15. Connor
CHAPTER 15
CONNOR
A fter a swim in my pool, I lounged in one of the cabana’s sun-warmed wooden chairs. My phone was beside my beer bottle on the table, and I just chilled while I waited for the FaceTime request. The sun was still high but getting lower, dimming the blinding brightness of the day by a degree or two, though dusk was still another two hours away. The air was thick with heat and humidity, which felt good on my wet skin.
I took a pull from my beer and gazed out at the pool. I’d made it through the work day. It hadn’t been easy, and I’d been a distracted mess, but I’d made it. Nothing left to do with the day except chat with one of my sons.
And speak of the devil, the familiar FaceTime ping came through. I smiled as I grabbed the phone off the table.
My younger son, Landon, appeared on the screen. “Hey, Dad!”
“Hey. How are things?”
“Eh.” He shrugged, then brushed a couple of curls out of his eyes. “Things are fine. I’ve mostly been working lately. It’s nice to have a break from classes, but that just means working more.”
I laughed. “Welcome to adulthood.”
He made a face, which made me chuckle. I missed my kids like crazy, and seeing Landon on the phone just made that hit even harder. As we caught up and I told him about Spain, my chest ached. I wanted him and his brother to come visit sooner than later, but I also kind of wanted to push the trip back; it was easier to deal with missing them when I knew they’d be coming to see me soon. Once they’d left…
Well. That wasn’t something I wanted to dwell on tonight.
We did land on the subject of their visit, though. He and Quinn figured they had about a ten-day window, plus a day or two on either end for travel. They were just waiting on Quinn’s girlfriend to confirm their chosen dates would work, and then they’d book their flights while I put in my leave request.
“Just let me know as soon as you can,” I said. “And you have your passport and everything?”
“Yes, Dad,” he said, rolling his eyes. “It doesn’t expire for like seven years.”
“Okay, okay. Do you guys want to fly commercial, or chance it with Space A?”
Landon quirked his lips. “I think commercial? We’ve only got so much time, and we’ll all be cutting it close to get back before classes start.”
I nodded. “Yeah, good call.” The space-available military flights were a great perk for service members and dependents, but they were risky. There was no guarantee there’d be space available on a given flight, or that the flight would happen at all, and those decisions were often made at the very last second. It was entirely possible that my boys could be waiting a solid week or more before they were finally able to board a plane, and with college starting up soon, I didn’t blame them for not taking the chance.
“Well,” I said. “Give me the dates you guys want to travel, and I can book your tickets. Or book them yourselves and let me know how much to send you.”
“Okay, will do. Where do we fly in, anyway? Like Madrid or something?”
“You can, but then it’s a four-hour train ride. Alternatively, there’s Jerez de la Frontera, which is close to me.”
He blinked. “Hairy what now?”
I laughed. “Jerez de la Frontera. I’ll text it to you so you can see how it’s spelled.”
“Thanks. And that’s close by?”
“About a half hour, forty-five minutes away. It’s about an hour flight from Madrid, or you can take the train from Madrid.”
Landon pursed his lips. “I’ll talk to Quinn and Savannah. See what they want to do.”
“No hurry. It’s a nice train ride, but it’s also a short flight. So… six of this, half dozen of the other. And remember, this isn’t the Norfolk airport,” I told him. “Madrid is huge , and you do not want to have to sprint through it because half of your forty-minute layover got chewed up by customs.”
He made a face. “But I hate sitting around in airports.”
“Your call, kid.” I shrugged. “Sit around and be bored, or try to Usain Bolt across one of those terminals.”
Landon scowled. “Okay, okay. We’ll book a long layover.”
We talked for a while longer, and then he had to get ready for work, so we ended the call.
I set my phone face down on the table beside my beer bottle. I let the quiet settle over me like the chill after the sun had set, taking the summer heat with it.
We hadn’t talked about anything earthshattering. It was mostly about travel and their upcoming visit, as well as the classes he’d be taking soon; exactly the kind of conversation we’d have had over the kitchen table or in the living room.
It left me unsettled, though. As if we should’ve been talking about bigger and more important things, not just having a normal everyday chat. It felt anticlimactic, leaving me happy that I’d spoken with my son but still feeling like “that’s it?”
I knew that feeling well from deployments and combat tours. And I also knew their mother had asked them to be upbeat whenever they talked to me. Don’t tell me about bad things, whether they were struggling in school or a good friend had moved away. Don’t burden Dad with things that’ll make him worry.
Some of the biggest fights I’d ever had with Aimee had been about that. She insisted she was trying not to add to my stress while I was deployed. I insisted that I wanted to know how my family was really doing, and once I’d found out she was hiding things—and asking the boys to hide things—I worried even more.
Now, every time I talked to the boys and everything was fine, I was afraid there was more going on.
