Chapter 6 #2
He’d barely known it before, because since the day they met, Than had been constant. Steady. The one person who saw him clearly and didn’t ask him to be anything else.
Until now.
The idea of losing that cut deeper than any romantic loss ever could.
Losing Than wasn’t something he could compartmentalize or outwork.
It would be like severing a limb. Facing BUD/S without him, going through that crucible without the one man who anchored him, was almost impossible to imagine. A life without Than in it was worse.
Okay. Than had a point.
If Mei were in love with him, that would be a complete disaster.
He didn’t love her like that. Not even close. What he felt was protective. Familiar. Brotherly. Mei would require presence, not just affection, emotional availability under stress, a willingness to let someone see him fail, hesitate, change.
Than had seen the women Fly dated, and he did have a pattern
For a reason.
Not because he was careless, but because he understood the cost of doing it poorly. His choices were risk management. Alignment. He didn’t divide himself lightly. When he chose a woman, it had to be real, and if it was real, he didn’t get to walk away.
He was sure he couldn’t walk away from that kind of woman.
But the truth of the matter was simple. He would hurt Mei if she was in love with him. His moral compass wouldn’t allow him to do anything but let her down gently, and that would mean Than’s love for her would have nowhere to go.
It would destroy all three of them in a single blow.
Fly groaned softly.
Damn it.
He now hoped, desperately, that what he’d seen between Than and Mei was real because if Than was right, this wouldn’t just hurt.
It would cost him the two people he wasn’t willing to lose.
It would ruin everything.
Days later, they arrived at the Charles Carroll House just as the sun dipped low over the Severn. Lanterns glowed along the terraced lawns, their light reflecting off the water. White tents rose among the sycamores, music drifting gently across the gardens.
Mei’s parents met them at the entrance, pride written all over their faces. Her mother clasped Mei’s hands, eyes shining. Her father shook Fly’s and Than’s hands with quiet gratitude, as if these two young men mattered to his daughter in ways words couldn’t fully express.
The artwork lined the stone paths and terraces. Paintings of blue crabs and marsh grasses. Sculptures shaped from driftwood and reclaimed metal. A photograph of a storm rolling across the bay, beautiful and dangerous all at once.
Mei paused in front of that one. “This is my favorite,” she said softly. “It reminds people that the sea gives and takes. You can love it and still respect it.”
As they moved deeper into the gardens, Fly finally noticed what was suspended above them.
Three enormous canvases hung from fine steel wire stretched between the old sycamores, floating in the open air as if gravity had loosened its grip for the night. They swayed almost imperceptibly in the river breeze, catching the lantern light and the last gold of sunset.
A blue whale reimagined. Not whole but pieced out for impact.
One canvas captured the whale’s head and eye, immense and calm, the gaze ancient and knowing, as if it had seen everything the water could give and take and endured anyway.
Another focused on the long, ridged throat pleats, pale and powerful, the brushstrokes layered so thickly they seemed to move when the light shifted.
The third showed the curve of a massive fluke, textured in deep cobalt and slate, the scale of it unmistakable even without context.
Than stopped beneath them without realizing he’d done it. He tilted his head back, eyes tracking the sweep of the images as they hovered above the crowd, above the music, above the soft clink of glasses and murmured conversations.
The whales didn’t dominate the space. They inhabited it. Moving through the night the way they would move through the sea, vast and deliberate, untouchable and utterly present.
But he didn’t look at Fly. Not once.
Fly felt it, too, the instinctive hush that came when something big and real passed overhead. He waited for Than to say something. A muttered observation. A dry aside. Anything.
It didn’t come.
Mei stood beside them, hands folded loosely in front of her, watching the guests react rather than the paintings themselves.
Fly glanced at her, then back up at the canvases, and understood that this wasn’t art meant to impress. It was art meant to remind people how small they were, and how careful they should be with what carried them.
Than swallowed, his gaze still fixed overhead.
