TWENTY-NINE
CAIDEN
Anger is easier than grief. It’s easier than helplessness, watching a system close ranks, and pretend it hasn’t just swallowed another person whole.
At least, with anger, you can hold on to it with both hands, point it somewhere or even use it to get through the day without folding in half in front of people.
I don’t do a brilliant job of hiding it, and the worst part is I don’t give a fuck.
By mid-morning, everyone has started giving me space.
Conversations trail off when I walk into a room.
Questions get shorter and more careful. I even snap at one of our junior officers over a mistake that doesn’t call for it, then snap again when he apologises, like that’s somehow more infuriating.
The look on his face follows me down the corridor afterwards, and I feel bad for about three seconds before the temper comes back and burns over that as well.
I keep my head down, my answers clipped, and I don’t go anywhere near Niko’s flat. That part is on purpose. Ari said he’d handle it, I agreed, and I meant it when I said I understood.
But understanding something and liking it are not, unfortunately, the same thing.
The absence sits wrong in my body all day, like muscle memory being denied the movement it expects.
I don’t see Ari, which is deliberate on my part, not on his.
I take routes that don’t cross with his, adjusting my timing just enough to avoid the obvious places we’d usually end up at the same hour.
It’s childish, petty, and beneath me in at least three different ways, but I would rather do that than stand in front of him and say something I can’t take back once it’s said.
By late afternoon, I’m running almost entirely on caffeine and my bad temper. Everything feels too loud, too slow, too incompetent to be borne. Men breathe too heavily in my personal space, doors close too hard, I even hear one person laugh in the next room, and I seriously consider murder.
But sadly — because Ari is Ari — he catches me anyway.
In the narrow corridor between buildings, where ignoring him outright would look odd even by military standards. He steps into my path with that quiet, infuriating efficiency of his and waits until I stop.
“Meet me later,” he says. “Motor pool. We can talk.” It’s definitely not a question.
I look at him for a second, and he looks tired. More than tired, really. Under normal circumstances, that would get me to agree before thought had much say in it. But tonight it only makes everything hurt worse. “Not tonight,” I say.
His brow creases slightly. “Caiden—”
“I said, not tonight.” The firmness of my tone catches both of us off guard. I see it in his face, the quick recalculation, the way he reins himself in instead of pushing. He could push, if he wanted. God knows he’s good at it. But the fact that he doesn’t almost pisses me off even more.
“All right,” he says after a breath, and I nod, already moving away. “If you change your mind, I’ll be at the motor pool.”
That almost makes me pause, though I don’t let him see it properly. I don’t turn around because if I do, I’ll crumble, and I’m not ready to give in yet. Not with all this anger still sizzling inside me looking for somewhere to go.
So, I walk away.
I reach my room, slamming the door harder than necessary and lean against it for a second, breathing through my nose until the pressure in my chest calms enough to let me think in straight lines again instead of looping back.
I sit on the edge of the bunk and stare at the door, silently seething about everything piling up on top of me.
Ari, stepping in, me stepping back, and agreeing this is sensible, right, and necessary. That’s the bit that keeps getting under my skin. I understand the logic fine enough. I could explain it back to him line for line if he asked.
It still feels like swallowing broken glass.
Mason flashes through my head without warning, and that’s becoming a habit I’d rather be rid of.
What really happened to him? Was he discharged? Reprimanded? Or even worse, prison?
The way the system dealt with him and carried on, business as usual, as if a man can be shipped out and that somehow settles the question of whether anything ugly happened in the first place.
Doing the right thing didn’t save him. Keeping your head down doesn’t save you either. It just buys time until the next thing finds you.
I don’t trust any of this.
I never have, not really.
And right now it feels like Ari is standing in the narrowest part of it, taking the pressure because he knows how and because he thinks somebody has to. He’s good at that. Better than anyone I know. Standing where the weight falls and making it look almost natural.
I hate that for him.
But I hate even more that he’s right.
And under all of that, because apparently my life isn’t difficult enough, I know exactly what he meant in the corridor.
“If you change your mind, I’ll be there.
” It wasn’t a demand or a guilt trip. Just Ari, flat out offering himself as a fixed point and then letting me do what I liked with the information.
That should comfort me. Instead, it fuels the anger inside and makes everything ache more.
When the time comes, I don’t go to meet Ari.
I don’t invent an excuse, send a message, or suddenly develop a sense of duty so powerful it overrides everything else.
I stay where I am and let the hour slide past while I lie back on the bunk fully dressed, staring at the ceiling as if it might have the decency to crack open and drop the solution to all of my problems on my head.
I tell myself I’m tired — which I guess is actually true. Tomorrow will be better if I let this day end here.
That’s probably a lie.
I tell myself Ari will understand, which is the worst one, because I know he will.
Eventually, exhaustion wins by default, as it usually does when I’ve run out of other options. Sleep comes badly and shallow, the anger still humming underneath it, unresolved and contained only because there’s nowhere else for it to go.
The last thing I think before it drags me under is Ari in that corridor, telling me he’d be there if I changed my mind.