Absolution (The Protectors 1)

While I couldn’t understand my sudden attraction to these men – and I knew after that mind blowing orgasm that that’s what it was – it didn’t freak me out as much as it probably should have. Maybe because it was coming at a time in my life when everything was already so fucked up that in the scheme of things, my sudden expansion in sexual preferences didn’t seem consequential. So much in my life no longer seemed as important as it had once been.

My childhood had been decidedly uneventful and entirely stereotypical. I was the typical army brat though, in my case, it had been the Navy that controlled nearly every aspect of my family’s lives since my father had been a Naval Intelligence Officer. While my sister had struggled under my father’s disciplined, orderly rule, I’d thrived on it. I couldn’t even remember a time when I hadn’t wanted to be exactly like my father and I’d breathed in his praise like oxygen. It hadn’t hurt that I naturally exceled at everything I did, but having the highest GPA in my graduating class and being scouted for college football teams had never once deterred me from my goal to follow in my father’s footsteps. Carrie had often ribbed me for being a kiss ass but it hadn’t only been about pleasing my father. I’d loved the challenge of pushing myself both physically and mentally so trying out for the SEALs had been a foregone conclusion because I never did anything in half measure. Failure wasn’t an option for me and defeat wasn’t even in my vocabulary. But while I was an unstoppable force in the field, I wasn’t capable of dealing with the chain of events that unfolded after the night my sister took off.

One event that left me powerless and helpless for the first time in my life.

The only thing that had kept me functioning was my team and our missions, because when I had those things, I turned off the endless loop that ran through my head of the terrible things that might have happened to my sister. My men often called me the Ice Man because I never reacted to even the evilest of atrocities we bore witness to. None of them knew that I was dying inside as I watched my family fracture and slowly implode. Every time I went home, I lost more of my mother as she sought the quiet of her darkened room. My father spent his days and nights trolling websites that described unidentified bodies found all over the country. On more than one occasion, he would show me pictures of cast models that artists created to try and show what a deceased victim might have looked like at the time of their death.

As the years passed, holidays ceased to exist, birthdays were barely remembered and Carrie’s room was turned into a shrine. And then my mother gave up. That wasn’t what the autopsy said, of course. But that’s what it was. There’d been no solace that she’d gone in her sleep, because even what some coined a “peaceful” death didn’t make up for the years of torment she’d suffered at not knowing what had happened to her youngest child. After that, my father stopped looking for Carrie. Maybe because he’d failed to bring her home to her mother, maybe because he’d done what I’d done and started envisioning Carrie living a happy, successful life somewhere else. Whatever the case was, he found his solace at the bottom of a bottle. And I did what I did best – I became the man my father had always wanted me to be. Because I was certain there’d be a day when he’d come out of his drunken fog and he’d need to know that he hadn’t lost everything.

But that day hadn’t come. What had come was a call from my father’s doctor, who also happened to be an old family friend, telling me my father would be dead in less than a year if he couldn’t get his drinking under control. I’d spent the first few days after my discharge trying to get my father sober enough to talk to me about getting some help, but the man who’d told me to leave him the fuck alone wasn’t my father. The news of Carrie’s death had come the very next day.

As the Prescott house came into view, I tried to push thoughts of my father to the back of my mind. I’d asked Mrs. Pellano to check in on him and I had plans to meet with his doctor tomorrow to see what my options were for forcing my father to seek help. My guess was they’d be limited and nothing that would be a long term solution. And from the words my father had spat at me when I’d first broached the subject, he wasn’t interested in anything long term.