Fade To Midnight (6 page)

“Sean!” Liv wiggled, giggling. “This is no way to win an argument!”

“What argument? Were we arguing?”

“Don't be facetious. We have to communicate.”

“We are communicating. In the best possible way. And this isn't an attempt to win an argument.” He slid his tongue teasingly across her slit. “This is just changing the subject.”

“Yeah, right. Tell me about it.” She smothered more giggles. “Your all-time favorite subject.”

“Busted.” He nuzzled her groin. “Now, let's see. The new subject is better than the old one. I was just going to go on about how excellent and admirable you are. What a fabulous mother you'll be. Your courage, your beauty, your character…” He slid his finger inside her, followed its path with his tongue, in a slow, hungry swipe that hit all her external sweet spots. “Your yummy succulent pussy. My princess, my queen, my goddess, my world. No arguments. What's to argue?”

She dug her fingernails into his shoulders. “Seriously, Sean. Don't change the subject. We're not done with this subject.”

He raised his head, wiped his mouth. “We're not?”

“No.” She tilted up his chin. “You make me feel like I'm one of the bad guys in this story. Trying to make you doubt yourself. Undermining you. About Kev, for all those years. You're so angry at everyone for doing that to you, even Davy and Con. And I don't deserve any part of that anger. Not one little speck. You hear me?”

The raw emotion in her voice penetrated the hot lust that gripped him, and he lifted up, sobered. “No, baby, you sure don't,” he agreed.

She stared up, blinking in the moonlight. Her beautiful eyes were shimmering with tears. Remorse bit him in the ass, and he slid up her body, kissing his way apologetically over the curve of her belly, and into the bounty of her even more bodacious than usual tits.

“I'm sorry, baby,” he whispered. “Please don't cry. You'll make me cry, too, and I hate crying. Makes my nose run.”

She laughed, soggily, to his immense relief. “Oh, shut up, you clown. I just want…I want…”

Her voice trailed off, and he waited, in an agony of suspense. “Yeah?” he prompted. “What do you want?” He held his breath, hoping to God it was something he was humanly capable of granting her.

She blew out a sharp breath. “I don't want you to be forever yearning for something that might not even exist, for the rest of your life. I just want you to…to get over it. To be whole. And happy.”

Whew. Talk about a challenge.

He positioned himself carefully over her body so that he put no pressure on that precious bulge, and pressed himself inside her. They sighed, in tandem, at the throbbing clasp of her body around him. “I'm working on that,” he said. “It's complicated. But I'm trying. Just keep loving me. That's gotten me the closest I've ever been. Closer than I ever deserved to get.” He sucked in air, at the perfection of being so close. “Just keep loving me,” he repeated, his voice raw.

“Oh, please.” Tearful laughter made her body contract, minute shudders of perfection around his cock. “As if I ever had a choice.”

He rocked inside her. “I'm not scared about the baby,” he told her.

She clutched at him, with arms, legs, every part of her. “It would be nothing to be ashamed if you were, doofus.”

“But I'm not,” he protested, stubbornly. “Really. I'm so happy about that baby, it just about makes my heart explode. Believe me.”

She gave him a tremulous smile. “Um,” she murmured. “OK. That's nice to know. And now,” she wiggled against him, and he gasped with delight as she squeezed him, deliciously inside herself. “So. You were talking about, ah, exploding? You want to elaborate on that?”

He grinned at her, and proceeded to do just exactly that.

T
he guy across the poker table in the big blind position was staring at him. Chilikers. The one who'd cornered him in the men's room and begged him for a stake a couple of hours back. Chilikers had been desperate to get back into the game and make up his losses, so Kev had fronted the guy fifteen thou against his car. But he hadn't done Chilikers any favors tonight. Kev could practically smell the guy's shit luck. As bad as his foul breath. And now he was staring.

