Second That Emotion

Second Thoughts and Last Chances

Latikia

Edited by

The Old Fart

Chapter 31

Eventually we all agreed that fun was fun, but it was time to turn in for the night.

Svetlana retired to the guest room where Ivan was ensconced, Dad got the second guest room next to theirs, and Buck (I have a hard time even thinking the name without smirking) was given the room right next to his, which was normally Lilly’s.

We’d agreed, the girls and I, amongst ourselves, not long after I got out of the Army, that each of them should have their own room. Their own private space that they could decorate the way they wanted, where they could be alone if they chose. It was all part of my effort to ensure that they felt like individuals and not attachments.

Over the years, excepting the later stages of their pregnancies, they’d rarely used those rooms for anything other than storing clothes or as studies or hobby rooms. They preferred sleeping in my bigger bed, hogging my closets and bathroom and generally getting in the way whenever possible.

I preferred that arrangement as well. Yeah, sometimes it was annoying having to dig thru their stuff to get to mine, having to maneuver thru them in the mornings to get showered and dressed, but it was never more than a minor annoyance.

I like having them around me. I love having them pile on and around me in bed, even when it was for nothing more than sleeping.

The thing is, we’d never had guests stay with us before who weren’t aware of our arrangement. And we’d never had a child other than our own sleep over, period.

Dad knew. We’d told him, Izzy and me, long ago. We’d told him about the three of us the day before I got out of the Army.

Ivan, Svetlana and…their son…they didn’t know and I’m pretty damn sure Izzy wasn’t too keen on having them find out.

So Peggy agreed to bunk in with Izzy, Lilly took AJ’s room and my son took a sleeping bag and happily moved into the room his sisters shared to sleep on the floor next to one of their beds. He said it was the same as camping.

The point of which is, that after embracing each one of my girls, giving and receiving three disappointingly chaste kisses, I went off to my room…alone.

I got undressed, brushed my teeth, washed my face, turned off the lights, crawled under the blankets and tried to get comfortable.

I don’t like sleeping alone. I didn’t mind when I was younger, because I didn’t know any better. It took some time to get used to Izzy sharing my bed when I was thirteen, but not much. It took a lot longer to get used to her not being there after she went off to college, even though our sharing the bed wasn’t an all the time kind of thing. It took time to get used to having Carlie sleep with me. The first few times I was awake all night, completely incapable of relaxing enough to fall asleep, and then, on the fourth night, no problem at all.

I had trouble sleeping at all for a long time after Carlie died, mostly because I couldn’t escape the emotional imprint left by her death.

When I finally returned home and reunited with Izzy, it was as though we’d never been apart. No trouble sleeping with her at all.

Oddly enough, the first time all three of my girls spent the night in the same bed with me, there was no sense of unease, no worry, no fear or apprehension of any kind. It felt right from the very beginning. It felt…natural, as though that was the way things were supposed to be.

Sleeping alone had long since ceased to feel right.

I tossed and turned, trying to find a comfortable position.

I was lonely.

I got up, turned on the hot tub’s heater, waited for the water to warm and then slid in, sat back and tried to relax.

Somewhere around four in the morning, while I was musing on the subject of honor, I sorta nodded off.

Honor has become a troubling concept for those of us living in the modern western world. Many believe it to be an outmoded concept, serving only to remind us of how far humanity’s advanced beyond our primitive and uncivilized nature.

Honor has been replaced, in the western world, by the fairly recent promulgation of individuality. And make no mistake, this idea is recent; barely more than a hundred and twenty years old, even in the west. It received its big boost just after World War I, at the very same moment Honor took its near fatal wound.

What is Honor?

Honor is public perception and acceptance of an individual’s personal standing within a cultural group. Respect, reputation…you may have heard of the expression ‘losing face’, well losing face is a loss of honor; loss of communal respect, reputation and standing.

In the west our growing reliance on the science of psychology has replaced Honor with self-esteem and the cult of individuality. No longer required to submit to the demands of public expectation, we now serve only our own personal perceptions of who we are, who we should be and how we should behave.

