Chapter Thirteen: Part Three
Following him into the kitchen, she watched him take the small joint of meat from the oven and expertly carve it. He started a wok burner and quickly assembled a crisp Asian style stir-fry. Kate smiled when she realised how much he reminded her of Carrie as he cooked. He sniffed everything, thinking carefully before throwing in the perfect amount of each ingredient.
The aromas leapt out; from the top-notes of chilli, ginger and lime to the deeper aroma of the sizzling vegetables and XO paste. Kate watched as the small amount of meat went in; vegetables and noodles made up the bulk of the dish. With a flourish, he filled two bowls with steaming food from the wok. Adding a squeeze of lime, some chopped chillies, a dollop of Greek yogurt, and then a sprinkle of crisp fried noodles, he said, ‘Dinner is ready, my lady.’
Rick showed her to the dining table. The far horizon was still flashing as the distant thunderstorms slowly rolled towards the water. After refilling her glass, he sat next to her, their knees brushing.
After finishing her first mouthful, Kate said, ‘Rick, this is delicious!’
‘Thank you. It’s simple, I know, but it’s my favourite style of food. I spent a lot of time eating food that had use-by dates calculated in decades, and quality measured by nutrient and energy levels alone. Food is supposed to feel alive and energising.’
‘Well mission accomplished, I say.’
‘Thank you, m’lady,’ he said with a raised glass.
After a few more bites, Kate asked, ‘When you were cooking, it looked like you were saying something to yourself now and then. Were you?’
‘It is a chant of gratitude to the spirits of the earth, plants and animal that make up our meal. It helps keep my intent focused on the whole of what I am doing, not just my actions.’
Kate looked at him, weighing his words and feeling a new depth in her understanding of him. She nodded, not trusting herself to be able to speak at that moment. The meal passed both slowly and quickly. Kate’s awareness contained only this amazing man, and the whirlwind of feelings he invoked in her.
He took the empty bowls into the kitchen and refilled their glasses. He looked at her for a moment before saying, ‘You have questions on your face but you are not asking them. Kate, ask me anything. I will answer you as honestly as I can. Please, Kate, ask me whatever you want or need to.’
‘Rick, how many women have you had in that room?’
Rick looked at Kate and smiled. ‘Three. Natalie, Larissa and Meghan. Natalie, you know. The purpose was to learn about D-s, watching Dom and Nat in some deeper scenarios, and some reasonably mid-level BDSM sessions. They go further than I desire to, but that’s their dynamic.’
‘Wasn’t that strange, watching two people you knew being physically intimate?’
‘Not in context. I understand how strange it might sound, though. It wasn’t the sexual aspects I was seeing. It was how Dom and Nat met and connected with each other so totally and at so many different levels. You’ve seen them so you know what I mean. Have you ever watched two friends dance so beautifully that you forget about them being your friends and only see the dance?’ Kate nodded in understanding.
‘It was like that. I needed to learn who I was and how to positively express my innate nature. Dom and Nat were in the ideal position to train me. Dom is the best, and you know he’s still a hero to me. Nat is a great Domme in her own right. Sometimes I think that the only time her crazy-big mind comes to rest is when she is in a scenario. The trust between all of us allowed things to flow easily and naturally.’
Natalie had already been very open about this with her, and for some reason, also hearing Rick talking about it this openly made everything feel okay. Kate nodded, encouraging him to go on.
‘Larissa was my first longer-term relationship. We went out for two years and were pretty much, but not quite, engaged. When I was posted overseas, she didn’t wait. Meghan, Meg, was my girlfriend when I got out of the service. We were destructively co-dependent and enabling. My apology for the descriptor, but it applies totally in this case. We were both fucked up, but for different reasons, and fucked up was all that either she or I could relate to or handle at that time. When Grandmother, Uncle and Dom started unravelling the mess I was in, she didn’t stick. It was an easy parting with no acrimony or recriminations. Natalie took her on as a psych client. She was doing well when we bumped into each other last year.’
‘How do you mean ‘fucked-up’ Rick? What happened?’ It just came out. Kate was horrified that she might have crossed a line, but he laid a hand on her arm in reassurance before answering.
‘It’s okay, Kate. I mean it when I invite you to ask me anything. In the service, we did a lot of stuff that never officially happened. More than a few times, what we were tasked to do never made written orders. In more than a few of those cases, we were disposable, meaning if we were caught, our existence would be officially denied. What we did was never nice or clean in the Red Badge of Courage or Here to Eternity kind of way. Warfare is no longer two sides in uniform slugging it out over a piece of real estate, and sharing your cigarettes with your prisoners once the fighting is over. Modern combat is chaotic, foul and loathsome. You never have a black and white scenario. When you realise that the guy who’d been doing a fair job of trying to kill you was a twelve-year-old with an AK47, everything becomes grey and dirty. The real tragics end up seeing life only in terms of black-and-white, and us-and-them, losing their values and humanity along the way. To keep your mind together, you do your best to try to accept living as a grey being, doing grey things in a grey world. In the end, I was a haunted, self-hating ball of misery and guilt. I had a layer of anger a mile deep and huge resentment towards myself, and the service. They offered me a command promotion, but I resigned instead.’
