Praise Me: Soldier (Praise Me Daily #4)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Theo

My skin is feverish.

Sweat is forming a pattern on the front of my gray T-shirt.

I can’t seem to uncurl my fists long enough to pick up the coffee mug and bring the rim to my mouth for a sip. No one else in this café is having difficulty performing basic tasks, like consuming their beverage. In fact, they’re multitasking while they drink. Having witty conversations, reading, typing on laptops.

All the clicking and laughter and scratching of pens, chair legs, skin…it culminates in a marching battalion of sounds to assault my ears. Ears that haven’t heard anything but silence…or screaming…in so long, they can’t cope. I can’t cope.

I can’t do this.

I thought I was ready for the outside world, but I’m not.

I don’t even have a cell phone yet because all the icons and apps were so confusing, but trivial at the same time. Unfamiliar like everything else.

My hands are jerky, sweat rolling down my spine while I fumble with my wallet, taking out a ten-dollar bill and wedging it in between the salt and pepper shakers. Is ten enough? Has the cost of coffee gone up since I’ve been imprisoned? Why didn’t I think to look at the menu more closely?

A man two tables away raises his voice to ask the waitress for the check and my skin shrivels like hot plastic. He’s a civilian. A civilian. But all I hear is a person in distress. Another soldier being tortured on the other side of the wall. Distant explosions. Gunfire. Soon-to-be dead men screaming for their mothers. All absorbed into the blackness of my cell. My sweltering, airless hole carved into rock somewhere so far removed from this fancy coffee shop, it shouldn’t even be allowed in the same universe.

Taking a deep inhale, I close my eyes and recite the directions back to my new apartment, reminding myself not to glance right or left on the way home, to keep my attention locked on the path in front of me, lest I see something that triggers my severe PTSD and causes a scene. Sort of like in the airport upon landing back in Chicago, when I thought the rumble of the baggage claim belt starting, a horn blaring three times in succession, meant there was incoming fire.

Those people didn’t need to be hustled to safety. They were safe, normal Americans, like the people surrounding me right now. Sometimes my brain forgets, though. It forgets everything but the fear and memories and horror of the last four years.

I push my chair back to leave, but I never get the chance to stand up.

A girl sits down across from me and…

The grating noises in the coffee shop fade into a low, thumping rhythm. I don’t realize right away that it’s my heart I’m hearing. I haven’t heard it do anything but pound with painful adrenaline in so long, I barely recognize the sound.

She’s short.

Young.

In round, tortoiseshell glasses. Beautiful brown eyes look back at me from the other side of that glass, bewildered and inquisitive all at once. Her dark hair is twisted up on the top of her head in a bun, but I can see light, golden strands woven throughout the messy masterpiece. She parts her lips to say something, and thankfully, she doesn’t, because I wouldn’t have heard it, anyway. Goddamn, that fucking mouth . Supple. Full. Kissed with a light gloss that catches the golden light above the table. The bow of her upper lip is unnaturally high, and it allows me to see the tiny gap between her front teeth.

I’m staring.

I can’t stop staring and my prolonged attention is making her blush.

She drops her head forward on a shy, breathy laugh.

“You’re…” She peers up at me through her eyelashes. “You’re Kevin?”

Kevin. Kevin. Who the fuck is Kevin?

“I don’t usually let my co-workers set me up on dates. I don’t usually go on dates at all, to be honest.” Slowly, she starts to unwind a light, tan and white striped scarf from around her delicate throat, which is circled by a thin necklace. A gold charm in the shape of a bow sits right on that little notch above her collarbone and my mouth begins to salivate. What is happening to me? “I just…um…”

Dear God, her voice is so…innocently husky.

My cock gives a heavy thrum. For the first time in years.

I feel the pulsation in my throat and nearly choke on the unexpectedness of it.

Beneath the table, I dig my thumbs into my knees. Breathe.

“Well, I’m trying to be more of a yes person,” she continues. “I always say no to happy hour. When I have vacation days at work, I never use them for anything but…”

“But what?” I ask, desperate for her to keep speaking.

My voice visibly startles her. It’s no wonder. I sound like I just crawled out of a grave. In a lot of ways, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. Starting with being in this coffee shop.

“I take short road trips to visit estate sales. That’s what I do with my vacation days.” She tugs on the sleeve of her sweater, but I don’t look down. I can’t look at her breasts. Not with my dick beginning to get stiff for the first time since I was imprisoned and tortured. All over the mere sound of her voice. “Do you think that’s morbid? I just love to see what someone collected while they were alive.”

Silence falls.

I realize it’s my turn to speak.

This is a conversation. Not a one-sided shouting diatribe in a language I don’t speak.

Say something or she’s going to get uncomfortable.

