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  Nights Without Night

  Fox Lake Series, Book #2

  Marina Vivancos

  Synopsis

  Isadoro and Iván have known each other since before memories were memories, when they were just the imprint of shape and sound pressed inside your head. They were raised together in La Portera, between the orange trees and water reservoirs, under an endless blue sky. Where they grew up is where Iván’s love for Isadoro grew, too. There, from the earth and the water, organic and helpless.

  Iván had grown used to this love. He’d grown used to absence, too.

  Isadoro left for the military when they were both eighteen and took a piece of Iván with him. It was as inevitable as the baking sun and sandy winds of those lands. Iván didn't know how to fight it.

  A thread between them remained. Phone calls, Skype sessions, rests between tours. But it was never quite enough.

  After eight years, Isadoro comes back. At his core, he is the same man Iván has always known. But life has transformed them both from the malleable shapes of childhood and into the stiffer skin of adults. The situation is complicated further when they rekindle the ‘benefits’ portion of their friendship. The heat between them has always been undeniable, and now it scorches through them.

  In the beginning, all seems well. But there are creatures under calm water. When they breach the surface, both Isadoro and Iván must learn how to help each other, but also to save themselves.

  Please note: This story contains themes of affected mental health following the return from military combat. However, the ultimate focus of the story is on hope and recovery.

  This story also contains explicit scenes of a sexual nature.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  This book is a work of fiction. Any names, places, character and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Marina Vivancos

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.

  Copyedited by Keyanna Butler

  Proofread by Kiki Clarke, Between the Lines Editing and Dara Nelson

  Cover by Natasha Snow

  PROLOGUE

  The scent of oranges, that sudden, bright burst of sunlight smell, always reminds me of childhood. Of the orange farm I grew up on, La Portera, where my parents, immigrants from Argentina to the U.S., worked and lived. Of the sight of my dad. The solid, rectangular shape of him, shirtless and tanned. Of my mother, her eyes piercing from the window of the rumbling Jeep she would drive, checking on the blood and organs and bones of the working organism that is La Portera. Of the scorching summer heat free from school. The adventures it brought.

  And, of course, of Isadoro.

  There is no story to tell about how I met Isadoro. It happened before memories were memories, when they are just the imprint of shape and sound pressed inside your head.

  Isadoro’s parents died when he was three. He was taken in by his paternal grandfather, Frank, winning custody over Isadoro’s Brazilian side of the family due to little more than distance and jurisdiction. Although he died when Isadoro and I were twenty, Frank is chiselled coldly in memory, an imposing figure despite his rather slight frame. Then a caretaker of the grounds surrounding the worker homes near the farm, Isadoro’s grandfather was a veteran of the Vietnam war. He had been limber despite his age, his body having come back from war untouched, although his soul was altered. His face, a stone carving covered in leather; his voice locked in his throat, coming out in bursts, the rat-a-tat of it piercing the fabric of memory; his eyes watchful and still, sight landing on a target and digging its talons in. As a child, I had been terrified of him, but he had been, if not exactly nurturing, at least consistent and present in Isadoro’s upbringing.

  My childhood memories are as full of Isadoro as they are of the scent of oranges. I have never met myself without him. As if to make up for his grandfather’s discipline and silence, Isadoro was a boisterous child, transferring that energy into becoming a charming young man. Even when he was five, he had a way of getting away with things that none of us could. He’d be able to wrangle an extra piece of candy from the titas—the women living and working at the farm—or convince one of the softer workers to allow him a ride on the tractor with him.

  We were constantly getting into trouble. When we were seven, Isadoro convinced me to slide into the newly laid-down plastic covering the expanse of the water reservoir that was being dug then, tying a rope to the surrounding fence to ensure our escape. The attempt failed, however. The rope snapped when I was trying to climb out and I had slid down again with a startled shout. Isadoro, who had clambered out first to pull the rope up as I climbed, immediately threw himself after me, almost barrelling into my startled body before I could get out of the way.

  “Iván! Are you okay?” he had asked frantically, and I had brushed him off with a roll of my eyes.

  “Dummy, now we’re both stuck here!” I’d said.

  Someone found us five hours later, parched and sunburnt and scared. The first thing Isadoro said when we were on flat ground was a cracked-lipped, It was my idea!

  No one was surprised.

  Sometimes, when we were tired of running around, we would go down to one of the freshly ploughed fields with a bucket and fill it with dirt. We’d trudge up a path until we reached our favourite Mesa Oak and sit under its shade. With a pilfered sieve we’d turn the coarse dirt fine, and then mix it with water. The mixture would turn into a sister of clay; mouldable until it dried and kept its shape. I’d forget about the world when I was with the mud. From my child’s imagination sprung forth figures of fantasy, starting their adventure clumsy and malformed and then earning ferocity and sharpness with age and experience. Mostly, Isadoro would just watch me and it would feel like casting a spell. As if not completely in control, my hands would just move, pressing and cupping the clay, running their fingers across it. It was a force beyond myself, breathing and alive.

