Evan Arden 02 Otherwise Occupied (5 page)

Ditching my boots and socks towards the end of the bed, I popped open the buttons on my jeans before I leaned back on my elbows.  It was definitely more comfortable that way as I watched Bridgett strip in front on me.

Ultimately, I was still too tired to stand up, but I had to keep up pretenses.

Unlike the rest of me, my cock was all too willing to join in a little late night fun, and I could see Bridgett’s eyes move to my crotch a few times as she removed the rest of her clothes.

I took a good look at her for the first time.  When she had been at my place before, I really hadn’t looked at much more than her ass, which was definitely “custom,” as Jonathan would have said.  Now I checked out her equally round tits – not
too
big, but nice and fleshy – and curved hips.  She was built like a woman, not a twiggy little thing, which I appreciated a lot.  She had good skin, pale and perfect.

“You
really want the shoes off?” she asked.

I
nodded my head, and she removed them before climbing over the top of me and pressing her lips down to mine.  I kept myself propped on my elbows and just let her do what she wanted for a few minutes while I kept looking at her.

Long, dark hair and a little patch of matching triangle lower down tickled as she ran her hands up and down my sides.  She straddled me lower, kissed down the center of my chest to my stomach, and then got off the edge of the bed.  I raised my hips as she pushed my jeans down my
legs until she was kneeling in front of me.  Her hands caressed my thighs, and I closed my eyes as the warmth of her mouth covered my cock for the second time.

“Fuck, that’s nice…”  My hand reached down and grabbed her shoulder, encouraging her to come back up and stop sucking me off.  I had another idea this time.  “Lay on your back.”

She did as I said, and I raised a leg up to straddle her this time.  I watched her tongue dart over her lips, and I moved up her chest with my dick pointing towards her face.  My hands came up her sides and took hold of both tits.  My thumbs grazed over the nipples until they stood out nice and hard and then pushed them both together and around my cock.

Bridgett sucked her lower lip into her mouth and bit down on it a little as I started to fuck her tits.
  Rocking slowly back and forth, I didn’t quite go up far enough to touch her mouth with the tip.  I probably could have, and she would have given me both the tit fuck and her mouth at once, but the angle wasn’t quite right, and I wanted to be done soon.

Moving a little faster, I felt the pressure building in my balls as my thighs trembled a little.  I leaned my head back and let out a moan as the first shot coated her skin between her breasts.  I looked down as the next one went higher, coating her neck, and the third stream further soaked her tits.

With a final groan, I climbed back off of her.  On shaky legs, I quickly went to the bathroom and soaked a washcloth, then took both it and a dry towel to hand to her.  As soon as she took them from my hands, I dropped to my back on the bed.  I stretched my arms up over head and yawned loudly as she cleaned herself up.  Once she was done, she curled up against my side and ran her hand over my chest.

I reached over, twisted my arm a little around hers, and gripped her hip to pull her against me.  This effectively cut off her reach to my cock as well, which was going to make it a little easier to get some sleep.  My head was getting that foggy feeling again, and I closed my eyes to let myself go.

“You’re going to fall asleep on me again, aren’t you?” Bridgett said with a bit of a giggle.

I grunted but didn’t open my eyes.  A moment later, I felt her fingers against my jaw.

“Really?” she asked quietly.  “You’re going to spend all that money and not even fuck me?  Twice now?”

I opened my eyes half way and looked
up at her.

“What do you care?”
I mumbled.  I was starting to feel the warm cover of sleep moving over my body, and making sounds wasn’t helping at all.  I needed the rest, and she was going to pepper me with questions.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said.

I ignored her, figuring that was the best way to get her to shut up.  I tucked my head into the pillow and subsequently against her arm as well before I closed my eyes again.

“You paid for me all night last time for a blow job and this time for a tit fuck? 
Do you really have that much money to throw away?  I mean, I figure if you’re Moretti’s killer then–”

I rolled quickly, covered her body with mine, and placed my hand over her mouth. 
I felt her fingers grip into my arms, but she wasn’t even close to matching my strength and remained immobilized.  Completely awake now – unfortunately – I stared down into her eyes with as much menace as I could muster.

“
Some things aren’t discussed,” I said slowly and quietly.