“No.” I clear the cobwebs from my throat. “I don’t think it’s morbid to visit estate sales. I think…any kind of curiosity about other people is a good thing. It probably means you’re not a self-absorbed piece of shit.”

She sucks in a breath.

The people at the table to my right go silent.

But then, the girl across from me breaks into a giggle that she quickly catches with her hand. “You’re very blunt, aren’t you?”

“Sorry about that. It’s been a long time since…” I gesture to our surroundings. “I’ve been in the service for a long time. Too long, obviously.”

“Oh.” She frowns. “Dierdre didn’t mention you were in the service. Which branch?”

Fuck. I forgot she’s here to meet Kevin, the bastard.

Oh well. I’m not going to pretend to be someone I’m not.

“Army. Special forces.”

“I see.” This girl is smart and she’s beginning to realize something is up, but she’s not letting the suspicion show on her face. Not so much that regular person would notice. But I’m not a regular person. I’ve been trained in wartime interrogation. Not to mention, I had to rely on infinitesimal facial tells to survive captivity.

Any minute now, she’s going to ask me if I’m really her date. Or if she’s sitting at the wrong table. I’m not going to lie to her. Actually, I’m not even going to make her ask. For one, she seems too smart to believe a lie. And two, I want to get this Kevin bullshit out of the way. I like having this person across from me. I’m no longer sweating or stuck in fight or flight mode. Something about her is…restorative. So absorbing that I can’t manage to think of anything but her, especially my constant, impending sense of doom.

“I’m not Kevin.”

Her only reaction is to breathe faster. A single swallow.

She glances down the row of tables and I follow her line of sight, both of us noticing the clean-cut man in a suit, checking his watch.

“If you’re not Kevin, why did you let me sit here so long?”

“I didn’t want you to leave.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean ‘why’?” I scoff.

She blinks, obviously still confused.

I lean forward, the forward shift causing my dick to chafe against my zipper, the bulk of me beginning to swell in a way I haven’t felt in so long. It’s her. It’s everything about her. What is that smell she’s wearing? Smells like sugar cookies. “Because you’re a fucking knockout. Or haven’t you looked in the mirror lately.”

“I’m…” She starts in surprise, her knee bumping the underside of the table, rattling the silverware. “I’m not a-a knockout.”

“Yes, you are, baby.”

“Baby,” she mouths without sound, her spine straightening with some indignance. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve been in the service so long, you forgot it isn’t polite to call a woman baby when you just met her.”

“I’m not going to tell you that.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I didn’t care much for being polite, even before I was in the service.”

She glares at me from behind those nerdy glasses and my balls start to pulse.

Jesus Christ, I’m hard . I didn’t think it would ever be possible again. Thought my post-traumatic stress had robbed my ability to feel arousal. I’ve been back on US soil for two months. During that time, some of my old friends have sent me pictures of single women, asking if I wanted to try dating. They’d even offered casual sex with some grateful—and apparently patriotic—friends of their wives. One friend even dragged me to a singles mixer, but I felt sick and impatient just being there. Porn has done nothing to encourage my body back to its usual state.

This girl , though.

She’s given me my first erection in four years.

I want to be happy about it, but…I’m suddenly very aware of my constricted balls. The weight of them between my legs, denim pressing in on everything.

“Stay where you are,” I rasp. “Pick me over Kevin.”

Twin pink spots appear on her cheeks. “I don’t even know your name and you’re telling me where I can and can’t go?”

“My name is Theo. Yours?”

She hesitates. “Maybe I shouldn’t say.”

My full concentration goes into staying still, instead of ripping the table out from between us and throwing it across the room. “I think you want me to know it.”

“July,” she whispers.

There goes my heart, booming again. I like when she whispers. I like feeling like we’re in bed, sharing secrets. I like…her. A lot. “Your name is July?”

“Yes.”

“Were you born in July?”

“No. August first. But I was due on July twenty-seventh and by then, my mother had already fallen in love with the name, so…”

Another first in four years? The urge to laugh. Holy shit.

I want this girl in my lap. Want to smuggle her out of here like stolen diamonds.

She’s bringing my body back to life.

More than my body. I’m not locked in numbness like I was this morning.

Like I’ve been for months since coming home.

“I don’t know if you’re m-my speed,” she whispers, but her gaze betrays her words, slipping down to the rough curve of my bicep, my throat, eventually taking a prolonged peek at my mouth. Is she attracted to me? “Going on this date alone was a big step for me, you know?” she finishes.

“I understand.” I look around, noticing the crowd has thinned out slightly. “It’s a big step for me just being in this coffee shop.”

That catches her attention, her expression turning inquisitive. “What do you mean?”

Despite urging from my friends, I haven’t spoken about my experience as a POW. It’s hard enough to have the horror inside of me, but harder still to watch that horror dawn on the faces of other people really brings home the gravity of what I survived. I find myself wanting to tell this girl, though. It almost feels inevitable. She’s supposed to know everything about me.

