Page 73 of Nightfire

His body was speaking, though. Every muscle was in high relief, a body in complete lockdown. What he wanted to say was painful. It was entirely likely he didn’t even have the words for it.

She lay her other hand on his chest, right over his heart. His thumping heart.

“You have something to say, Mike. I can tell. And it looks like it’s hard for you. But I’m not in a hurry. Whatever it is, it can wait. Maybe tomorrow⁠—”

“No!” He breathed in, said it more quietly. “No. I need to get this out.” He looked down at his lap, at where his rigid penis reached almost to his belly button. So stiff you’d have to pry it away from that flat, muscular abdomen. “So here it is. I have a strong sex drive. Which most people think is a good thing. I’m male, relatively young, healthy. Strong sex drive kind of goes with the whole package, right?”

He was sweating. A drop of perspiration rolled down his check and dropped on his chest. There was such tension in him, like a tuning fork quivering. Chloe had no idea how to relieve him. Her only gift to him could be stillness, and attention.

She nodded.

“Wrong.” The word came out through clenched jaws. “In all these years, it’s never been good, never been clean, healthy fun. It—it didn’t feel healthy, it felt sick. It was more than an itch I had to scratch. It was like—like on a regular basis some terrible poison accumulated in my body and I could only expel it through my dick. There was this tension that would build and build and I simply couldn’t stay put. It was like being possessed. I’d just have to go out and do something about it. And without even planning it, I’d end up in some bar. Exactly the kind of bar a woman looking to hook up goes to. I don’t know…I think maybe I gave off some kind of special vibe or smell or something because five minutes in the bar and some dame comes up to me. Regular, like clockwork. Five minutes, ten and a woman’s drinking my beer and telling me her address. I learned a long time ago to recognize a working girl. Paying for it was going too far, even for me. But anyone else was fair game as long as she wasn’t married or seeing someone else. That was another line I drew. But that leaves a lot of women in the game. I was like this grenade and someone had pulled a pin. So I’d grab the fuck-du-jour—” he stopped, fixed her in his intense blue gaze. “Sorry, but that’s exactly what it was. I can’t whitewash it.”

He was vibrating beneath her hands. She kept her voice quiet and low, exactly as if speaking to a distressed animal. “It’s okay, Mike.”

He shook his head sharply. “No, it’s not okay. Not even close to being okay.” He drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “So…I’d go off with the woman, mostly to her house because I didn’t like anyone in my place. And we’d fuck. And fuck and fuck. I could keep it up for as long as I had to. Once, I heard we lost two guys I’d trained with. Went out, found myself three women and fucked for 24 hours straight. I was like in a daze. I’d had too much booze, yeah, but it wasn’t that. It was like—like if I drank enough, if I fucked hard enough, long enough, I wouldn’t⁠—”

His throat clicked again. His entire body now was one huge stress signal. His eyes were red, breath wheezed in and out of that barrel chest.

“Die,” Chloe said and he jolted.

“What?”

“If you fucked hard enough, long enough, you wouldn’t die.”

It was the classic addiction story. God knows, she’d heard enough of them when volunteering on the Hotline and at the shelter in London. The means changed but the mechanism never did. Drugs, alcohol, sex. Those were the classics but there were others, too. Some had foot fetishes, some had to spend money until they were bankrupt and still kept on, some cut themselves…she’d seen it all and she’d heard it all.

The story was always the same, when you dug down deeply enough. Addictions were like a wall between you and the void. Until you discovered that the addiction was the void.

Chloe’s body couldn’t handle alcohol well. Otherwise, she wondered whether she would have become an alcoholic, simply to fill the massive emptiness at the heart of her life.

Mike’s case was so clear. He’d seen his family being slaughtered when he was just a young boy. They were dead and he was alive. He did what he could to keep from remembering that, every second of every day.

“No, of course not. That’s not it at all.” Agitated, Mike threw back the covers and stood up. Every muscle was tense. His veins stood out, as if his body was even now pumping blood to the extremities, readying himself for battle. “I fucked and drank so I wouldn’t die?” He made a sound of disgust deep in his throat. “That’s crazy. I’m not crazy.” He pointed a trembling finger at her, eyes wild. “I’m not crazy!”

“No, of course you’re not.” Chloe pulled her legs up to her chest and put her arms around her knees. She understood the reaction. She wasn’t afraid of Mike, not in any way, but instinctively, her body was curling itself up in the presence of a strong, agitated male. “I didn’t say that. You did.”

Mike paced the room, long, fast strides. He pushed his hands through his hair which was already mussed from their lovemaking. It stuck up in sweaty spikes. He was even more aroused than before. It seemed his entire body was in agitated movement except for his penis, lying like a rock against his flat abdomen.

He was buzzing, agitation almost visible on his skin.

Chloe watched him pace back and forth, wishing she could help, knowing that she couldn’t. He had to work this out for himself. Everyone did. It was the one big lesson she’d taken away from her work in crisis centers and from her own therapy. You could be helped, but the real work—well, you had to do that yourself.

Mike was resisting.

“I wasn’t afraid I was going to die if I didn’t fuck. That’s crazy talk. But there was something there, something really dark and uncontrollable. This…thing would build up in me and I’d just explode if I couldn’t get it out. Except in battle. Dodging bullets took me right out of myself. In combat, I’m the Man. Cool as ice. Fucking Sniper-Man, with nerves of steel. I once hunkered down in a hide in my ghillie suit for three days to get a shot. I knew I’d have a window of about a minute in those three days, so I didn’t eat, drank very little always kept on eye on the scope, and didn’t sleep. Didn’t budge an inch. My heart rate slowed down. Didn’t give my dick a thought. Came back Stateside and it went up and stayed up.”

“I’m really sorry about your family, Mike,” she said quietly and he stopped with a jolt and swayed, as if shot in the heart.

Had she overstepped the bounds? For a second, she wondered. He looked like a wild man, with his hair sticking out all around his head, red eyes holding back tears, humming with tension.

“You know?” His voice was rough, hoarse.

She nodded.

Mike was frozen for a minute, two. Then he scrubbed his face briskly, as if just waking up. When he lifted his hands from his face, his cheeks were wet with tears.

“Oh, God.” He sat down abruptly on the side of the bed next to her. The mattress dipped with his weight. He pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I see it. Almost every night. I see it, over and over again. Sometimes I just hate the thought of trying to sleep, because then I’ll see it in my nightmares, you know?”