Ten #2
“You push, all the time. You push me. You push Niko. You push the command. And somehow, it works. You never get punished or shut down. Men like me are told to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. But you get to cause chaos and call it a fucking personality.” The words come out like gunfire.
It sounds like he’s been holding that in for a while.
“There’s the real Caiden. Touchy, touchy,” I murmur. “Who knew you were so obsessed with me?”
“I’m not—”
“Yes, you are. You think about me in your bunk at night. You count all the ways you hate me, and you don’t dare admit that you only hate me because you want me.”
“You’re unbelievable,” he hisses.
“So I’ve been told,” I say.
He jerks his vest out of my grip, and for a second, I think he’s about to step back. He snaps instead, shoving at my shoulder, hard. I fall back a step, then catch myself and laugh.
“There we are,” I say softly. “Good boy.”
“Don’t call me that,” he says, moving forward and crowding me. “Don’t fucking—”
“Why?” I ask. “Because it makes you think about getting on your knees?”
His nostrils flare, and his hands ball into fists at his sides. “You think you’ve got me figured out,” he grinds out. “You don’t know shit.”
I take another step back, deliberately giving him room, testing if he follows.
He does, so I press into him, getting right in his face.
“You’re right,” I say softly. “I don’t know everything.
I don’t know, for instance, what kind of noises you make when someone puts their hand on your throat and squeezes just enough to remind you that you’re alive.
” His breathing picks up as I lean in as close as I can, my lips hovering over his.
“I don’t know whether you like people telling you what a good job you’re doing when you’re trying to hold it together,” I murmur.
“Whether anyone’s ever looked at you and said, ‘such a good boy, Caiden,’ following every rule while you’re secretly dying to break all of them.
” He swallows. Hard. “And I don’t know,” I finish, my voice barely above a whisper, “how long you’re going to keep pretending you want me to shut up, when every word I say makes you breathe harder. ”
There’s silence for a few seconds, then his fists grab the front of my vest, shoving me backwards, then slamming me into the nearest tree. The bark digs into my shoulders, and my rifle bangs against the trunk with a dull thunk.
I’m delighted, and my laugh bursts out of me. “Finally,” I say, grinning in his face.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” he snarls in my face. “You know that, right? One day you’ll say something like that to the wrong man and he’ll—”
“What?” I cut in, my eyes on his. “Break my nose? Put me on my back? Choke me until I stop talking?”
He bares his teeth. “You think this is funny?”
“I think this is foreplay,” I say calmly.
“The funny part comes later.” His grip tightens so sharply that the webbing of my vest bites my skin.
For a second, I think he’s going to slam me harder or maybe hit me.
But his eyes drop to my mouth, again, and I soften my voice on purpose. “You’re looking again.”
He rips his gaze back up. “You’re disgusting.”
“Probably,” I agree. “But you’re the one pinning me to a tree, detka.”
His breath stutters. “What does that word mean?” he asks.
“Nothing you didn’t like.”
“I didn’t—”
“You didn’t stop me,” I point out. “You never do; that’s the thing. You always come closer and push back.” I roll my shoulders against the bark lazily, his hands flex with the movement. “For someone who claims to dislike me so much, you seem to spend a lot of time touching me.”
His fingers loosen when he realises what he’s doing. He realises what it looks like, and drops his hands as if he’s been burned. “I’m going back to the group,” he says, his voice flat. “Before I do something I actually regret.”
“You’ll regret not doing it more,” I say, tilting my head.
He glares at me, taking a few steps back. “You’re not worth losing my career over.”
“You’re right,” I say. “You’d be more useful if you kept it.
I don’t want you to fail. Where would the fun be in that?
I want you standing. Wearing that pretty uniform.
Following all your little rules.” I push off the tree and step into his space again.
“It’s so much more entertaining watching you break them one at a time.
” I brush past him with a deliberate little graze of hip and elbow.
“Come on, Lance Corporal,” I toss over my shoulder.
“Your CO will cry if I keep you too long.”
We emerge back onto the faint path like nothing has happened. The men are arguing cheerfully about who shot whom, and Niko catches my eye and frowns, instantly reading the shift in the air around me. “What did you do?” he asks.
“Nothing at all,” I say, entirely truthfully. Because technically, I haven’t done anything. Yet.
We walk back toward the base, and I fall in step a little behind Caiden, watching the way his jaw grinds. I smile to myself because he thinks this was the dangerous part.
The dangerous part will come later, when he’s alone in his bunk, wondering what would’ve happened if he had let go.
That’s the thing about men like Caiden Varrik.
They can survive bullets, explosions, orders, and war.
It’s the thoughts they can’t outrun, and I’ve just given him a whole new arsenal of those.
And we’re only getting started.