Chapter 6
brOCK
Finlay groaned. He was a notorious skirt chaser, and he spent every minute not downrange trying to go downrange.
Foster arched his brow as he stared Finlay down. “You got a problem with that, Ryan?”
“No, boss. I’m good. I’ll be sure to bring the good shit,” Finlay replied as if he didn’t give a shit that we’d just lost a Saturday.
My day would be spent getting as shitfaced as possible anyway, so whether I did it with my brothers or alone didn’t much matter to me.
We were still waiting on intel and the green light to come down from on high about Adam’s rescue mission. The brass was still dragging their damn feet while our teammate was being held hostage.
I didn’t know what Foster had planned. Didn’t really give a fuck, either.
I’d do as ordered, but if something didn’t happen soon, I’d be putting in for leave and reaching out to some of my private military contacts.
Someone had to go get Adam, and if the United States Government wouldn’t fucking do it, I would find someone who would. Or do it my damn self.
I pulled up to the address Foster gave us the following day and found him sitting on the tailgate of his big-ass truck in the driveway at the massive beach house his parents owned.
A couple of his wife, Julie’s German Shepherds with him—Greta and Otto—were running around the street, chasing one another, and fighting over a toy.
“Lieu,” I greeted him as I sat my donation to today’s drunk-fest in the bed of his truck.
Foster nodded silently, then said, “Jones.”
I nodded. We sat together, neither saying anything. Everything had been said already. Both of us were pissed as fuck to be sitting in Virginia with our hands tied while our teammate was fighting for his life as a prisoner of war.
The silence stretched out between us, only broken up by the dogs. We watched the dogs play for a bit, with Foster occasionally giving them a command in German. The dogs were fucking badass.
Foster’s wife, Julie, fucking amazed me.
As if she wasn’t busy enough with five freaking kids, she raised trained tactical guard dogs, military spec ops canines, bomb sniffers, and drug dogs.
You name it, she could teach a dog to do it.
Matilda, the dog we currently used on the team, was one of hers, and Greta had saved all our peaches a time or two.
Otto, the bigger of the two dogs came back to the truck with the rope and jumped in the truck bed, nudging me. Foster handed me a ball. I tossed it for the dogs and watched them take off down the street. The big dog shocked the fuck out of me when he launched himself out of the truck bed.
Foster whistled. “Nice throw. I thought you were a defensive guy, not a quarterback.”
I cocked my head at him, shocked he knew that. “Yeah. How…”
He laughed. “My dad is a huge fucking college football fan. You enlisting pissed him off. He hoped you would be heading to Texas or, at the very least, the Naval Academy.”
“I thought about it, but I knew what I wanted, and I didn’t want to put it off for four years,” I explained vaguely.
The Naval Academy, then the SEALs, had been the dream, but being a foster kid with no familial support made the Naval Academy a difficult road to travel, so I’d chosen the shorter route. I still got to where I wanted to be.
Some might’ve felt short-changed a bit, but I didn’t. If I’d gone to the Naval Academy, I wouldn’t have been in the right spot to meet Adam. And missing out on the greatest thing that’d ever happened to me was high on the suck list.
Another twenty minutes later, the other guys started trickling into the parking area in front of the house.
But as a few of them headed toward the path around the house to the backyard, Foster called, “Hold up!”
We all looked at him.
“Adam never misses an Army/Navy game if he can help it, so I thought we’d hang out and watch the game in his honor.”
The guys all looked as mudsucked as I felt.
They nodded, and I hoped whatever it was I did passed as a nod as well.
My head felt wobbly, and my knees were weak.
I swallowed. Bile churned in my stomach.
I’d been so focused on pushing the brass and Mercer toward a rescue mission that I’d forgotten what day it was.
As we settled in for the game and started drinking, I was thrown back to another day.
To another game. That day, it had just been Adam and me.
We’d just finished our first deployment, and I’d moved into an apartment even though the Navy wouldn’t pay for off-base housing for single enlisted.
Adam had thought I was nuts, but I had my reasons for needing privacy. Reasons I was forbidden to speak about.
FALL 2004
It was a rare day off from Green Team’s crazy as fuck training schedule.
So, Adam and I grabbed some beer and steaks and settled in for a day of college football and day drinking.
We were shooting the shit during the Army-Navy game when Adam turned to me, a question burning in his eyes.
