GABRIEL
It’s raining again, and the whole base smells like wet canvas and the popcorn Delgado apparently smuggled in. The mess hut doubles as our theater. Hayes rigged a projector against the far wall, and a sheet that used to be a cot liner serves as the screen.
Kestrel doesn’t get many luxuries, but command approved a hard drive of movies for morale, and morale, as it turns out, means twenty-some soldiers packed onto benches watching a British man in a suit explain time travel to another British man in a suit.
I don’t sit, standing instead in the back where the light doesn’t reach, arms crossed, and tell myself I’m here to observe unit cohesion. That’s the phrase I’d use in a report. Unit cohesion.
Reyes sits three rows up between Hayes and Delgado, and Walker’s wedged in beside them like he’s been a part of this unit for months, not days.
I’ve watched that happen over the last two weeks like an inevitable crash—Walker cracks a joke, Hayes cracks one back harder, and now they finish each other’s sentences like they were separated at birth.
I called it the day he arrived. Predictable.
Reyes laughs at something, his head tipped back, shoulders shaking, and even though the sound doesn’t carry to me over the admittedly fantastic movie score, I don’t need to hear it. I have it memorized by now. I could pick his laugh out of a crowd of a thousand men.
I should be watching the base. I should be watching the wire for movement. Instead, I’m watching a twenty-three-year-old laughing at dumb jokes.
He turns around. Doesn’t scan the room first, doesn’t pretend to be looking for someone or checking the time. He finds me in the dark like he knew exactly where I’ve been standing this entire time. My pulse does something idiotic.
Reyes leans in to say something to Hayes and Delgado, and then he gets up, unhurried, and walks over to the drinks table at the side of the room. He picks up a can of soda, cracks it, and takes a sip.
Then he walks toward the back. Toward me.
I go still like I’m about to be fired at, my muscles locking down as I wait.
Instead of stopping in front of me, he leans against the other side of the support beam I’ve been bracing up, close enough that if either of us took a deep breath, we’d be touching.
“Colonel,” he says, his voice low. There’s nothing regulation in it. It’s equal parts worship and challenge, wrapped together in a dangerous package. It’s an invitation.
I close my eyes long enough to remind myself of all the insignias I’ve earned, every rule I’ve built my life around, the many sets of eyes currently forty feet away watching a movie about a man who can’t tell what’s real.
I open them when I feel something warm against the back of my hand.
His pinky. Behind the cover of the beam, out of line of every line of sight in this room except mine, Reyes has moved his hand a fraction of an inch, and now the side of his pinky finger is pressed against my hand.
He’s stroking back and forth, slowly, deliberately, the motion too small for anyone to define, and too big for me to survive it.
I shoot him the look, the one that’s been ending arguments for over two decades. It fails me now.
Reyes’s mouth curves, unbothered, daring. I can see the words in his eyes. If you don’t like it, walk away.
I don’t walk away.
My body has made the decision for me, blood rushing south so fast it’s dizzying, my breath stuttering in my lungs as he bites his bottom lip and sweeps his finger in broader strokes. My slacks go from comfortable to a genuine tactical problem in under three seconds.
I breathe deep, then shallow, then deep again, so badly out of rhythm as I think about his fingers on me. Not this small, maddening graze, but wrapped fully around me, and my cock pulses hard enough that I have to fight not to make a sound.
Hayes laughs out loud at something on the screen, and the sound snaps me out of the fantasy. I clear my throat and step away from the beam, walking away from Reyes and his fingers. My skin still tingles where he touched me.
I don’t look back to see if he’s smiling. I fucking know he’s smiling.
Okafor is coming up the side aisle from the other direction, and the last thing on this earth I need right now is Sergeant First Class Okafor getting a good look at the front of my pants, so I duck through the side door into the latrine instead. It’s blessedly empty.
I brace both hands against the sink and look at myself in the mirror that’s mostly rust spots. My slacks are tented. Obviously, humiliatingly tented, over a graze of a pinky finger behind a support beam, like I’m nineteen years old and not a full colonel who has commanded men through Velin Pass.
“Stupid,” I mutter at my own reflection. “Reckless. Stupid.”
As stupid and reckless as the twenty-three-year-old I can’t get out of my damn head. I pace the three feet of open floor I have, fingers dragging through my hair, and my cock does not care about my self-recrimination. If anything, it’s getting harder.
Resigned, I duck into the stall and rip my belt open, shove my slacks down enough to free myself, and groan when my cock springs into my hand.
I want it fast. I want it hard, and I want it over with.
I want the ache gone so I can walk back out there and stand in the dark and be a colonel again.
But my hand slows down almost against my will, because all I can think about is how light his touch was.
How careful. Sensual. From a man who knocks down doors and shoots at moving targets.
I don’t hear him come in.
A body presses against my back, and I know before I’ve even finished flinching that it’s him, because nobody else at Kestrel would dare. And nobody else’s proximity does this to my pulse.
His hands find mine and push them aside, gentle but sure, and then his fingers wrap around my cock with a grip that’s nothing like my own.
“W-what are you doing, Specialist?” It comes out broken. I have never once stuttered in my life, not once, and Noah Reyes took that away from me with one touch.
“Shhh.” His mouth is close to my ear, his breath warm against my neck. “Let me do this for you, sir. I got you.”
I should stop this. I need to stop this. “We can’t. I’m not—”
I stop talking with a hiss when he does something on the upstroke, a twist that makes me see stars.
The list of reasons why we shouldn’t do this is a mile long, all of them sound, and every one of them is enough to end careers and get men reassigned to places colder than this. I’ll stop this, right now, I’ll…
I lean back into him instead, a quiet and unmistakable moan leaving my throat. It’s the sound of surrender.
Nobody has ever touched me like this. I’ve touched myself a thousand times in a thousand dark rooms and never felt anything close to what his hand is doing now—slow, sensual, perfect.
My hips roll forward into his fist, and I know, with a certainty that should terrify me and doesn’t, that I will never be able to give this to myself again. Not like this. Not without him.
“That’s it, Colonel.” His voice drops, rough at the edges. “Just let go. You have no idea how many times I’ve jerked off thinking about making you come.”
I look down with a groan, watching what he’s doing to me with a mixture of shame and arousal.
The latrine window lets in just enough light from outside to showcase the contrast between us—his tanned fingers wrapped around my cock, his hand moving in slow, sure strokes that undo decades of discipline one pulse at a time.
Reyes presses against me, and I feel the outline of his erection against my ass, separated only by the thin material of his pants.
“Oh, fuck, Reyes, I—”
I erupt, painting his fingers, his knuckles, and I have never in my life come that hard, not once, not for anyone. My dick pulses in his hand, one, two, six times, and I have to bite my fist so I don’t growl his name loud enough for the entire base to hear.
My chest heaves as he brings me down, still gently massaging my dick with those capable fingers. When I turn around, I find Reyes grinning at me in the dark like he just won a war I didn’t know we were fighting.
He brings his hand to his mouth and licks my cum off his fingers, slowly, one digit at a time, eyes on mine through it all, and I have absolutely no functioning brain cells left to form a single coherent thought.
Then he salutes me.
With the hand he just jerked me off with.
“Good night, sir,” he says, and walks out, leaving me in the latrine, spent, wrecked, and ruined.