“Geezus,” Fly murmured quietly. “Those are… something else.”
Mei only smiled, a small, contained expression that held something mysterious and meaningful.
While the whales drifted above them, suspended between earth and water, Fly had the strangest sense that the night itself was holding its breath.
As they moved, Fly watched her explain the pieces to donors, calm and articulate, grounded in her purpose. This was as important to Mei as the Academy and her future, this space where passion met responsibility.
Than drifted toward the buffet table, already elsewhere. The space he left behind felt deliberate. Maintained.
Fly stayed where he was, watching the gap widen, irritation threading through the unease. This wasn’t going to happen, not if he had anything to say about it. It wasn’t in his nature to stand by and allow things to fester.
They weren’t strangers circling each other in polite silence. They were four years deep. Study sessions, deployments of trust, inside jokes, long nights, and harder days. You didn’t build something like that and then stay silent when there was heavy stuff to deal with.
If that was all they were doing now, pretending, then what the hell had those years even meant?
He loved Than, deeply. They were blood brothers, soon to be brothers in arms. Than was a rock against Fly’s restless energy, the steady center that made Annapolis feel survivable instead of suffocating. Fly wanted the best for him.
And Mei…goddamn, she was the best.
Fly had never allowed things to implode from a distance. If something was wrong, you faced it. You named it. You dealt with the consequences.
Mei wasn’t fragile, Than wasn’t blind, and Fly wasn’t willing to stand there and let silence do more damage than the truth ever could.
When she passed him, Fly caught her arm. “Mei?”
“Yes?”
“We’ve been friends for a long time, and I need to ask you something important. I expect you to be honest with me because our friendships are on the line.”
Her eyes widened. “What? What is it? Of course, you have my word.”
He hesitated just long enough to make sure she knew this wasn’t casual. “Do you have feelings for Than?”
Color rushed up her cheeks, fast and honest, all the way to the roots of her hair. She didn’t deflect. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I do.”
Fly closed his eyes. The relief was almost knee-buckling in its intensity.
He nodded once. “Geezus. That’s a fucking relief.
” He let her go. Then, because Than was hurting like hell, he added in the crux of the problem.
The very thing that had threatened to tear them apart. “He thinks you’re in love with me.”
Her reaction was immediate and visceral. She stepped back, eyes wide. “God, no. Absolutely not.”
The sting landed anyway, quick and sharp, and Fly didn’t pretend it hadn’t.
“Fair,” he said lightly. “Still hurts a little.”
She winced. “Not because you’re not attractive or kind or…God, you’re impossible.”
“I’m impossible?” he asked.
She narrowed her eyes at him.
He laughed. “Okay. I’ll allow it.”
She exhaled, tension easing. “You’re kinetic.
You light up every room you walk into. You’re always moving, always pulled in ten directions.
” She tipped her head, studying him with quiet clarity.
“You don’t do halfway. You don’t choose things that would ask you to stop and reorganize your whole life. ”
Fly stilled. Just a fraction. “That’s not wrong,” he said.
“You would exhaust me,” she added gently. “Not because you’d hurt me, but because you’d hold back trying not to.”
That one landed deeper.
He smiled, rueful. “I don’t like to enter things I can’t do cleanly.”
“I know,” she said softly. “That’s why I never wondered about you.”
She paused, then continued, voice dropping without her meaning it to. “Than is different. Grounded. Quiet. He stays. Those eyes. That face.” She swallowed. “That body.”
Fly choked. “Please,” he said, coughing, “tell him that in stages. Preferably not all at once and while I’m in earshot.”
She laughed, then sobered. “You’re wondering why I haven’t said anything.”
“I was,” he admitted.
“What we have, the three of us, it’s rare,” she said. “I didn’t want to break it.”
“And now?”
“We’re leaving Annapolis.” She shrugged. “You’re about to freeze your nuts off at BUD/S, and I’m shipping out.”
