Free Dying Commitment (Lucky Thirteen) by S.M. Butler Page B

wasn’t Jack, and logically, I knew that. I couldn’t stop the association.
    So there I was, hiding downstairs in the sitting room rather than talking to the man and telling him the truth. Perhaps it was telling that Dylan didn’t come after me. I’d finally crossed the line from sanity to crazy town. This kind of panic attack had never happened before, not to this severity. I’d had nightmares for months while I was in recovery. The mere mention of “sweet pea” had made me nauseous for a while. After a longer time, it had dulled to just niggling at my consciousness when it happened. A bad eye twitch type of thing. I certainly wasn’t expecting such a powerful anxiety attack. And I knew the symptoms well enough to know that this was what it was.
    I fell asleep on the sofa downstairs, after hours of staring at the ceiling, at the wall, anything to take my mind off what happened. I slept in fits, waking over every little noise. By the time morning came around, I was frazzled, but I’d almost gotten myself calmed down enough to walk back up the stairs to the room.
    He had slept without a shirt, in just a pair of boxers. It shouldn’t have been hot. I was in the middle of a crisis, but my body responded when he rose from the bed to go use the bathroom down the hall. I sat down on the bed, scooting back against the headboard and crossing my legs. When he returned, he came over and flopped down in front of me, facing me in the same position I was.
    “I don’t know what the fuck happened last night. I’m going to guess that you’ll shut me out of that, too. But if you do want to talk about it… I’m here. I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll even stay on the other side of the room if you want. Okay?”
    I didn’t know what to say to that. I’d never had a man offer such a thing to me before. It had always been about sex with them. I’d made sure of it. Even with Dylan, as soon as it started being complicated, I was trying to run in the other direction. I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out.
    He sighed heavily when I didn’t say anything and stood up. He grabbed his jeans and slipped them on. “I guess I’ll go down to breakfast.”
    Inside I was screaming to get it out, but I wasn’t brave enough. It just kept getting stuck in my throat. Finally, it tore from me like Tourette’s. “Jack called me sweet pea.”
    Dylan stopped, his T-shirt in his hand. He turned back to face me, probably surprised to hear me at all. He sat down on the edge of the bed, his torso turned to face me. “Go on.”
    “Jack wasn’t just my partner. We were having sex, too.”
    “He was your lover.”
    Was that what it was? Didn’t you have to be in love with someone for them to be your lover? Wasn’t that a rule? Or was your lover just someone you fucked regularly? I wasn’t sure how to define it. “Yeah, I guess.”
    Dylan didn’t say anything more. He was leaving the ball in my court. He did sit quietly while I collected myself. The NSA knew what Jack did to me. But they didn’t know that I had been intimate with him. They didn’t know that I’d fallen for my partner, idolized the older man. Thirteen didn’t either, because Stephen Collins didn’t ask those kinds of questions. He only cared if you did your job or not. But it wasn’t a hard thing to figure out. I’d been weak. I’d let the man seduce me, and…
    “One morning, I was in the shower. I could hear Jack moving around, but I didn’t think anything of it. I got out and had a towel, but I’d left my clothes in the room. Anyway, I walked in and got a bullet in the chest. I fell, but I managed to pull myself up. Jack stood over me, told me I should have stayed down, and then shot me again. Then he took my money, my clothes, my guns, everything I could have used to get somewhere safe. And he took my laptop, which had tons of information on all kinds of government movements, and the CD I had created for the report to the NSA. He knew all my