Chapter 12
RAIN LOCKER
Gabriel waved off Phin’s offer of a granola bar and scratched at the rough beard on his chin.
Even as a special forces soldier where beards were encouraged, he never got used to the hair on his face.
It always felt dirty. He blamed his father for insisting on strict hygiene practices.
But it stuck, and now he found himself scraping his nails through the sweaty oils caught in the short, dark bristles and hating it.
They had no water or electricity. A shower would be out of the question, as would clean clothes. But he decided on a quick wet wipe bath. It was far from satisfying, but it would quell the urge to claw his own skin off. At least for a little while.
If sponge baths were a last resort, he wasn’t sure what a wet wipe bath was.
But he’d used them often, hunkered down in some sandy hole in the middle of a country he couldn’t pronounce.
The kind of place where time was etched in the moments between magazine changes and ticked off by the brass around your feet.
It was easy to forget you were human. Easy to slip into the mindset of a cog in a machine.
That’s where the little things, the moments of hygiene that barely cut through the top layer of grime, reminded him of who he was.
With one hand on the wood paneling, he walked towards the small bathroom.
They had showers in the station for the firefighters on twenty-four-hour shifts, but now they just taunted them.
Blake mentioned that he thought the station should have a generator, but it wasn’t working.
And it was probably better that it didn’t.
Tactically speaking, they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves.
The telegraph was working. Last he checked, Judd was sitting hunched over a cardboard box tapping away. He wasn’t sure what surprised him more—that Judd not only had the patience to meticulously help assemble a telegraph, but also knew Morse, or that aliens had invaded Earth.
Come to think of it, he didn’t think anything could surprise him ever again. Including himself.
Not after what he’d said to Blake. Things he had never told a therapist, never told his family, had come out as easy as pie. And he couldn’t explain it. Not then, and not now. Blake had asked him why he told him, and the answer he gave him was the only one he could give himself.
I wanted to.
The feelings he had kept so close to his chest had almost destroyed him; his addiction still made him burn with shame.
All of it. He presented it to Blake, and he found acceptance.
Blake had accepted his truth. Took it for what it was and held it close, gentle but without reservations.
He could have taken it like a hit, but instead, he took it like a gift.
Not for the first time, Gabriel didn’t know what to do with that. With Blake.
Forgiveness isn’t something Gabriel expected.
Hell, he wasn’t even asking himself for it.
He knew he was supposed to. But he didn’t treat his addiction the way he should.
There probably should have been some kind of therapy, not just Phin kicking in his door and locking him in the bathroom until he stopped begging to be let out.
The only twelve-step program Gabriel had ever done was the twelve steps Phin took to the bathroom to lock him in.
There were times in that tiny bathroom where he wanted to die.
Not because of the pain and sickness, those were tough, but that was nothing compared to his seething guilt.
A living thing that shifted in his grasp.
Every time he thought he had reconciled it, it evolved into something else.
Something more sinister. He stared at his reflection until it wasn’t his anymore.
It was the whiskey-soaked facsimile of who he was.
Because he wasn’t just withdrawing from alcohol. Gabriel was experiencing all the things the alcohol had dulled. The hate. The pain. The anger. The blood. The feel of a bullet leaving his barrel to end the life of a person he would never know.
And for what?
The country he left was the same as the one he touched down on.
People were still oppressed. Extremists still hated those they didn’t understand.
And innocents were caught in the middle, profiled for the color of their skin or the God they served.
Every day, more people he couldn’t save.
Just like those dead in the streets here.
Wars waged. People hated. Guns were fired. And none of it made a difference.
That soldier was someone he could have saved.
He could have seen the hollow look in her eyes.
After all, he was familiar enough with it, wasn’t he?
The same look he had seen reflected back at him for years.
The dead-eyed stare of a mind too young to process what she’d seen.
It was an innocuous visit—she didn’t need to see him for it.
He’d waved her off without reading between the lines.
Without understanding the way her hand lingered on the doorknob, or how her lower lip wobbled.
She came looking for help, and he had grown so jaded that he forgot the reason he wanted to serve in the first place. The one time he could help, and he failed.
