She placed her feet flat on the hardwood floor and leaned forward on her elbows. "Instead you showed up at my office seventeen years later talking about dead bodies and a murder case."
Jack swiped a hand over the scruff of his jaw. "All I wanted was to protect you from that bastard stepfather of yours." For years he'd been stumbling around the truth like a blind man. He stared into Olivia's steady eyes and knew with a wrenching knife-wound to the gut that he had to start being honest with her.
Restless, he slammed out of his chair and began pacing the room, his fists jammed in his pockets. "Graduation night," he began, "I looked for you, thought you'd left early." He remembered how he'd walked off the stage, clutching his diploma in one hand and holding his cap on his head against the stiff breeze with the other. His car keys were tucked in his dress slacks and he searched the crowd.
Olivia nodded for him to continue.
"I couldn't wait to meet at the dugout like we'd arranged." He smiled, thinking of how pumped up he'd been. "I had to see you. Right then." But he couldn't locate the top of her dark curly head among the staff and families that pressed toward the graduates. "Someone said you'd gone home early, so as soon as I could, I drove to your house."
Her surprise was genuine. "I didn't know."
"No one answered, and it occurred to me that you'd already gone to the dugout like we'd planned. As I turned to leave, the front door swung open. Your step-father stood there. No shirt, no shoes. A bottle of Jim Beam in his hand."
He saw it as clear as a picture, Roger scratching his bare belly with the hand holding the liquor bottle, drunk as a skunk and mean as a rabid dog. Pure ugliness around his mouth.
Jack sank into the chair and leaned on his forearms. "I didn't lie to you when you asked what I'd done with my life. I just gave the short version."
Olivia sat up straighter, steel in her eyes. He couldn't tell if she believed him or not. "Give me the long version," she ordered.
He sighed, staring down at his hands. "I went to college just like I told you, but it was a Special Forces training school that crammed five years of academic studies and intensive training into three."
Her beautiful green eyes widened. "Military school?"
He nodded. "Invictus. Right after that the Marine Corps. Did time in Kuwait and South America."
Shock layered her face. "You were just a kid."
"I'm not sure I was ever a kid." He smiled without humor. "I finally went back to Maryland, to Invictus." He spread his hands, palms upward. "Pretty soon, the Organization was the only home I ever knew. The only place where I felt half-way normal."
"I don't understand. What did they do to you?"
Jack didn't answer and cradled his head in his hands.
Olivia rose and knelt in front of him, but not touching him, he noticed. "That still doesn't answer why you left so abruptly."
He looked up into her face, closer now. "After the night when you and I… after that night I felt different, changed."
"Emotionally? So did I."
He shook his head, unable to meet her eyes, and rose again, left her sitting on the carpet. He gazed through the wide glass window into the night as if he'd find the words there to explain that long-ago time. "I swear to God, Livvie. I loved you. From the moment I first saw you, I loved you." First as a friend, then… "
In fact, Jack recalled the exact moment he ceased to think of Olivia Morse as a nuisance and tagalong and saw something in her that sparked his interest. The promise of womanhood in her budding breasts and skinny hips and legs, of something alluring that drew him to her like a magnetic force field.
At the first blush of spring that last year the three of them were together all the time – Olivia, Ben, and Jack – like the three musketeers. They'd driven Ben’s pick-up truck to the rock quarry north of the city. They wore tank tops and shorts, and relished the pale sun beating on their bodies for the first time since winter. After rummaging for empty beer and soda cans, they lined them up on the largest rocks and took turns shooting the rifle.
Jack's arms wound around Livvie, demonstrating how to hold the rifle butt against her right shoulder and sight down the barrel before squeezing off the shot. He bent his head to see the sight line for himself, and Livvie shifted her hip into his body and turned her head into his face. Jack inhaled the sweetness of peppermint on her breath and the smooth skin of her cheeks tinged with the sun’s warmth. She peered upward through impossibly thick lashes and stared unblinking at his mouth while something inexplicable shifted inside him, a turn down a divergent road from which he couldn't return.
If he’d known that the force of their attraction would nearly destroy him, would he have acted on it anyway? Or was his destiny decided long ago by some cosmic force he didn’t understand and over which he had no control? Determined by the unique arrangement of his genes?
Jack had seen a matching emotion in Livvie’s face, and he knew she’d felt it too, that shift in their friendship. As he gazed at her, all those years ago, a placid serenity seemed to descend over her. She’d reached a momentous decision, but he didn’t know what that meant until much later. When it was too late to go back.
Then Ben shouted up at them from the creek bed, and the moment was lost.
Jack turned from the window, saw Olivia brush her fingers against damp cheeks, and continued his story. "Within a week of that night I noticed changes in myself," he continued, "significant ones. I moved up a weight class in wrestling because my body bulked up so much. I became strong – so damned strong – my muscles developed overnight, and I grew five inches that spring."
Olivia crossed to the window to stand beside him while they both searched the inky night. She still avoided touching him, but he felt her soothing warmth. "I didn't notice," she whispered.
"Every one of my senses heightened – sights, sounds, smells so acute I thought I'd suffocate. I pushed you away because I wanted you all the time and didn't want you to think I was some lust-crazed maniac."
"But we never… " she protested, "after that."
"Yeah." He tried to smile, faltered. "The most bizarre thing was the healing."
"Healing?" He sensed her confusion.
"Amazing powers, a cut, a wrenched ankle, a scrape or burn – all healed freakishly fast. I must have injured myself a dozen times that spring and never saw a doctor once."
She wet her lips and touched his shoulder so that he turned toward her. "You… you can't expect me to believe that."
He went on anyway. "After that the dreams started, weird psychedelic images and nightmarish stories, like someone had slipped me acid. But none of them made sense the next morning. Night sweats, headaches, nausea, blurred vision… "
"That sounds like drugs." Accusation registered in her voice.
"God, Livvie, something much worse."
She shook her head in bewilderment. "What could be worse?"
But Jack wasn't ready to talk about that yet. Instead, he pulled out the one fact he knew he had to tell her. "Like I said, it was grad night and I couldn't find you, so I went to your house, but you weren't there." He hesitated. "Roger was."
Roger Strong, who'd made a believer of him long before anything else.
Jack rushed the words out on a single breath. "I killed him."
She jerked back from him and sank into the wing chair. "Oh my God."
Silence filled the room while the magnitude of his confession hung between them.
Finally Olivia spoke, her voice frantic, a light sheen of sweat on her upper lip. "But… it was an accident, right? Roger was always getting into drunken brawls." Her fingers clutched the arm of the chair. "Tell me it was an accident, Jack."
"Not exactly an accident," he said disgustedly. "More like him swinging a broken whiskey bottle at my face and me avoiding it the best way I could."