Page 13 of Salt Kiss
Patience that should make anyone wary.
But the banker doesn’t seem deterred. Either he’s used to Mark, or he wants something and wants it badly enough that he doesn’t care what the consequences are of him getting it. I knew people like that in Carpathia. The local politicians looking for clout, the Marines looking for glory or at least a good fight, the wholesalers and middlemen swooping into a town the minute supplies got scarce to make deals and scrape the last bit of money out of the civilians there. It would be easy to believe that things ended miserably for them, but that was only true like a third of the time. Maybe Geoffrey Laurence will get what he wants from Mark and never have to discover what’s behind that aloof expression.
For Geoffrey’s sake, I hope so.
Mark is in a strange mood as we get back in the car and Jago takes off. His fingers are tapping against his knee, and his jaw tightens occasionally as we pass ugly college apartments and bland State Department buildings.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I say, and then regret saying anything at all when his dangerous gaze moves to me.
“What for?” he asks.
It’s too late to take anything back now without making his mood worse, so I force myself to reply. “For whatever safety report that has made your afternoon so frustrating.”
He looks at me a moment and then looks away. “It wasn’t the report that ruined my afternoon, Tristan. Only my company.”
The banker? I suppose I could see that—there had been that indefinable air of avarice to him, and while I think Mark thinks fondly of sin, I don’t know if he thinks fondly of all sinners.
“I offered him a business deal some years back,” he says after a minute. “And I’ve never forgiven him for his answer.”
“He refused?”
“No.” Mark’s voice is hard. “He agreed.”
I have no idea how to interpret this, and I don’t get the sense that Mark is welcoming questions on the topic. At any rate, he shifts, sitting up and turning to look over at me. “What did you hope for when you came back?” he asks.
I’m looking out of the window, but I can still feel the simmer of his gaze on my skin. “Back, sir?”
“Yes, Tristan, back.” In my periphery, I see his fingers flex over his knee. “From the war.”
“It’s not a war anymore,” I say automatically. “We were there on a—”
“A coalition counterterrorism mission, yes, I know what they called it in the briefing room, and I know what they still call it. Indulge an old man and let me call it a war.”
“You’re not—”
“So what did you hope for? When you were over there, tired and cold and scared shitless or bored to death? There must have been something. Something you held on to and built entire palaces in your mind around. Something you promised yourself you’d have within days of stepping off the plane.”
Something I’d hoped for?
I know what I would hope for now, in my right mind, with the horror—however freshly congealed—behind me.
For Sims not to be dead.
For McKenzie not to be dead.
For all of us to graduate from West Point and then decide we wanted to sit behind computer screens or embed ourselves like pointless burrs somewhere in administration, where our biggest headaches would be paperwork and space heaters that didn’t get warm enough.
For me to wake up and once again be the Tristan Thomas everyone used to know, the boy who liked honor choir and novels about dragons and basketball practices so grueling he couldn’t even walk after.
But while I was there? In it?
I think back. I’m sure I wanted a steak dinner at some point. The kind of steak dinner that made your stomach hurt it was so filling, with two different kinds of potatoes and fresh rolls and pie.
I wanted sex, I know that much, although it had been hard to conjure up specifics, since my imagination when it came to sex was blurry and mostly informed by porn. I wanted to nap for hours and hours, nap long enough and hard enough that I made a Tristan-shaped impression in a mattress so soft it barely met the legal requirements for the wordmattress.
And then I remember.
I remember sitting on a cot once we’d returned from the outpost to the base for the last time. I’d stared at my hands. The hands which had killed Sims and so many other people besides that it no longer mattered how many they’d also saved. Someone had propped an old iPad against a rucksack on a cot, and a few soldiers were watching a movie about driving and crime, and at some point, I looked up and the two characters were kissing in an elevator. Kissing so slowly and tenderly that it felt like a fairy-tale kiss even though the movie was the furthest thing from a fairy tale.
