Page 46 of Double Shot
Yours.
The hotel had a very excellent gym, and I paid it a visit.
I wore myself out with steel and sweat, giving myself to the burn of exercise. This was one of the things that I had been denied for months. No one I loved or cared about, no gym, no freedom, no Sadie. Just that sadistic bitch, and her laugh and her teeth.
The whole time Sadie was going through an emotional breakdown.
I pushed, sweat dripping until my eyes were burning from it. That was fine.
I hit my limit on the bench press. It started with sweat running into my eyes, and then once the tears started flowing, I cracked like a dam. Thankfully, the facility was empty, and I was able to limp to the showers and hide my breakdown under a roar of water and steam.
I sat for a while, the hot water not running out, and my leg raw with agony.
Sadie had been sitting in a shower like this once.
I thought about how shite the showers were at Wolf Creek, and wondered if she had sat in one of them and cried her heart out while Lach was sleeping, some IV stuck in his arm, that she had put in.
Fuck all of this.
Fuck the Escadrille, and Kaijin, andLe Generale. I wanted to crush them, to make them bleed and scream with the pain that they had put us through, and all because we wouldn’t join their fucking heroin Cartel, or that they had hired us for a suicide mission in their petty fucking family dispute.
I calmed down, and had room service for lunch, a round of painkillers, and finished off the bottle of whiskey from the previous night. The suite had been serviced while I was away, and that was a nice touch. Of course, it was a nice touch, the Fairmont sat literallyoverthe Monaco Grand Prix track, and faced the Mediterranean. There was nothing about the place that wasn’t nice.
Lach had texted me a few times through the day, an unusual change from the usual pace of things. He was going to keep Sadie out and occupied so that I could have the privacy I needed to get my things taken care of. I knew as soon as I sent him the text, they would be in the suite posthaste. I was glad for it. I didn’t want her to see me break down, and there was no way I could have worked through the portfolio stuff if she was here. I would have doted on her every second.
Did you have omakase without me?I texted Lach after he sent me a pic of the offering at the in-house sushi restaurant. Ninety-five euros seemed like a surprisingly good deal for a chef’s tasting course at a place as posh as this.
Lach: No, mate, made ressies for lunch tomorrow.
Good, room is clear. RTB- I texted. Return to base, we had lived for those three letters to come across the radio, sweeping across the ruined wasteland of the Afghani highlands. We would wheel the jeeps and IFVs around and make for home as quick as we could. There were showers and hot meals, and fewer mortar rounds. RTB was the bell calling us home.
They returned, laden with bags. They had spent a good deal of money, but it was all needed. Not just in terms of replacing missing clothes, but in the basic pleasure of buying things. Everything we had previously owned had been blown to fuck all, why not buy each other gifts and trinkets?
Sadie had been enormously worried over the contents of those emails she had sent me, and I saw that her building tears weren’t because I had read something that she wanted to keep private, but that I would see all the ugliness and hurt in them, and I would turn away from her. I took her in my arms, in my lap, and she came close to having a crying jag that might have cleansed her soul, but she wasn’t ready for that yet. There was something still unsaid between us, a dam of sorts.
Kyle bowed out, excusing himself for strong cocktails and some distraction. I knew that he was making room for the two of us, and not off hunting for his own sport. She had a number of things for me, and a few joking gifts from him. Those would have to be repaid in kind, but that would take some time to come into my mind. Then there was the engraved General Service Time Piece. Something caught in my throat, and I felt my eyes sting. It was enormously thoughtful.
There was no way she could have known, but I had owned one of these before. It had belonged to my grandfather, and the only engraving on it was a woman’s name, my grandmother, Esther. It was gone, lost when the house went up.
Then she all but led me from the lounge, overlooking the sea, to the large bedroom and its waiting king-sized bed. She doffed her clothing with quick efficiency. There was no striptease or attempt at seduction, only the flash of her breasts, the dark triangle marking her pussy, and a slowly growing ache between my legs, and in my chest. We had been close this morning, before Lach had opened the blinds on the day and swept her from my presence.
He surely had many reasons, I did need my space for the things I had done that afternoon. I knew that the two of them had gone through his game the evening before. I thought about what I knew of that, his penchant for fucking tactically beautiful women in the ass, and how he took pleasure from destroying beautiful things. Was it the same for him, emptying his balls into their perfectly coiffed hair, their precision-applied makeup as it had been lobbing grenades through the arches of brutalist regime monuments and the palaces of warlords?
Another thought started to intrude, I felt Sadie’s lips on mine, her hand feeling tiny, tugging me out of my boxers. The remembrance of her lips on mine, groaning as Lach and I took both of her holes, it was violated by the spectre of Gwendolyn.
The desire all but died, remembering her cruel touch, how her hands had felt small wrapped around my cock, and how I never knew if she was going to suck me, or use the damned loop cinched around the base of my business to make me hard regardless of what I wanted. There were flashes of her teeth biting into my tenderest flesh, or her soft breasts pillowing my cock as she brought me to orgasm.
Then Sadie was there, and I heard her whisper that phrase that seemed like the language of the seraphs.I got you.And she did have me. We spoke in the shadowy language of lovers, confessing our hearts to each other. She knew what that woman had done to me, at least what I had told Kyle, and that she knew this sort of cruelty.
We would have to find the person who was callous enough to lay hands on my Sadie and make that piece of shit pay. And dearly.
Revenge would have to come later, because there was something much more important at hand. I could feel how wet she was, and her need for me was almost palpable. There was no grand seduction, no acrobatic feat of a gymnast or Olympic lovemaking, like some erotic gods fucking. I was a nearly shattered man, and she was a beautifully broken woman. When I sank my cock into her, it was like something soothed both of us. Her breath was hot against my neck, and my chest. I made love to her, no rush, no urgency.
The only thing that mattered was that we were together again, and there was absolutely nothing left between us, not even space or air. I could die in that moment, or live in it for eternity and it would have been perfect.
Such things, like shadowy languages, aren’t meant to last.
When she came, it was such a small and soft thing, I was brought close to tears. This was her, this was the Sadie that I had dreamed of. When the sadist woman had taken every inch of my pleasure away for hers, I had held the thought of this woman, seemingly so small, but so much more important than myself, as an amulet against the abuse.