I raised an eyebrow and waited for her to acknowledge what I said.  When she nodded quickly, I released her mouth, but the damage was already done.  A single tear fell from the corner of her eye.  Part of me wanted to apologize, but she had to know she couldn’t just open up her mouth and talk about that kind of shit – it didn’t matter where we were.  Next time we’d be in a bar or someplace, and she’d end up getting us both killed.

Pushing off of her, I landed on my back against the mattress.  The ceiling needed to be painted, and I spent a moment wondering if I should put on a fresh coat of your basic ceiling white or maybe try something at little more interesting.

“I’m sorry,” I heard from beside me.
  “If you want to…to just sleep or whatever, that’s cool.”

Swallowing down whatever tetchiness was still left in
me, I nodded and looked at her.  Though her eyes were dry now, I knew I had scared her, and that’s not what I really wanted to do.  She needed to remember what kind of life she was leading and what kind of people ended up around her because of it.  She was young, but she couldn’t afford to be stupid.  If she did, she’d die young, too.

“I…I sleep better with someone here,” I finally admitted.  “I’m not seeing anyone, so…”

I let my voice trail off in hopes that the whole conversation would go away, but Bridgett was the most inquisitive of streetwalkers.

“You have
nightmares?” she asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Bad ones?”

My eyes narrowed at her slightly.  I didn’t want to go
in this direction, and I also didn’t want to have to throw her out.  I nodded once without speaking, but she still didn’t take the hint.

“What about?”

“For fuck’s sakes,” I growled.  I resisted the urge to get up and drag her ass back to the street corner but only just barely.  “Look, I’m tired, okay?  I haven’t slept in two days because I have shitty dreams, and the last time you were here, I slept really well, okay?  Now can you just shut up for a few hours, or do I have to drag your ass back to your pimp and find a new whore?”

My heart was starting to pound faster
, and if this kept up, I wasn’t going to be able to sleep no matter who was here.  Thankfully, Bridgett finally understood and lay her head down beside mine.

There was just no reason to go into the detail
s.

“So tell me what brings you here, Evan.”

I leaned back against the back of the chair and closed my eyes for a minute.  Mark Duncan, the military counselor assigned to me after I was discharged and moved to Illinois, seemed to be a patient man.  Though we had only spoken once before – the same month I relocated to Chicago – he understood it took a while for me to get going.

He was a short guy with dark hair and glasses.  He
must have loved what he did because he didn’t make enough money to get glasses that actually fit, and the little marks on the side of his face where the frames bore into his skin were red.  There were papers all over his desk, and his bookshelf was disorganized to the point of annoying me.  There was a picture of a young woman, but it was an old picture.  Her hairstyle and clothing screamed the nineties.  There weren’t any other pictures of her, and I figured she must be an ex since she was too old to be his daughter.

There weren’t any family-type
pictures, though he was prime age to be married with a couple of kids.  There were other pictures on his desk and on the window sill behind his chair, but they consisted of what looked to be a build site for a new house and a huge group of people holding tools.  There were also pictures of groups of kids holding banners that showcased various walk-a-thons and similar functions.

“I’m having dreams,” I told him.

He scribbled on his notepad, which made me want to roll my eyes, but I managed to refrain.

“Bad ones?”

“Not awful,” I said.  “Not like I’ve had in the past when they put me on meds.  It’s just that I haven’t had any like that in a couple years, and they’re keeping me up at night.  I don’t know why they’re coming back.”

“Can you tell me about them?”

“I…uh…”

Fuck.

I should have realized he was going to want me to talk about them.  Talking about the dreams meant talking about what happened in the desert, and I didn’t want to go there.  All I really wanted to do was get some sleep, and this option seemed to be the most expeditious.

“Just…just about the past,” I finally said.  “I just want to know why they’re back.  Why now
, when I haven’t really thought about any of that crap for a long time?”

“If you don’t tell me what they were about, I’m not sure how much help I’m going to be,” he urged softly.

With my eyes closed, I went through some of the deep breathing shit the first counselor taught me to do when I had panic attacks.  I didn’t get those any more – not since the first year – but the breathing still helped sometimes when my brain went into overdrive.

“I’m…I’m in the hole.”

“Where you were kept prisoner?”

“Yeah.”
  I swallowed a couple of times.  “I’m just waking up, like I did every day when it got hot.  I kept trying to spit sand out of my mouth, but I never could, you know?  There was always more of it.”

