7. Gabriel
GAbrIEL
I ran through the day twice. Cleaned my sidearm even though it didn’t need it.
Wrote tomorrow’s tasking in my head, drafted the follow-up report to command on the range card, listed every man’s ammunition count from memory.
All the tricks, but none of them work, because the second I stop giving my brain a mission, it goes back to a deadfall on the Velin approach and a specialist pressed shoulder to shoulder against me in the wet needles.
I could feel his body warmth. I could smell him.
I roll onto my side. The bunk creaks, the generator hums, and rain taps against the roof, and I am forty-five years old and hard as a rail spike over a twenty-three-year-old under my own command.
Three nights of this, three nights of pretending it’s insomnia, or the mission, or the coffee, and lying here rigid in every sense while a voice with a hook in it says yes, sir on a loop in my skull.
I press the heel of my hand against my cock through the blanket. It was meant to relieve the pressure, but instead, every nerve ending in my body lights up like a flare.
“Christ,” I breathe into the dark.
I have a rule. It’s the oldest rule I have, older than the Army, laid down somewhere in a boyhood I don’t examine, poured like a foundation.
Men don’t want this. Real men, soldiers, colonels, men who lead other men into gunfire and carry them out again—they do not lie in the dark thinking about a young man’s mouth.
Except I found cracks in that foundation years ago.
Twice, maybe three times in twenty years, alone in some hotel room between postings with a laptop and enough bourbon I could blame it on…
I looked. Men with men. I watched with my jaw locked and my pulse hammering, and afterward I sat in the shower until the water went cold and swore it off like a man swearing off a drug.
It never happened. It doesn’t count if it never happened. And, of course, I’d never do it again.
Reyes killed that in just three days.
My hand is already moving. My breathing goes deep, and I tell myself to stop, but my body won’t listen to the order.
Fine.
Fine. One tactical retreat. Burn the fuel out of the fire so I can function tomorrow. That’s all this is. Pressure management.
I shove the blanket down and take myself in hand, and the first full stroke punches the air out of my lungs. Skin on skin, too dry, too rough, and better than anything has felt in years, because the second my eyes close, he’s there.
Not at the ridge. Not at the range. In my office, in the ops hut, the map table between us, and Reyes standing in front of my desk with that slouch and that mouth already loaded.
You wanted a reaction, I tell him. How’s this one?
In the fantasy he doesn’t argue; he holds my eyes, chin level, pulse beating quick in his throat, and then he goes down.
Slow. Deliberate. Knees on the plywood floor of my office, looking up at me through that mess of brown hair, and even kneeling he makes it look like defiance, like he’s daring me to stop him.
My fist tightens. My hips come up off the bunk to meet my hand as I fuck it with rough strokes.
His mouth. God, his mouth, the full lower lip I have been not-looking-at since the briefing hut, wrapped around me, and in my head he’s not gentle about it and neither am I.
My hand is in his hair. His hands are braced on my thighs, gripping.
That smart, ruinous mouth is finally put to work with no room left in it for talking back.
Except he’d find room, wouldn’t he? Yeah, he would.
He’d pull off just long enough to say it, wrecked and hoarse, yes, sir, and go back down, and the sound I make into my own forearm at that thought isn’t one I’ve made in a decade.
I’m sweating. The rain drums harder and I stroke faster and the fantasy jumps ahead like a film with frames cut out.
I’m hauling him up off his knees, turning him, folding him down over my desk with the patrol orders scattering, one hand flat between his shoulder blades.
He’d push back against me. Of course he would.
He pushes against everything. And I’d hold him there, hold him still, make him wait for it the way he’s made me wait through three nights of this, and when I finally pushed into him he’d say my name instead of my rank and the foundations I poured would come down and I would not care.
Noah.
I’ve never let myself think it. His first name. It goes through me like a round.
“Fuck—”
I get my forearm across my mouth again just in time.
The groan comes up from somewhere below my ribs, muffled against my own skin, and I spill over my fist in pulses that make my vision white out.
That make everything white out—rank, rules, the war, all of it gone for four or five seconds of pure bliss.
Then the room comes back.
Generator. Rain. My own heartbeat, slamming. The mess cooling on my hand and stomach, undeniable as evidence.
I lie there and stare at the ceiling, waiting for the guilt to roll in like it did in those hotel rooms. The cold shower. The oath. The never-again.
It comes, but it’s… smaller than I remember. Or I’m bigger, or the want is, because underneath the shame there’s something worse, something like relief. Like I’ve been carrying a ruck for forty-five years and just now set it down for thirty seconds, and my shoulders remember the weight.
And fuck. The relief is more dangerous than what I just did.
I sit up, clean myself off with the shirt I’ll wash myself before laundry detail can see it, and put my feet on the cold plywood.
Nothing was solved tonight. The fuel didn’t burn off.
I lit it, and it liked the heat, and tomorrow at 0700 that boy will fall in for PT with his hair a mess and his collar crooked and say yes, sir with the hook in it, and I will have to stand there and count reps knowing exactly what his name sounds like in my head when I come.
He’s not dumb. He can read people, situations, I saw it happen with my own eyes. And I’m going to be standing just four feet away.
I scrub both hands down my face, stubble rasping, and the clock ticks over to 2341. A hundred meters across the mud, in a lousy bunk surrounded by his teammates, Specialist Noah Reyes is asleep and has no idea that in my head he just assumed a position no superior officer has ever put him in.
Or he isn’t asleep. Maybe he’s finding ways to relieve the pressure too.
Christ. That thought should not do what it does to me.
I lie back down, close my eyes, and start planning tomorrow’s random patrol window, because it’s the only ground I’ve got left that I still know how to hold.