To be fair, there was a lot to stare at. It was weird for a guy to wear sunglasses at four in the morning in a darkened room. Add to that the webwork of old scars across one side of Kev's face, the redder, fresher scars that showed through the spiky ash-colored hair sticking up all over his scalp; mementos from the waterfall bashing and the subsequent surgeries. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. The tremor in his hands had nothing to do with the cards he held, but if his fellow players should misinterpret that as a tell, fine with him.

Chilikers snapped to attention as the dealer distributed starting hands. Kev glanced around for tells. Laker was petting a stack of chips even before the rest of the cards were dealt. Moriarty didn't like his hand. Kev felt it, from the set of his shoulders, the muscles contracted on either side of his nostrils. Chilikers's eyes had a hot gleam of excitement. Kev's eyes swept the other players, plugging in data.

He squeezed out his hole cards. An ace of hearts and an ace of spades. In a ten-handed game, pocket aces were good almost a third of the time, but the table was modestly tight. There'd probably only be three or four players in the pot, and he'd be a 3-2 favorite. He wished he could take pleasure in it, but he hurt too much. His head throbbed, and he had a heavy knot in his guts. Sensory overload. The volume was turned up to the highest decibel, and he couldn't turn it down. Whatever had damped him down before was gone. Going over Twin Tails Falls hugging an enormous tree had killed it.

And ah, Christ, how he missed it now.

Sunglasses helped, and ear plugs, and the poker game itself. But smells got him, too, and he could hardly go around with a plug on his nose. He was used to being stared at, but even he had his limits.

He could have endured the sensory overload, if that had been all it was, but the overload came from inside, too. Emotions blazed through him, leaving charred trails in their wake. He wasn't equipped to handle such violent endocrinal activity, after years of floating numbness.

Still, he preferred to call this state emotional overload rather than bugfuck insanity. Not that he could really quantify the difference.

All day, he surfed waves of rage and free-floating terror. When those eased down, aching melancholy awaited him, interspersed with jittery euphoria. And the lust was through the ceiling. He'd steeled himself to ask Bruno about that, and Bruno solemnly informed him that constant sexual awareness was more or less normal for a healthy guy, and welcome to the club, already. According to Bruno, normal guys thought about sex constantly. All night and all day, porn footage unspooled in their heads. How normal guys managed to get through their days without totally humiliating themselves was a mystery to him.

At night, if he slept at all, his dreams were turbo-charged nightmares that spat him into waking consciousness flash-fried on adrenaline. He was taking a protracted break from sleep. He couldn't take the stress anymore. All-night poker was more restful.

If he could keep his mind on it, that is. He yanked his attention back to see Laker limp in with 200. Kev raised 600, three times the big blind, breathing with his mouth so as not to smell the guy's aftershave.

He'd been in this unenviable state since he'd woken from the second coma, the one following the stress flashback. The one which had necessitated reconstructive surgery upon the face of Dr. Prateek Patil, Kev's neurosurgeon. Embarrassing, considering how hard the guy had worked on Kev's fucked-up brain. Patil hadn't deserved to get pounded all to shit for his trouble. But life was seldom fair.

He doubted that same fit would come over him if he should see Patil again, but nobody wanted to experiment with that hypothesis, least of all Patil himself. The guy had a restraining order out on him.

On the button, Stevens cold called $600. Kev wrenched his mind back into focus. Stevens's hand couldn't be that great. His normal pattern was to re-raise big hands, get the blinds to fold, and eliminate random hands that could flop big and crush a high-percentage hand.

Pay attention.
Hard to calculate what kind of hand Stevens would be playing with, his head pounding like this. Moriarty folded. His $100 blind went into the pot. Chilikers squeezed his cards and studied them again before he called $400 more. He'd been an early winner, after he got the stake from Kev. He'd even gotten ahead by about thirty thousand for a while, but for the last hour he'd been taking beat after beat. He'd gotten more sullen with each one.

Laker, the limper, called. He was getting pot odds for any two cards. That left four for the flop. Laker, Chilikers, Stevens, and himself.

