Chapter Nineteen #2
“Neesa really liked that because it said that, sight-unseen, you needed to trust the agreements made in a relationship. For her, that’s not always been the case.
She’s had some philanderers who have made her distrustful.
” Yes, Rylee told Dakota that on purpose because if Jasper was a shithead, Dakota probably knew and should tell Rylee about it or risk messing up her trust in him.
Manipulative? Sure. But it was in the service of a friend.
“Principled Reciprocity was the game I thought applied best to my experiences,” Rylee said.
“Oh, we are getting deep.”
“I saw the philosophy books on your shelf,” Rylee countered. “So they were either there to impress, or you’re up to this conversation.”
Dakota chuckled and took another bite.
“To make sure we have the same working definition in Principled Reciprocity, if you do a favor for me, I do a favor for you. Your kindness is returned by my kindness.”
“I feed you scampi, you feed me pizza,” Dakota said.
“No, you fed me scampi, and then you fed me pizza. The only tit for tat is spending an evening in your house, then one in mine.”
“Fair point. But with the good stuff in Principled Reciprocity, there is also a penalty. If you do something bad to me,” Dakota said, “expect the same from me. And here I can see how you and Neesa intertwined the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
If both do an act of kindness, both win.
If someone does an act of kindness and it’s met with a negative, the relationship loses. ”
“And it’s doomed when both prisoners decide to be rats,” Rylee said. “In the game of Principled Reciprocity, it’s rarely an even back and forth. Sometimes you do two or three nice things in a row. Scampi and pizza.”
“Keep going.”
“I think that we have days of strength and days of weakness. Months of health and vigor and weeks of ill health when we need to lean more heavily.”
“You can’t show up with the same level of energy all the time,” Dakota agreed. “It would be good if I don’t feel like cooking, the other person takes on that task. When someone doesn’t feel like changing the oil, I don’t mind.”
“When we’re both just whipped and sad because of the things we’ve dealt with that day, we order takeout and collapse on the sofa in each other’s arms. But those are followed by days of adventure and boisterous laughter.
Races to the tops of the mountains, and awe while standing in front of a painting that says everything that I could never put into words.
” Rylee took a bite from her pizza, then covered her mouth with her hand to add. “It’s the dream.”
“I don’t think it’s a fantasy. Although it’s aspirational, sure. And communication is key.”
“And kindness,” Rylee added.
“Always.”
“Not always. I’m divorced, so I can promise you, it’s definitely not ‘always.’”
“How long ago?”
“Seven? No, eight, almost nine years ago. The end came from a revelation that began when I was deployed to Cameroon to help with a natural disaster. I speak French, but I practiced with native French speakers from France. Could I converse in Cameroon? Yes, but it was a strain and exhausting. When I found an English speaker, even one with a heavy accent, it was a relief. This was when people started talking about different love languages back in the States. I wondered if my then-husband had tried so hard to communicate in my love language that he was simply tired, like I was when I tried to speak in Cameroon. Maybe what needed to happen was that I focus on the way he expressed devotion, not how I received it.”
“Interesting,” Dakota said.
“Your love language is acts of service, I’m right, aren’t I?” Rylee asked.
“That,” Dakota said. “And quality time. Yours is service, too, or you wouldn’t have your job.”
Physical touch is up on that list, Rylee thought, but simply said. “Mine are the same as yours.”
“Your ex?” Dakota asked.
“Yeah, I thought in our relationship, maybe I was seeing things in a monolithic way. I didn’t want to say I knew the only way to love and perhaps we had incompatible love languages and that lack of communication was affecting us—me, he seemed fine—over time.”
“Listening.”
“So I’m going to call my efforts to engage with him a bid for attention. Like I’ve seen Tank communicate with you. Tank looks to you, you look back. He walks under your hand, and you give him a couple of scritches. He puts his paw on your foot. That kind of thing.”
“We’re communicating our affection or information,” Dakota said, turning to Tank.
Tank lifted his head to check in and, seeing the calm room and no signal, he lay back down.
“Imagine what would happen if Tank didn’t get those returned gestures from you?”
“He’d increase his attention seeking, and then it would fall off. Eventually, he’d stop trying and just go off to do his own thing.”
“Right, so after I got married, that’s what happened,” Rylee said. “It was almost as if my ex thought, ‘caught me a fish. It’s flopping in my boat, that’s all that’s necessary.”