  Falling in love with Isadoro felt a lot like that. Inevitable and organic, it was shaped without my knowledge or consent until it was suddenly there, fully formed. It came from the water, from the air, from the earth itself. Even if I had wanted to, I wouldn’t have known how to stop it, until I too was the malleable earth, shaped by that feeling. I am who I am because of Isadoro, pushed into a form by the friendship that was solidified in the impressionable years of childhood until being without the feeling was unthinkable. By the time I was sixteen, I knew every angle and curve of this unreciprocated feeling.

  I am his best friend, and he is mine, but a deeper part of me will always belong to him.

  Somehow, this imbalance doesn’t hurt. Not anymore. My skin has calloused where it rubs. Even when I used to see Isadoro with other people, his lips against theirs through the blur of alcohol and pounding music. Even when we were fifteen and he was my first real kiss. Even when I was seventeen and we fooled around, and at times it felt like I was dying, the way he would look at me, it didn’t hurt. Not really. It was too full of something else for that.

  It was therefore inevitable that when Isadoro finally left me, armoured in a uniform and destined for the arid sands of a desert that not even my hands could shape, I would lose myself a little, scraps of me left in the IED craters of Afghanista
n and then Iraq.

  Isadoro left, but he took me with him. I would see him in the moments between wakefulness and sleep. In those Halloween hours, when minutes turned into stretched, thin things, I would poke through to him until I too could feel the heat and the dust, the voice of his comrades, the fear, the boredom.

  I wondered which bonds would hold stronger; those forged in the fires of battle, or the ones eroded into shape by the waters of childhood.

  He would stay with me during every leave. I would take him in and take him out, stay close and watchful until he disappeared again. And when he came back for good, eight years after first being deployed, shaped by the winds of the desert instead of my hands, I took that, too.

  What else could I do and still be myself?

  CHAPTER ONE

  I can practically count the minutes by the twitch in Isadoro’s jaw. No one else would be able to tell, but I can see the slight strain in his mouth, the stiffness of his back, tucked against a wall. Even though we’re in the courtyard of the bar, he still checks the door every time someone comes in, head swivelling on the pike of his body. His brown eyes flicker around the room, landing on me periodically as if checking on me as much as I’m checking on him. I try to be subtle, but there are so many reasons I can’t keep my eyes off him. I take in his dark, short-cropped hair, in near-military style even though he was in the more uniform-lenient Special Ops for the last four years. Watch his jaw clench the more we stay here, the line of it darkened by stubble. I stare at his features; the wide nose I used to press to annoy him; the sweeping eyelashes I once covered in my mother’s mascara when we were nine; the square chin I’ve wanted to punch more than once in my life. Each is a familiar instrument, but their composition carries a foreign sound. A sort of still-held note that suggests a sudden crescendo, or a dip.

  “I mean, I liked it fine. It was fine. It was good, whatever. It’s just…that romance was so…” Iva makes an incomprehensible gesture with her hands. Her long wavy hair is tied up in a messy bun, strands falling around her face, swaying with the gesticulation.

  “That made sense,” Joaquin snorts. From what Iva has told me, Joaquin and she are childhood friends. Both their parents immigrated from Puerto Rico before they were born, and there is an easy comradery between them that causes an ache inside me. Although my interactions with Isadoro aren’t stiff, they are shadowed by the canyon of distance and time, and the secrets we have buried in its bed.

  “What I mean is that…I was just left a little like, ‘and the award for this year’s most unnecessary heterosexual romance goes to: Fantastic Beasts.’”

  “Pretty sure that movie came out in 2016,” Ezra pipes up, his hand clasped around Joaquin’s, tucked in the space between them as they stand side by side. Iva rolls her eyes.

  “I stand corrected. The award for this year’s most unnecessary heterosexual romance goes to your dry pussy trying to ride my huge dick,” she says. Joaquin snorts loudly and Isadoro lets out a laugh. I turn to him, grinning. I hadn’t even realized I’d been feeling tense until the knot of it loosens at the sight of his smile.

  “Excuse me, the one here with a huge dick is me,” Ezra says haughtily, amber eyes closing and straight nose in the air. Joaquin lets out a burst of laughter and Ezra looks at him incredulously.

  “Excuse me! Why are you laughing!” he says loudly. Joaquin presses the back of his free hand to his mouth, closing his eyes and shaking his head. We dissolve into giggles.

  “Honey,” Iva says, “I’m a bisexual girl. I guarantee you that my dick is bigger. And detachable. And it vibrates.”

  “I’ve got one of those too,” Ezra mutters testily. A blush rises on Joaquin’s darker skin.

  “Oh, my. Do tell,” Iva purrs. Ezra opens his mouth, which is immediately covered by Joaquin’s hand.

  “Nope. Nope, nope, nope,” Joaquin says, shaking his head. Iva grins, pointing her finger at his face and saying nothing. This must obviously mean something to him because he tilts his head back, groaning.

  “No!”

  “Drama queen,” I laugh, “we’ve all got one of those.” I share a look with Iva.