Right?

Wrong, wrong, WRONG!

Ever heard of peer pressure?

Children know all about Honor, even if they aren’t familiar with the word. It’s all about fitting in with your peer group, all about acceptance, about being on the inside looking out and not the other way around. Honor means that if someone hits you, you’d better hit back, even if doing so means taking a severe beating in return. Losing a fight is nowhere near as bad as loss of Honor within the group.

Honor is about status, renown, regard and above all else…reputation.

Having a strong (positive or negative) reputation makes you a powerful figure in the eyes of others. It is your armor, your weapon, your bankbook.

If your reputation is that of a weakling, you’ll be treated like a weakling. You’ll be tormented, teased, abused, taken advantage of and possibly even killed.

Your reputation is, for all intents and purposes, who you are. It doesn’t matter one lick how you see yourself…its how others see you that matters in the end. Perception is everything.

Still think I’m wrong?

Ask a politician about public opinion polls.

Ask a celebrity how important their fan’s good will is to their career.

Ask an athlete or a soldier why it’s important to ‘fight the good fight’, even in a losing cause.

Honor may be dying, but it’s still a long way from dead and buried.

By the time her hand was over my eyes I was wide awake. I stayed very still and waited to see what her plan was.

“What did you do to Ivan?” She pronounced my brother’s name ‘E-von’, and her lips couldn’t have been any closer to my left ear without touching it. I felt her hot breath pulsing against my eardrum with each inflected syllable. She must have been lying on the floor behind me, because the one hand was pressed over my eyes from the right side and I felt her breathing in my left ear.

“What makes you think I did anything to him?”

“He hasn’t moved since those men of yours put him to bed last night.”

“Ivan always was a sound sleeper.”

“Not like this. Did you drug him? I hear you CIA types are rather fond of drugging people.”

Inside I flinched and a small knot formed in the pit of my stomach.

“I’ve never used drugs on anyone, and I sure as hell wouldn’t use them on a member of my family.” I assured her.

“Ivan says you and he were never very close as children. Perhaps your scruples do not extend to family members you are less than fond of?”

I nodded. “Yeah, well you might have something there. Still, the fact remains; I did not drug my brother.”

“Very well, I will take you at your word…for now.”

“How very gracious. You’ll be leaving, now that we’ve cleared that up?”

She chuckled, pulled back with the hand she held over my eyes, drawing my head down and back against the edge of the hot tub.

I’ve never adequately described my brother’s wife. She’s very tall for a woman, almost at tall as I am, and she (so my mother told me not long after Svetlana and Ivan were married) had come to the States on some sort of student exchange program and stayed to compete as a track and field athlete at the collegiate level. She’d been a pentathlete, and by all accounts, a fairly good one. The woman was strong. She had platinum blond hair, ice blue eyes, and breasts capacious enough to feed an entire maternity ward all by herself. She was probably what the ancient Norse had in mind when they dreamed up the Valkyrie.

Svetlana may have been a big beautiful athletic girl, but she also had brains, evidenced by the fact that she became a well regarded lawyer. But my reading of her emotional status, both at dinner the night before and right then in my room, told me that Svetlana was one cold, calculating, conniving bitch. She was used to getting what she wanted and wouldn’t quietly take no for an answer.

“Not just yet. I have a few more things to discuss with you, little brother.”

I cringed at those words. The patronizing tone alone was enough to set my teeth on edge. I can tolerate Izzy calling me that, but no one else.

“Such as?”

“Why do you refuse to introduce your brother and me to your political friends? It could be most beneficial for everyone involved.”

“Two reasons really. First, as I told you at dinner, I don’t like being manipulated. Not by anyone. Second, in my line of work, you don’t make friends. Political enemies…those I’ve got coming out my ears, but I doubt very much that using me as a reference would do either of you the slightest bit good.”

“You’re being modest.”

“No, I’m being honest.”

“You won’t help us?”

“No, I won’t.”

“I could make it worth your while.” she said and a second hand began caressing my chest.

