Page 5 of Salt Kiss
“Do you really need this?” I ask. I look around us at the rooftop, the serene blue sky, the corseted server coming toward us with plates of something colorful and sweet looking. “This place is for sex, right? Why would you be in any danger running a place for people to have sex?”
Mark’s jaw moves the tiniest bit, like he’s pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth while he thinks about answering. Then he says, “Kink and sex aren’t always the same thing, firstly. Secondly, I think you must have a very charmed view on sex if you think the mere presence of it precludes danger. And thirdly, Lyonesse is in rather a special situation. We exclusively invite the famous and the powerful to be members, and we take their membership payments only in information.”
It takes me a minute to understand. When I do, I feel something between disgust and admiration. “Payment in information. And then you use it for what? Blackmail?”
Mark lifts his drink as the server sets the desserts down. I don’t take up my spoon just yet, watching Mark swirl the ice in his glass once and then take a practiced swallow. The server leaves, and Mark swirls his glass again.
“Yes, blackmail,” he answers. “Sometimes.”
“Sometimes.”
“Blackmail is an axe. No matter how sharp the blade, you can’t expect it to work as delicately as a scalpel. There are much better uses for my information than cracking apart logs.”
“But axes and scalpels alike can make enemies, sir.”
“Just so.”
I pick up the folio. “I’ll need time to think about it.”
“You have a week,” says Mark. He hasn’t touched his dessert yet either. “I want it to be you, but I can’t wait much longer than that. To my regret.”
I nod and stand. He stands as well and shakes my hand, and once again, sparks spray up my nerve endings at his touch.
Touch-starved—that’s what the combat stress counselor said after my last mandated session.Skin hunger. She recommended hugging my dad, getting a pet, and downloading a dating app. I dismissed all three at the time, but if I’m having to catch my breath after a handshake, then maybe it’s necessary.
“I’ll let you know, sir,” I say, and then I walk down through the glass fortress of Lyonesse with the folio under my arm and my mind replaying the crunch of his fork against the butterfly’s wings over and over again.
Two
I’maware of two things as I flip through the portfolio that night, beer in hand, my father’s empty Virginia farmhouse creaking and sighing around me.
The first is that this job should be everything I hate. I hate lying, thieving, manipulation—and Mark doesn’t even do that for our country anymore; he does it forhimself. That’s greed; that’s selfishness. And that’s even on top of how Mark makes a living, which is with his kingdom of vice.
I flip through page after page of acts of sex and pain and humiliation, having to Google half the things I come across, even with the helpful descriptions printed after each term. I know nothing about this world; I barely know anything about sex that hasn’t come from porn. Porn that apparently was limited in scope if I’m having to research this much.
I’m a walking punch line—a twenty-nine-year-old combat veteran who’s also a virgin. And I’m going to shadow someone who’s made a living out of screwing?
But the second thing is wholly and incontrovertibly this: I can’t live another day as Tristan Thomas, unemployed former soldier.
I can’t stay in my father’s farmhouse, even though I know he’d let me, since he’s moved in with Blanche in the city. I can’t spend my hours trying to read, trying to watch TV, driving around the not-quite-suburban, not-quite-country roads instead. Running until my lungs feel like they’re made of broken glass. Jerking off with my teeth clenched together as if I’m still afraid of waking my teammates.
I have todosomething.
Or rather—God help the soldier left in me—someone has totellme to do something.
It only takes me until midnight to email and accept the job. I don’t bother countering the salary or benefits—after the army, they both look embarrassingly good. Probably to make up for the meager time off, but I don’t care. I don’t want time off.
After I send the email, I take a shower and go to bed in my teenage bedroom, which still smells faintly of cheap cologne and deflated basketballs. I fall asleep to a cold wind blowing against the old house, dreaming instead of wind against new tents. Of a long convoy, a coffee-stained paper map. Bullets spraying through ferns and, just once, through a carotid artery.
Dream me already knows they’ll write up a citation for that bullet, nominate me for something. They’ll say I’m a hero; they’ll talk about courage and valor like they’re lucid, uncomplicated things.
But dream me knows it’ll be a lie, just as I know it’s a lie every moment that I’m awake.
There’s nothing simple about killing. Not ever, but especially when they want to give you a medal for killing your best friend.
The next Monday,I’m back at Lyonesse. Ms. Lim, wearing no collar this time but instead a set of keys at her narrow waist, takes me behind the desk to a hallway. To my validation, it does indeed lead to a security room, albeit one much bigger than I imagined.
She leaves me with a giant of a man named Goran, who has deep gold-tan skin, black hair buzzed short, and a tattoo of an insignia featuring a grim reaper on the back of his neck, peeking above the collar of his suit jacket. Before he turns to greet me, I catch the lettering around the edges of the insignia—First Battalion, Ninth Marines. The Walking Dead.
