Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

She grinned. “See how easy it is?” She had wrapped his arm around her shoulders and looked up. “Do me another favor,” she said.

“Sure.”

“For one night stop thinking of me as a nine-year-old in braces.”

Actually, Broker was thinking she was more like ice cream in a black dress. “How come you never got married?” he asked, stealing her question to him.

A lake breeze moved across the material of her dress and he felt the motion, warm, inside the skin of his hands. “I don’t need a husband. I need a fucking wife,” she observed frankly.

He took her hand and his fingers grazed the ridges of scars in her palm. “Okay. You’re all grown up.”

“This could be our last night ashore. Know what I mean?”

He nodded. “It could get rough.”

They stopped walking and stood close. A couple in shorts, with wires distorting the silhouettes of their heads, speed-walked by wearing Walkmans in the dark. Like blinders. Another time, Broker might have pushed them into the lake.

“So…maybe there will never be another night quite like this. Why don’t we just appreciate it,” she said. Slowly she raised her arms and put them, no longer hard but soft and willowy, around his neck. As her energy circled him, her hipbones pressed, definite and hard, and it was very warm down there between them.

His capillaries stood up like happy red wires and he lived through a perfect kiss.

“Don’t worry, tomorrow I’ll turn back into a tomboy with a dead frog in my pocket,” she whispered and punctuated it with a hot lick to his earlobe.

“No you won’t.”

“Yes, I will. That’s the problem.”

First they did it with their eyes in the moonlight.

Eloquent with the eyes. The body can only try to take the shape. The body is awkward, it sweats, and fumbles and that is why, even in the dark, you look into each other’s eyes when you make love, to pretend you are not just an animal, to pray that there really is a soul .

Then, like all the best moments of his life, the details were lost in the absence of the ordinary and, like always when he rediscovered this place, he wondered why he couldn’t live here all the time.

For a while they continued to float in each other’s arms soaking up the last tremblers. Then it was eyes again. And breathing returning to normal and the tickle of drying sweat.

Very slowly they found their way back into their own skins and, after an interval, she rolled to the side, removed one of his cigarettes from the pack on the night-stand, lit it, and passed it to him. Now they’d have to talk. Talk ruined the world. What the world needed was a government of eyes.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

Broker exhaled a stream of smoke at the ceiling. “I never thought this would ever happen again.”

“What?”

“Lay in bed with a woman and look at the ceiling and share a cigarette. It’s not allowed in Minnesota.”

They both laughed and Broker knew that when this was over, he would be old. He just knew. Days like this would never never come his way again.

He watched her roll off the bed and go to the refrigerator and open a mineral water. Then she crossed the deep pile carpet in a glide against the triangles of Scandinavian maple that framed the windows. Broker sighed with happy fatalism. The arena was full of pirates. Now he had opened the last two remaining doors and admitted the lady and the tiger.

But for now the night air came tactile through the screens, still special to the moment and they nudged it with their eyes, back and forth across the room, against each other’s skin.

She sat on the window ledge tipped in quicksilver against the night and stars. The cool, beaded bottle rested on her thigh. She drew one knee up and stretched her left arm over it.

He tried to picture her with long hair. A few more pounds.

He tried to picture her…cooking.

Making love with her had been an outrageous clean, free place. And now a long moment of calm.

But nothing was free, was it?

And they had made love in the eye of the storm.

Broker saw the problem. The castle walls in her eyes had been kicked down in the rumpus on the bed. She had been generous. She could play at surrender and back and forth. Now she had to rebuild her fort and stamp out the seeds of romantic entanglement that could sprout like weeds from every drop of her sweat.

With a mischievous salty grin she ambled to the bed. “The trouble with guys,” she said, “is once they find a great piece of ass,” she took a swig of water, “they don’t know what to do with it.”

“Some guys,” said Broker, pushing up on his elbows. So much for the warrior-virgin theory. “I guess we’re used to it being quieter…after.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I know, I should be spacey and postcoital gooey. Was Kimberly, the space alien, like that in the dark?” Tough talk, but her eyes were still big and grave. “All the guys I’ve been with said the same thing: ‘Let’s get married after you quit the army.”

“Well, you quit the army.”

“I didn’t jump. I was pushed. And not because of the Gulf stink. It was later. Because of a little scrap of tin that costs a dollar in the PX.” She laughed and extended her finger. “You got one and I don’t.” She pointed at his penis, but she was talking about the Combat Infantry Badge. She started stacking up the rocks in her eyes.

“Never happen,” said Broker. “They give it to you, they have to open the combat arms to women.”

“I did the work. I should get paid like everybody else.” She pointed to the two scars in her hip. “What’d I do here, knick myself baking cookies?”

“You’re right,” sighed Broker. “Definitely not post-coital gooey.”

Nina put on a freckled roughneck grin. “I have to mind my stereotypes if I’m going to gatecrash their party and nail LaPorte’s scalp to the clubhouse wall.”

“You really think that’ll work?”

“So I’ve been led to believe.” She set the bottle down on the night table. “The same senior officers who put the bug in my ear about LaPorte think it’s inevitable. A woman is going to cross the line in the next five years-the army just needs a push. The kind of push that comes from a big splash. If LaPorte drops from a great height, I’ll get my splash.”

“Ambitious,” said Broker. More comfortable now that it was out in the open.

She jerked her lips in a bawdy grin. “Somebody has to be the first swinging vagina to command a rifle company.” She climbed on the bed and straddled his hips. “You secure enough to handle that kind of ambition?”

“Sounds fine to me.” He reached up for her.

“Uh-uh. This time I get to be on top.”

“Okay.”

“Can you handle that?”

“Like I said, some men-”

“Confident, aren’t you?”

“Too much talk.”

“One last thought before the next round of killing starts. Could you handle being a general’s wife?”

“ What ?”

Nina looked down with a warm smile and said, “See.” Broker threw the pillow at her. She threw it back.

More serious now, she lay down beside him. A prolonged silence buried the banter and she said, “Tell me about my dad, Broker.”

Broker adjusted a pillow under his head. “His left foot was a cornerstone. Guys like him hold institutions together.”

Nina flicked a curl of lint from a tidy breast and knit her brows. “Had he lived and stayed in the army he’d never have made it past colonel. You know what I mean?”

“Uh-huh. He lived by the book but he wasn’t an ass kisser. He told me once he’d grown up in the shadow of giants. He was talking about men like Ridgway, Bradley, Patton. He had a little of that aura.”