Jo Robertson - The Avenger

Definitely good for a few more rounds. Even if he had to tolerate pizza and cheap, empty-headed conversation.

"Back in a minute," he said, grabbing his coat from the rack and heading out into the brisk night, tugging the collar close around his neck.

At the liquor store he chose a moderately-priced bottle of Burgundy before picking up the pizza and walking the quarter mile back to his apartment. The food would be cold by the time they got around to eating it – rather, before she devoured it – but he had no intention of letting the heat of the moment slip by.

She might get one slice eaten while he set up the camera. She would need the extra energy because he had every intention of keeping her very occupied tonight.

Olivia didn't look at all surprised when Jack showed up on her doorstep without warning. He hadn't meant to see her alone again before he left for the mountains, but her accusing eyes had wounded him all day. He told himself he'd explain what little he could and beg her forgiveness.

Those sharp green eyes darkened several shades as she swept them over his casual clothes – jeans and a black tee shirt under his leather jacket. She stepped back and opened the door wider. Barefoot and looking very young in jeans and a collared shirt, she took a seat on the sofa in the living room. Jack chose a wing chair in the opposite corner, putting distance between them.

"I never meant to take advantage of you." The the words spewed out of his mouth sounding common and inadequate.

"You left me," she said after a painful pause.

The truth stung. "You think I used you."

"I may have been young, Jack, but I always knew what I wanted." She tucked her bare feet under her legs. "What I didn't know was why you left after… well, you know." She lifted her slender shoulders. "It was my first time. I suppose I was immature enough to dramatize the whole event, but I felt as though you'd saved my life. I thought it meant something." A small smile crossed her lips. "Very foolish of me."

A white, hot jab of anguish stabbed Jack's gut.

Moving to Oakland from Texas at the age of fifteen actually had saved his life, he reflected, considering his father was in prison and his mother ran through men and alcohol at the fast pace. He'd been a mess when he came to live with his foster parents, kicked out of juvie and given one last chance to reform.

Turns out his one last chance had been Olivia. She'd saved him then and he couldn't help wondering if she'd save him now. "It's complicated," he said, looking at his interlocked hands dangling between his legs. "I wanted to call you, let you know what happened, send a postcard, but – "

She placed her feet flat on the hardwood floor and leaned forward on her elbows. "Instead you showed up at my office seventeen years later talking about dead bodies and a murder case."

Jack swiped a hand over the scruff of his jaw. "All I wanted was to protect you from that bastard stepfather of yours." For years he'd been stumbling around the truth like a blind man. He stared into Olivia's steady eyes and knew with a wrenching knife-wound to the gut that he had to start being honest with her.

Restless, he slammed out of his chair and began pacing the room, his fists jammed in his pockets. "Graduation night," he began, "I looked for you, thought you'd left early." He remembered how he'd walked off the stage, clutching his diploma in one hand and holding his cap on his head against the stiff breeze with the other. His car keys were tucked in his dress slacks and he searched the crowd.

Olivia nodded for him to continue.

"I couldn't wait to meet at the dugout like we'd arranged." He smiled, thinking of how pumped up he'd been. "I had to see you. Right then." But he couldn't locate the top of her dark curly head among the staff and families that pressed toward the graduates. "Someone said you'd gone home early, so as soon as I could, I drove to your house."

Her surprise was genuine. "I didn't know."

"No one answered, and it occurred to me that you'd already gone to the dugout like we'd planned. As I turned to leave, the front door swung open. Your step-father stood there. No shirt, no shoes. A bottle of Jim Beam in his hand."

He saw it as clear as a picture, Roger scratching his bare belly with the hand holding the liquor bottle, drunk as a skunk and mean as a rabid dog. Pure ugliness around his mouth.

Jack sank into the chair and leaned on his forearms. "I didn't lie to you when you asked what I'd done with my life. I just gave the short version."

Olivia sat up straighter, steel in her eyes. He couldn't tell if she believed him or not. "Give me the long version," she ordered.

He sighed, staring down at his hands. "I went to college just like I told you, but it was a Special Forces training school that crammed five years of academic studies and intensive training into three."

Her beautiful green eyes widened. "Military school?"

He nodded. "Invictus. Right after that the Marine Corps. Did time in Kuwait and South America."

Shock layered her face. "You were just a kid."

"I'm not sure I was ever a kid." He smiled without humor. "I finally went back to Maryland, to Invictus." He spread his hands, palms upward. "Pretty soon, the Organization was the only home I ever knew. The only place where I felt half-way normal."

"I don't understand. What did they do to you?"

Jack didn't answer and cradled his head in his hands.

Olivia rose and knelt in front of him, but not touching him, he noticed. "That still doesn't answer why you left so abruptly."

He looked up into her face, closer now. "After the night when you and I… after that night I felt different, changed."

"Emotionally? So did I."

He shook his head, unable to meet her eyes, and rose again, left her sitting on the carpet. He gazed through the wide glass window into the night as if he'd find the words there to explain that long-ago time. "I swear to God, Livvie. I loved you. From the moment I first saw you, I loved you." First as a friend, then… "

In fact, Jack recalled the exact moment he ceased to think of Olivia Morse as a nuisance and tagalong and saw something in her that sparked his interest. The promise of womanhood in her budding breasts and skinny hips and legs, of something alluring that drew him to her like a magnetic force field.

At the first blush of spring that last year the three of them were together all the time – Olivia, Ben, and Jack – like the three musketeers. They'd driven Ben’s pick-up truck to the rock quarry north of the city. They wore tank tops and shorts, and relished the pale sun beating on their bodies for the first time since winter. After rummaging for empty beer and soda cans, they lined them up on the largest rocks and took turns shooting the rifle.

Jack's arms wound around Livvie, demonstrating how to hold the rifle butt against her right shoulder and sight down the barrel before squeezing off the shot. He bent his head to see the sight line for himself, and Livvie shifted her hip into his body and turned her head into his face. Jack inhaled the sweetness of peppermint on her breath and the smooth skin of her cheeks tinged with the sun’s warmth. She peered upward through impossibly thick lashes and stared unblinking at his mouth while something inexplicable shifted inside him, a turn down a divergent road from which he couldn't return.

If he’d known that the force of their attraction would nearly destroy him, would he have acted on it anyway? Or was his destiny decided long ago by some cosmic force he didn’t understand and over which he had no control? Determined by the unique arrangement of his genes?

Jack had seen a matching emotion in Livvie’s face, and he knew she’d felt it too, that shift in their friendship. As he gazed at her, all those years ago, a placid serenity seemed to descend over her. She’d reached a momentous decision, but he didn’t know what that meant until much later. When it was too late to go back.