The Cornerstone (20 page)

“Peanut,” I said, slapping her ass. “We’re going hiking.”

“We’re
what
?” she groaned into the pillow.

“Shower. Breakfast. Hike,” I said, punctuating each word with firm slaps.

“If you fucking spank me again, I will punch you in the nuts so hard you’ll have to swallow around them.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen your scrawny arms,” I said, folding her beneath me to prevent fists from flying. “That’s not happening anytime soon.”

“And just for that,” she said, “I’m showering alone.”

We hit the trailhead about an hour later. She didn’t say much for the first mile, and she stayed far on her side of the path.

Her skintight running pants and matching jacket were distractingly sexy. Though it made no logical sense, I assumed she jogged in baggy sweats or old t-shirts. In my head, it was easier to deal with the idea of her sweating in non-descript clothes than looking like a
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit model all over Boston.

I kept stealing glances at her legs, and when she noticed, she shook her head at me, smiling.

“I thought you knew how to be covert,” she said.

My hand brushed against hers, a subtle invitation. I could demand many things from Shannon, but I only got them when she was willing to give.

“Can you tell me where you’ve been since I last saw you?”

For the first time in years, most of my activities weren’t highly classified. “I’ve been training new SEALs. We did an advanced cold water excursion, then some desert survival drills, and this week we were running simulated operations.”

“You’re teaching the baby SEALs?” she asked, laughing.

I frowned and shook my head. “They go through at least a year of hardcore training. They aren’t exactly delicate when I meet them.”

“I’m sticking with baby SEAL,” she said. “So you must have gone through that hardcore training.” I nodded and she continued, “What’s that like?”

I tried to think back nearly fifteen years to when I was out of college and getting my first taste of the frogman’s life.
Intense
and
grueling
didn’t begin to describe BUD/S. My body morphed during that time, changing from fit and strong to powerful. My mind changed, too. I learned to be perceptive and calm, but ready to strike in an eye blink.

“There’s a lot of water,” I said, and she rolled her eyes at me. Fuck, I wanted to spank her in the middle of this trail. That fire really did it for me. “Seriously. Entire days are spent ocean training. Treading water for six hours. They park us in the sand, arms linked, and let the Pacific Ocean do its worst. Then there’s drown-proofing, where your ankles and wrists are tied. They throw you in a pool and hope for the best.”

“I must say, it’s nice that you survived,” she said.

“It is, yeah. Good to be alive,” I said. “The worst part—worse than the tear gas exposure drills, worse than being awake for one hundred and thirty-two hours straight, worse than blacking out at the bottom of a frigid pool—was the Underwater Demolition Team shorts. When you’re in BUD/S, the dress code is very strict, and it usually involved these awful shorts. They’re ugly beige and thin. Too thin. Awkwardly thin.”

“I get it, honey,” Shannon said. “And you should know: there aren’t many fabrics that can conceal the heat you’re packing.”

“I’m sorry. What was that? Did you say something complimentary about my cock?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she muttered. “Now, these shorts.”

“Don’t lie: you love my cock,” I said, and Shannon snorted with laughter. “These shorts are obscenely short. They’ve been around since World War II. They’ve only ever been issued to SEALs, and I think it’s just a long-running hazing ritual. You know what’s insane? I’d always see people in San Diego who were training to get into BUD/S wearing them. Like they were getting a running start on the full SEAL experience by flashing the furry side of their balls.”

“What do you miss most about home?” she asked. She knew I’d spent the majority of recent years overseas, and about a decade before that was consumed with similarly grueling cycles of deployment.

I lifted my baseball cap from my head and ran a hand through my hair. “Many things,” I said. “My life is regularly irregular, and I’m good with that but there are times when I miss consistency. I’d like to sleep in the exact same place for a month, just to remind myself what that’s all about.” I shot her a smile. “It would be even better if you were sleeping there with me.”

“Save the horseshit for another time, commando. I’m here and I’m not leaving, so stop trying to be cute.”

“You think I’m cute?” I asked.

“Let the record reflect that I never suggested you were, in fact, cute. I claimed you were attempting to
be
cute,” she said. “And annoying the shit out of me while doing it.”

