Page 29 of My Forbidden Commander

I should be scared. Okafor is watching, Hayes doesn’t shut up about the pattern in his head since day one, and there are more eyes on us now than there were then. Any smart soldier would put the brakes on, go back to being a good boy, let the tension die a slow death under cold showers.

But I’m not sure I’m a smart soldier, and I’m definitely not a good boy. Because Wolfe wants me. It’s not a guess anymore.

I might have come here to face death head-on, but I have a new plan now. It’s not smart, and I don’t care. I want him. Not stolen touches behind a support beam, not a rushed hand job in a latrine with the door unlocked. I want all of him, everything he’s been denying himself.

I don’t care what Okafor thinks he’s seeing. I don’t care if Hayes builds an entire conspiracy board out of dates and eye contact. Command can write whatever regulation they want; regulations didn’t stop me from crossing sixty meters of open ground under fire, and they’re not going to stop me from crossing whatever distance is left between me and Colonel Gabriel Wolfe.

He can fight it as long as he needs to. I’ve got patience.

15

GABRIEL

The clock on the footlocker says 0445, and I’ve been staring at the ceiling since before it said 0300, running the same couple of minutes in my head, over and over until they’ve worn a groove like a tire track through mud.

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.”