“On purpose?”
He glances up at me, his expression flat. “Obviously.”
I sit down because if I don’t, I might start laughing and never stop. “Are you trying to seduce me, Sergeant?”
“You are very easy to seduce,” he replies, handing me a mug, calm as ever. Rude, but accurate.
We settle in side by side, backs against the wall, legs stretched out under the blankets like this is something we’re allowed to do. Ari passes me food and watches me eat with that quiet focus he gets when he’s paying attention and pretending he isn’t. “This feels like a date,” I say.
He exhales through his nose. “It’s not.”
“You brought blankets,” I point out.
“It’s cold.”
“You brought food.”
“You get hungry.” Our shoulders brush, then his knee nudges mine under the blanket. I turn my head and find him already looking at me, his eyes flicking briefly to my mouth before locking back onto mine.
I lean in first. Slow. Giving him time to stop me, he never does, though. His hand comes up to the back of my neck, and he holds me there while he kisses me. “We should really stop,” he murmurs.
“You won’t,” I say.
His mouth curves faintly. “Neither will you.” He kisses me again, and my hands slide into his jacket, fingers curling there because I need to hold onto something solid. The blankets shift. The mugs tip over harmlessly. The base lights glow below us, distant and irrelevant. I kiss him again, deeper this time, and the watchtower disappears into dark and quiet certainty.
We get sloppy. Not careless, never that, but hungry. The kind of hunger that sharpens instead of dulls. We meet over and over again. In stairwells, in the equipment shed where the lights flicker, and Ari mutters about it being a death trap while kissing me anyway. In the back of trucks with canvas sides, hands everywhere, laughter muffled when something creaks too loudly.
We don’t always have sex. Sometimes it’s just his shoulder pressed into mine while he smokes behind a building we’re not supposed to be behind. Other times, it’s him fixing my jacket zip with an irritated click of his tongue because it’s twisted.
He even teaches me a Russian word that has nothing to do with sex. Just a stupid, ordinary thing. I repeat it wrong on purpose until he sighs and corrects me again, his finger tapping on my nose in time with the syllables. When I finally get it right, he looks absurdly pleased.
Sometimes it’s his thumb drawing slow, absent lines over my knuckles while we sit on a bench, pretending not to know each other. Once, he passes me a mug in the mess hall without looking and our fingers brush, and it feels more intimate than half the things we’ve done horizontal.
We break the rules we already broke before and invent new ones to ignore. He drags me into storage rooms under the pretence of ‘inventory.’ He learns exactly how much pressure it takes to make me forget where we are without tipping me over the edge. We don’t cross that line every time, but when we do, it’s deliberate.
He starts sleeping badly. I can tell because he goes quiet in the early hours. When I ask, he shrugs it off or kisses me like an apology, like a promise. When I push, he shuts me up with his mouth and a look that saysnot now. So, I let him have not now. We’ve learned when to stop asking.
He gets smug about it. About me. About how easily I come undone for him. About how I can barely walk straight some mornings and still show up to drills like nothing’s wrong. “British endurance is a myth,” he murmurs once, watching me lace my boots with an infuriatingly pleased expression. I flip him off, and he laughs like he’s won something.
Maybe he has.
By day seven, it feels like the walls are closing in. Every corridor holds a memory. Every shadow feels like it knows our names. I start counting things without meaning to. Meals, cigarettes, times he says my name. I stop checking the schedule because it doesn’t change and knowing exactly when the axe will fall doesn’t make it lighter.
On the ninth night, he looks at me longer. Holds on tighter. Smiles like he’s trying to memorise the shape of my face from the inside out.
I catch him watching me eat, watching me breathe, watching me exist like that alone is something he’s afraid of losing.
When I ask him what he’s thinking, he kisses me instead, and I let him pretend that it’s not almost over.
Thirty-Eight
Arseny
If anyone bothered to audit the last ten days properly, Caiden Varrik and I would be court-martialled on principle alone. We’ve broken the no-sex-on-base rule so many times that it stops feeling transgressive and starts feeling logistical. Storerooms, offices, and vehicles that absolutely should not have been occupied. Corners of the compound where prying eyes don’t quite reach, and footsteps echo just enough to warn you before disaster. I’m honestly impressed he can still walk straight.
There’s a quiet satisfaction in that thought. A smug, mean little spark that lives somewhere inside. I catch myself watching him cross a room and thinking,yeah, that’s mine, in a way that is wildly inappropriate and deeply satisfying.
Tonight doesn’t feel like the others, though. The mess hall is loud in that specific way that only happens before departures. Too much laughter, too many hands clapping shoulders, Vodka bottles appearing where they shouldn’t, and people pretending they’re celebrating when really, they’re bracing for absence.
