NOAH
I give myself a few seconds more of basking in the glory of last night as Hayes snores like a diesel engine, then I make myself sit up.
I need to be smart. Okafor walked in on me jerking off in the showers, and he already thinks I’m a live grenade with the pin pulled out. I don’t need to give him proof.
And Gabriel…
Gabriel is not going to wake up this morning feeling powerful like me. He’s going to wake up feeling like the floor dropped out from under him. The Colonel knows very well that what happened yesterday is evidence of something that ends careers, and he spent two decades building his.
I lace up my boots and think about the two ways this goes. He’ll either panic and bury this for good. He’ll go cold, regulation, treat me like any other specialist on this base and pray I do the same. Or he’ll panic and snap, do something reckless hoping to make the feeling stop.
Either way, it’s not a question of whether he wants me anymore. He wants me. I had my hand on the proof. The only real question is if Gabriel Wolfe is going to run.
He barely looks at me during formation. It’s painfully obvious that he’s trying hard not to.
“Warm up,” he says, eyes moving down the line like he’s counting rifles instead of men. “Then we run the wire. Twice.”
Hayes makes a noise like he’s being shot. I don’t make a sound because I’m too busy watching Gabriel’s gaze skip past me like water skips a stone, landing on Okafor, on Delgado, on Walker, on anyone who isn’t standing in the second row wearing my face.
He finally speaks to me during push-ups. “Reyes. Elbows in.”
My form’s fine. My form’s been fine since basic. But he says it anyway, voice flat, just like any superior officer correcting a soldier he’s not thinking about at all. So I fix my elbows and don’t give him the satisfaction of arguing.
“Yes, sir,” I say, no double meaning in it at all.
He sets the pace on the wire run like he’s trying to outrun something, and I know exactly what, because I’m the something.
Two laps of gravel and mud, and he stays up front the whole way, and every time the file bends around the perimeter road, he manages to end up on the far side of it from me, like there’s a piece of invisible wire strung between us that only he can feel.
It should sting. And it does a little. There’s a version of me that wanted him to look at me during the stretch, the way he did that morning at the range, like I mattered. Instead, I get his back, and Hayes’s wheezing, and Quinn’s dry commentary about pussies who can’t take a beating.
But mostly I feel recognition. I’ve seen that kind of panic on men’s faces before.
Sometimes fight and flee aren’t two very different responses.
They’re the same animal wearing different faces.
Gabriel’s not avoiding me because he stopped wanting me last night in that latrine.
He’s avoiding me because he wants me so badly it scared the rank right off him, and now he’s punishing his own body for it by running four kilometers like the mud owes him money.
Scared men fight. Scared men run. Gabriel Wolfe is currently doing both at the same time, and I’m the only person on this base who gets to watch it happen.
By 0900 tasking, I’ve decided distance is a game I can play too, except my version involves getting closer.
“Sir.” I raise a hand before Okafor can hand out the route reconnaissance assignments. “I’ve got a question on the north leg rally point.”
It’s not really a question. I could answer it myself. But questions mean briefings, and briefings mean standing across a map table from him, close enough to see the muscle working in his jaw.
Gabriel doesn’t even look up from the board. “Sergeant Okafor has the details.”
Okafor answers it. In four words. I get nothing but the back of a salt-and-pepper head bent over grid coordinates that don’t need his attention nearly as much as he’s suddenly giving them.
At 1100, I start walking to the command hut with a legitimate excuse—ammunition count discrepancy—but before I can get halfway there, a runner’s already coming with a note from him.
Efficient. Cowardly.
At 1330, I hear he went out on the ridge with Walker, discussing sight lines, which means he chose three hours of talking with the new guy about ballistics over three minutes of being in the same building as me.
I laugh, alone, walking back to the hut, because it’s either that or something way less flattering to my ego.
At chow, I sit where I can see the door, and when he finally comes through it with Okafor half a step behind like a bodyguard, his eyes find me across the mess hut for exactly one second before he looks at Callahan and starts a conversation about patrol rotations that could have waited until never.
He thinks he’s subtle. He’s not.
“Okay.” Hayes drops onto the bench across from me with his tray, following my line of sight to where Gabriel’s standing with his back half-turned. “Did you piss off the Colonel? He’s been looking through you all day.”
“Something like that,” I say, and eat my beans.
Hayes squints at me like he’s trying to read fine print. “That’s it? That’s all I get?”
“That’s all you get.”
“You’re no fun since the shootout,” he mutters, but he lets it go, because Delgado starts a story about Walker nearly walking into a guy wire, and Hayes cannot resist a good disaster narrated in real time.
I finish my food and watch Gabriel find four separate reasons not to be within thirty feet of me for the rest of the meal, and by the time the sun’s dropping behind the ridge, I’ve stopped being amused and started being something closer to tired.
Night falls quickly at Kestrel, thanks to the mountains. It’s just like someone hit a light switch. I sit on my bunk, listening to Hayes snore and Spencer’s rifle parts click together across the room, and think about the day.
He’s not going to come to me. I kind of knew that already, but the way his eyes skipped past me today proved it.
Gabriel Wolfe is the kind of man who’d spend years building a closet to hide in, and last night I put my fist through one of the walls, so now he’s going to try to shore it up brick by brick. Unless somebody makes him stop.
He’s not going to knock on my hut and ask to talk. Men like Gabriel don’t ask. They deny, deflect, run PT into the ground and send runners instead of walking over, and they do that for as long as it takes, which for him could mean until the end of this war.
I don’t have that kind of patience. I came to Kestrel because I got tired of waiting for things to resolve on their own. That never worked out for me. Running straight into what scares me is the only strategy I know.
So, new plan.
I’m going to corner him. Somewhere private, somewhere where the door shuts, and no Okafor standing outside reading into things.
And we are going to talk about what happened in that latrine, out loud, with words, like two grown men instead of two soldiers playing chicken with a support beam and a pinky finger.
Worst case, he has me written up, and it’s a court-martial, my file getting one more black mark, and they ship me somewhere even colder than this to think about my life choices.
I survived worse things than a conversation.
I can survive Gabriel Wolfe telling me no to my face if that’s what it comes to.
But I don’t think that’s what it’s going to come down to.
Not after last night. Not after what he let me do to him.
Or how he stared at the wall I’d just come against, hard enough to show through his shorts.
Spencer clicks his bolt home and reaches for the light switch.
“Lights out?” he asks me because everyone else’s already sleeping.
“Yeah,” I murmur. “Go ahead.”
The hut goes dark, and I lie there working out logistics instead of feelings for once—who’s on duty where, which hours the command hut sits empty, how long I can stall before Okafor starts circling me again like a buzzard.
In the end, there’s only one place where Colonel Gabriel Wolfe is completely alone every day. His hut at night.