Lioness: I Can’t Say To You What Can’t Be Said (Patreon)

Jo was the last person Cruz wanted to talk to, but she was one of those people Cruz needed to talk to. You could ignore a mother-in-law or an old friend from college with a great investment opportunity. Jo couldn’t be ignored, only defied.

“You fucking bitch,” Cruz snarled into the phone when she picked it up, relishing being able to just spit that across however many cell phone towers separated them.

She was out of the Marines, out of the CIA, no prospects, no direction, but at least Cruz and the word ‘ma’am’ weren’t neighbors in her head anymore.

“Nice to hear from you too. Aaliyah Amrohi is in Oklahoma City. She pulled up on your block and eyefucked your old house.”

Cruz had been prepared for maybe anything but that. For Jo to guilt-trip her or call on her patriotism or just read her the riot act over her own bruised ego. But Aaliyah…

Cruz hung up the phone.

***

Technically, Cruz was on leave. She would finish her tour of duty and get an honorable discharge, even if that was four months from now. As far as anyone was concerned, she was a psychological wreck, too scrambled to do any doorkicking. Cruz found that a bit insulting. A bit true, too.

She hadn’t been back in Oklahoma City since joining the Marines. Most of the people she knew there were either dead or in jail; none of the memories she had of the place she wanted to revisit. But Aaliyah was there. Aaliyah was there.

What the fuck.

***

She’d gotten spoiled. Flying with the CIA was all private jets; life with Aaliyah was taking Bentleys to private jets. As a civilian, she flew coach. It made her miss the spartan simplicity of flying in a C-130 Hercules. At least they didn’t pretend to be comfortable. Cruz felt like she’d been brain-damaged, having to treat a packet of peanuts and a cup of flat Diet Coke like a meal.

Aaliyah Amrohi. What the fuck.

***

It wasn’t hard to find Aaliyah. Go to the best hotel in Oklahoma City. Look for Arabian muscle. Only there wasn’t any muscle in the lobby. And while she was looking for Aaliyah’s trail, Aaliyah was looking for her.

“Cruz.” The word came from behind her.

It was the first time Aaliyah had ever said her name.

***

Cruz’s knees felt weak. Something caught in her throat. Her palms sweated.

She felt ridiculous. A teenage girl with her first crush—Edgar hadn’t gotten her like this, but the guy before him had, or maybe the one before him…

And now, it wasn’t because she didn’t know what to say to this woman. It was because there was nothing to say.

She walked to the little arrangement of couches and loveseats, meant to be sat at by waiting guests. Cruz didn’t think whatever corporate consultant had put this installation together had ever thought something like this—betrayal and heartache and every emotion under the sun—would be happening on their neat little bundle of feng shui.

She sat. Aaliyah sort of… lingered after her, following like a ghost, until finally she sat down in the plush loveseat that bordered Cruz’s couch.

Around them, the hotel hustled and bustled as much as Oklahoma City could ever bustle. And Cruz felt a tight, fierce joy at seeing Aaliyah’s face again. She’d thought it would be buried in her memory—a sight she could never reclaim from all the shit it’d been locked under.

And here Aaliyah was. Showing it to her again.

She wondered how much Aaliyah was enjoying the sight of her face. She was looking at her like an addict—unable to get enough of seeing Cruz. But other than that fixation, nothing slipped loose.

Aaliyah had always been so open, so easy. When she loved you, she loved you—it was all a question of degrees, not binaries. Not maybe, maybe not, but how much, how hard. And now she could’ve been wearing a burqa. There was no body language, no expression on her face.

I might as well have let her get married, Cruz thought, her mind a swirl of things Jo had said, Aaliyah had said. ‘She’s going to be making babies and raising babies and they’ll grow up to be terrorists.’ ‘I can’t wait to get fat. I don’t want to get old, but I wouldn’t mind being fat.’

It made her think about destiny, inevitability—words people used to wiggle away from responsibility. The same way she was using this babble of pointless thoughts to wiggle away from looking at Aaliyah the way Aaliyah was looking at her.

“This has to be the first time I've seen you without a bruise,” Aaliyah said.

And Cruz couldn’t take this, couldn’t… It was no wonder she’d run away from it. It was as bad as she’d thought, fully deserving all the fear that jangled her nerves. And like she’d been trained to do when she was suffering, she threw a punch before she could endure more.

“Are you here to kill me?”

Aaliyah blinked. Like she’d taken a punch. But whatever she felt, it took a long time to reach her and went a long way to get back out. “I'm not like you. I thought I was… I thought you were…”

“I thought I was too,” Cruz told her, because she was suffocating and it felt like breathing in fresh air to say it.

