Page 67 of Wolf.e
“Were you afraid when you went overseas?”
I keep my gaze on her while I take my sip.
“Mason said you went three times,” Brinley admits with a shrug while she fluffs her long hair around her shoulders.
“No, I wasn’t scared,” I answer.
“Not at all?”
“No. There’s no point in being afraid. It doesn’t change the outcome,” I say simply. “Everything dies.”
“That’s not true,” she says, a coy little smile lining her face.
I study her for a beat.
“Everything dies,” I reiterate.
“Love doesn’t,” she says with a wistful little grin.
I make apfftkind of sound and run a hand through my hair.
“This is real life, not the writings of Fitzgerald.” My brow knots as I watch the way her blue eyes hold the lamplight.
“You read those classics?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t believe in love? Fate?”
“They aren’t real. I’ve studied how the mind works for a long time.” I twist a piece of Brinley’s hair between my fingers, and she moves against me, her ass taunting my cock to go again. “They’re what we use to give ourselves false hope that true happiness actually exists. As long as you understand it isn’t reality, you can still enjoy them.”
Brinley smiles. “Do you not have faith in anything at all? That someone is watching over you?” she asks, running a fingeraround the scar I earned on my ribs when a fence ripped me open in Iraq.
I look up at her and run a hand through my hair.
“I have no faith in anything but myself,” I say.
“That’s a grim existence,” she comments, her words starting to string together a little. She shifts her weight in my lap and her ass offers my cock a hit of friction. Having her in my lap is so foreign to me. I’ve fucked a lot of women, so many that I’ve lost count, but human connection is something that feels new. Brinley continues to run her finger over the swirls in the vines on my skin, I don’t hate it.
“When I was thick in the middle of my second tour, I got trapped in a cave filled to my waist with water. There were ten of us. We were heading to capture an operative for an ISIS leader,” I tell her, watching her fingers skim my skin. “It was a trap and there were landmines under the water. Six of my men died. I thought I was dead. I carried a nineteen-year-old boy out on my shoulder. We left part of his legs in the cave. I still hear his screams every fucking day. I watched small children scream in horror as they watched their parents die, I stopped countless women from being raped—by both fucked-up American soldiers and their own people. I watched a five-year-old girl have her arm and leg blown off at the hands of a car bomber. Yet pedophiles and murderers rot in jail cells until they’re ninety when there are many more fitting ways they could be made to suffer. There is no God. There is no reason for anything. People die every day and life just goes on.”
Brinley looks at me with a scrutiny I don’t understand, it’s not a judging glance but the look of a woman trying to understand who I am.
“Is that why your cut says Solider of Bedlam? It’s the military men that wear that?” she asks.
“No, you earn that a different way,” I tell her, not offering any more explanation.
She must sense I’m not willing to talk about it because she changes the subject.
“You must have faith in your country if you fought for it.”
I take another drink; this conversation is getting a little too heavy.
“I don’t have faith in my country, I care greatly about it, there’s a difference.”
“One isn’t the other?” Brinley asks, taking another sip.
“Not even close,” I tell her.