Chilikers was staring at him again as the dealer burned the top card and flipped up the board. Queen of diamonds, jack of diamonds, two of clubs. Coordinated board. Sucked, for him. Anyone with two diamonds only needed one more to win, or any two connecting cards for a five card straight. His head throbbed sickeningly. He stuck his hand in his pocket, clutching the prescription bottle, but the pills would be useless now. He'd waited too long, hadn't wanted to dull his edge. He was so nauseous now, he wouldn't be able to digest them. So there was no way out of this shitty headache now but straight through it.

Besides. Seemed stupid to zonk himself into deliberate dullness after years of spending a fortune on extreme sports just to prove to himself that he had a fucking pulse.

Man, he felt that pulse now. Every heartbeat a meat mallet blow to his frontal lobe, thudding against the swelling, the scar tissue, the knitting bones of his skull. The healing process would be slow, though the doctors had assured him that the situation would improve. The pain, nausea, dizziness, the disorientation would diminish over time. And they had. He'd already gotten off the antiseizure meds. He might even regain some lost memories, they had hopefully hypothesized.

Though it was clear none of them wanted to be anywhere near him when that happened.

But Christ, it hurt. Every beat of his heart. Sometimes he wished that organ would give it a rest. Just stop, and leave him the fuck alone.

Concentrate, goddamnit. Stop whining
.
Self-pity is not useful.

That would be a lot easier if that bastard would stop staring.

It didn't usually bother him, but the disgust, the veiled hostility on Chilikers face bothered him a lot, in his current state. Kev met his eyes straight on, and silently invited him to state his fucking problem.

Chiliker's eyes flicked away. He checked. Stevens, too.

Kev bet $1,500. Stevens called. Chilikers, too, then Laker. The pot was up to $8,500. And Chilikers was glaring again.

Ignore the fucker.
He funneled his mind by brute force into the calm detachment that he craved. He played for the express purpose of concentration, detachment, serenity. And he was blowing it because some greedy asshole was giving him the hairy eyeball? Unacceptable.

The dealer burned, and flipped the turn. Ace of diamonds.

Ah.
Now that was a problem. His mind seized on to it hungrily, rejoicing in the new slew of calculations to make. He had a set, yeah, but a bunch of possible hands could beat a set of aces. His brain churned out the list, examining probabilities in a blinding inner stream of data that gave him sweet relief. As long as he could keep it up.

He'd happened upon this new coping mechanism by chance. Bruno had brought him a laptop to keep him from going nuts in the hospital, after they'd taken the restraints off. He'd discovered online poker while fucking around with it. It had taken serious effort to get those restraints removed, and convince the hospital staff that he was not going to wig out and attack them. He winced, just thinking about it.

Online poker was the first thing he found that helped. It chilled him, just that crucial bit that kept him halfway sane. He needed dark glasses to stare into the computer, and even so, the glow of the screen intensified his headaches badly, but it was better than a padded cell.

He'd played for days on end, until the doctors started talking about taking the computer away. He'd made it clear that wasn't an option, and shortly afterward found himself discharged, much sooner than hospital protocol dictated. The staff was scared shitless of him.

He didn't blame them. Christ, he scared himself these days.

As soon as he could stagger out on crutches, he'd sought out some real poker games. High-level play. Seasoned, talented players. The more layers of complexity, the better the trick worked for him. Those guys played for real money, though. They'd kicked his ass for a while. It had been an expensive coping tool while he made the adjustment.

Not anymore, though. He won, now. Almost always. He cycled through a big circuit of clubs, so that no one got too tired of that fact.

Not that he gave a shit about winning. The money in his pocket when he walked out was a byproduct. It was the process he craved. The stream of calculations in his head, blotting out the jangle of emotional overload. The game as he played it was painkiller, anxiolytic, and sleep substitute. After hours of probabilities calculation, he felt almost rested.

