Requiem for an Assassin Read Online Free PDF Page B

involved, fine, I admit it. But why can’t you at least acknowledge there are other reasons, too?”
    “Because…”
    “I’ll tell you why. It’s because you’ve never been tied to anything larger than yourself. You don’t believe in anything. So you can’t imagine someone who does. She must be either deluded or lying or naive.”
    I felt myself flush. “I understand your selfless reasons better than you know. I also understand the more devotion you give to the organization or the corps or the country, the more it’ll hollow you out when you realize your love was always unrequited. The more you’ll feel betrayed.”
    We were quiet for a moment. She said, “It doesn’t have to be that way for everyone.”
    “You know anyone whose experience has been different?”
    We stared at each other. Her eyes were narrowed and her nostrils flared slightly with her breathing. That’s the way it was with us. We could go from bliss and harmony to anger and recriminations as fast and with as little warning as a tropical storm. What made it bearable, what made it good, was that the foul weather would pass with equal suddenness, usually leaving something glorious in its wake.
    “Anyway,” I said, “I am tied to something larger than myself. I’m tied to you.”
    Her eyes softened. Then she stepped in close and kissed me. I turned my head away, still irritated, but she reached up and turned me back. I resisted for another moment, mostly for form’s sake, and then gave in.
    We stood like that for a minute or so, and the kiss grew into something more. I could feel her breasts, the heat of her skin, and suddenly I wanted badly to be alone with her someplace.
    She broke the kiss and hooked her fingers through my belt. “Let’s go to your apartment,” she said. “We can fight better there.”
    We did. And things were good again, until next time, when the pattern would repeat itself.
    But between the periodic swings from bitter argument to sweet resolution, things were mostly good. I haven’t been deeply involved with many women, but among them, only Delilah really knew about, and accepted, what I was beginning to try to think of as my past. The surprising depth of our mutual chemistry, and the improbability of the romance it led to, was a quiet miracle for me. Delilah shared with me intimacies that I sensed came from the deepest places within her, aspects of her mind and her body that by long habit she had learned to protect ferociously and that she conceded now only slowly, cautiously, with fear-tinged hope.
    I found myself opening up with her, as well. I’d meant it when I told her I was getting attached. I’d been alone so long, I’d learned to conceive of myself that way, but slowly and strangely, my conception of myself was beginning to include someone else. Sometimes the attachment scared me, and felt like a burden. Other times it seemed like a life raft, or at least like ballast. Either way, it was real, and deepening.
    But one thing I didn’t share with Delilah was the onset of periodic…anxiety attacks, for want of a better description. Occasionally, I would get so lost in a book in a café that I would neglect to look up when I heard someone come in, or so lost in thought on a morning stroll that I’d suddenly realize an entire minute had elapsed and I hadn’t checked my back. At those moments, I’d be gripped by a kind of horror, the feeling you get if you accidentally run a red light at full speed and miraculously manage to breeze through the intersection unscathed. You can tell yourself no harm, no foul, but still you know you fucked up, that in another universe you were annihilated by a truck coming from your left, or you mowed down a young mother stepping off the curb, or were overtaken by some similar catastrophe. A primal part of your mind screams, How could you be so careless? Do you want to die?
    I was used to living with fear, and there was always a reason for it, typically that someone was trying