“I was held in an enemy camp for four years. A prisoner of war.” Across the table, her lips part on an intake of breath. “I saw nothing but the walls of my cell and the faces of my captors for so long, this coffee shop feels like a figment of my imagination. It doesn’t seem like real life. Nothing does.”

“Four years?” she whispers

I hum a confirmation. “I wish I could go back into the darkness and tell myself if just survived the torture a little longer, I’d eventually find myself sitting across from an angel in glasses. Might have given me something to hang on for when I’d forgotten how to hope.” Damn. My gut is beginning to churn, my skin going clammy, just talking about my time in the camp. It’s getting hard to draw a breath. “Never mind, I don’t want to go back into the darkness. I want to stay right here—”

My words cut off abruptly when she reaches across the table and lays a hand on my forearm, her fingertips finding one of my many scars, tracing it lightly. “I’m sorry, Theo,” she murmurs, wetting her lips. “I’m sorry you had to live like that for so long. You must have been incredibly strong to get through that.”

Maybe.

But I’m not strong right now.

My attention is locked on her hand where it connects with my skin. It has been over four years since anyone has touched me without the intention to do harm. Warmth spreads from the place where our skin connects, rolling downward toward my belly, heating my skin like I’m sitting too close to a fireplace. And I can’t help looking at her tits now, small and high and proud in her modest, white V-neck sweater, those mouthwatering handfuls seeming to grow plumper with every breath.

July’s eyes find mine through the forest of her eyelashes, shy and overwhelmed and I know I should draw my arm away, because my neglected body is poised to ruin this. I’m going to take this encounter too far and she’ll run away, refuse to ever see me again. I don’t want that. I need to see her again. As soon as possible.

I need to be in her plans. I need to make her plans.

But I don’t draw away. I soak in her delicate touch like she’s the sunset and this is my last day on earth. Shouldn’t I warn her, though?

“July,” I manage, my tone rocky.

“Yes?”

“I haven’t been touched by a woman in a long time,” I say, in desperate need of adjusting myself, the stiff flesh of my cock crammed up behind my fly, seeking space to grow. To be relieved. “I…think you have to stop.”

“Really? I’m only touching your arm.”

“Please,” I pant.

She starts to remove her hand, but her fingertips linger and she’s curious. Too curious for her own good, apparently. “What if I don’t?”

“I’m going to embarrass myself. Please, I…” I lean forward across the table, devouring the nearness of her mouth, the shape of her nose, eyes, chin. “My body has been through so much pain, it forgot what pleasure feels like. But it started to remember as soon as you sat down in that chair.”

“You haven’t…been with a woman in four years? Not even since you came back?”

“Couldn’t even get hard until I saw you, baby. And like I said, we have to stop talking about this or I’m going to…” A wave of lust snares my loins and my hips jerk, a moan trapped in my throat. Jesus, my cock is straining against my zipper, my spend dribbling out everywhere, ready to pop. “I’m going to bust if you don’t stop touching me, July. Hell, if you keep looking at me like that, it’s going to happen.”

“How am I looking at you?” she breathes.

“You’re curious.” Despite the agony in my jeans, I scrutinize her face for clues as to how she’s reacting. How she’s feeling. “You’re curious because it would be the first time you’ve watched a man get off, huh?”

“Yes,” she says, her voice low, thready. “I-I didn’t know I could have this effect on someone.”

“You’re having it on me.” I pound a fist on the table, making the sugar container bounce. “Going to bring me off with nothing but that pretty face, aren’t you, baby?”

That’s when she moans.

It’s only the smallest, briefest sound but it’s like a cannon boom in my head.

It’s the final straw.

My cock swells and lengthens that final degree—and in such swift fashion, I have to snatch up a cloth napkin in my fist and press it to my mouth, my willpower demanding my body cool off, to stop whatever is happening due to her scent, her coy but rapt body language, the fucking way she’s looking at me. STOP . But—

I ejaculate in my jeans.

My balls spasm, cock rippling with the flood of semen. Four years’ worth of pressure leaves me in a blistering liquid rush, filling my briefs, soaking into the cotton, while I grit curses into the napkin, straining my vocal cords in an attempt to stay quiet. My stomach screams in agony over what it’s been holding in and the sudden, dramatic loss of tension, my thighs shake in the seat. I see heaven and hell on the backs on my eyelids, and in between it all, there’s her. July. Looking up at me in that excitedly nervous way.

And it’s a good thing her image is seared into my mind, along with her name, because when I open my eyes, she’s gone. I’m staring back at an empty seat, the outline of her perfect face still lingering in the vacant air.

My obsession with finding her begins here…my mission sharp and clear.

Urgent.

Only, this mission won’t end with me getting locked down.

No. It’s July’s turn.