GABRIEL
His hand around me. His mouth near my ear. The sound I made when I came.
I don’t recognize that sound.
I’ve been shot at in six countries. I’ve held a dying sergeant’s hand in a farmhouse outside Ravnik while artillery moved closer with every impact, and my voice never cracked.
Years of it never cracking, and then a young specialist put his hand on my cock in a latrine with a plywood door that doesn’t lock, and I snapped like brittle wood.
Lying still isn’t doing anything for me, so I get up and sit on the edge of my bunk with my elbows on my knees and my hands hanging between them.
I look at them like they belong to someone else.
They don’t shake, ever. Except when Noah Reyes puts his life on the line for mine.
Or when he wraps his fingers around my cock.
Fuck.
This is the part where I’m supposed to march myself to the ops hut and write the report.
Fraternization. Conduct unbecoming. A subordinate officer initiated contact with a superior officer, twice, and the superior officer didn’t stop him.
I could write it that way, and it would even be true, technically, and it would end both of our careers inside a week.
I should transfer him. Command’s already moving bodies around like chess pieces. I go as far as picturing it, Reyes with all his gear on his back, taking the next truck out.
My stomach turns over so hard I have to put a hand flat on the mattress.
No. Not that.
There it is. I’ve run out of excuses. I don’t want to stop this.
It’s like the last forty-five years of my life mean nothing, like all my rules, all the times I forced myself not to want things, it all means nothing because Noah Reyes showed up at Kestrel and blew it all up.
But instead of dying in the explosion, I feel like I woke up.
And that’s the part that terrifies me more than a fraternization charge ever could.
I’m hard again. Of course I am. I’m sitting on the edge of my rack at 0455, remembering how he felt against my back, so I get up before my hand decides to solve the problem the way it solved it every damn night this week, because if I start that now, I’ll be late for my own PT formation, thinking about the soldier I’m supposed to be able to look at without wanting to put my hands on him.
When I dress, it feels like I’m arming myself for something, and I don’t like the odds against me.
By 0700, when the fog has thinned to a gray haze, I’m standing in front of the formation, making sure I don’t look at the fourth man in the second row.
“Formation, attention.”
Boots come together. I run my eyes down the lines. The new arrivals. Okafor, Delgado, Spencer, Petrillo, Hayes, and then, because there’s no way around it, Reyes.
He’s already looking at me.
Not smirking at least. Not the wicked, knowing tilt he wore on his lips when he walked out of the latrine with my cum on his tongue. Just steady brown eyes, like he’s waiting to see what I’ll do. My stomach swoops.
“Warm-up,” I say, my voice thankfully flat and even. “Then we run the wire. Twice.”
Hayes makes a noise like a man being informed of his own execution. “Twice, sir?”
“Twice, Corporal,” I confirm.
Walker smirks. “Don’t worry, Hayes, I’ll make sure to kick you in the ass if you start lagging.”
Hayes rolls his eyes. “I withdraw my earlier comment about backup being reassuring.”
“Noted,” I say, unsure of why I’m entertaining his less-than-insightful asides.
I put them through jumping jacks and mountain climbers, not correcting anybody, because chances are I’ll put my hands on the wrong man for the wrong reason, and I’m not doing that in front of twelve sets of eyes and God.
“Reyes,” I say anyway, because his form is off and I built a career on not letting things slide, even when it’s inconvenient. “Elbows in on the push-up.”
“Yes, sir.”
There’s no hook in the words this morning. He fixes his elbows and doesn’t look up at me again. Somehow that’s worse than the hook. I don’t know what to do with him when he’s not testing me.
“Formation up. Wire run, single file to the gate road.”
I take the front like I usually do. This morning, though, I take the front like a man putting distance between himself and a fire, setting a pace that has Hayes swearing quietly by the end of the first kilometer.
“He’s punishing us,” he gasps from somewhere behind me. “This is a punishment. I did nothing. I have done nothing wrong in my entire adult life.”
“Pace is the same as Tuesday,” Delgado says.
“Pace is a war crime,” Hayes counters.
