8. Noah
NOAH
Wolfe stands at the center of the gravel pad in a gray shirt and black shorts while the six of us spread out into a loose circle around him, and I make the executive decision not to look directly at him.
Yesterday I got two seconds of eye contact in the ops hut and rode the high for six hours. I have to ration this stuff.
“Warm-up,” he says. “Then calisthenics. Then we run the wire.”
Hayes groans quietly. “The whole wire?”
“The whole wire, Corporal,” Wolfe confirms.
“Outstanding,” Hayes mutters. “Love the wire. Married to the wire.”
We start with jumping jacks and arm circles, and Wolfe walks the circle like an inspector at a factory, quiet, hands loose at his sides. He stops behind Petrillo during push-ups.
“Hips are sagging. You’re doing half the work and getting all the back pain.”
Petrillo fixes it. Wolfe moves on. He plants a boot next to Spencer’s hand during mountain climbers.
“Hands under your shoulders, not out front.”
Spencer adjusts with a grunt.
Delgado gets his flutter kicks corrected with one word: “Lower.”
And Hayes gets a full ten seconds of silent observation during his burpees, which is somehow worse than any correction, because Hayes starts burpeeing like his mother’s honor depends on it.
Then squats. Bodyweight, slow count, and I know my form is good. My form is good. I’ve been squatting since basic and nobody has ever—
“Reyes.”
He’s behind me. When did he get behind me?
“Weight’s in your toes. You’ll blow a knee on a ruck march like that.”
“Sir, my weight is—”
He doesn’t let me finish my objection.
“Down. Hold it there.”
I sink to the bottom of the squat and hold, my thighs already burning, and then hands close over my hips.
Every thought I have ever had leaves my skull at once.
“Back,” he says, his voice low, and pulls.
I shift my hips backward, putting my weight in my heels, and my ass bumps flush against his front.
We both go absolutely still.
One second. Maybe a second and a half. His hands are still on my hips, big and warm through damp fabric, and I’m pressed against him at the bottom of a squat with my pulse going off like war drums. The fog is thick, and everyone else is huffing through their own reps with their eyes on the gravel, and nobody sees it.
Nobody sees his fingers tighten—just once, just a fraction—before they let go.
“Heels,” he says, and his voice comes out lower than the correction requires. “Like that.”
He steps back. I stand up out of the squat and risk one glance over my shoulder. Wolfe’s gray eyes, darker than the cloudy sky, lock on me for one long beat before he turns and walks the circle again, another routine inspection.
I do the rest of my squats staring at a supply pallet like it owes me money. My heels are perfect. My heart rate is a war crime.
“Wire run,” Wolfe calls. “Single file until the gate road, then open it up. Go.”
The perimeter loop is four kilometers of mud, gravel, and misery, and I spend the first two of them running directly behind the worst decision of my life.
He runs at the front, of course. Machine stride, shoulders rolling, the gray shirt going dark down his spine, and those black shorts doing things that should require a security clearance.
I try looking at the mountains. The mountains are fine.
I try looking at the wire. The wire is wire.
I try looking at Hayes, who is making a sound like a leaking air mattress, and that works for about forty meters before my eyes drift forward again like a compass needle finding north.
He has a body built for the war. With every stride, the muscle in the back of his thighs bunches and releases, and I can still feel his hands printed on my hips, and I’m running four klicks in wet fog getting progressively harder, which is a tactical situation with no good outcomes.
“You okay?” Delgado pulls level with me. “You’re breathing weird.”
“Pace is weird.”
His eyebrows come up. “Pace is the same pace as always.”
“Then I’m weird,” I say, and he grunts like that settles it.
Third kilometer. Wolfe drops back along the file, checking each man, and when he passes me, our eyes catch for half a stride, and his jaw is set like concrete, and he says nothing.
He hasn’t said a word to me since like that.
He surges back to the front, and I watch him go, and that’s it. That’s the whole ballgame.
I cannot run another kilometer like this.
“Lace,” I call out, dropping to the side of the track and going down on one knee. “Catch up.”
Hayes waves without turning around. The file pounds past, boots and breath, and gets swallowed up by the fog, and I count to five with my fingers on a lace that was tied fine.
Then I’m up and moving, cutting off the track between the supply hut and the generator shed, into the gap where corrugated walls block the sightlines from everywhere that matters.
I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t. There are eight hundred reasons I shouldn’t, and I stop counting them the second my back hits the metal and my hand is inside my shorts.
I’m already so hard it hurts.
Forehead against the cold wall. Quick, rough strokes, no finesse, no patience, because the file will lap the wire in twelve minutes and because I don’t want finesse.
I want the thing I can’t have. I want two hands closing over my hips at the bottom of a squat, and this time nobody’s watching, and this time he doesn’t let go.
I let myself have it. The fantasy. Wolfe stepping into the gap behind me, silent as always, one hand flattening between my shoulder blades and pinning me to the shed.
That low voice at my ear saying down and hold it there and not talking about a squat at all.
His boot knocking my feet wider. His hands dragging my shorts down and spreading me and taking me right here against the metal, hard, rough, both of us still sweating from the run, and I’d have to bite my own forearm to keep quiet while a colonel with storm-cloud eyes fucked the smart mouth right out of me.
My strokes get faster. The metal wall creaks under my forehead.
It’s been over a year. Longer than that since there was anyone good. Some sergeant in a bar three towns from my last posting, careful hands, forgettable face, and none of them—not one of them in my whole stupid life—has done to me what this man does by correcting my squat form.
Like that.
The voice does it. I come with a groan I strangle down into a whimper, hips jerking, painting the corrugated wall in stripes while my knees threaten to file for separation. I stand there shaking, breath fogging against the metal, heart slamming like there’s an incoming RPG.
Okay.
Okay.
I shake off the last of my cum, tuck myself in, straighten my shorts, wipe my hand on the inside hem of my shirt where it won’t show. Deep breath. Normal face. Normal soldier face. I jog out of the gap between the buildings at an easy recovery pace, rounding the corner of the supply hut—
—directly into Colonel Gabriel Wolfe.
He’s stopped on the track, alone, chest still working from the run. He must have dropped off the file to sweep for me. Because I fell out. Because he counts his people, always, and one of his people disappeared off a perimeter run in the fog.
I look up at his face. His eyes are already moving—me, the gap between the buildings, back to me—and I feel the heat spreading up my neck and across my cheeks, and there is no way that my face isn’t a signed confession right now.
“Sorry, sir.” It comes out breathless. “Needed a constitutional.”
A beat. His jaw flexes. His nostrils flare, just once.
“Rejoin the file, Specialist,” he finally says.
“Yes, sir.”
I jog. I do not run. Running would look like fleeing, and I am absolutely fleeing, but I’m doing it at a dignified nine-minute pace. I make it thirty meters before the itch between my shoulder blades wins and I glance back.
Wolfe hasn’t moved.
He’s standing on the track in the fog, staring at the gap between the supply hut and the generator shed. At the exact spot I just painted with my cum.
And his shorts are tented.
Not a little. Not something you could argue about. He’s hard enough that his black PT shorts have no chance of hiding it, and he’s just standing there, looking at the place where I—
He turns his head and catches me looking.
I face front and run.
No more nine-minute pace for me. I fly up the track after the file with my blood roaring in my ears and a grin wide enough to hurt on my face, because I wasn’t imagining it. I was never imagining any of it.
Colonel of the Mountain, sir.
I’ve got your number now.