Chapter 12

twelve

The next morning,I wake with my usual erection, deciding to take care of it in the shower. Before, my mind was filled with images it had conjured from scenes at the club, from the kinky porn I’d started watching, but I don’t need any of that this morning. Only Mark’s face, lit by Singapore at night, studying mine. Only his voice, cold and level.

I will use you like a toy.

I will degrade you. I will enjoy it.

Normally, I masturbate like a soldier. Fast, efficient. A quick hand on my cock, the shortest road to release. But this morning, I imagine what Mark would do to me. Nothing as easy as a quick orgasm, I don’t think. Nothing as obvious as steady, tight strokes. He’d touch the inside of me until I was squirming. He’d press against my prostate until I was mindlessly fucking the air. And then he’d edge me until I became nothing but swollen, aching flesh, so full of cum and need that I’d let him do anything, any depraved thing he wanted to do to me.

When I finally climax, a hoarse noise tears up from my throat, my stomach muscles seizing as semen erupts from my jerking, pulsing organ. My heart is hammering against my ribs. I press my forehead to the cold tile of this way-too-opulent hotel shower and tell myself to stop.

Just. Stop.

Maybe he wants to fuck me, but there’s enough in the way that he won’t, and I don’t know if I can handle him saying no to me again. I’ve been through hunger and fire, blood and death, but there’s still a part of my heart that’s soft and easily bruised. Offering Mark what I offered last night?.?.?.?it’s too close to exposing that delicate, beating tissue to him.

When I dress and emerge into the main area of the suite, I find Mark fully dressed and taking a virtual meeting by the window, his watch glinting in the morning sun as he drinks his cappuccino. There is an open newspaper next to his plate, and another folded neatly by his mug. It should be quaint, the paper, the analog watch, but Mark as a man resists even the idea of quaintness.

Instead, it feels purposeful, sophisticated. Intentional. I think if I asked him why the physical newspaper, why the old-fashioned wristwatch, he’d have answers so obliquely logical that I’d feel like an uneducated jackass for even asking in the first place.

“So Hill, Avendano, and Hodges,” Mark says. “With Collier as a possibility.”

“I’ll make it worth your time,” says the other person in the meeting. They sound arrogant and a little desperate. It only took a few weeks in combat for me to learn what a bad combination those two things were in a person.

Mark laces his hands together, his eyes leveled on the screen of the tablet propped in front of him. “There will be several favors I’ll have to call in, and lots of collateral information used up in the process, so it won’t be cheap. It also might not be possible.”

“Ten as a down payment that you can keep no matter what, then,” the man says. “Ten more for succeeding.”

Mark’s face doesn’t change, but I notice his toe taps a little impatiently under the table. “And then thirty more in stock.”

“Twenty million dollars, and thirty million in stock?” the man says incredulously, and I fight to control my expression as I realize exactly how much money is being discussed over an empty cappuccino cup right now. “Trevena, that’s not possible.”

“Ah, Richard,” says Mark. “You know that I know it is.”

There is a silence.

“Fine,” the other man grinds out. He sounds furious. “But that’s contingent on you getting this done.”

“A problem for another day,” Mark replies lightly, and then ends the call.

“Tristan,” he greets, and there’s no sign of anything on his face pointing to our conversation last night—no wariness, no pity. It’s the same cool expression I see every morning when I go up to his office after the daily security meeting.

“Good morning, sir.” I hope I appear as cool as he does and not like I just rode my own fingers thinking of him.

“Please, have some breakfast. And take your time. Today is an easy day. I only have one job for you.”

I sit and help myself to fruit and coffee. “Anything you need me to do, sir.”

“Tonight, I’ll need you to order room service,” he says, setting his tablet back down on the table. “And then receive it without your shirt on.”

I stare at him, my hand frozen on the spoon I’d been using to serve myself cut papaya. “Sorry?” I ask.

I was expecting an excursion into the city, perhaps another visit to last night’s club. Not whatever this was.

“Let’s say”—Mark glances at his watch, seems to be doing math in his head—“at twenty-three hundred hours.”

“Is the shirtless part important?”

“Very. Also, order enough food for two. With champagne.” Mark thinks for a moment. “And have the shower running when they come to the door.”

