Kathleen Creighton - Secret Agent Sam

“Everybody makes sacrifices,” he said softly.

“You wouldn’t give up your career. Nobody would ever expect you to.”

“Maybe not…but I’d definitely make some adjustments, in a heartbeat.” His eyes narrowed as though she’d become a light too bright to look at. “But that’s beside the point. What if I told you I’d be willing to accept your career? That I wouldn’t ask you to give up a thing?”

She stared at him, devastated, wanting to scream at him, curse him for taking away her anger, the only defense she had. She turned her face away from him and rubbed a hand over her burning eyes. “It wouldn’t work,” she mumbled. “I know you mean it. You’d try your best, but…I know what you want, Pearse. I know exactly the kind of life, the kind of home and family you want. Because it’s what I had, growing up. It was great. No doubt about it. It was…wonderful. And I can’t rob you of that. I can’t.”

“Don’t you think you should let me decide what I’m willing to give up?” He punched down on the mattress beside his hips, trying to push himself upright, and she saw anger awaken, now, in his eyes.

She shook her head…closed her eyes…took a breath. “Okay, but…it’s not the only thing-”

“For God’s sake, Sam,” he exploded in a torn voice, “what else is there? If you don’t want to be with me, just say so.”

She jerked around, trembling violently. “That’s just it, dammit-I do want to be with you. I want to be with you. I want to share myself with you, and I want you to do the same with me. I don’t want this…I can’t stand this one-way street. It’s too damn lonely, Pearse. It’s too damn lonely…” She squeezed her eyes shut, but it didn’t stop the tears or the sob that ripped through her throat. “Sometimes I feel like I’m in love with a ghost. A really kind, loving, benevolent ghost. Because…the truth is, I don’t have a clue who you are. I can’t touch you.” She clutched air with her fingers, then gathered the fistful to her chest. “I can’t touch you here. I can’t get past your barricades. Your secrets…”

“Secrets?” She could almost see him cringe away from her as he said it, and his eyes blazed at her, with anger, yes, but with something else, too. Something that looked very much like fear. “What are you talking about?”

She dashed away tears, grateful at least to have the anger-baton passed back to her. It was much more comfortable than the tears. “Your family, Pearse. Your childhood. Those brothers and sisters you never told me about. Your parents.”

And now she could see him withdrawing behind his defenses, like a turtle into its shell. “They died,” he said stiffly. “I told you that. It’s no secret.”

Make him tell you, Sam.

She leaned toward him, shaking inside, knuckles white as she gripped the safety bar on the side of the bed. “Yeah? How did they die, Pearse?”

He made a small violent gesture of denial. “God-I was a kid, I don’t remember-”

She held up a not-quite-steady hand. “Don’t-I mean it. Don’t give me that. It was in the papers. It’s in the record. Tony looked it up. If he knows, you sure as hell do.”

He glared at her, and he’d never looked at her that way before…with his face a mask of anger and fear. In a voice so icy it made her shudder, he said, “If Tony knows, then why don’t you ask him?”

She almost gave it up, then. She’d never felt such anger before, not from her Cory, gentle, empathetic Cory, not directed at her. It devastated her; she wanted to turn and flee, run away from it as fast as she could. But somehow she stayed. She stayed because somehow she knew that for a man like Cory, such anger could only mean wounds too deep and raw to deal with any other way. Wounds beyond the scope of her experience, or her power to heal.

You have to make him tell you.

Yes, and she’d started this. She’d gone this far, opened the door, grabbed the tiger’s tail. She couldn’t let go now.

Pulling back a little and drawing in a calming breath, she said, “I did ask him, actually. He wouldn’t tell me. He said it has to come from you-whatever it is-this terrible, deep dark secret. He said you need to tell me.”

Cory jerked and made a scoffing noise. “Since when did Tony become a shrink?”

“You know what?” said Sam, ignoring the sarcasm. “I think he’s right. I think you need to tell me. Because if you can’t, if you can’t bring yourself to share even that much of your past with me, then I don’t see how there’s anything more for us to talk about.”

She saw the anger drain from his face, leaving only fear. Fear that bleached his skin to a muddy gray, and misted his forehead with sweat. Fear that lurked behind his eyes like the monster in a child’s closet. “You’re not being fair, Sam,” he said, in a gritty voice, barely above a whisper.

