Home - COD Simon Ghost Riley X Female OC

Chapter 36

If anyone had asked him, Simon would have lied and said he wasn't avoiding MJ. He had seen her only a few times in the past three days, just enough to know she was still on the mend. He'd been training, running, sparring with the other guys. Letting out some of his energy, keeping himself from feeling like he was doing nothing.

And thinking a lot about his mother. She had experienced so much pain in her life, so much unnecessary suffering, but she had loved her boys. He wished a man could have held her up, held her together. He wished he hadn't been her only option, that someone stronger could have reached out for her when she fell. She had deserved at least that, any human did. He had often wondered, since he was a child, why she had chosen his father. If there was something in that man that could have loved her, way back then. Before he was born. Perhaps the man had wasted all of his love on her in the beginning, that's how she ended up so empty. That's how he had ended up empty except for his need to care for her and his brother.

Tommy had found love, a family. Made a life for himself. Simon had been proud of him, and on long, late nights, he often searched and searched his memory for a time when he had told him that. He hadn't found it yet, but it didn't stop him from continuing to sift through memory after memory, looking.

He had made a down payment on the apartment for his mother after his second deployment. It felt like a lifetime ago. He hadn't been making much but he hadn't needed more than enough of it to eat on. He needed her to have a safe place to live. She had been truly grateful, tearing up and trying to convince him to stay with her. Sometimes, his nightmares were just an infinite loop of him saying no. He'd been too tough, too independent for that.

He had found it untouched after his family was killed, she had been staying with Tommy and Beth. He hadn't had it in him to sell it, he had continued making payments on it and finally bought it outright after his first mission with the 141.

That first mission had made him feel important, confident, he had thought maybe he would go and live in the quaint little downtown apartment himself, but when he returned he found he couldn't even bring himself to walk down the street it was on. He couldn't look at it. So he got a hotel room on the other side of town, called a few cleaning services, and told the woman he chose that he would pay her monthly, indefinitely, to keep it clean. She was a kind lady, she sometimes sent him photos to prove her handiwork, and informed him of any repairs needed. He had already told her that he was returning. She never asked questions, she had simply promised it would be ready.

He had told Mariana he had kept it for something important. It was the truth. He hadn't known what, safehouse had always been a possibility, meeting location. Something. Living there had never really returned to his mind but the thought of taking Mariana there and nursing her back to health with his own two hands seemed to make the thought of it clean and inviting. His mother would have wanted him to use it for something like that.

Since he asked her to go back to London with him, the truth was that he was nervous, anxiously gripped by the prospect of more failure. He barely knew how to care for anyone but himself. He barely knew how to care for himself. And there was always that possibility, in an open place like a city, in a building with windows and the ability to come and go as you please, that she would be in danger. Maybe in spite of him, maybe because of him.

And that pushed him to plan for a future where, once she was solid, free to choose where she went next, he would let her go. Quietly step back and remove the danger that was being associated with him.

The problem was, laying eyes on her ruined his image of that future. It made it look stupid. And she knew something was up with him. She gave him that we-all-wear-masks-Simon-Riley side eye every time he walked in. She saw right through him like the ghost he was.