Accidental Shield

Then I reach for my phone and pull up the home security app. All the signal lights are still on, no unusual motion from the cameras. There’s no breech.

It’s a quiet night, just like it should be.

I sit up taller, wiping the sweat off my forehead and the back of my neck. The woman’s photo in my dream, the mark we were supposed to extract, it hasn’t hit me this bad in years.

Closing my eyes, I try remembering what she really looked like, before she’d been snatched from Honolulu along with her young daughter. They’d been taken hostage, held for ransom at this secret compound just outside Bali, which is where my Damysus team found them.

The woman was wealthy. Married the wrong man with dirty connections. And that made her a target.

Fuck, she could’ve resembled Val. Young, with long flowing hair, but the face in the photo in my dream wasn’t hers.

It was all Val.

Fuck the mind’s trickery.

I get up. Phantom pain still scorches the scar tissue on my back.

The scars haven’t hurt like this in years, but tonight, they feel fresh, new. Knowing I need to stretch my muscles, I walk through the house to the back and go outside, onto the lanai.

The night breeze always feels refreshing. I cross the tile, the sand, then walk to the ocean, slipping through the coolness until the gentle waves slosh up past my waist.

Let it wash away the dream. Let it take away the pain. Let it renew my fucked up soul.

Baptism by water and salty air.

If only it could do the same for the past.

I swim past the spot off the shore where Val went under. That scared the living shit out of me.

I’d cursed myself for swimming so far away from her the entire time I was bringing her back, thinking how easily she could just disappear. And before that, when she’d jumped me, her slick, wet skin gliding across mine, I’d nearly lost it for a whole different reason.

What the hell is this woman doing to me?

She’s a cock tease, a sweetheart, and an enigma wrapped up in one fragile, annoyingly delectable package. She’s practically a stranger, someone I’ve only known for a few days because she was dropped into my lap, and yet…yet I feel how my lip curls every time I think about her situation.

I know how hard I have to choke back the growl rising in my throat.

I remember exactly how she tasted, those cherry wine lips sweeter and so much more decadent than her frigging cheesecake on a stick.

Yeah, fuck me.

I’m starting to realize just how tangled up I am in Little Miss Forgetful, two tragic lives locked like horns, a thousand things that could only go more wrong if I’m reckless enough to let us share a bed again.

You know what you promised, I tell myself, cutting brisk, angry laps along the shore.

She needs to stay safe. Build up her strength. And if anything happens to her, it’ll be my fault, especially if said anything means me.

Hell no. She’ll come through this unharmed. No worse for wear than she is right now.

She’s handling this amnesia fugue well, all things considered. I’d be like living with a chimpanzee with a gas lighter if I ever had my memories wiped.

Some of them, anyway.

Some, I could happily lose.

My back burns again, but it’s more of a dull, itchy sensation now.

I stop swimming, flip over and relax, float on my back, waiting for my breathing to normalize. Then I right myself and swim back to shore, following the faint, glowing lights from the house.

It’s a peaceful night. Barely even any odd, distant ships on the horizon, their lights winking duller than the stars.

Everyone mentions how breathtakingly beautiful a Hawaiian day can be, ending in a sunset crafted for the gods, but few people who aren’t locals talk about the nights.

Out here, you’re one with the stars. The entire island goes quiet and the ships fade to these distant, twinkling lights on the horizon, a sharp reminder how insanely far the closest continent is from these islands.

Then there’s the sky, a void torn open, spilling stars.

Calling it fucking magnificent would be a hilarious understatement.

It’s the kind of yawning chasm full of silver you just want to cast your deepest wishes into.

So I do, picking up a good-sized rock once I’m on the shore. I stand there alone on the beach for a few seconds, looking up, and let it come.

I think of Val. I toss my rock. I say a few words to the naked heavens up above.

Not about me. I tell them to take care of her.

Let her dream, dammit.

Let her make it through this.

Let her find a man worthy of her body and her sad little heart, some lucky SOB who knows how to crush her worries and her fears up into a tight, scrappy ball and set her free.