I swallowed hard, but the dryness in my throat made it feel like I was swallowing sand
again.  I could almost feel it scratching my larynx.

“Fuck.”

“Where are you now, Evan?”

“Chicago,” I said quickly.  “I’m not there.  I know that.”

“Can you go on?”

“Yeah.”
  I leaned forward, put my head in my hands, and took a minute to center again.  “There isn’t much more, really.  I’m just in the hole, waking up over and over again, and trying not to eat the fucking dirt.  It made me cough, and it would get in my lungs, too.”

“You haven’t told me much about what happened there,” Mark said.

“Not something I like to talk about.”  I hoped my succinct words and terse voice would dissuade him, but he was a fucking counselor, so that wasn’t going to happen.

“It was a very significant life event, Evan.  You were a prisoner of war for eighteen months.  Don’t you think that warrants some discussion?”

“I talked about it with the last guy,” I reminded him.  “The one in the hospital – in Virginia.  He cleared me.”

“He cleared you from the psychiatric hospital,” Mark clarified.

“Yeah,” I responded as I looked into his eyes, “where I was held for observation only, evaluated, declared unfit for further duty, but otherwise unharmed.”

“And when was the last time you talked to…
” he glanced down at the file in his hands, “…Doctor Hartford?”

“Before I moved here.”

“Before you were discharged?”

“
Around the same time,” I said.  “He’s the guy who discharged me.”

“With a diagnosis of PTSD.”

“Look,” I said, “I know all this, and we went through all this shit when I saw you the first time.  Do we really need to do it again?  I was really just hoping you could tell me if there’s some kind of sleeping pill or whatever I ought to be taking.”

Mark looked over my file, glanced up at me, and then back to the file again.
  He adjusted his ill-fitting sports jacket before settling back into his chair with one leg crossed over the other.

“
I’m a psychologist,” Mark said, “not a psychiatrist.  I can’t prescribe medication, though I can make a recommendation to your regular doctor.  Honestly, I think you’d be better off if we just talked for a bit.  It was recommended that you visit with me at least every other week after you moved here two years ago, but this is only the second time you’ve been here.”

“I don’t usually need it.”

“But you do now.”

I shrugged and leaned back against the chair.  I glanced at the couch
, and though lying down did sound good, I had never felt comfortable on a shrink’s couch.  It was just too cliché.  I was glad he had the high-backed chair as an option because Hartford never had.

“I just want to get some decent sleep without…”

“Without what?” he asked when I stopped talking.

I took a long breath.  I was so off my game, I
was going to fuck up at my job which was completely unacceptable.  I needed sleep to focus, and I couldn’t seem to get any rest without Bridgett, the newbie hooker, in my bed.  That was about as fucked up as some of the shit I went through in the Middle East.

Well, no, it wasn’t, but it was still fucked up.

“I just need some sleep,” I finally said.  “I really think if I just got a couple nights of decent sleep, I’d be fine.”

“How about I make you a deal?” Mark said.  “You tell me a little more about your time in the desert, and I’ll talk to your doctor about the possibility of getting a prescription for sleeping pills.”

“I don’t have a doctor,” I admitted.

He eyed me again, wrote something down on his notepad, and then looked back up.

“Taking care of yourself isn’t much of a priority for you, is it?”  Mark leaned back a bit in his rolling desk chair.  He put the end of his pen in the corner of his mouth and chewed on it a bit.  I wondered if he was a smoker because it reminded me of Jonathan and how he would play around with anything even slightly cigarette shaped.

I checked out his fingers and noticed slight yellowing.  Inhaling slowly, I detected the slight scent of tobacco smoke in the office.  He didn’t smoke in here – it wasn’t strong enough for that – but the scent was on his clothes.

I looked up at him through narrowed eyes.

“It’s a little hectic at work,”
I snapped. “The place doesn’t offer health care.”

Quite the opposite, really.

“There are still some basics you should be considering.  When you were in the Marines, you had regular physicals.  Don’t you think that’s important now?”

“I’m not sick,” I stated.

“Sickness is relative,” Mark replied.  “You are here for a reason, just like you might go to an urgent care facility if you had a cold you just couldn’t shake.”