  “I don’t,” Isadoro says. We turn to look at him and he shrugs.

  “Well,” Iva drawls, “I don’t suppose those are standard military provisions.”

  People are usually a little weird about Isadoro’s service, either over-asking or stepping around it awkwardly. Iva, despite having met him a few hours ago, isn’t one to pussy-foot around, taking everything in stride like there’s nothing that can fell her. I suspect the confidence is partly an act, but whose isn’t?

  “I must have missed that particular care package,” Isadoro replies.

  “Wait. Are you telling me that the giant dildo I sent you didn’t get to Iraq?” I ask, faking surprise.

  “I made do,” he says, and the surprise turns a little less fake.

  “Oh, my. Do tell,” Iva says again. I snort, rolling my eyes.

  “Yes. Do tell,” Ezra says. Joaquin looks at him. “For purely scientific reasons, of course. Knowledge is power,” Ezra adds hastily. Now it's Joaquin’s turn to roll his eyes, but the edges of his lips tilt up in a smile.

  “I don’t kiss and tell,” Isadoro says.

  “You kiss your dildo? Kinky,” Iva says, cackling. Isadoro shakes his head, smiling as we all laugh. The slope of his wide shoulders has relaxed somewhat, and I lean against him slightly.

  Thank God for good friends.

  I’d first met Iva more than a year previously when I had started the condensed Digital and Traditional Arts program I’m currently on at Fox Lake University. Both of us being Hispanic, we’d bonded in the studio. The friendship had been a little bit of a relief. Being twenty-six years old, most of my classmates aren’t that much younger than me, but I can’t help but feel that the gap between us is widened by the disparity in experiences. It makes it harder to connect, but Iva made is easy.

  Without having the money or the scholarship to go to college without including a massive amount of debt with the experience, I had chosen to go straight to work after high school. I started in miserable customer service jobs, freelancing as a digital artist on the side. Somehow, the freelancing took off, until I managed to land a position in a company that could give me a steady source of income, meagre but enough to live on when added to my job as a bartender on the weekends.

  Despite the talent my manager saw in me, everybody around me was so overqualified that the educational differences between them and me started to show. If I had had the time and energy, I would have been able to teach myself the programs that kept coming out and updating, but I didn’t. When I started lagging despite my best efforts, the boss had called me into her office, and I had been sure I was done for. I prayed for the firing to be a shot to the head, quick and painless.

  Instead of a killing blow, I was given an opportunity. The company would pay for a two-year course at Fox Lake for the promise of coming back and working with them for at least three years. I had sat in the boss’s office, stunned, before snatching the opportunity up with both hands.

  The workload, I had to admit at the beginning, was tough. It was a long time since I had been in the role of student, and it showed. However, I come from a family of immigrants, meaning that hard work is in my very blood, the only example I’ve had since I was young. Not even the most tedious of classes have been able to even chip at my resolve to succeed.

  Currently in the second semester of my last year, I’m nearing the home stretch. Come summer, I’ll hand in my final projects and return to work in the fall, hopefully with a bump in salary that will allow me to drop the bartending job.

  Frankly, I can’t wait to stop feeling like I’m just treading water. These past years, ever since high school ended and Isadoro left, I’ve been trying to ignore the hand-to-mouth feeling so many people are familiar with; the sensation that I’m just one bad step away from failure.

  I turn back to look at Isadoro. Now that the conversation ha
s calmed, I can see the tension return to his shoulders, as if he can only be distracted from it for so long.

  Isadoro’s last tour ended a mere month ago, at the tail end of Christmas. As I watch him, I can’t help but catalogue the changes between this Isadoro and the one that left at eighteen years of age. It’s not that I’m surprised—not only because only a fool would expect eight years of training and war not to have an impact—but because I had seen the change in increments every time he stayed with me during his leave. The experience had been reminiscent of playing a game of Statues. Every time my back was turned, he would shift. Every time I turned back, he would solidify into stillness, changed into a different form. I used to dread the moment the game would be over—when the changes would be too great, and I’d lose the chance to see anything of him anymore.

  Despite how accustomed I became to him being gone, being at war and in danger, I had still followed his career closely, watching the news obsessively as I tried to fill in the gaps between what little Isadoro shared with me. My awareness of him never waned, even though his absence became normal.

  After joining the military in 2010, following the surge in troops 2009 brought, he went to boot camp and then was deployed quickly to Afghanistan. I watched as the tides changed in the following years, how troops were called back as Obama made promises in a lilting voice. I hoped the waters would pull Isadoro back to me, but almost the opposite happened. After two year-long tours, he called to tell me he had applied to join the Special Forces—the Green Berets.

  The news had been numbing and infuriating at once. I couldn’t help but feel betrayed. Despite its presence in both the news and my life, war was a foreign concept to me. At times, I thought I understood Isadoro’s motivations for joining. Others, they were incomprehensible to me. I had been so unable to process the news of his desire to not only stay in combat, but go in deeper, that I had hung up on him, and refused to pick up when he called me again.