Their relationship had only deteriorated from there.
He’d been eight.
And he’d never trusted his father.
But apparently he trusted these two men on his new team enough to not only sleep in front of them, but to continue sleeping while they put him to bed like the child he never had been and set up his apartment.
It was a welcoming.A homecoming that he hadn’t seen since his weekend visits with his grandfather.
Joey finished the Chinese food in the dark and the quiet—he never had turned on the lights.He could see fine in the ambient light from the windows.He was thinking that without realizing it, he had found a pack.Harding and Chadwick, at the very least, he could trust.
Without conscious thought, Chadwick’s little quip about Joey having “Schrödinger’s stuff,” popped into his mind, and it hit him then.
Schrödinger’s cat.Joey wouldn’t know if the stuff was there until he checked.Until then it was both there and not there, but since Joey had no access to it, they might as well believe it was not there.
Hence all of the “Schrödinger’s stuff” in Joey’s apartment.
The smile was there before he could stop it, but since nobody was awake in his new den to see it, he allowed it to be.Deer.He could be comfortable with Chadwick, with Harding, because they were deer.
Carnivorous Deer
“HOW’D THEnew guy settle in last night?”Harding asked as Gideon poured his coffee.The coffee station at the SCTF was pretty swank.No cappuccino machine, but a choice of creamers, flavors, a French press, and hand grinders—caffeine was the blood in their veins, and Harding made sure it ran sweet and true while Gideon helped by finding the super fancy stuff.Not necessarily sugar, but the choice imported beans, the richest creamers, syrups instead of plain white granules—although there were plenty of those.
And the coffee cups had become a tradition.
Only Harding and Gideon would know this.For a short time, during a dangerous joint task force deployment in covert ops, Harding had been Gideon’s CO.They’d been far away, in the Afghani desert, living in a big tent with the other ten guys from their unit.Harding had provided them with a coffee station then too; nobody knew how he’d done it.Coffee and books—their unit had them when nobody else did.There were even (oh dear God!) cookies.Oreos and E.L.Fudge.
Gideon, one day when the boredom of “hurry up and wait” had beenkilling him,had asked his stepmom, Trish, if she could ship coffee mugs to the middle of the goddamned desert.He could never explain how he’d gotten the idea, but something about the depersonalization of the OD green and desert camo had worn on him worse than the heat.He listened to the men’s conversations, their music, their discussion of books, their families.
They were individuals, even Harding, who kept the best stone face on that Gideon had ever seen.
But still… Gideon had caught him laughing at jokes somebody texted him every morning.He’d seen him readeverybook in the lending library, and he and Gideon had discussed some of them at length.They both enjoyed political thrillers, because—as they both saidoften—nothing in the books was as scary as what they knew about real politics.
And on a daily basis, they donned native clothing and slipped into the desert to do dangerous things, and if they got killed doing them, nobody would ever know who they were, what they’d done, or what sort of men had died protecting their country.
He felt like they needed something to say “an individual was here.”
His stepmom—sweet woman from whom he’d never asked a thing until that moment—had asked for specifics and had come through.
He would never forget the day the case had arrived.Each cup had been wrapped with exquisite care, and the coffee cups were the sturdiest she could buy.There was a funny cartoon or inscription to match each man in the unit but no names.
They spent the day playing “match the coffee cup” and setting up the box they’d come in to hold them between uses.It was a wooden crate, and there was a hope the cups would sustain the periodic shelling that happened in their area.
Two weeks later, they’d gone out on a mission and had come back short one man.Garfield Molloy had died in Chadwick’s arms while Harding tried to bandage together what was left of his chest, and they were both hollow eyed and empty as they walked into their tent.
Then Harding saw the coffee cup, and for the first time in their yearlong deployment, Chadwick saw fury cross his features.He strode up to the coffee station, picked up the cup and stared at it, jaw working, and for a moment, Chadwick thought he’d shatter it on the hardpacked dirt beneath their feet.
He hadn’t, though.After a moment, his face had relaxed a little, and he’d allowed profound sorrow to cross his craggy features.
He held up the cup.It featured the orange cat from the comics, standing on the scale in bewilderment, accusing it of lying.While whippet lean,theirGarfield had often contested facts like that.”Naw, it can’t be this cold in the desert.The thermometer must be lying.”
“To Garfield,” he’d said softly.
“To Garfield,” the rest of the men said.Very carefully he set the cup down in the wooden crate, and it wasn’t taken out again.
They lost three more men before that mission was complete.Before the remaining eight men shipped home, they sat outside on camp chairs around a bonfire that they’d earned by making the area safe from insurgents and toasted their friends with their coffee cups—but this time filled with wine.
After the last toast, they hurled the cups at the rock they’d camped behind, one after another, the fragments and dust mingling, because they all knew that their friends were not the only parts of themselves they’d leave in the desert.