“Sir,” I say in affirmation, although I’m still confused. I’m not above ordering room service for someone else or anything like that, but it’s strange to be planning it this early in the day. And planning to be shirtless. But it’s my job to do as I’m told, so ordering room service without a shirt it is. With the shower running.

So fucking weird.

“And there’s one more thing for today?.?.?.?” says Mark, and that’s how, an hour later, we end up at a narrow church tucked between apartment buildings, kneeling in the back row while the priest does the liturgy of the Eucharist.

The service is in English, as are the songs, and even though it’s been years since I regularly went to Mass, I recognize the hymn from my childhood, and start singing along about one bread and one body and one Lord of all.

But I’m only a verse or two in when I become aware of a pair of blue eyes fixed on me.

“Sir?” I whisper.

Mark’s looking at me like he’s never seen me before. “You can sing,” he says.

I don’t even know what to say to his observation; it’s like having someone tell me that I have green eyes or freckles on my nose in the summer.

It is strange to think that I can spend nearly every moment of every day with someone and have them not know this about me, this thing that it feels like the whole world knows. Tristan Thomas can sing. He sang in high school, and he sang at West Point, and then when he was deployed, he’d sing if someone had a guitar. He can’t even go to a bar that has the potential of karaoke without being cajoled into singing.

It’s a pointless talent for a soldier. Like a sledgehammer that’s also able to paint miniature oil portraits. Yes, it’s interesting, but when has that ever gotten the job done?

I turn back to the hymnal, even though this song has, like, five lines to it and I’ve had it memorized since I was little, and start singing again.

He keeps watching me. And after we go up and get our Communion, I can feel his gaze moving back to me when we sing the final hymn.

Finally, Mass is over, and rather than get in a car back to the hotel, Mark has us walk.

“Is there a reason we went to Mass today, sir?” I ask after we’re a block away from the church, knowing it’s not actually my business but still curious. Mark’s residual Catholicism seems at odds with his present job and maybe even his past one. That he still feels the need to come sit in Mass sometimes is strange to me. He is hardly what you expect to see in the dictionary if you were to flip the pages open to Good Catholic Man.

A priest torn apart in his own sacristy?.?.?.?they had to rip out the floor and the walls?.?.?.

I shake off my dad’s words, forget them. They’re just rumors—rumors that seem very far away from the man who just charmed every old lady within peace be with you hand-shaking range.

Mark eases out of his suit jacket and drapes it over his arm. I don’t do the same, although I’d dearly like to. The humidity here is a living, breathing thing.

“I find it anchoring,” Mark finally replies. “Don’t you?”

“Because it’s familiar? Yeah, I guess.”

“You’re not religious?” he asks. It’s his turn to sound curious.

“Not really,” I say. “I never minded going to Mass before I went to West Point. I liked it even. I liked the singing and the comfort of it and seeing everyone.” And then I pause, having surprised myself.

When I look over, I see that Mark has lifted a brow. An invitation to elaborate.

“Well, I—I’d just forgotten that part,” I say, feeling a little silly. He doesn’t care about this. “I’d forgotten that I liked seeing people. Being part of a group.”

“Being part of a group—you didn’t feel that way in the army? With your platoon?”

“With them, yes. But when I came home after my first deployment, it was?.?.?.?”

I can’t describe what it was. Like being a pod person. Like being an extraterrestrial. I felt like a stranger among people who’d known me my entire life.

“They didn’t understand,” Mark finishes for me.

“Even my father—all his deployments were during peacetime, you know? He didn’t seem to understand that it was different, and whenever I tried to explain it, it kept coming out wrong.”

And it was never that I consciously gave up trying to explain it, but I kept telling myself that if I could just think of the right words first, the right metaphors, it would be like a spell. A spell that would unlock the truth, and I could make my father see how terrifying it had been, how lonely and yet also how cramped and teeming. And I’d be able to explain how we’d see something so deeply fucked up and then we’d all wake up the next day and go back to business as usual, and how that turned life into something so flimsy that nothing meant anything anymore.

