Just as I was beginning to give up hope that he’d tell me anything, Tap took a deep breath and surprised me. “It wasn’t what I thought it would be,” he admitted.
I quirked a smile at him. “Job expectations got you like what the fuck?” I joked, raising my octave at the end for emphasis. “I know that struggle.”
“Yeah, I suppose you do.”
“What did you expect it to be like?”
He rubbed a hand over the stubble on his jaw. “I thought I’d be going after bad guys.”
Seemed like a reasonable expectation to me. “And you weren’t?”
“Oh, I was. These guys were horrible. The worst. But it was… complicated.”
I nudged him with my elbow. “Break it down for me.”
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You hear about these men doing all this fucked up shit, and you expect monsters. You don’t expect to see their human side… to understand that they’re not the monsters your conscience needs them to be. They’re just men. Husbands. Dads. Sons. I’d be listening in on plans to blow up a city center and potentially kill millions that was interrupted so the head terrorist could tuck in his children and say the Tahajjud, the nighttime prayers. They could be so callous and calculated one minute, and so compassionate and loving the next. Sometimes meetings were postponed to give a terrorist time to walk an elderly parent home.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah. Some of them were monsters, but the majority were just like you and me, only radicalized. They believed that what they were doing was for the greater good. They saw themselves as the heroes in the story. It’s so fuckin’ hard to get information from someone who truly believes they’re the good guy, but that was my job and lives depended on it.” He was staring at the wall, but he was somewhere else entirely. Some-when else.
My heart hurt for him. “I can see why that would get complicated.”
“I expected everything to be black and white. Good versus evil. That kind of shit. But it wasn’t. We were killing them to keep them from killing us, and they were killing us to keep us from killing them. It’s like this big, fucked-up loop that nobody can find a way out of. In the end, there’s nothing but death, destruction, and orphaned little kids who grow up and do the same damn thing.”
I stared at Tap, really seeing him for the first time. I couldn’t imagine the things he’d gone through, the things he’d seen and heard, the kill orders he’d been involved in. No wonder the man was so private. It was a wonder his humanity was still intact.
“I get it.”
Coming out of his daze, he looked at me, as if he just remembered I was there. “Get what?”
“Breaker’s a monster and I know I have to stop him, but it would destroy me to watch him be sweet and kind to his son or daughter before I pulled the trigger. Especially knowing that one day that son or daughter would come for me or my future child.”
He met my gaze and his dark eyes churned with torment and pain. “Yeah, I guess you do get it.”
I didn’t know what else to do, so I hugged him. Blinking back tears as I pressed my cheek against his chest, and said, “Thank you. I know it had to be difficult, but this country is safer because you took down those monsters. Even the dads and sons.”
***
Tap
Sasha was crying. She was trying like hell to hide it, but I could feel the dampness of her tears through my thin T-shirt.
She cried for me.
Had anyone ever cried for me before?
Mama cried when I signed my life away to the service. She cried again the first time I was deployed, all the while threatening that if I didn’t bring my ass home safe and sound, she was going H.A.M. (hard as a motherfucker) on the entire Middle East.
Elaine had cried a few times, but it was neverforme. Her tears were another tool of manipulation, another card she could pull to get me to do her bidding. There’d been no feeling, no compassion behind her waterworks.
I couldn’t believe I opened up to Sasha like that. I still wasn’t sure why I’d done it. Maybe because she’d shared so much last night that I wanted to give her something in return? Maybe because I’d tossed and turned all night and my defenses were down? Maybe because I couldn’t understand her motive for wanting to know? Regardless, I’d never talked about my days in the service to anyone. Sage, our club’s psychiatrist, had tried to rip out the details numerous times, but I never told him shit.
A part of me had always believed talking about those memories would be like reliving them, and living through that shit had been hard enough the first time. I refused to go back.
But it wasn’t like that at all.
Talking to Sasha about my past had been surprisingly therapeutic. It felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Even more, I felt… understood.
