Page 16 of My Forbidden Commander

“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.