Page 14 of Salt Kiss
I thought of that kiss as I’d gone to bed that night, as I waited for the lengthy, formal debrief the next day. As I sat in a folding chair, the cold metal biting through my uniform jacket, watching the major trying to pretend he wasn’t freezing his ass off after being used to the comforts of the permanent base near Uzhhorod.
I thought of how lovely that kiss must have felt for those actors, how soft their lips must have been, how tender their mouths. Soft like nothing in my life, tender like something could only be outside of a war, in the real world, in real life. Real life where you didn’t kill your best friends.
And I remember thinking that if I could only have a little of that softness, that tenderness, I’d be whole again. I’d be fixed, healed. I knew it.
Touch-starved. Like the counselor had said.
“A kiss,” I say softly.
“A kiss?”
I’m too lost in the memories of those last days at the forward operating base—of the shuffle back to Uzhhorod, and then to Stuttgart, and then home—to watch my words. To notice how much I’m talking. “I’ve only been kissed a few times before,” I say. “But I remembered how good it feels. We watched a movie with a kiss one of my last nights at the FOB, and it was all I could think of. How nice it would be to have someone’s mouth against mine, and their hands on me.”
Mark’s fingers have gone still. “Who was kissing you in these thoughts? A girl from home?”
“There was no girl from home,” I admit. “No boy either. I’m not good at starting things. And when someone starts something with me, I—”
There are no words for what I do. Evenobsessiondoesn’t capture the swiftness and intensity with which I can fall in love. And like an infection, my obsession needs only the tiniest cut, the shallowest scrape to take root. A single glance, a kind word as I’m handed a cup of coffee.
I think of it as a kind of curse, one I’ve had since birth, and the only cure I could think of when I was younger was transferring that curse to an entire country rather than to a person. A country, at least, was big enough to hold an obsession, and the army was more than happy to nurse utter devotion inside my chest.
“I get attached,” I say finally.
“You’re telling me that a soldier as beautiful as you, as strong and stupidly noble as you, can’t find someone to kiss because youget attached.”
I become aware that his attention is still fixed on me. And the word he used—beautiful—feels stuck and quivering in the ground like an arrow at my feet.
He called me beautiful.
“It’s a problem,” I answer distractedly, my mind on that arrow of a word.Beautiful.
“I find that hard to believe,” he says. “Who wouldn’t want you to get attached to them?”
He says it so casually, so mildly, that I know he doesn’t understand. Falling in love at the smallest provocation...no, most people don’t want that. In fact, nobody I’ve ever met. It’s smothering. Cloying. I can be those things and often was in high school.
And I feel a little embarrassed now, having revealed this unwanted flaw of mine when I typically do everything I can to keep it hidden. There’s a reason I lean on army discipline so much, on silence. If given the smallest opening, the worst of me will burn its way out, a fever no medicine can contain.
“What did you hope for, sir?” I ask, hoping to redirect the conversation away from myself. “When you got out?”
“Of the army? I don’t suppose you’d call it getting out, since I left to join the CIA.”
“Of the CIA, then,” I say. “What did you want when you left?”
A serrated laugh as he looks out the window. “I wanted to kill a lot of people.”
I don’t know what to say to that. Especially because from the way he says it, I know he means it.
His fingers are tapping his knee again, and his jaw is tight as he stares out at the city. I get the feeling he’s not really looking at the world beyond his tinted reflection.
We pass the rest of the ride in silence.
Six
“I’m not goinginto the hall tonight,” Mark says as we walk across the bridge into Lyonesse. “So your services won’t be needed.”
“At all?” I ask, glancing up at the bright afternoon sun.
I’ve barely worked today.