Kate looked into his eyes and saw no concealment, nor did he try to hide his tears as he talked. Recognising how profoundly he was opening up to her, she asked, ‘How the hell did you break out of that, Rick?’
‘Dom and Edison were the only ones who could reach me. I had excluded everyone else, even JC to a degree. He was hurt and fighting his own demons in a hospital bed, also trying to come to terms with deprograming from the machine he’d been made into. He was in a four-wheel-drive and took the full brunt of an IED blast. The shock wave knocked him around really badly and he took a heap of internal damage. He went from active combat to a peacetime hospital bed in a couple of hours. Kate, that’s one of the problems. Nobody’s mind can adjust from combat to peacetime rules that fast. Add serious injury and concussion to the mix, and you can see a big part of the challenge.
‘I visited him when he was hurt. I was out of the service for almost a year, and doing a great job of fooling myself that I was okay. Seeing JC with all the tubes and stuff keeping him alive, my indestructible little brother in every possible way – except for us having different mothers – it took me out… all the way out.
‘We were both falling apart, but I was mobile and I went on a bit of a bender. A month later, Dom and Edison kidnapped me and dragged me to Alegria.’
Seeing the questioning look on Kate’s face, he reiterated, ‘I mean literally. He and Edison tracked me down and physically overpowered me, stun gun and all. They dragged me, hogtied and helpless, into the sweat lodge on the Big End. Dom, Edison and Uncle took turns over nearly four full days, watching and sweating with me, never leaving my side the whole time. Then Edison and Dad went back to collect JC, who was just getting out of hospital and cracking up too.’
Kate’s look of horror was clear. ‘You have a little of the actual picture, Kate. I was literally hogtied on the sweat lodge bench for four days. They just smiled as I hurled every abuse I could at them. They knew all of it was actually aimed at myself. All my anger, self-loathing, and ultimately, my terror of feeling and seeing what the numbness was hiding. They didn’t let me leave the bench for the entire time. The guys were feeding me and cleaning me… crap, piss, vomit, the works. That’s what real love is, Kate. That is why I can say I trust and love them so much. I resisted with everything I had, but they got through to me in the true warrior’s way, head on, with love and respect. The shell I had built up needed to be broken up and pulled away, and that’s what they did. When they got rid of it, I was a gooey mess.
‘Grandmother came into the programme at that point. We, JC and I, spent the best part of a year in the Village and at the Race, where she lives. She gave me jungle herbals and did her jungle magic. Dom, Edison and Uncle did heaps of shamanic journeying and sweat lodges with me. Dad, Nat and Grandmother worked with JC for a month or so before we were both whole enough to do the rest of what we had to do together. That was how screwed up I was. I couldn’t even recognise that JC was going through the same thing. Neither of us could at the time.’
‘How come your father worked with JC and Edison with you?’
‘They were too close to stay as objective as they needed to be, and they trust each other without reservation.’ Rick reached out and wiped a tear from Kate’s cheek away with his finger, and then he smiled, wiping away one of his own.
‘Long story cut short? Two years later, we are both at peace. The memories are all without energy and resting quietly. We did a lot of lodges and medicine circles with all of the adults from Alegria involved. Everyone there had seen combat in one form or another. That made it easier for us all. We talked everything through, no reservations. Their stuff too, like a group therapy session, but way deeper and more intense, especially with Grandmother’s journeying tea.
‘The end result? I know we did a lot of important things that were necessary. I know a lot of good people are alive today because of what we did, but the reality of what we actually had to do remains repugnant all the same. The natural human reaction is to try to shelve that stuff, but it ends up piling up so heavily that it breaks the shelf. Then the personality snaps.’
‘Did any of you snap?’
Shaking his head, he said, ‘No. It was somewhat close on my part. Edison and Dom went way out over the edge of reason for a while, but no permanent damage as such. They both dropped the ball big time the year their folks died. They were on a bloody dicey job and the green slime – Intelligence – got it very badly wrong. It started with them getting dropped in front of hardened positions, right in the middle of a minefield that intel strongly suspected was there, but forgot to mention. They lost two-thirds of their men in the first few minutes of that engagement. Especially in these units, the men are all as close as family. In many ways, they’re closer. About ten minutes in, they were rallying their remaining men to leg it out of there when Edison was blinded by a blast at almost the same moment Dom took his bullet. They only got out of there with Dom shooting from Edison’s back as Edison carried Dom out; Dom screaming out left, right, jump or duck as Edison’s eyes. They were lying in hospital for less than a day when they’re told, “Sorry guys, there was a plane crash and your folks are gone”.’
Rick paused to make sure Kate was okay with his disclosure. She nodded, her mind reeling with the horror of what he was telling her.
‘Eight weeks later, Dom still had bandages around the holes in his chest and Edison’s sight was mostly returned. Both of them had also gotten a few extra holes on the way out that were still healing. Unfortunately, bodies heal far faster than minds. They checked themselves out of hospital, jumped on a plane, and began the kind of drunken rampage that Hollywood makes disaster movies about.