Chapter Eleven Battle Scars
CHapter eleven
Battle Scars
Nathan buried his head in his hands, elbows braced on his knees and dragged his palms through his hair as if he could scrub the last ten minutes out of existence.
Fuck.
Fuck. Fuck.
He’d lost it.
Completely. Lost himself in a heartbeat.
Something he hadn’t done in years. Not properly. Not since the early deployments, when fists had flown too easily, and the anger had been a hair-trigger pull away from disaster. He’d trained that instinct out of himself. Had to. Had been proud of it, even.
Calm under pressure. Steady when it counted.
A soldier to be trusted when everything else went to hell.
Until today.
Until him .
Freddie.
Hardly a damsel in distress. Nor some civilian fleeing war and torture, begging for rescue. But Nathan, without thinking, had answered the call like a loaded weapon someone else had cocked and fired.
What the hell am I if I can’t hold it together anymore?
Not a soldier.
Not a father.
Maybe not even a man.
Another broken thing the army had spat out and left behind to rot.
The door to the changing hut creaked open, and Nathan jolted upright. His pulse kicked hard before his brain caught up. No desert. No sniper. No enemy here.
Just Worthbridge.
The stale, damp air of a Wednesday night changing room.
And Freddie Webb .
Far more dangerous than any bullet.
Nathan slumped back down as Freddie slipped inside, shutting the door.
“Hey.”
Nathan didn’t trust himself to reply. He nodded once.
A stiff jerk of his chin. And Freddie crossed the room in three easy strides to sink onto the bench beside him, close enough that their bare knees touched .
Nathan shifted, spreading his legs wider on instinct.
He needed the space. The steadiness. Needed—God, he needed contact.
It had been a long, brutal deployment. Lonelier than he liked to admit.
And right now, Freddie’s nearness was like a live current under his skin.
“You alright?” Freddie asked.
Nathan scrubbed both hands down his face until his skin stung. “Yeah,” he lied, then nodded to the door, the screech of a whistle and thuds of a ball filtering through the thin walls. “Sorry if I got the match abandoned.”
Freddie huffed a laugh, almost fond. “You didn’t. Reece roped some RNLI bloke in to fill the spot, after being fixed up by Trent, the paramedic he’s been pining over, so he’s quite happy about that, and I swapped out with our rookie. Kid’s been itching to get a game for weeks.”
Nathan nodded again, but it felt hollow. Everything inside him was rattling around loose, ready to crack if he so much as breathed wrong. Then reality caught up with him.
What he’d done.
Who he’d done it in front of.
“You here to arrest me?”
Freddie snorted. “Nah. Off duty. No cuffs.” He scraped his trainers over the scuffed linoleum floor. “Besides, can’t exactly nick a bloke for defending my honour, can I?”
He said it lightly, but Nathan caught the tightness around his mouth, the way Freddie flexed his jaw as if he wasn’t sure whether to grin or grit his teeth.
“Not that I needed it.” Freddie bumped his shoulder to Nathan’s.
“I don’t just arrest gobby teenagers. Took down a pissed-up rugby player last month outside The Jolly Sailor.
Bloke chucked a pint glass at my head, then tried to snap my arm.
Didn’t end well for him.” He lifted the back of his hand, where a faint scar arced across his knuckles. “Got a souvenir for it, though.”
“Should’ve dropped him at the shoulder,” Nathan said quietly. “Drive the pivot, use the collarbone. His weight goes forward, he’s yours before he gets anywhere near teeth.”
Freddie arched a brow. “Christ. Remind me never to try biting you.”
Nathan almost smiled. Almost .
Instead, he looked down at his hands. Still streaked with grease and dried blood, the knuckles torn raw. He flexed his fingers.
“Wouldn’t get the chance.”
The words hung there, rough-edged, unfinished.
Freddie shifted beside him, his thigh brushing Nathan’s.
Whether it was nerves or something hungrier Nathan didn’t know.
Couldn’t know. Not anymore. He’d already made a spectacular twat of himself out there on the pitch.
Whatever fragile thing had once been between them was now lost to time and distance, watered down with different lives, different choices.
It didn’t stop it from aching like a bastard, though.
“You…” Freddie hesitated, then forced it out. “Alright?”
Nathan exhaled a humourless laugh, dragging his palm down his face. “Cliché, right? Soldier comes home, fucked in the head.”
“It’s cliché, because it happens.”
Nathan let that settle. Scratched through the fuzz of his buzz cut until his scalp stung. “Yeah. Maybe.”
“Although…you did always go a bit Vinnie Jones on the pitch. Took the game a bit too seriously, I recall.”