“No, you couldn’t. You have nothing I want. Nothing.” I said, stressing the last word as firmly as I knew how.

“I don’t believe you.” she said sweetly, breathing hotly into my ear.

“Ask me if I care.”

Svetlana was startled; her pride was hurt and she quickly grew very angry. The hand that had been on my chest pulled away, I heard a rustling sound behind me and then something cold, thin and sharp pressed against the skin just above my Adam’s apple.

Several thoughts ran through my head right then. Most involved causing a very particular big blond a whole lot of pain. Not terribly useful thinking though, because she might, in her agony, actually slit my throat.

I am, as several people have noted over the years, extremely durable, and I heal a hell of a lot faster than anyone I’ve ever heard of, but one thing I’m not is bullet-proof. Or, for that matter, knife-proof. I can be hurt. I’ve come close to dying a couple of times, but as the saying goes, ‘close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear weapons’. Who knows, since the LA change maybe I was invulnerable.

It just not the kind of supposition you find yourself eager to put to the test. You’d look awful damn silly if it turned out you guessed wrong.

There were another couple of options available, but both of them posed rather complicated moral choices.

Did I really want to blow up this woman while she was right next to me? No, I didn’t. I might not have liked her, but she was my brother’s wife and my nephew’s mother. That made her family, whether I liked it or not.

And this single fact limited my other choice as well. It would have taken no time at all to slap a ring inside her. But I’d refused to do that with my own wives for eight long years. Just thinking about it still made me queasy.

The knife blade pressed harder against my neck and I felt a trickle of something dribble down onto my chest.

“Perhaps you should start. How much blood does big boy like you have inside, hmmmm?” she murmured and began stroking my hair and the side of my face with the fingers of her right hand.

If I hadn’t felt her reaction for myself I’d have had trouble believing it. The bitch was actually getting turned on.

“And you are a big boy, aren’t you; but so delicate and fragile in appearance. I think it must be the skin.” Her fingers became more possessive and erotic in the way she caressed my face. Her body temperature was rising, her breath grew hotter and more erratic, and I realized that if I didn’t hurry up and do something I was going to have a real problem on my hands.

“There’s a little more than two gallons of blood in my body and I’d like to keep as much of it inside as possible, so be careful with that knife. I’m pale enough as it is.”

“Such lovely smooth skin. So soft...uhmmmmm.” Svetlana shuddered all over and sighed loudly. “How do you do that? One moment all I can think of is cutting you into tiny little pieces and the next…” She shuddered once again.

“Why don’t you let me get out of this tub, and then we can go over to the bed, sit down and have a nice long talk?” I suggested.

“No, I don’t think that would be a good idea. If I let you up, I lose my bargaining position. I find a dominant position is very important…in successful negotiating.”

The hand over my eyes slid to the side, over my cheek, down the side of my neck, below the knife and started rubbing small circles over the right side of my chest.

“So soft and smooth…and cold. Like granite. The water must not be doing a very good job of keeping you warm.”

Svetlana began huffing in my ear like a steam train chugging up a steep mountain grade, and I started getting truly irritated.

“If you were nice to me, I would keep you warm.”

“Forgot about Ivan already?” I asked tersely.

“Who?” she rasped. Then the tip of her tongue darted out to lick the outer edge of my ear.

“My brother…Ivan? Your husband? The father of your son?”

“Forget about him; he’s still in bed asleep. The lump hasn’t moved a muscle all night.”

“Okay, to hell with him then. What about my girls? They’re not asleep. And if they find you in here with a knife at my throat and pawing me like a bargain basement sweater, they will not take it well. They shot the last woman who tried.”

“Those two lerva?” She clicked her tongue in a ‘tisk, tisk’ sort of fashion and I could feel the delicate wind currents stirred up as she shook her head from side to side. “Kvaisha, I don’t know what you see in them…they’re so very ordinary. Not like you at all. Now you and I, we would make a striking couple, don’t you think?”