I laughed and slapped her ass. “I mostly miss home cooking, or having a kitchen. And that isn’t to say Navy food is bad. It’s not. It’s just not home. My brother loves pickles. He’s a pickle freak, and yeah, I’ve told him that his fondness for dick probably started there. He used to make his own pickles when we were in high school, and no matter where I go, I can’t find anything like Wes’s. It’s that sort of thing I miss.”

“In other words, you miss people cooking
for
you,” she clarified.

“No, actually,” I said. “I can cook pretty well. I make a mean pancake.”

“I prefer my pancakes sweet,” she said. “Keep your mean pancakes to yourself.”

“Duly noted.”

“I don’t cook,” she said. “I’ve tried, but…yeah. It’s just not my thing. I never have the right ingredients either. Grocery stores annoy me. I don’t have the patience to babysit a simmering pot or turn a piece of meat at the right time. I just want it”—she waved her hands in front of her—“I just want it
done
. I’ve tried, but instead of making food, I summon demons.”

“I can see that,” I said.

Shannon stayed quiet until we rounded a steep bend. “There’s one thing I can make, though,” she said, almost to herself. I glanced at her, wanting to hear more. “Even when I was younger, I was a wreck in the kitchen. I was good with measuring things for recipes. My mother made butternut squash pie. She did it all from scratch, roasting the squash and rolling the dough and everything. She grew the squash, too. She had a garden in the yard. I never understood why she grew such random things like green beans and pickling cucumbers and zucchini. I never thought to ask her why she chose those, and not bell peppers or strawberries.”

We were headed toward the trail’s high point, but the incline didn’t seem to bother Shannon. She was pushing forward and barely breaking a sweat. Nothing should have surprised me about this city girl.

“Lo said she died when you were really young.”

She veered off the trail and climbed some boulders to look out at the valley below. “She did,” Shannon said, nodding. “She had undiagnosed preeclampsia. It’s a pregnancy complication. She bled to death.”

With her hands braced on her hips, she stared ahead, silent. Her words were too crisp and efficient. They weren’t real. This was the hard-ass version of Shannon, the one who liked to pretend she was too tough to let anyone else know she cared or felt.

She hopped off the boulder and marched back toward the trail, and I was right behind her.

“How old were you?” I asked.

Her shoulders tensed when those words hit her. Another mile passed without a response from her, and I was ready to shift gears into less sensitive subject matter. Sometimes I got lucky and she shared freely, but other times she closed right up.

“Nine,” she said, pulling her cap lower. “I was nine when she died. Erin was only two, and God, she was so confused. She wandered around the house for months, looking in my mother’s bedroom, her sewing room, the kitchen. Everywhere. She didn’t understand, and how do you explain death to a baby? What do you say?”

I stopped to tie my shoelace. Shannon
never
talked about Erin. I asked her about that situation once, and she clammed right up.

“She’s the only one who isn’t involved in the business,” I said.

“She never wanted that,” Shannon said. “She’s independent and selfish, and she took a lot of joy from flipping off my father.” She loosened her ponytail and then retied it, all with her back to me. “Not that he didn’t deserve it. So anyway…she was a baby, and she didn’t understand anything that was happening. She was convinced my mother was in the house, and all you’d hear was her crying and screaming.” She tugged at the hat again, until the brim fully shielded her eyes. “My father lost it one night. He couldn’t handle hearing ‘mama, mama, mama’ all over the house so he locked Erin in a basement closet. It was dark and freezing, and he nailed the fucking door shut. It took Matt and me almost three hours to get it open, but I guess it worked because I’ve never heard her say ‘mama’ since that night. It was like the word vanished from her vocabulary.”

She sucked in a watery breath and turned her face toward the sun. She still wouldn’t cry in front of me. I knew this wasn’t information she readily shared, and I knew there was something about getting away from her world that made her open up. I loved and hated it in equal measures. She was with
me
, and telling
me
, and that gave me a surge of victory I hadn’t known I wanted. But these stories were horrible, and I wanted to hug her, kiss her, and ask a million questions about why no one ever put an end to this shit. She shouldn’t have dealt with this then, and she shouldn’t be mothering all over her siblings to make up for it now. Someone had to end this.

“Was it always Erin and Riley?”