Patil was still pissed. There was a lawsuit pending. But whatever. If Patil wanted money to compensate his shock, pain, and mental anguish, Kev would give it to him. Of course, money didn't do shit for shock, pain, or mental anguish. He should know. He had plenty of money, and what fucking good had it ever done him?

He'd apologized to Patil, very sincerely. Bruno had gone to see the guy while he was recuperating from his surgery, to grovel on Kev's behalf, since they wouldn't let Kev himself anywhere near the man. But Patil had been unimpressed. Maybe it was the shattered orbital bone, the dislocated jaw. Kev could relate to that. He'd had a shattered orbital bone and a dislocated jaw himself when Tony had found him. He'd been too damaged to talk at the time, but he remembered the pain just fine.

It had an unsalutory effect on a guy's sense of humor.

Bummer, for Patil, that he'd resembled the troll from Kev's nightmares so closely.
No.
Correction. Not nightmares.
Memories.

Not clear ones, nor particularly useful ones, but still, they were memories. Not dreams, or fantasies, or hallucinations. He was sure of it. If there was one good thing about going over a waterfall and getting pounded to pulp, it was that. He had a narrow bridge connecting him to his former self, and he was clinging to it.

He no longer went out, except for the nighttime poker. He just holed up in his loft, trolling cyberspace all day, sunglasses on, shades drawn. Looking for his memories under every rock he could turn up. Since he finally had a snowball's chance in hell of finding them.

Osterman
. He had a name for the monster who haunted his nightmares. He even had a visual reference, in the luckless Patil's face.

Osterman was the name of the troll that stood guard at the door where his memories were locked. And a name was something to start with. It was a seed. Entire forests could be grown from a single seed.

He had a scarce handful of other data. The date, August 24, 1992. The warehouse south of Seattle where Tony had saved his life. A man had been beating him to death, Tony had ascertained, after watching on the closed-circuit camera for a while. Tony had been unwilling to get involved, but he didn't like the look on the guy's mug. He'd been enjoying himself a little too much. A few shots with Tony's Beretta sent him scuttling like a rat, and Tony had been left with a comatose guy, soaked with blood and beaten to hamburger. No identity. None of his marbles, either. Dead weight.

The homemade tattoo on his leg that read “Kev” was as good a name as any, so he'd stuck with it. Though it seemed odd for a guy to tattoo his own name on himself. What, like he might forget it? Hah.

Then there was the fact that he spoke some Vietnamese, of all things. That, plus his combat skills had led old Tony to conclude that Kev was Special Forces, but Vietnamese? Special Forces would make sense if he spoke Arabic, Persian, Pushtu, Croatian, Spanish. He was thirty years too young to be a Vietnam vet. It didn't track.

And the math, the science. Big bodies of human knowledge he was inexplicably familiar with. Theoretical physics. Biochemistry. Computer engineering. Earth sciences. Astronomy. The physics of flight. The history of aeronautics. The migratory patterns of birds, animals, and insects. Extensive first aid and field medic skills. Carpentry. He could sew, for the love of Christ. He connected the dots and got a scrambled clot. None of it made sense. But did any human life make sense?

Since the ride over Twin Trails Falls, his dreams had gotten clearer. They lingered after he woke up, instead of scuttling away to hide. Things were shifting in his mind, tectonic plates moving. Little puffs of steam, spouts of ash, but no dramatic realizations, no floods of returning memory, no “aha!”

Nothing so easy. Just feelings, images. Teasing, poking at him. Like his tiny angel, for instance. What the fuck was she about? She was too perfect, too iconic to be a real person, in that shining dress of hers. More like an angelic doll. A divine symbol, not a person.

Maybe he'd desperately needed a benevolent presence to counteract Osterman's evil, and his brain had fabricated the little angel for protection. Maybe he'd been religious, before. Spiritual.

And then again, maybe not. He remembered throwing someone through a window. That didn't strike him as particularly spiritual.