The hot tub’s water had gone from a soothing one hundred degrees to ice cold in the time it took us to have our little conversation and I could see a faintly bluish tinge replace my normal glossy white coloration.

Fuck queasy moral sensibilities.

I didn’t need to see Svetlana to form a link. As I’d learned from Dr. Wills, actual physical contact was more than enough. I slid my hand up and clamped it over the one of hers that was still actively caressing my chest.

I hammered a ring the size of a dinner plate into the woman and lost a little more blood in the process when she started shaking like she had a vibrator with afterburners buried between her thighs.

“You’re not going to hurt me, Svetlana. You’re going to do everything in your power from now till the day you die to ensure that nothing ever hurts me or the people I love in any way.”

I raised my left hand out of the water and held it up at shoulder level.

“Now, give me the knife.” I demanded.

All her passionate feelings vanished, replaced and overwhelmed by the strength of the emotions I’d invested in her ring.

She rolled away from me, taking the knife blade from my throat and placing it in the palm of my raised hand. I turned my head and examined the weapon. It looked a lot like an ordinary kitchen butcher knife. I guess she wasn’t the type of woman who carried a pearl handled switchblade in her purse.

I closed my blue tinged fingers around the haft, stood up and turned around. Svetlana lay spread eagled, her robe was still cinched tight around her waist, but one shoulder had slipped down, exposing the right side of her chest. One large heavy breast pointed directly up at the ceiling. The nipple was a very pale pink color and the corona surrounding it was half a shade darker, slightly larger around than a silver dollar, but more irregularly shaped. The mound moved only when she breathed, which she was doing quite a bit of right then, gasping and panting, but was otherwise as immobile, and shaped about the same as one half of a football.

I shook my head sadly and climbed out of the hot tub, thin sheets of ice broke free of my hips and legs whenever I moved or flexed a muscle. I walked around her horizontal body, tossed the knife onto the bed as I went past it and headed to the closet.

I put on a pair of old jeans and a gray sweatshirt and walked back out.

Svetlana had managed to collect herself, was sitting up and adjusting her robe over the exposed portions of her body when I emerged.

“You’re a very lucky woman.” I said coldly.

She looked up and nearly fell back into the tub. “You’re blue!”

“If anyone else had put a knife to my throat, they’d be dead now…or wishing they were. I let you live because you’re my brother’s wife. Remember that. You’re alive because of him and for that reason only. Now might be a good time to go see how he’s doing, don’t you think?”

Her mouth was moving like it had a mind of its own, but nothing was coming out. She scrambled to her feet, crouched like a cat and then dashed past me, flung open the bedroom door and rushed headlong into Izzy, Lilly and Peggy who were standing like sentinels across the doorway with angry scowls on their faces.

Svetlana plowed thru them and barreled down the hall towards the room where my brother was.

I didn’t see any of that, but I could feel what was going on. Feel Svetlana’s mindless obedience and fear, feel the anger boiling in each of my girls, the anxiety and concern the lay beneath the surface of their shared anger.

I turned around slowly and watched them staring down the hall. Then, as one, they turned towards me. And their eyes, which had been narrowed by their scowls, got very, very wide.

“There’s blood on your neck.” Peggy said.

“I know.” I waved one arm towards the bed. “The knife’s over there.”

They hurried inside and gathered alongside the bed, all three looking down at the blood stained butcher knife.

“She cut you?” Izzy asked, looking up and over at me.

“It’s nothing.”

Lilly snatched the knife off the bed and began stalking towards the door with murder in her eyes, jealousy and death in her heart.

“Lilly, there’s no need for that.” I said.

“Yes there is…she hurt you and I’m going to cut her goddamn tits off!”

“Lilly!” I said, raising my voice. In my ears it sounded like thunder bouncing off the walls. Lilly stopped dead in her tracks.

“Do you want the children to see you like this?” I asked, a chill in my rumbling voice.

“She hurt you.” Lilly protested, shaking the knife at me.

I shook my head. “She cut me. That’s all she did. She doesn’t have what it takes to hurt me.”

