Chapter 29 #2
“I… I’ve, uh, had time to think about things. And I’m kind of deciding that I didn’t treat you quite fairly,” he admitted.
“Understatement,” she chuffed.
“Yeah, well?” Trask prodded, not willing to let things go now that he’d opened up the line of conversation.
“Fine,” she relented. “I’ll tell you what kind of partner I’m looking for. If you’ll be honest and tell me why you’re so terrified of making a commitment,” she offered evenly.
She was right. He was. But did he dare reveal his reasons?
Shit. If he wanted something…more with Jett, he was going to have to suck it up and spill his guts.
The first thing he had to face, was that he’d missed her like crazy since she’d moved out.
“Before I get too far into the weeds, I just want to say that I made a mistake, not giving you…more of myself.” He drew in a slow breath. “I miss you, Jett. In retrospect, what we had together was just starting to feel…special.”
“You think?” she snorted, adjusting the altimeter slightly and checking her gauges. And why did it turn him on that she could have this conversation and operate an aircraft at the same time?
“I knew that, Trask, and I didn’t think I was making any secret of it.”
“Which threw me for a loop,” Trask confessed. “It all felt so…fast.”
“Maybe,” she acknowledged. “But when you know, you know. So, there’s that.”
Trask was almost afraid to ask.
“What did you know?”
“Uh, uh,” she responded with a huff. “First, you’re going to tell me why you’re running scared. Then, I’ll answer your question about what kind of partner I’m looking for. But unless I hear all the right words from you, I’m not going to tell you what I figured out.”
It was only fair. He’d been the one to blow everything to hell, and even though Jett had left him high and dry, so to speak, he had to give her props. She’d been nothing but cordial to him, ever since.
Trask coughed slightly and unburdened himself. “Here goes. But don’t say I didn’t warn you that I’m somewhat of a mess. I, um, had a…problem during my last few months of service, that kicked my ass,” he professed dourly.
“What kind of a problem?” Jett inquired with a tilt of her head. He could sense she was listening intently.
“A woman problem,” Trask revealed. “And it was messy.”
“Okay,” Jett responded evenly. “I kind of figured there was a bad breakup involved which is what defined your reticence with me.”
“It does. It did,” he concurred. “And it shouldn’t have. That wasn’t fair of me.”
Now that he’d started, he wanted to air it all.
“Audrey was a fellow officer, and we’d danced around our surface attraction to each other for a while.
I wasn’t exactly opposed to taking things further with her.
She was in a different chain of command and had her own regiment, so there’d be no regulations conflict.
My spidey-senses were telling me to take it slowly, but I ignored them. Which was a mistake.”
This was harder than Trask had thought, since he’d been so stupidly blind.
“She made a move after a debriefing one night, waylaying me in a dark hallway. Needless to say, it didn’t take much to rev me up, and we spent some…memorable time together before things morphed into a relationship that spanned the next few months.”
That had been his first mistake. Starting out with all the physical stuff that had him bypassing his brain, before digging a little deeper into Audrey’s psyche. Then he’d let her spin things from sex, into a full-time girlfriend/boyfriend thing.
Which was one of the reasons he’d been so spooked with Jett. Physical needs had once again taken over right away, and they’d basically fallen into bed without “dating” first.
But here he was again, comparing apples to oranges, and it wasn’t fair.
“Audrey was a willing participant with…everything we did in bed,” he managed to reveal without gagging. Because the thought that he’d done anything sexual with the duplicitous woman now made him sick to his stomach.
Jett didn’t hesitate to fill in what he’d neglected to say. “Meaning she liked your dominant tendencies.”
Trask coughed. “She did. But as things progressed, and she preened on my arm wherever we went, I found out we were incompatible in so many other ways.”
“Like what?” Jett asked.
“Like, she wasn’t a stickler for following rules, and I was.”
“Uh, you’re describing me, Trask.”
He immediately stepped up to defend Jett. “No. You’re nothing like her. She was…cruel in the way she bent regulations. She carried out unsanctioned training, and treated her troops like inferiors, which at the time I failed to see.”
She’d hidden those things from him successfully for a while, but her true colors had eventually bled through.
“When she tried to dictate how things were going to progress with us, far too rapidly for my liking, I started to balk, and began noticing that a lot of her traits weren’t nice at all.
I finally noticed that she could be downright evil when it came to punishing inferiors, or her enlistees for slight infractions.
I didn’t like what was coming to light, so I started to back off. ”
“Don’t tell me. She didn’t take that well.”
“Not in the least,” Trask stated. “When, after a particularly heated argument, I told her we were simply in different places in our lives, and that we should end our time together as friends, she became vindictive, deciding that I needed to be taught a lesson for defying her. She…”
Damn, this was painful. After a thirty-year career without so much as a blemish, Audrey had tried to smear his good name, and had almost succeeded.
Trask swallowed the lump that had risen in his throat. “She reported me to our superiors, saying that I…abused her.”
Jett groaned, and Trask felt that solidarity deep in his heart.
It was like Jett really saw who he was, and didn’t doubt for one second that he wouldn’t have done such a heinous thing.
He cleared his throat. “She’d taken pictures of her…skin after I’d—”
“Nope. You don’t have to go into detail here, Trask,” Jett assured him. “I get the picture. And I want to go bitch-slap that woman. She sounds like a fucking cunt.”
Whoa! Trask had never heard a word like that come out of Jett’s mouth before. His spitfire must be really pissed.
His spitfire? Where had that come from?
“How did you get out of it?” she asked, bringing him back into the conversation.
“Luckily,” he told her, “I had a good friend who was an acting attorney for the base where we lived, so I contacted him as soon as she filed charges. It was a good thing, too, because a lot of my superiors, hearing Audrey’s complaints, immediately thought the worst of me, and would have thrown me right under the bus to be prosecuted, or at the least would have gotten me court-martialed, if not for Kurt.
He spent hours poring through the many texts she’d sent me over the month we’d been together, and in the end, was gleeful.
Her language, her suggestions, her over-the-top demeanor; they all pointed to her not only being okay with a little…
rough play, but put her firmly in the driver seat where she’d suggested some outrageous scenarios for our meet-ups. ”
“So what happened?” Jett asked.
He could see she was practically holding her breath as she dropped altitude to closer peruse the landscape up ahead.
“Charges were quickly dropped. But at that point, I was disillusioned that so many people I thought would have my back, had instead been quick to judge me guilty. So I decided to cut my losses and leave the service.”
“Which burned your ass,” Jett responded wisely. “You were a career soldier, and had thought to retire with a few more stars and bars on your uniform, but the Marines let you down.”
She’d summed things up amazingly well in just one sentence as she continued.
“I feel for you, Trask. And I understand how, after going through all that, you had a hard time trusting my motives.”
Trask ran a hand over the back of his neck and sighed.
“Well, I don’t understand it. Because you’re nothing like her. So, if you will, can you explain it to me?”