It seemed a very long time that she went on gazing at him, while her heart thundered and her body trembled, while voices of protest and rejection and denial screamed and echoed inside her head. She closed her ears to them all and said softly, “Goodbye, Pearse.” Then turned and walked away on legs of glass.

He was losing her.

What she was asking of him was too much. He couldn’t do it. If he talked about it, he’d have to remember. And if he did, the memories would overtake him like an oncoming freight train. They would surely crush him. He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t.

If he didn’t, he was going to lose her.

The pounding is only in your head, Pearse. You know that. It’s a nightmare. Nightmares can’t kill you.

Except…he knew they could. Nightmares could kill, and they could destroy.

And by God, he wasn’t going to let it happen to him.

Sweating, teeth clenched, Cory lifted a shaking hand and drove his fingers into his hair, pressed them against his skull as if doing so could keep it from cracking under the pressure of the din inside. A din so loud he couldn’t hear his own voice call out her name.

But he did call, and she heard. He saw her pause. The noise in his head subsided to a muted thumping, and this time he heard himself hoarsely croak, “Sam-wait.”

She turned halfway, one hand still on the doorknob. Waiting.

“My father killed my mother,” he heard himself say in a voice carefully stripped of all emotion. “He shot her. Then he turned the gun on himself.”

At the first words her head jerked the rest of the way around, and she stared at him, her eyes nearly black in a face bleached white with shock.

He went on in the same relentless, expressionless voice. “That’s what happened. That’s what I was told.” And then, gently, cruelly, “Are you happy now?”

“My God…” And he could hear the soft, sticky sound of her swallow.

He couldn’t take pleasure in how shaken she was. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, contrite and emotionally drained, and put an arm across his eyes. “You wanted to know.”

He felt her come closer, creeping uncertainly toward him as if he were a wounded animal, or some unknown and possibly unstable substance. Both of which he supposed he was, at the moment.

She cleared her throat. “Where were you when it happened? Were you there? Did you see it?”

“I don’t remember.” He moved his arm and looked at her, eyes aching with exhaustion, and the unaccustomed strain of functioning without glasses. “Really, Sam. I don’t remember. The newspaper accounts said the children-the little ones and I-were in the house at the time. But I have no memory of it. Sorry.”

“Do they know why it happened?” She was frowning intently at him and trying to sound totally unemotional, the way she did when she was trying to hide how emotionally touched…shaken…hurt she really was.

Encased in his own shell of numbness, and thoroughly regretting, now, that he’d done this to her, he shrugged and said gently, “Classic posttraumatic stress, probably. He’d been in Vietnam. I’m guessing he had a violent flashback, attacked my mother, someone called the police and when they arrived, he shot her, then himself.”

Sam’s eyes narrowed. “But…he didn’t hurt you or the other children?”

“No.” The pounding had started up again. He wanted to put his hands over his ears to block it out, but he knew it wouldn’t help. Nothing did. He rubbed his eyes instead. “Evidently not.”

“You were there…and you were how old? Ten? Twelve?”

“Eleven,” he said woodenly. He could feel the fear creeping up on him, like icy fog.

Her voice was disbelieving. “Pearse…Cory. Surely, you must remember something.”

He felt the bed dip with her weight, and then a soothing coolness with a little bit of sandpaper roughness to it touched his face, stroked his hair back from his forehead. He’d never known Sam’s hands could be so gentle.

Emotion, a devastating mix of love and despair, shivered through him. He caught her wrist and heard her gasp as he said in a voice tight with pain, “Maybe I don’t want to remember. Did you ever think of that?”

She sat for a long time without speaking, just looking at him with her wounded eyes, and that dauntless and defensive lift to her chin. Then her gaze shifted past him to the IV bag hanging above his bed, and he saw her throat working.

“You know,” she said in a flat voice with a huskiness in it she didn’t bother to clear, “during my training for…this job, they covered PTSD pretty well…the causes and effects, symptoms, prevention…treatment. All of it. I guess they do that, now. Anyway, one of the things they told us is that PTSD can take lots of different forms. Violent flashbacks like your father had, or nightmares and depression, flirting with suicide-the things my dad had to deal with after Iraq-those aren’t the only symptoms. When you can’t-or won’t-let yourself remember, when you shut yourself off from people emotionally…that’s PTSD, too. And you’re not going to get over it, Cory. Not unless you talk about it.”