“I’d call you all pussies,” Quinn says, not sounding winded at all, “but it seems like you can’t take the same kind of beating. Be an insult to vaginas everywhere.”
Maddox snorts, and Callahan chuckles.
I don’t slow down, though I find myself trying to separate Reyes’s breathing from the rest. I do check over my shoulder at the halfway mark, just once.
He’s running in the middle of the pack, easy, unbothered.
For half a second, our eyes meet across the wet gravel.
He doesn’t smile. He just holds my gaze.
I face front and run harder.
The second lap is worse because everyone’s too tired to complain, and the quiet makes a man hear his thoughts too clearly. Mine are always the same: the sound I made when I came. His hand. The way he said sir, like he’d wanted to say it that way for weeks and finally got the chance.
By the time we hit the gate road for the second time, my lungs are burning way more than four kilometers should cause, and I realize with cold clarity that I spent the entire PT session running from a twenty-three-year-old specialist without ever increasing the distance between us.
“Formation, halt.” I don’t look at anyone in particular as I speak. “Weapons maintenance, then tasking at 0900. Dismissed.”
They scatter toward their huts, and I stand on the gravel with my hands on my hips, getting my breath back, letting myself watch Reyes’s back until he rounds the corner and disappears.
I do not think I am going to survive this deployment the way I planned to.
I spend the rest of the day like I’m walking through a minefield with an unknown layout, and it doesn’t take me long to realize my avoidance is a tell in its own.
At 0900 tasking, I brief the route reconnaissance through Okafor.
I don’t address Reyes directly once, not even when he asks a perfectly reasonable question about rally points on the north leg.
I have Okafor answer as I stare at the map board instead, and out of the corner of my eye, I can see his jaw tighten.
At 1100, I send word to his hut about ammunition resupply through a runner instead of walking the forty meters myself.
At 1300, Wilder wants to walk the ridge and discuss sniper positions, and I go with him gladly, because a few hours off base discussing sight lines and dead space are a few hours I don’t have to spend on this base pretending I don’t know exactly where Reyes is at any given moment.
At 1530, back at the command hut, I catch him near the supply line, laughing at something Walker said, and when his eyes drift toward me across the yard, I look down at the clipboard in my hand like it’s just delivered urgent news from headquarters.
It hasn’t. It’s yesterday’s ammunition count.
I already know it by heart. Distracted, I walk straight into Okafor, nearly knocking him to the ground.
I know I’m running—I’ve commanded enough scared men to recognize it. If there’s a difference between discipline and denial, I’m not sure which one I’m practicing anymore.
By 1700, the light’s starting to die over the ridge, and I’m alone in the command hut with the day’s paperwork when the door opens after a clipped knock. Which means it’s Okafor.
He doesn’t say anything at first, just standing there with his arms loose at his sides, looking at me like he’s mapping new terrain.
“Something on your mind, Sergeant?” I ask, because the silence is starting to feel worse than any question he may have.
“Just wondering if you’re avoiding Reyes,” Okafor says, “or if Reyes is avoiding you.” He waits a moment, obviously not in a rush. “Either way, it’s loud.”
Never mind. The question is worse than the silence.
“Was there a tasking issue, Sergeant?” It’s a miracle I manage to sound unbothered.
“No, sir.” He doesn’t move, doesn’t even blink. “Just an observation.”
He turns and walks out into the last of the daylight, and I sit there with my hands on the desk on either side of a report I didn’t read a word of.
I could have denied it. I didn’t. It’s a kind of confession, and we both know it.
I look at the map, at the wire, at the four hundred meters of mud and gravel between my hut and his, and I finally grasp what’s been eluding me all day. You can’t outrun something on a base this small.
I should have known that since that first briefing, when those warm brown eyes held mine too long and I told myself it was nothing. Fuck, I’ve been telling myself it’s nothing for weeks, and instead of growing, the distance between us has only closed.
I run. He chases. It’s a war, and I’ve never, not once, been on the losing side of an engagement.
But tonight, I don’t know whether I want to win or lose this one.