never know when to keep my mouth shut... why don't you give it a shot..."
This was a first. Barely dawn, a woman draped all over him, and Ham Tyler was not figuring out how to get up and out before she woke up. Hell, he even remembered her name. The room was chilly. He should probably start the fire. Then Angie stirred a little, without waking, and he looked at her where she lay against his shoulder, one leg flung carelessly over his, one hand strewn even more carelessly close to where it could get the day started way too early for both of them.
Cold room, warm bed, soft skin... no-brainer. He moved Angie's hand to a safer location and went back to sleep.