“Ehsan had you on his laptop. I saw it before anyone else did—my people were too busy being killed by your people.” Her lips wobbled and it was so close to being a smile that Cruz felt like running away from it, just running until the motion had burnt away anything in her that this could touch. Until she was skin and bones and nothing Aaliyah could touch. “My uncle is running the business now. He made it clear he won’t… he’ll just be an oilman. People who are only oilmen don’t end up stabbed to death at their daughter’s wedding.”

“Then you know.” Cruz felt like she was begging.

“I thought I knew. I thought you were a victim—”

Cruz wanted to say that she was, she had been. But that was a piece of her. An old piece, like a skin she’d shed. The new her wasn’t someone who could be victimized, but it also wasn’t someone who could take Aaliyah’s hand or look into her eyes.

Or she could do those things, but she could stab a man to death too, slit his throat, open up his heart so his blood pumped into his chest hair instead of his arteries.

So who gave a shit that she could hold someone’s hand?

“I was a soldier,” Cruz said, like air coming out of a tire. Not a defense, an admission. “I followed orders.”

“You weren’t being a soldier with me.”

“No.” And yes.

“Did you…” Aaliyah stopped. Long enough to tighten whatever she was wearing on the inside to keep Cruz from seeing her, really seeing her, like she’d taken for granted all those weeks… “Did you know?”

“Know what?”

Aaliyah lunged forward, leaning into Cruz’s space, as close as they’d been when they’d made love. Or when she’d seen Cruz’s injuries and just needed to assure herself they weren’t so bad.

“Did you know you were going to fuck me?” Aaliyah boiled. “Was that in your mission briefing? That you would have to dress this way to make me look at you and talk this way so I couldn’t stop thinking about you?”

“Aali—”

“Were you just waiting for me to kiss you? Was it a phase of the operation that I laid my hands on you—”

“It wasn’t supposed to happen. They didn’t want it to happen.”

Something shrill came out of Aaliyah’s throat like steam whistling out of a teakettle. “Then why’d you do it, why’d you let me—”

“Because I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to, just like you said, I wanted to.”

Aaliyah collapsed. Like she’d nailed herself to a wall to keep herself up and now those nails were gone. Her forehead touched to Cruz’s. “You destroyed my entire world. There is no… experience I’ve had in the past decade that I can ever have again. I won’t fly in a jet, I won’t shop with champagne. There is no possibility that I can still carry with me except… except you. You burnt down my life. All I have left is you. Like an addiction. Or a religion.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. Don’t apologize. You can’t apologize when it was your mission—you meant to hurt me, all along, you meant to take my father away.”

“Yes.” The least Cruz could do was admit it. It felt good, clean.

Sweet poison. Like the high from cutting into your own flesh.

“You knew it would hurt me.”

“Yes.”

“You planned it.”

“I didn’t know…” Cruz stopped when Aaliyah pulled away from her, her eyes red. Touching Aaliyah again, it’d felt like she’d been doing something to comfort her—even if it was just letting her purge all the venom that she didn’t deserve to have inside her. “I didn’t know you then. I didn’t know that you didn’t… deserve it.”

“Then there’s someone who does deserve this?”

“No. But your father… fuck… the things he did, the fathers he took away from… I know what it’s like to grow up without a father, with nothing, with nobody…”

She was scrambling now, jumping from thought to thought. It wasn’t defensiveness. It was knowing how much Aaliyah was hurting and all Cruz had to sooth her was an explanation. Why she’d done what she’d done. Why Asmar Ali Amrohi needed to die.

Aaliyah wiped her eyes before her tears could be tears. “Ehsan knew. I heard him shouting. So you defended yourself.”

“Yes.”

“And my father?”

Like her phone rang and she took it out and answered it, Cruz heard Jo’s voice: Lie. Maintain your cover. Give her just enough of the truth to be totally wrong about it.

“No. That was after Ehsan… it was the mission.”

“And before Ehsan confronted you, were you going to do it?”

Cruz heard another voice. It sounded like a Marine recruiter from a long time ago. Lie. Don’t give her false hope. Cheat—if you don’t, you’re not trying. “I don’t know,” she confessed.

“Why not? If he was such a bad man, who took so many fathers away…”

“Because of you.”

Aaliyah slapped her. The sound echoed off the classy marble floors and walls and ceiling and eyes followed the reverberation. People looking at Cruz. Seeing her cheek glowing red like she’d been splashed by someone else’s blood.

It was a shock to realize the private world they’d been in. Cruz would’ve thought everyone would notice the tension, the emotion, surging and swelling between them… but from a yard away, it was just two women talking.

Weird to think of it that way. Just two women talking. Just Aaliyah and her friend Zara talking, like they’d done a thousand times before.

Tears came to Cruz’s eyes.

“Don’t you cry,” Aaliyah told her. “Don’t you fucking cry. You murderer. You traitor. Don’t cry, don’t cry, please don’t cry…”

And she was holding Cruz as she sobbed, as she sobbed, as they sobbed.