“Unforgettable image,” he said.
“Sorry.” She smiled faintly.
Fly lifted her chin gently with his knuckle. “We don’t get many moments where timing actually lines up. He deserves the truth.”
“Why?” she asked, searching him.
Fly didn’t smile this time. “I think he feels the same way about you, and because pretending otherwise will cost him more than the risk.”
She held his gaze, then nodded once. “Okay.”
As she walked away, Fly let the moment settle.
He wasn’t giving anything up.
He was clearing the space for something that had been waiting longer than he had.
After Mei left Fly, her heart raced, not from fear, but from the sudden clarity of it. He had seen what she could no longer hide, and the words he’d given her still reverberated in her chest.
I think he feels the same way about you.
The truth of it pressed down as she crossed the lawn, heavy and undeniable. Silence was no longer neutral. Avoidance was no longer kind. Whatever she was afraid of saying now would cost Than far more if she didn’t say it at all, and that was unacceptable.
She let the realization settle as the Charles Carroll House rose around her, its pale stone glowing under lantern light.
The old sycamores threaded the terraces with soft halos, shadows stretching and overlapping like held breath.
Beyond them, the river whispered against the shore, steady and patient, carrying the sounds of the evening with it, low music, laughter, the quiet clink of glasses.
The Severn moved as it always had, indifferent and enduring. But tonight the world felt suspended, as if time itself had paused to give her this one, narrow window.
Then she saw him.
Nathaniel Locklear stood near the edge of the lawn, one hand resting lightly at his side, the other adjusting the cuff at his wrist as if he were still getting used to the feel of it.
The tux fit him beautifully, broad shoulders filling the jacket, clean lines emphasizing his height and strength without trying to tame it.
The black fabric made his skin glow warmly under the lights, his hair silky black, temple cut, but shorter in the back was just barely within Annapolis standards, with the year coming to a close and graduation finally in sight.
It was the first time she had ever seen it natural, untouched by product or combed back from his face, the strands thick and dark enough that her fingers ached to slip into them.
His ancestry lived in the planes of his face, but the uncontained spirit of the Lakota lived in his hair.
This man carried warrior blood passed down through generations who had fought for their very right to exist, for their land, their people, their culture.
That history lived in him, quiet and lethal and enduring.
He struck her like potent electricity, straight to the deepest place in her, the place that recognized truth before thought ever caught up.
In secret, she had studied his culture. She had learned where he was born, read what she could about his people, their history, their endurance.
She had fallen in love with all of it, and with him, in a way that felt different from anything she had ever known.
She was aware of him down to her marrow, to her roots.
He was so damn sexy, and the most endearing part was that he had no idea.
He thought she loved Fly.
She lost her breath.
Her mind followed right after.
For the first time, Mei didn’t turn away from what she wanted.
She was going to make sure he understood where her affections truly lay, and that she offered him all that she was. She wanted, no, she needed, to know how he felt about her.
He didn’t look different, not really. He looked like himself, just amplified. All the steadiness, the calm gravity, the contained power she had grown to trust, now wrapped in silk and wool instead of uniforms and salt air.
Her heart. She’d lost that four years ago. She hadn’t meant to. It had just…happened.
She told herself she’d kept her distance for good reasons.
For Fly. For the sake of the trio they’d built so naturally, joyously, and deeply.
For the friendship that had become her anchor through four relentless years.
For the reality that they were all leaving Annapolis soon, scattering to different billets, different coasts, different lives.
For the knowledge that Fly and Than were about to walk into BUD/S together, into something brutal and consuming that would change them forever.
Her boys. Her friends.
None of that diminished what she felt for Than. It never had. It only made the silence more dangerous.
She understood now what restraint had cost her. Every day she’d waited, the truth had gained weight. What had once felt like protection had become something else entirely, avoidance dressed up as care.
She’d tried reason. She’d tried telling herself that friendship was enough.
It wasn’t.