Page 102 of Summer Heat
Cash stretched his arms over his head, trying to alleviate the discomfort in his chest. Didn’t work. Instead, he leaned back on the table top and stared at the sliver of moon teasing the dark night. “Yeah, we were.”
They were in a spend-their-life-together, dream-about-kids kind of way. It was a life he couldn’t comprehend at the moment, but one he wanted more than anything when they were in college: his name tacked to hers, his ring on her finger, his life pledged to the center of his world. Cash wanted to come home to his wife, to make her laugh, to pass the years in whatever normal existence they would have chosen. He didn’t want the life of a sniper and a spy.
A light breeze picked up. An owl hooted. Time floated by, until she also lay back on the table. He turned his head. Nicola was as stunning now, staring into the night sky, as she’d been in that pool years ago. “Life’s thrown a few curve balls, huh?”
“Did you ever think about what if?”
“Did you?”
“I did for a while. And then I drowned myself in work.”
“You going to tell me who you work for?”
“CIA.”
The CIA? Well, shit. Color him flabbergasted. “Not what I thought you were going to say.”
“You were thinking more like, FBI. Linguistics department?”
He laughed. “Yeah. Truth is, well, yeah.”
“I guess Uncle Sam thought I had too much to offer to stick me in a middle of nowhere Podunk town in witness protection when they found out I was fluent in, like, eight languages.”
“Eight? Come on, slacker. I thought it was more like twenty.”
She laughed. “Oh, now you’re counting dialects.”
Their banter felt so familiar; it made him want to tear his hair out. “You could say the same thing about me and Roman. Drowning ourselves in work. He never questioned why I was just as torn up about you as he was.”
“We’d been inseparable, the three of us, since we were kids.”
“True.” He took her hand in his and leaned them both up. The heat from her touch stayed with him after she drew her fingers away.
“I never told you this, but I actually had a crush on you way before college. Like sixth grade.”
He heard the smile in her voice. “Now you’re just making shit up. You need another favor? Cell phone privileges again, huh? Maybe you want the cute little gun you pointed at my head?”
“Maybe I am. Maybe I do.”
God, he hurt again all of a sudden. “I never told you this, but I had a ring.”
She bolted straight up. “Excuse me?”
He’d never told her because he never had the chance. She died. Cash pushed up on his elbows, unsure where the fuck that honest tidbit materialized from. He laughed, not all that shocked that he’d confessed the truth, and stood up. “Good night, Nicola. Hope your arm feels better.”
Choking on the memory of the worst day of his life, Cash pushed inside. His throat burned as badly as his eyes. Having been maced and having suffered through whatever the Army had desensitized him with in chemical warfare training had not prepared him for that moment he’d just had—telling Nicola he had a ring. He had bought the ring the day she left his life, but he was listening to her sweet voice now because she was alive and kicking.
The woman was alive, and he could barely stand it. Pain like he didn’t know could exist seared his lungs and burned his gut.
God!
What if he’d run to her office and dropped to one knee?
What if he hadn’t let her out of bed that day?
His pulse wouldn’t slow down, and his mind wouldn’t—couldn’t—stop spinning at all the things that could have saved him a decade’s worth of despair.
Cash wanted to fist his hands into his hair, to screaming that he hated that woman and that he was scared he would never love anyone the way he had once loved her.