If Phin hadn’t seen between his own lines, read the flickers in his eyes, he wouldn’t be here either.
He still wasn’t sure if he deserved to be.
Six years. It had been six years since he had been locked in that bathroom.
Six years of sobriety, and he still felt the desire.
The burn that would silence it all. Drinking was so much easier than sobriety.
Sometimes he wondered if he’d left that bathroom at all.
Still curled around his toilet in a heap of self-pity punctuated with moments of heavy loathing and anger.
The irony of his coming out of the closet only to be locked in a bathroom wasn’t lost on him. He just wished he found it funny.
Blake would find it funny. He would take it for what it was—truth. Life was ugly and cruel, shades of gray that were sometimes hard to distinguish from one another. But truth was truth, and there was comfort in that.
Gabriel pinched his nose. He needed to get a hold of himself.
To focus. His past didn’t matter here. Neither did his confusing feelings for the paramedic.
Blake was a civilian. He was only part of the mission in so much as he needed to be evacuated.
To be set down somewhere safe so Gabriel could continue on.
So he could seek the forgiveness he didn’t deserve with the barrel of a gun.
Withdrawing the wet wipes from his pocket, he opened the door to the bathroom only to hear a gentle splashing.
“Oh, sorry,” he said as his eyes adjusted to the almost dark of the room.
A bundle of birthday candles stuck with melted wax bases to the sink provided the only light. They flickered in the stagnant air, casting shadows across the shower in the corner and the toilet opposite it. The single cloudy window set high in the ceiling was covered with a taped-up garbage bag.
Blake was hovering beside the toilet, one arm raised and the other pressing a wet rag to his chest. His hair was slicked back from his face.
Fingers clenching around a soaked rag, water sluicing down his chest to drip past his belly button.
It pooled in the low-slung tactical pants, soaking through the canvas belt that held the large pants on narrow hips.
Gabriel’s eyes dropped to that waist. God, it was so narrow. He bet his hands could wrap around it, fingers touching as he—
Dragging his eyes up like he’d been slapped, he tried not to focus on the way the heated light dragged shadows across the toned planes of Blake’s abdomen.
Not ripped, but there was definition in his torso.
The faintest of V’s leading down to those sinfully low-slung pants and delicate hairs only visible in the cast light.
Studying his face was almost as distracting. His face was hard and soft; his lips pillowy and expressive, jaw defined and sharp. In the dim light, he could see twin spots of pink across Blake’s cheeks.
“Kinda gross, I know.” He jerked his head to the back of the toilet. He’d taken the top of the porcelain upper deck off and was using the clean water there to give himself a sponge bath.
Gabriel’s dick wanted to take this moment to remind him that he was, in fact, so so gay.
He twisted, trying to cover his hardening dick.
Blake swiped the rag across the back of his neck, and Gabriel had to look at his feet to stop from watching the water sliding down his back.
He took to reciting his serial number, over and over in his mind until his upstairs brain regained some semblance of control.
Because if he let his dick take over, it would go along the lines of acting like some kind of horny caveman.
If he was going to be honest, his dick was making a very persuasive argument for it.
“Here.” Blake tossed him a dry cloth. “There’s enough water left if you want to. I know it’s not exactly pleasant, but at least you won’t smell like Phin.”
Gabriel laughed. “I think that ship has sailed. I’m starting to grow my own fungus.”
Blake wrinkled his nose. Gabriel nearly audibly groaned—it was so cute it should be illegal.
“Um,” Gabriel took a deep breath and fingered the hem of his shirt.
Just like back in high school when he was changing in a locker room with a bunch of other guys, he didn’t know how to act.
Normally, he would just plow ahead. He wasn’t some kind of horny asshole (despite what his dick claimed) and was perfectly capable of being in the same space as naked men.
But it always felt like he needed their consent or something.
And with Blake? It was doubly complicated.
“Water’s clean,” Blake assured him, taking his silence for disgust.
“I’ve bathed in worse; I’m not worried about it. It’s just…you don’t mind? Being shirtless and bathing with me?”