Page 94 of Whisper

Kris snorted. Finally, he pulled back, his fingers revealing his red-rimmed eyes. “I said a little more than that.” He sighed. “I swore I would never be a part of the detainee program. That one day it would come apart and I would fucking cheer when it came down around the agency. I would fucking cheer.” Kris rubbed his eyes. “George said I was damn close to being a traitor.”

“You’re not a traitor.”

Kris slumped, falling backward against David. “I’m being sent back to CTC. To Langley.” He rolled into David, burying his face in David’s chest. “I leave in a week.”

Relief bubbled through David, and he wrapped his arms around Kris, pulling his body completely against his own. They fit together like a puzzle made of two pieces, their bodies made to conjoin in a million different ways. “Palmer said we’re rotating out, too. Soon, he said. Very soon. I’m going back.”

“Where are you based in the States?”

In all the time they’d been together, they’d never spoken about home. About the United States and what life was like for them back there. It hadn’t seemed real, as real as their days in Afghanistan and after. Going back to America seemed like a movie he was about to see, something that was going to happen to another person.

It felt exactly like he’d felt when he was ten years old, fleeing Libya with his mother. Then, like now, he’d clung to another person to make the journey.

America wasn’t a place to go alone. He’d die if he were alone there, suffocate under the pace and the energy. But Kris would be there. His palm found the small of Kris’s back again. He spread his fingers, stretched his hand open until he swept down Kris’s ass.

“I’m at Fort Bragg. North Carolina. It’s a little over a four-hour drive to Langley.” He swallowed. “I’ve already looked it up.”

Kris smiled, that sly curl of his lips that crinkled the corners of his eyes. The smile sounded like the shape of his laugh—sardonic, but warm at the center, for the one who mattered. For David. “Have you? Think you’re going to be coming up to visit?”

It slipped out, before he’d thought it through. Days and days of hearing Arabic, of hearing his language, his father’s faith, saturate the air around him. “In shaa Allah,” he said.

Kris’s eyes went wide. David’s breath stuttered, stopped. “I mean—”

Kris pressed his fingers to David’s mouth. His lips followed, trading places with his fingers. David drank him in. Pulled Kris on top of him, until Kris was everywhere, until his arms surrounded David like a veil and his body was the moon over David, rescuing him from the sun, from the memories, from everything.

Falls Church, Virginia

July 1, 2002

Kris’s apartment smelled like dust and old age.

Thank God for automatic bill pay. His checking account, abandoned save for his paychecks deposited by the CIA, had dutifully pumped out payments for his apartment, his utilities, and his insurance for the near year he’d been gone. But not a soul had entered his cramped home. Dust over an inch thick coated everything. His windows were covered in grime. A forgotten spoon in his sink lived under a cover of green fuzz.

He cleaned for days, scrubbing every room from top to bottom. In the background, the television hummed, tuned to CNN all hours of the day and night.

None of his old clothes fit. His body had changed, broadening in places, tightening in others. He had an empty closet and a stack of designer clothes to donate. The only things that fit were combat pants and worn field jackets that always smelled like gunpowder and woodsmoke. His Pakistani clothes fit, too, thanks to David. Kris spent the days cleaning his apartment in breezy kameez pants and his silk house coat, the necklace David gave him nestled against the hollow of his throat.

The day before he reported to CTC, he went on a shopping spree, frantically buying out Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch. He blew thousands, but came home feeling like a runway model, like all those days spent enduring mismatched camo and unwashed shirts were vindicated. CIA money would make him the most fabulously dressed officer. He’d helped win the war for them. They would make him look fabulous again. And no one would make him feel badly about it now. Not after everything.

CTC hummed like a beehive had been kicked over. Shifts worked around the clock, targeteers and analysts and operations officers stacked in working groups and zeroing in on anyone who was anyone in al-Qaeda. Kris plugged into the Afghanistan group, avoiding the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed group, the detainee interrogations group, and the Zahawi group.

In the evenings, he worked out in his apartment’s gym, watching CNN on the televisions over the treadmills. After, he fixed dinner in his apartment, throwing together a protein shake and a chicken breast while CNN kept droning. He fell asleep to the shifting lights and the dull susurrus of the TV.

Finally, eleven days after he’d set foot in his apartment, his phone rang. The incoming number looked like a credit card, long digits stretched across the display. An international number.

“Caldera.” His heart pounded.

“It’s me. We’re in Tajikistan, at Camp Alpha. We just got word. We’re going to Germany, then back to the States.”

“When will you be home?”

“Three, four days, at the most.” There was a pause. Static. “We’ll have three weeks off when we get back. Stabilization. I can be anywhere. I don’t have to stay at base.” Kris heard David swallow. “Can I—”

“Yes.” Yes, David could come. Yes, David could stay. Yes, David could spend every day and night at his apartment, in his life. Yes, he wanted David. Forever.

Three days later, as fireworks bloomed over DC, David pulled into Kris’s apartment complex in his truck. He was still in his uniform, his green military bag on the floorboards and a duffel beside him in the passenger seat. David jumped out, jogged to Kris, and wrapped him up in a hug, lifting him from the ground and swinging him around, like they’d been apart for months and not two weeks. Fireworks kept bursting overhead, red, white, and blue falling like glitter over the city. Music blared from the radio, the National Anthem and God Bless America. It was the first Independence Day since September 11. Patriotism was in the air, so thick Kris could taste it.

Everyboomsounded like a mortar blast, a dropped bomb in Afghanistan, an explosion blooming over the Shomali Plain, Bagram Airfield, Tora Bora. Every fizzle of firework was a scream, every hiss of a rocket rising into the air a wail. Kris had closed his blinds, shuttered his windows, as soon as the fireworks started.