Nathan inhaled. “Wasn’t the game.”
“No?”
“No.”
Nathan leant his head back, eyelids heavy and tired and helpless against the pull. But he could still see Freddie and Christ , he was still the most beautiful thing Nathan had ever laid eyes on. And right now, the heat was unbearable.
It would be so easy.
To kiss him until neither of them could breathe.
But Freddie reached out, stopping Nathan’s thoughts and swept a light, almost trembling thumb across the scar carved into Nathan’s right eyebrow.
The one that had never fully healed, leaving a permanent gap in the hairline, a faint, jagged reminder of everything he hadn’t been fast enough to escape.
It made him look like some washed-out nineties rapper, Nathan had joked once.
But under Freddie’s touch, it didn’t feel like a joke anymore.
It was a mark. A reminder. A place Freddie recognised without needing to ask.
But ask he did.
“How’d you get this?”
Freddie’s touch was so light it sent a shiver through Nathan and when their eyes met, it was a quiet, devastating collision.
Nathan’s chest rose and fell in shallow, broken breaths, the world narrowing to the warmth of Freddie’s touch.
Fifteen years of silence and pretending it didn’t matter, undone in an instant.
And now, it hit him. How much he’d missed this. Missed him . The easy, impossible closeness. The friendship threaded through every glance. The softness hidden under all that steel. The love. Steady, stubborn, unshakable . And how it had never truly gone away.
So he told the truth. “Got that before I learned how to hide it.”
Freddie’s throat worked on a swallow. Lips parting. Breath ghosting out. And his hand trembled where it touched Nathan’s face. And there was a beat. A heartbeat. Maybe two. Where everything hung on the edge, and the tip of Nathan’s tongue.
But the door creaked open.
Freddie jerked his hand away. Cleared his throat as the other lads all burst in. Nathan clenched his fists in his lap and didn’t move, didn’t speak, dropping his head back against the wall to let the moment bleed out between them .
To say it was awkward as the lads piled in, stripping, towel-whipping each other, crashing into the shower cubicles, was the understatement of the fucking century. Nathan kept his head down. No banter for him. No claps on the back. He wasn’t part of this brotherhood. Not after tonight.
He’d fucked up.
And he knew exactly how soldiers who went rogue got treated.
The showers hissed and thudded on, and when Reece finally emerged, towel slung low on his hips, dragging a hand through his wet hair, Nathan got it. How Freddie got pulled into his orbit. Tall. Broad. Muscles carved from granite. A man people trusted to save them. A fucking hero .
Not a soldier. The ghost-maker.
And that stung harder than any punch Reece could’ve thrown.
But what made it worse?
Reece crossed the room. One big hand clutching his towel, casting a heavy shadow over Nathan as he stopped in front of him.
“No hard feelings, mate.” He held out a hand. “Got a mate back from Kabul. Still flinches every time a car backfires. I get it.”
Nathan stared at the offered hand for a beat too long. His gut twisted. Fists itched. But he reached out anyway, gripping Reece’s hand with enough pressure to say he was still standing.
Still trying.
“Right. Yeah. Sorry.” His voice cracked like a dried-up riverbed.
Reece gave him a nod, as if he saw too much, and said nothing. And that was worse than if he’d swung back .
Freddie slipped off to the shower, and Nathan couldn’t follow him. So he dressed. And the lads filed out one by one, shouting and laughing like the punch had never happened, leaving Nathan alone in the changing room. He should leave too. Should be halfway to his car by now.
But Freddie stepped out of the showers, steam clinging to his flushed skin, and Nathan couldn’t help but fucking stare at him.
Towelling off, raking fingers through his damp hair, body dripping, lean muscle carved sharp, every inch of Freddie was a revelation and Nathan ached with the memories of how that body had once felt pressed up against his own.
God, he was fit.
Far better than Nathan remembered.
Better because Freddie wasn’t some seventeen-year-old kid anymore. He was a man now. Sure, steady, still devastatingly beautiful without even trying. And it was that version of him, real, solid, and still achingly familiar, making Nathan’s gut twist into painful knots.
“There’s still something here, isn’t there?” Freddie whispered.
Nathan’s head snapped up, but too late. His eyes had already betrayed him.
Heat burned across his face, and he hated how naked he must’ve looked under Freddie’s stare.
But before he could pull together a single coherent thought, the door slammed open and Alfie barrelled in, hoodie half-zipped, cheeks red from the cold.
“Oi, Dad! We goin’ or what? I’m bloody starvin’.”
Freddie turned back to his bag, towel hitched precariously around his waist, pretending to dig for his clothes. Nathan swallowed hard, shoving down everything clawing its way to the surface .