On top of that, there was that same familiar feeling that when the call ended, he was gone. A world away from me in his mother’s apartment while I drank my beer in the muggy silence.
When I’d been in warzones or on ships, their absence had been painful but as close to normal as anything ever was in those places. Here, in a rental house that was big enough for my whole family, I felt like he or his brother should come wandering outside at any moment, swim trunks on and drinks in hand. Like I should’ve been just waiting for them to come trooping down the back porch stairs so we could all cool off in the pool before grilling burgers or steaks.
That wasn’t going to happen, though. Even if I still lived in the States, the boys were adults now. They had lives that didn’t involve me or their mom on a daily basis. All those years kids spent at home? All the family time and soccer games and dinners at the kitchen table? They were over, and I’d missed a lot of them because of my career.
Now I was missing even more. And I wouldn’t even be spending the years after the kids moved out making up for lost time with their mom, because…
Well, because that was gone too.
I sat back against the deck chair and closed my eyes.
I missed my kids. I missed having a partner.
I missed…
Fuck.
I missed not being alone.
* * *
Lying in the darkness, drenched in cold sweat, I stared up at the ceiling and tried to catch my breath.
The dream felt fragmented now, coming in flashes of color and fear rather than as vividly as when I’d been asleep. I couldn’t taste sand or blood anymore. A swig of water from the bottle I kept beside the bed helped ground me in the here and now; both the taste and the cold, not to mention the familiar motions of reaching for it, uncapping it, and taking a drink.
I was still jittery. Fucking hated that feeling. Some part of me—probably one saturated in toxic masculinity—thought it was childish to be so shaken up by a bad dream. It made sense for one of my kids to wake up terrified back when they were little. I was a grown man.
A grown man, I reminded myself, with a head full of trauma that the military wouldn’t let me get therapy to treat. Nightmares weren’t weak or infantile; they were par for the goddamned course.
As I steadily came back down to earth, I caught myself missing my ex-wife. Our relationship had lasted long past the end of its shelf life, and I wouldn’t have gone back for anything. In moments like this, though, I was all too aware that our marriage hadn’t been all bad. On nights when my combat demons dropped in for a visit, Aimee had always known how to bring me back into the present and calm me down. She’d never given me grief for waking her up, and she’d never looked at me differently after she’d seen me cry after an especially bad nightmare. Regardless of the fact that we’d ultimately divorced, I was grateful for a lot of reasons that she’d been in my life. One of those reasons was nights like that.
Nights like this .
Sighing into the silence, I wiped a hand over my face. After being separated for this long and after my deployments, I should’ve been able to handle this alone. And I supposed I could. Wasn’t like I had much choice.
Was I handling it well? Hard to say.
Getting back to sleep after a nightmare like that was always hard. It had been easier when I’d had Aimee curled against me, her warm presence and gentle touch keeping me anchored in reality as I tried to slip off to sleep. Alone, it was easy to get lost in the darkness again. To start losing track of what was real, what was a dream, and what had been real at one time while the lines blurred between consciousness and sleep. With or without her, more nightmares almost always came, but she’d feel me jerking or shaking, and she’d wake me up. Sometimes it happened several times in a night. Sometimes I didn’t remember it, but I’d know when I saw her the next morning, heavy circles under her eyes as she clung to her coffee cup.
Maybe it was just as well I was sleeping alone these days. At least then my nightmares only fucked up my sleep.
* * *
I did manage to grab a few hours of sleep. The nightmares still came, and I remembered waking up shaking at least two more times before my alarm went off. I was groggy as all hell, even after a shower and a mule-kick-strong cup of coffee, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. At least my ex-wife hadn’t lost any sleep over it.
I made it to work on autopilot, sucking down coffee all the way, and I refilled my travel mug as soon as I got to the hospital. There was a corpsman in the breakroom nursing a gigantic energy drink, and while I would’ve sold my soul for that kind of stimulant, it wasn’t going to happen. I couldn’t even look at the logo of an energy drink brand without feeling the phantom twinge that heralded a kidney stone beginning its southbound journey.
The coffee would just have to do. Good thing I’d long ago learned how to function at a hundred percent—okay, seventy-two percent—when I hadn’t slept well.
After a briefing from some of the hospital’s higher ups almost put me into a coma, and then a meeting with my department nearly finished me off, I was seriously considering indulging in that energy drink after all. One can wouldn’t give me another kidney stone, right?
“Either give me something strong or fucking shoot me,” I remembered gritting out to an emergency room doctor. “But do it fucking now .”
Coffee it was.
I thankfully made it through an uneventful sick call. Nobody had anything out of the ordinary—the odd injury from overdoing it at the gym, a handful of people who definitely needed to be home in bed no matter what their supervisors had to say about it, and a young Marine following up after being treated for a badly sprained ankle.