Dakota’s face clouded.
“So after Cameroon, I realized my ex had a love language that he used with his friends, and that his interactions with me were more transactional conversations about running the house and finances. My bids for attention went unnoticed, and eventually, I didn’t care anymore. So I left.”
Dakota slowly shook his head as a frown tugged at his lips.
For some reason, Rylee felt the need to apologize to the man.
Too much, too soon. Too open.
And yet, she didn’t want to play games with Dakota.
Didn’t want to waste precious time.
Didn’t want to pretend not to think difficult thoughts or that she only wanted fluffy conversations. She and her friends had these kinds of talks, but most of the men she dated weren’t up to the rigor.
As she and Neesa agreed on their way to Macadoo’s, brainiacs were sexy as hell.
And the sight of the books in Dakota’s house was a definite aphrodisiac.
“Forgive me,” Dakota rubbed his hands over his face. “I left the conversation for a second as I was using that lens to look back at my own experiences. There’s a lot to unpack with what you said.”
Rylee sat quietly to invite more.
“My life experiences … Sex,” he paused. “Can we talk about sex for a moment?”
Rylee’s body reacted with enthusiastic waves of horny.
“Let me narrow that topic because that’s too broad, and I’m not throwing you into the sea without a life jacket. Sex as it applies to intimacy.” His face flamed red with his hair-trigger blushing mechanism.
Rylee laughed. “Go ahead.”
“Thank you. So I had a lot of time to think about a lot of things while deployed to Afghanistan.”
She nodded. “Vast vistas of nothing lead to belly-button-lint thinking.”
He chuckled. “For the most part, yeah. It was boring with spikes of adrenaline. With my fellow crewmen, I was in a brotherhood. We put our lives on the line for each other. We talked through everything. We laughed. We drank way too much. We roughhoused. We were obnoxious as hell. But the one thing I can say is that there was a deep intimacy that I had—obviously, outside of sex—with my team. And up until that time, all through school—”
“High school or college?” Rylee asked.
“High school for sure, where I was an athlete and got the perks that can seem like a movie trope. But also during my time at the Naval Academy.”
“I interrupted you to get a timeline in my head. So I imagine you finished USNA and then qualified as a crewman. We’re talking about your early twenties here.”
“Exactly. Before I was removed from a society where I had access to relationships with women, I spent little time considering intimacy. And I got my intimacy needs met through sex.”
“But that changed?”
A slow smile spread across his face. “I like sex. And I really like the closeness and intimacy I get from being with someone physically. But now I understand that sex is only one way to get my intimacy needs met.”
“I like this,” she said. “Keep going.”
“So intimacy with my brothers came from deep sharing and commitment to everyone’s well-being.
If something hit my brother’s leg, it impacted everyone's capacity to fight. I needed to protect my legs and not become a burden to the team because my injury could make or break a mission and could be the difference between life and death. His leg was the same as my leg. All legs needed to be functioning.”
“Why did you leave the Navy?” Rylee asked.
“This AWG gal I knew was involved in figuring out how best to train and configure the special forces for future realities.”
“What did she come up with?”
“That everything we know about fighting was about to come to an end,” Dakota said.
“On the ground, we were about to have drone warfare. In the sky? Potential space warfare where satellites had the capacity to take out other satellites, which could shut down communications and GPS coordinates at strategically delicate times.”
“When did she come up with all this?” Rylee extended her hand. “Sorry to be bouncing around like this. It’s that I want all the answers at once.” She laughed.
“Drone warfare, especially using night vision to look for soldiers? Ten years ago. DARPA started working on uniforms that would thwart the drones from hunting our soldiers.”
“That’s not new, right? Those have been part of the uniforms for what, forty years or so?”
“You’re thinking about the patterns on uniforms, so if someone is using near infrared.
Yes, that’s been around for a very long time.
I’m talking about heat-sensing night vision, and the only way to do that is to use a thermal shield that encapsulates a person’s body heat.
They did come up with prototypes of ponchos.
In the last five years, they’ve started using them in the field, mostly in Ukraine.
Right now, Ukraine is setting a new bar for warfare.
We’ll never go back to the tactics used in the Gulf wars. ”
“By using drones, which was part of AWG’s predictions,” Rylee said.