“I’m not sick,” I repeated
, “and I don’t go to the ER for a fucking cold.  I know what I was diagnosed with, and I know I didn’t go and get every single checkbox checked that I was supposed to after discharge, but I also didn’t see the point.  I wasn’t getting severance since I didn’t have six years of active service.  Hartford gave me the diagnosis just to make sure I could still see him after I left the hospital.”

“And did you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I sighed.

“This is totally irrelevant,” I said.
  “I didn’t come here for this.”

“Your health is exactly why you are here,” he countered.

“Just forget it.”  I stood and began to walk to the other side of the room.

“I’d like you to stay,” Mark
called out.  He stood up and took a couple of steps towards me, which emphasized a slight limp.  When I glanced down, I could see he wore a shoe with a thicker heel and sole on his right foot.  “There’s only twenty minutes left in the session.  You can stick it out that long, can’t you?  I really would like to talk to you some more.”

“Morbid curiosity?”
I sneered.

“No,” he replied
sincerely.  “I’m concerned about you.”

“I don’t want anyone writing a fucking book about it, all right?”

“All right,” Mark replied through narrowed eyes.  “What makes you say that?”

Tensing a little, I tried to keep myself from actually balling my hands into fists.  Whenever I thought about Hartford and his ideas, I wanted to punch something.

“Hartford wanted to write a book.”

“Ah.”  Mark shifted in his seat.  “Well, I’m not much of a writer, and I really just want to know how you are doing now, so can we finish the session? 
I mean, you already paid for it.”

Forcing myself not to roll my eyes, I sat back down in the chair and looked at him.

“What do you want to know?” I asked.

“All I really know is the part that is a matter of public record,” Mark said.  “Anything you want to tell me that
isn’t still classified would be a good place to start.  If you’d rather talk about the known stuff, that’s fine, too.  It’s up to you.”

There was a lot that was still classified as far as I knew.  It wasn’t like there was anyone coming out here to debrief me of any changes, of course.  Regardless, it was best to go with the things that could be found by anyone who did some digging.

“You see the video tape?” I asked.  An involuntary cold shiver went down my back, and my stomach tightened up.

“I have,” he admitted.  “I watched it again when you were assigned to me, but I had seen it on the news before then.”

“That guy – that writer guy,” I said.  Inside my head, tiny little explosions began to commence in the center of my skull. My hands clenched without my permission, and my mind fought to only say the words, not actually see the pictures. “You know the one?  When they had us all on our knees in front of the camera – right after the bags were taken off our heads – he was on my left.”

“I know who you mean.”

“He kept saying he had a wife and kids,” I remembered.  “He kept begging them and talking about his two little girls.”

I hesitated.  Most of this was on the tape – the one they played over and over and over again.  There were probably five hundred copies of it up on YouTube.
  Most of it, but not all of it.  There was a whole bunch of it before that part that never got out of the government’s hands.

“Before they had us on camera, when the guy was talking about his kids – there was one of them
– one of the insurgents – he said someone had to die, and I told them to just shoot me instead of the writer guy because I didn’t have a family.  It didn’t make any difference though.  They shot him anyway.”

Pain in my lungs made me stop speaking for a second.  They were trying to go into overdrive or something, and it took all my concentration to stop myself from hyperventilating. 
My fingers gripped onto my knees in an attempt to stop shaking, but at least my voice remained steady.

“Sometimes I think he got off easy,” I said.  “Thinking that sometimes makes it hard to sleep, too.”

“That’s a change in your thinking,” Mark said.  “At least, as far as what you talked about when you were here before.  There’s nothing about the video in Doctor Hartford’s notes.”

“Maybe it’s still classified and no one remembered to tell me
.” I shrugged.  “If you see any MPs coming up the driveway, give me a chance to run, okay?”

I laughed, but he didn’t smile, and I couldn’t really hear the humor in my voice, either.

“It was on the news a lot.”

“I was still in Saudi Ar
abia when it broke out,” I said, “then Germany, and then the hospital in Virginia.  I didn’t see it for a couple of months – not until they were discharging me.  It was a year old by then, anyway.  It’s not like I had paparazzi following me or anything when I got back.  Instead, I had freaking MPs.  The whole media circus didn’t have any effect on me.”

“You think something like that just goes away after a year?” Mark asked.

“No,” I said, “but it wasn’t the worst anyway.”