I had a feeling there would be a basewide safety briefing in the next week or so about ATVs thanks to a pair of Sailors who came to see me. They’d sheepishly admitted that their scrapes, bruises, one’s sprained wrist, and the other’s concussion had happened on an ATV tour where they’d “totally listened to everything the guide told us!” Yeah, right. I had two sons who’d been teenage daredevils. These two weren’t fooling me.
I sent them off with light duty chits, prescriptions for high-octane Motrin, and a list of symptoms that were “get your ass to the emergency room” serious.
After sick call was over, I ducked into my office for a quick bite to eat and some more coffee. And while I was at it, I took out my phone and perused the gay club scene in a few cities. Sevilla again, but also places like Granada, Málaga, and Madrid. Someplace I could go hook up with someone and forget about the man who kept elbowing his way into my thoughts. I mean, at least that was a more pleasant place for my focus to drift than to my combat days, but it was still distracting and frustrating. I couldn’t have him, so I needed to look elsewhere.
Just browsing the options of clubs in various places actually gave my tired brain a welcome boost. It was something to look forward to, and it admittedly revved up my libido. Even though it was hard to imagine being this attracted to any other human being than Alex, I knew I could be. And this weekend, so help me God, I would be.
But for right now, I had patients to see, so I headed back downstairs.
I was halfway down the hall with my nose in a chart when bootsteps started coming from the opposite direction. Out of sheer habit, I looked up, and I stopped sharply enough that my own boot squeaked on the gray linoleum.
Alex halted too, eyes wide.
Oh, hell. I was awake now. Like me, he was in uniform—green camouflage with the sleeves crisply rolled to partway up his strong biceps. I thought about the snug T-shirt he was wearing underneath, and how much I’d love to see it stretched across his abs if he’d just unbutton that blouse and?—
Alex found his military bearing before I did. “Uh. Good morning, sir.”
I cleared my throat. “Good morning, HM1.”
We exchanged nods, then continued in opposite directions, Alex completely oblivious to the way my heart was slamming against my ribs.
God help me if we ever crossed paths outside. He was already hot in uniform, but if we were outdoors, we’d both have our covers on. Which meant he’d have to salute me.
Why that struck me as hot, I had no idea. Only that I simultaneously hoped it happened and prayed it never did. I didn’t really care much about rank, and things like submission or subservience had never done it for me. But the thought of Alex snapping to attention and saluting me—why did that make my pulse race?
Probably because I was tired as hell and nothing really made sense.
And maybe a little because I could imagine him doing it perfectly professionally, oozing military bearing from head to toe, but with a glint in his eyes for me and me alone. Something mischievous and sly, visible only to me in the shade of his cover.
Yeah. I was an idiot.
I was also suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to reprise our weekend in Sevilla. In particular, everything that happened after that trip.
All the risks I’d run through still existed. All the potential fallout was still there, waiting to come crashing down on us if we dared push our luck again.
But that intense attraction was still there too.
As much as I’d never been the reckless risk-taking type, I wanted to be this time. Not for the thrill or the rebelliousness, but for another chance to feel all the things I had when we’d been behind closed doors.
Was what why I was imagining him saluting me with a spicy little glint in his eye? Probably.
And it was just that—something I was imagining. Something I needed to forget about and move on from so I could do my job and keep my career. It was that simple.
It was also just my goddamned luck that I crossed paths with him again an hour later. He was heading out of the emergency department with one of the portable ultrasounds, and apparently we were on our way in the same direction.
Neither of us spoke. We didn’t look at each other.
But then the hallway came to an intersection. Left would take me to the elevators to go down to my department. Straight would take him to Radiology.
By all rights, I should’ve turned and he should’ve continued.
But… we both stopped.
I gnawed my lip and chanced a look at him. He did the same. Neither of us bothered with military bearing this time; there was no one else around, and if he was anything like me, he’d forgotten all about it.
When I locked eyes with him, it was suddenly hard to breathe. Maybe I was seeing things, but I swore, behind all the caution and nerves in his expression, there was that glint of hunger. As if he too wanted a rematch, but this wasn’t the time or place.
There was never a time or a place for two guys like us, but that didn’t stop me from wanting it, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t stopping him either.
Fuck it. We hadn’t been caught in Sevilla. We could do it again.
Thinking fast, I glanced around us. Then, keeping my tone casual and conversational, I said, “I’ll, um… I’m going to check out Paraíso in Madrid on Saturday night.” I smiled. “Maybe I’ll see you there.”
Alex’s lips parted and his eyes widened.
I turned to go before I lost my nerve, but he called after me, “Lieutenant Commander?”
I faced him again, heart pounding.
He swallowed hard. “You said Paraíso, right?”
My mouth had gone dry, so I just nodded.
“Okay.” He flashed me a quick smile. “Have a good time.”
“I will. Thanks.”
And then I left.
And I had no idea what I hoped he’d do with the information I’d given him.