All the anger and hatred that had filled my little flower fled, replaced in an instant by an enormous flow of sorrowful remorse.

The knife dropped from her nerveless fingers, landing on the floor with a clang. I walked up and pulled her close, folding my arms around her in a snug embrace.

“It’s alright.” I said soothingly and as I held her, warmth gradually returned to my body.

I looked around to where Peggy and Izzy stood next to the bed.

“I will not sleep alone in my own house.” I said.

Izzy looked at me as if I were nuts. “But Ivan…and…we can’t…” she sputtered. Peggy nodded her agreement.

“Ike, it’s too dangerous.”

Lilly tightened her arms around my waist.

“I’m not sleeping alone.” I growled. “Ivan and Svetlana won’t be a problem, I can guarantee that.”

“But…” Izzy began.

“Izzy! The only butts I’m interested belong to the three of you. And those butts had better be in that bed tonight…or else.”

“Or else what?” Peggy challenged with an eager grin.

I smiled brightly in return. “Or there’ll be three girls with very sore bottoms, and they’ll still be in that bed tonight.”

“Promises, promises.” Izzy muttered.

I chuckled and nodded my head.

“If you like.” I said, and gave her my darkest leer, flames flickering behind my eyes.

The first of the five men thru the unmarked door fell back quickly as a sudden wall of bone chilling air hit him squarely on the unprotected skin of his smooth shaven head and face. The unexpected cold front washed over all five men, none of whom had been expecting artic conditions within the climate controlled building, causing all but one to swear loudly and back away swiftly from the open doorway. The one who didn’t recoil pushed thru those in retreat, head lowered like a bull, shoulders squared and thrust forward as though walking against a gale force wind, and boldly stepped into the unexpected.

His eyes swept the small room, noting the sheen of chilled condensation on the industrial gray walls, the single camera hanging from the ceiling, and the room’s sole occupant, who lay unmoving on an oversized army style field cot, the lone piece of furniture.

The standing man stared dispassionately at the recumbent figure. Manacles still attached to his wrists, gauze bandages wrapped securely from the crown of his head to just above the bridge of his nose.

The large, bulky figure on the cot didn’t move and from appearances alone might have been asleep or dead, except that every few seconds he spoke so softly that his lips never even twitched. From moment to moment his voice would change; a baritone male one moment, a woman’s soprano the next, followed by three completely different female voices in rapid succession, all of them just barely audible.

“Out of his gourd.” the upright man muttered to himself.

He stepped carefully back to the doorway and activated one of the switches on the intercom panel beside it.

“You’ve got a major problem with the air conditioning.” he announced tersely. “It’s like a friggin’ meat locker in here, and our guests fingers appear to be turning blue.”

The disembodied voice that replied sounded peeved.

“We’re aware of the temperature issue. Just get him up and back into room seven. The Boss is waiting.”

The upright man flicked the switch off and looked out the door at the four other men.

“You heard him…The Boss is waiting. Get the damn gurney in here and let’s get Frosty on his merry way.”

“We’re running out of time.” the darker, more aggressive voice snarled in my ear.

“I’m aware of that.” the lighter, brighter, more reasoned voice replied.

“So do something already and speed this fuckin’ ride up!”

“What would you suggest I do?”

“Hell, I don’t know…but doing it like this is taking forever! Does he have to relive every goddamn fuckin’ second?”

“It’s not that bad. Besides, he needs to know what happened. He needs to understand how it happened.”

“He’s five years away for Christ’s sake! We’re not gonna make it.”

“Four and a half years. Look on the bright side; he’s remembering on his own…we’re not spoon feeding him the memories any longer.”

“Wonderful, a genuine breakthrough…let’s call the psychologist’s union and make an announcement why don’t we? Don’t either of you get it? These assholes are probably tired of word games by now. You know what that means, right?”

The bright voice sighed softly and that gentle sound echoed like thunder in my mind.

“We know.”

“Then get a fuckin’ move on!” His bellowed words crackled thru my mind like bolts of lightning.