And if I could make General Ricker Thomas understand, then maybe I could eventually make everyone understand. Or at least understand enough that they would stop seeing me as some sort of symbol. As a stock photo of a courageous soldier, clear-eyed and valiant.

Mark nods a slow nod. He gets it. I feel like a jackass right then for forgetting that.

He gets it.

“You know what I’m talking about,” I say. “That feeling of when you come back.”

“I thought it would be worse after the CIA,” says Mark. “But it wasn’t. It was about the same. You want to tell everyone what it was like, what you saw, what you had to do, and at the same time, you can’t even find a single word to start describing it that doesn’t shrink the entire thing down into something smaller and easier than it was.”

“Yeah.” We cross a narrow street, Mark’s shoulder brushing once against mine. “That’s it exactly.”

I see our hotel peeking above the other buildings, but Mark veers left, down another narrow street. I’m getting used to Mark’s excursions when we travel, but I do wish, professionally, he’d tell me where we were going so I could get my bearings first.

“Anyway, to answer your question, sir, I’m not religious now because I don’t think I ever was in the first place. I liked it, church, the building and the people in it, but God felt like part of the package and not the reason for it. He’s never felt as viscerally there as something like the army. Like America.”

“Have you made a graven image of our country, Tristan?” Mark asks.

Have I? Maybe I had at one point. At any rate, I’m afraid I’m onto a new graven image now, a new idol.

He’s walking right next to me.

“Not anymore, sir.”

“Hmm.”

We stop in front of a small storefront with a display of dusty clocks in the window. Without pausing to read the sign listing the shop’s hours, Mark walks through the open door. The rooms above the store have their shutters flung wide to cajole a stray breeze, but the shop below is stifling and dim, filled with shadows and ticking clocks.

Mark approaches the counter in back, already unfastening his wristwatch with practiced movements. “I think this is running fast,” he says to the man behind the counter, whose expression doesn’t change. “Could you quote a repair for me?”

The man blinks behind his glasses, once, and then takes the watch and goes into the back. Mark leans against the counter, looking utterly relaxed and dashing with his jacket over his arm, and his white shirt hugging his wide shoulders and tightly muscled chest. A gentleman out for an afternoon stroll, with all the time in the world.

I almost remind Mark that our plane leaves tomorrow morning, so there’s no time for a watch repair that will take longer than a few hours, but then I notice how often his eyes drift back to the doorway the man left through. Even if his expression is easy, he’s very aware of the time it’s taking for the shopkeeper to return.

The man comes back several minutes later, the watch and a folded piece of paper in his hands. Mark takes the watch, unfolds the paper, and reads the numbers scrawled there. He sighs, disappointed.

“It’s too much, I’m sorry. I’ll have to try somewhere else.” He gives the man an apologetic nod, pockets the paper, and then we leave.

The shopkeeper doesn’t speak a word in return.

* * *

After we get backinto our suite, Mark hands me a bottle of water and then says he’s going to take some calls in his room. I won’t be needed until the shirtless room service tonight, so I’m free to do whatever I like. I go inside my room and chug the entire bottle. And then it takes about thirty seconds before I’m toeing off my shoes, taking off my jacket and tie, and draping myself sideways across the bed.

Twenty minutes, I tell myself. My internal clock is pretty decent at this sort of thing, honed under the threat of bullets and bombs, and so I close my eyes, certain that I’ll wake up exactly when I want to.

Except when I do wake up, it’s with that abrupt and sick feeling of oversleeping. The sun is lower in the sky, and my feet are cool from where they’ve been hanging off the bed. I check the clock—it’s close to six—and pad into the suite to see if Mark needs me.

But Mark isn’t there.

I stand for a moment in the empty living area, straining my ears for sounds from his room. When I hear nothing, I go over and knock and then let myself inside.

It’s also empty, as is the bathroom.

He’s not here.

Except?.?.?.?except his phone is here, on his bedside table, next to his slim leather wallet and passport. He wouldn’t go anywhere without his phone and passport, right?

Alarm skates through me, grazing my thoughts, and I grab my shoes, jacket, and phone, ready to go find him. I get all the way to the door out of the suite when I see the note wedged into the crack between the door and the jamb. I pull it out. It’s written in pen on the hotel stationery.

