“I’m holding it together. I know what she needs. And I need you to give her to me.”
Another pause.
The air was wired.
A strange thing to have in my pretend world. Wasn’t it meant to be easy and lacking that conflict that was the thing I was escaping? The pain?
There was a lot of pain here. Not inside me, I was thankfully still numb to that. But on the outside. In the air. In the way both of these pretend men spoke.
In every syllable that Pretend Heath seemed to rip out from his very soul. It was very strange I was able to construct such pain. I had a powerful imagination, everyone told me that, but not that powerful. But maybe it was that powerful because now I knew pain really well. Intimately. That must’ve been it. Before I injected happiness and love into my fantasies because I was lucky enough to know it very well. Now it would be pain and ugliness.
No more happiness and love. Not ever again.
Yes, that was it.
I decided it just as I was jostled into another set of arms. They did that thing where they squeezed me like an uncracked egg. But I was already cracked. Shattered, leaking out through the broken pieces.
Gravel crunched under boots.
My eyes flickered as I decided it might be time to open them, because this might be the last time I was strong enough to create a fantasy this strong, this real, and this might be the last time I could see Heath. So I should feast on him before I get taken away from my mind.
“No, Sunshine,” he murmured. “Keep your eyes closed.”
He must’ve been watching me, staring at me pretty hard to see the tiny movement under my closed eyelids to signify that I was about to open them.
I kept them squeezed shut. If he didn’t want me to open my eyes, it was for a reason. He was protecting me from something, maybe. I let out a little giggle at that. He was protecting me from something when there was nothing left to protect.
We stopped.
“Fuck.”
The third male uttering that word and somehow using it as a cry of sorrow instead of a curse.
More familiar.
This was Keltan.
“Set her down, we need to see her injuries.”
“You can see them from here,” Heath hissed.
“Brother, you need to let her go.” Keltan’s voice was gentle, tentative, like he was trying to talk a man off a ledge.
“Letting her go is what got her here in the first place.”
I sensed this might go on for awhile. Again, this puzzled me as to why my pretend reality might be full of such things. Something tickled the edge of my mind, tried to coax me out of my layers with the seductive thought that maybe this was a reality. Maybe this was the true one.
Maybe they were really all here, wherever here was, and maybe I was getting saved.
Much too late of course.
This thought and the men’s argument was cut off by the sound of tires.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Luke’s furious voice clipped out from somewhere near.
A door closed.
“I told you to sit fucking tight,” Luke said, his voice almost a shout.
“And since when did you think that what you told me to do is what I’m going to actually do?” a woman’s voice asked.
Familiar.
Too familiar.
She began to yank me out of the thought that this was all pretend. Because if I was imagining this, I would never bring her here. No, I would never want her to see me like this. I would never hurt her like that. I was already hurting, scarring the man I loved beyond belief. But I didn’t have the strength to save him, because I needed him before I was lost altogether.
“Since you’re four months fucking pregnant,” Luke continued, voice hard.
“I waited until you stopped the killing.” The voice was closer. “Which I could’ve done. Viking women gave birth on the battlefield, Luke, and I’m much tougher than they—”
She stopped speaking at the same time the gravel stopped crunching when her voice got nearer and nearer.
It was an abrupt knife through her words, the ensuing silence. I guessed it was when she saw me.
The pain was coming back quickly now because I was beginning to sicken with the realization that this was real. How was it that I was having a more violent reaction to being saved than when I thought that I was still being tortured?
“Baby.” Luke’s voice immediately softened, all of the previous anger leaking out like my soul did through the cracked pieces.
His voice was broken too.
I didn’t want to open my eyes now.
Because his voice told me he saw something on Rosie’s face.
Pain.
Because of me.
“Polly,” Rosie croaked.
More gravel crunching.
I smelled her perfume.
My hair moved and a soft hand trailed across my forehead.
It took all of my strength to open my eyes.
The pain came back then. With Rosie’s tearstained face.
All of it.
The outside and the inside.
I looked behind her, not at the people around her. No, at the yawning desert around us. It was dusk or dawn. Did it matter if the day was ending or beginning? Maybe it used to.
Not anymore. Endings and beginning were the same now.
Meaningless.
“We’re in the desert,” I whispered. “I’ve always liked the desert. It’s a nice place. A nice place.”
And then I was gone.
One Month Later
Heath
They were in the conference room.
The one he couldn’t walk into without the chill of what felt like someone was walking over his grave.
But every step in a place that he’d existed in before was a step over the dead remains of his life a month ago. Before he’d died the second he opened the doors to that truck. Saw her chained, bloody, brutalized beyond belief, beyond comprehension. Wearing his torn fucking tee shirt. And wearing nothing on her face.
The woman who wore her heart on every inch of her body, in her expressions was wearing nothing. That hit him as hard as her physical injuries. And they hit him pretty fucking hard.
He hadn’t lost that much of himself in those two seconds in three tours in the desert.
No war could take from him what those moments took from him.
And though she was back, she wasn’t back. No, he couldn’t even find comfort in the fact she slept in his arms every night and he woke to her every morning because it wasn’t her. Not really.
So everywhere he went, when he had to leave her, when he forced himself to leave her, it haunted him with what was there before.
The conference room was the worst because that was where they got the news. That’s where they finally got her location and he hoped, like a stupid motherfucker that they’d find her.
Whole.
That was the last place he entertained the idea of an unbroken Polly.
So it was fucking torture to sit at the same seat he’d sat in one month ago.
But he did it. He welcomed torture. He needed pain, he craved more of it. Because he could never go through in a lifetime what Polly lived through.
They met here once a week. Well, all of them did, the women included. But the men met every single fucking day since it happened, usually with a member of the Sons of Templar either by Skype or in residence.
The whole club had come when Polly had been found.
As a show of solidarity more than anything else.