Page 90 of Haunted

He drags his hands down over his face and looks at the ceiling.

“That man is pond scum,” I continue when the silence lasts a beat too long. “I lived with him. I know exactly how far he was willing to go. I couldn’t let him near you.” He isn’t stopping me, so I keep going, because surely somewhere in here is the sentence that fixes it. “There has never been a single moment since the day I met you that I would not give my life for you.” I need him to hear it, to feel the size of it. “You know this.”

He laughs. “I do know. You would lie down in traffic for me. I’ve never doubted that. Not for a second. But that’s not what I wanted. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life terrified that the man I love is out there putting himself in harm’s way because he thinks I need protecting. That’s not love. It’s ownership.”

It feels like a slap. “How could you say that?”

“Because it’s true. I don’t doubt you love me. I just think that the part of you that comes to the surface doesn’t see me as able to take care of myself, and I’ve had a long time of doing just that.” He turns to me. “And what could he have really done to me? I was within shouting distance of a hundred people. All they would have had to do was open that curtain. What could he have seriously done that he didn’t know I would press charges for later? Was his hatred so great that it outweighed his own sense of self-preservation?”

I stare at him. “You don’t understand, do you? You don’t get it. You already trusted him. I could hear it in your voice. You said his name, and if I weren’t there, all he would have had to do is smile and say, hey, can you look at my laptop? It’s just out in the back hall. Less than twenty seconds and he can spirit you out. It’s a room full of classrooms that are sitting empty because it’s a Saturday. How much of that conference can you hear right now? How clearly do you think they could have heard you?”

“That doesn’t change the math, Lance. He comes to me, he threatens me, he yells at me, maybe he punches me if he’s feeling super angry. It hurts me, it scares me, and it’s over. So, you need to explain to me why you did what you did. Because I just can’t understand it any other way except that there’s a trigger in you that you can’t control. And it scares me. How do you know what he would do?”

“Because he did it to me.”

He’s silent. I stare straight ahead at the door.

“What did…” He stops. “Lance, we need to talk about this.”

“He likes hurting people. Do you understand me? He likes hurting people a lot.”

“Okay, I think I get it.”

“He liked—combat. A lot. He thought it was sexy.”

A beat, while he decides whether he heard what I’m not saying.

“And did you?” he asks. His voice has gone careful and level.

“Maybe the first couple of times. Then it stopped being a game he was playing and started being—” I stop. “Like this punishment I had to get through.”

“Why didn’t you…?”

There’s no answer he would understand, so I go with the one that I understood at the time. “I hid it. Like some 1950s housewife. I disguised a split eyebrow for a week once because I couldn’t—a Marine does not get to be the guy it’s happening to. We’re the ones who stop it happening ever. He told me if I left he’d come forward with things that would get me a dishonorable discharge,” I say.

“So that’s how he kept you. Report me and everyone learns you’re weak. Not fit for the uniform? That’s it?”

“That’s it? Do you know how many of my brothers in the Corps were privately convinced I had no business wearing the uniform next to them? We could cover each other because we had to. Don’t think that somewhere in the back of their minds they wouldn’t have been fucking gleeful to see this, so they could say, this is what gays in the military brings us.”

I have to clear my throat a few times. I have never said these words out loud to another human being. I feel raw and aching. I am aware of the way he’s staring at my pants leg. He balls his hand into a fist.

“Why did he hate me? I never did anything to him.” His voice sounds small and vulnerable.

“Because I never stopped loving you. Not even when I was lying next to him. And he knew. He didn’t know your name, or anything about you. I wanted to keep that memory away from him. But he could find out. That goddamned picture from the Excelsior comes up fast when you search it. He was never stupid. Just mean.”

I can feel the shame come off me like heat.

“What made you finally get out?” he asks, after a long time.

“The last fight was bad. He’d been drinking. He came at me with a broken bottle.” I shrug. “There’s a scar above my knee now. Little thing. You can’t even see it.”

“It’s two inches long. Horizontal. Just above your left knee,” he says, with no emotion at all.

My hand goes to cover it before I can stop myself. “Yeah.”

“So this was vengeance, today. It wasn’t just protecting me.”

“I needed him neutralized.”