She wrapped her hand around her ponytail, smoothing the strands and then repeating the motion. “No, but my father was worst to the youngest ones. Well…maybe that’s not accurate.” She took a sip from her water and offered it to me. “He hated us all in different ways. Riley and Erin have scars you can see, but…it’s what you can’t see that does the most damage.”

This was the second time Shannon mentioned her father’s abusive behavior, and she didn’t have to say anything else for me to know he harmed her, too. It wasn’t simply the trauma of seeing a brother beaten or a sister trapped, and I found it hard to breathe around the weight of that knowledge. I wanted to find his remains so I could have the pleasure of killing him again.

I lived with an intimate knowledge of the unimaginably gruesome awfulness that existed in the world, and though it was easier to believe that awfulness was extraordinary, that it was exception, I knew it wasn’t exclusive to the war-torn regions I frequented. The unimaginable happened to ordinary people every day, and often, the people you least expected.

I didn’t want it to be
my
person.

“But he didn’t take on Matt or Patrick, and they were better at not triggering my father. Sometimes I thought Erin wanted to piss him off. When she was older, she went out of her way to do it, as if she wanted to know how far she could push him. She was willing to go all the way to the edge, and there were times when I thought she wanted to go over just to see what the fall was all about. She’s fearless like that. I mean, she’d have to be. She walks on fucking lava.”

I handed the bottle back. “What exactly does she do? Other than infiltrating the bedrock of the Italian mafia?”

“She’s a geologist now. She studies volcanoes, and travels all over the world doing research. She’s been published in journals, and even a few science magazines. She’s smart, really smart,” Shannon said, and I had to pause and study her for a second. The pride in her voice was measurable, and all of this was coming from the woman who routinely refused to speak about the sister in question. “When she told me she wanted to go to the University of Hawaii, I figured that was just her way of telling everyone to fuck off. Then she got there, and she took some geology classes, and she was a convert. It’s probably the right field for her. There aren’t many options for people like Erin. It’s either village witch or head of the Holy Roman Empire, and I think that ship has sailed. Somehow volcanologist is right in the middle.”

We continued along the trail, following the Bosque River, and even though the silence was heavy with history, it wasn’t uncomfortable. A desert cottontail rabbit charged across the dusty path and into a cluster of low juniper bushes, then scrambled over the footbridge ahead. I tracked its movements while organizing the shards of childhood Shannon just placed in my hands.

Everything inside me demanded that I wrap my arms around Shannon and hold her until those memories faded into the background, but she wouldn’t allow that. Going to her now would result in a brush-off, a brash comment, and even more ground to cover until I earned my way back.

“So I can make a pie,” she said, her voice high and shaky. “I have to get three or four squash because something always goes wrong, and Patrick and Sam give me a ton of shit about it. I only burnt one this year.” She laughed and started down a narrow path off the trail. “I hope Lauren remembers them.”

“I can guarantee you that Lo will not forget about a pie,” I said. “Pie is a major component of her world.”

“Fair point,” she murmured.

This path led toward a large, flat rock the size of a gazebo. She climbed up and stood in the center, then turned back and beckoned me to join. That was the invitation, and I was taking it. I jogged to the rock and grabbed her around the waist, turning her upside down while she laughed and shrieked.

“You’re going to drop me,” she screamed.

“I’m giving you a new perspective on the valley,” I said, my arms banded around her torso as she wiggled and kicked. I pressed my teeth against her backside and bit. “You’re supposed to be appreciating nature, peanut.”

“Are you
biting
my ass?” she yelled.

“It’s a nice ass,” I said, kissing the same spot before setting her on her feet.

We settled on the rock and shared the lunch we’d picked up before leaving the hotel. She tossed eighty percent of the turkey from her sandwich aside, explaining that she preferred sandwiches composed mostly of vegetables and cheese.

“If it were up to me, I’d skip the bread and stick with cheese and fruit,” she said, gesturing to me with her water bottle. “And nuts. Cheese, fruit, nuts. That’s all I need. There’s a market in Chestnut Hill that makes these perfect little cheese plates, but it’s a pain in the ass to get there from my place. Sometimes I send Tom to get me one for lunch, but I can’t really justify him spending that much time on cheese.”