Remember. 2300. Don’t forget the champagne.

Or the shower.

I stop. Consider.

If Mark wanted me to go with him to wherever he went, he would have asked, and clearly he’s planning on coming back to food and champagne. And me shirtless.

The thought of that makes me restless, unsure, blood pooling into my groin with hot, sporadic surges.

Maybe he’s changed his mind from what he said last night. Maybe it’s a test.

Maybe he just wants champagne and a bodyguard peep show.

Whatever the reason, I do precisely as he asks. I unbutton my shirt and leave it in my room, and then I call down for dinner when it’s time. Mark hadn’t specified what he wanted to eat, so I make a guess with steak, and then order a couple different desserts for him to try.

When the food arrives later, I feel rather silly opening the door without my shirt on, the shower running in Mark’s bedroom with absolutely no one in it.

“I’ll take that,” I say to the person who’s brought up the cart, half trying to hide behind the door as I do. Six weeks of working in a kink club, and I’m still shy about someone seeing my bare torso.

The hotel employee’s eyes slide past me to the room, where the lights are low and one of the bedroom doors is cracked open. The sounds of the shower’s spray hitting tile echo through the space, and the employee and I come to the realization at the same time.

Shirtless man, dinner for two. Shower running.

I suddenly understand exactly what this must look like.

“Of course, sir,” the employee says, cheeks pinking. I tip him and roll the tray inside and then fight the urge to go bury myself in a pile of towels after I turn off the shower.

Why the fuck had Mark wanted the hotel to think—why plan for that?

But I don’t have the chance to ask him, not over dinner at least, because an hour passes without him coming back, and then another.

And then another.

I eat my cold steak and some dessert.

I put my shirt back on and then sit on the couch.

I fall asleep there, in front of the food and champagne I ordered, fighting the urge to feel like I’ve been stood up.

But I can’t fight it, and the bitter loneliness of it follows me into my dreams, where I don’t dream of Sims exactly but of standing with Sims in an alley, the alley where McKenzie died.

He hadn’t been there, not in real life—but also in real life I hadn’t been miserable over a man I hadn’t even met yet.

We stand there over McKenzie’s body and I can’t feel anything other than Mark’s rejection, even with one of my dead best friends at my feet. And Sims turns to me and says, with blood running out of his mouth, What, you thought he might change his mind about you?

When I flutter my eyelids open a few hours later, it’s to the blue haze of pre-dawn, and there’s a tall figure standing in front of the couch, looking down at me.

My body must already recognize him because I don’t jolt up with adrenaline. My heart speeds in a very different way than with fear.

“I hope you treated yourself to the good champagne,” says Mark. He’s wearing different clothes than yesterday: a T-shirt that looks brand-new and cheap, and jeans that look brand-new and expensive.

I straighten up, blinking fast. He looks faintly amused and also tired. Smudges stain the skin under his eyes and his jaw is rough with stubble. His hair is tousled and loose, hanging over one side of his forehead. It makes him look younger.

“Sir,” I say. “I didn’t realize you’d left until after you’d gone.”

He waves a hand, stepping around me to examine the room service cart nearby. “I didn’t want to wake you. I just had a place I wanted to visit while I was here.”

“A place,” I say, looking at his clothes again. The lettering is in Thai. I think it’s advertising a brand of beer.

Mark lifts a metal lid to look at the hours-old steak underneath and then grabs a roll. I notice that the tattoo on his arm is gone?.?.?.?but a smear near his elbow reveals the trick. Makeup. He’s covered his tattoo in makeup.

“I haven’t seen very many T-shirts in Thai here,” I say.

“Hmm,” Mark says noncommittally.

My father’s words come back to me right then, shimmering amidst the shirt, the uneaten meal. Surely there are times he goes missing that you can’t account for?.?.?.

Shirtless with the shower running, that’s how he wanted me to take the food. Just enough to make the moment memorable and embarrassing for the hotel employee.

“Last night, sir?.?.?.?was I an alibi?”

“Technically, the person who delivered your room service is the alibi,” says Mark easily, taking a bite of the roll. I’ve never seen him eat like this, fast and chewing hard. “And let’s make sure you’re packed. Our flight is in three hours.”