Page 32 of My Forbidden Commander

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.

17

GABRIEL

The clock on the footlocker says 0104, and I should be sleeping.

Four days. Four full days since the latrine, and Reyes hasn’t looked at me twice at formation, hasn’t done a single thing to remind me that his hand was ever on my cock. He laughs with Walker at chow. He runs the wire without once falling out of step to catch my eye. He doesn’t ask any questions at tasking, keeping his eyes on the board.