Somehow, I knew I wouldn’t like what came out of his mouth next.
“I’ve always wondered…” he started.
“What?” I asked.
My heart sped up, and my skin turned clammy. I’d never kept anything from him that he’d directly asked me about, but there were things I’d kept to myself. He was my best friend, but there were things I couldn’t tell him.
My sexual orientation was not something I ever discussed.
I’d known I was on the gay side of bisexual since middle school.
Girls, in general, just never did it for me.
I’d slept with a few women over the years, but soft curves under me couldn’t hold a candle to rough hands and a chiseled body over me.
My desire to be a Navy SEAL was the thing that kept me from leaving women in the past forever. DADT kept me from being who I wanted to be, who I really was. It kept me from being honest with my friends and teammates. Hence, the women and the facade I’d put on.
Then there was Adam. He presented one hell of a problem. Not that he was aware he was a problem. He thought everything was hunky-fucking-dory, but it was far from it.
I’d been attracted to him from the jump, but I’d kept that to myself too.
DADT was part of that as well, but if I’d had any inkling that Adam returned those feelings, I’d have risked it all.
But he was decidedly straight—even if there had been some blurry lines when he and I picked up a woman to share for the night.
The other thing I’d never really spoken to him about was my family or childhood. Adam knew I was a foster kid and that I didn’t have any family at all. Being severely abused made people leery of adopting me, so I’d bounced around for years until I’d turned eighteen.
I feared he would ask about something I wasn’t ready or able to discuss. I hoped like hell I was reading this situation wrong, and he was going to ask something about the mission we had in the works.
I didn’t get off that lucky. Adam asked about one of the two things I never spoke about.
“How’d you get that scar?”
I peered at him, wetting my lips. “What scar? I’ve got quite a few, and you know the stories behind most of them.”
We were both riddled with scars. You didn’t go through BUD/S without getting hurt and sometimes even injured. Adam and I’d both gotten lucky and weren’t ever hurt enough to constitute being recycled into the next class and starting BUD/S over.
Undeterred as always, Adam said, “The one on your back, Rocket. That huge-ass one that you’ve always had.”
I huffed softly. “I got it on the farm when I was about ten.”
Adam studied me, his head cocked. “What the fuck happened? It looks gruesome.”
I sucked my lips in between my teeth, biting down on them. Walking into the kitchen, I pulled the Jameson from the cabinet. I walked back to where Adam sat waiting, poured a couple of fingers into both glasses, and offered him one.
Adam wasn’t a whiskey man, but I’d gotten him used to drinking it on occasion.
He sipped it, whereas I’d down the shit like it was fucking water and I was a man dying of thirst. I watched him grimace as he sipped his.
I swallowed mine, then poured another and sat back down.
I placed the glass and the bottle on the table before me.
The smell of the whiskey burned my nose as I leaned over my legs with my elbows on my knees.
“Rocket…” he started.
I waved him off. “When I was a kid, I talked about this shit so much I should be used to it, but I’m not. It still turns my stomach and puts me back on the farm, half-frozen with more broken bones than not. I’m fucking lucky to be sitting here, honestly.”
Adam opened his mouth. I was sure he would ask a bunch of questions, but I cut him off and told him the whole sordid tale while I downed shot after shot of Irish whiskey. By the night’s end, I was so drunk I couldn’t remember my own name.
I remembered Adam’s, though, and I remembered how much he turned me on when I let my guard down. As I drank that night, I had no filter and divulged way more than I should. Way more than I ever intended, and not all of it with words coming out the piehole in my fucking face.
Adam helped me to bed, promising to stay with me. “I’ve got you, Rocket. Let’s get you to bed."
“Fuck, you’re gorgeous, Woody,” I said, cupping his cheek and pulling his lips to mine.
I took his mouth like I’d been dreaming of since we met all those years ago. Years of pent-up sexual frustration and fantasies all came out as I pulled him closer and closer, determined to enjoy every second of our first kiss without a girl sharing it with us. He wrenched his mouth from mine.
Adam’s eyes burned into mine as he licked his lips. “Okay, Rocket, it’s time for you to go to bed and for me to sack out on the couch.”
He pushed me back on the bed and pulled the blankets over me. As Adam turned to go back to the living room, I grabbed his hand, tugging it to get his attention.