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oman gave me chill bumps and a hard-on when crossing her legs. When she spoke in that sensual, husky tone, it was almost impossible to not hurdle the distance dividing us and kiss her senseless. Fear of her refusing to counsel me afterwards kept my ass on the couch, spilling my guts. It was time to do it all over again this fine Friday morning.
My truck took up the space directly in front of her office door. I had thirty minutes until therapy and nothing much else to do. Andre had to have sensed my boredom because he called. Having not heard from him in a week, I damn near jabbed my finger through the pulsating green symbol on my radio bluetoothed to my phone.
“Andre, my boy. You must’ve gotten a weekend leave and missed me?” I joked, salvaging a bottle of water from the small cooler amongst quite a few other items on the passenger’s seat. A gleaming gray Glock was one of them, a journal with a whole lot of depressing shit in it another.
“I see you’ve got jokes, Tobin.” Then why wasn’t he laughing? “But, you’re right. I’m still in the barracks because I have no one I trust to go to the bar with. You and me had a flawless system for fucking off. I watched your back, you watched mine. We got buzzed together and got an ass full of sand because you have an affinity for the sky and its moving parts. Now, all that’s in the wind, thanks to you.” He wasn’t laughing because he was in a funk about having to convince the higher-ups to offer me a general discharge instead of dishonorably discharging me from the Marines. He would have preferred to have me there instead of enjoying civilian life thousands of miles away. Still. I was the only friend he needed, according to him, since he didn’t trust easily.
Sighing, I chugged the water, capping it when I’d had enough. “Man, I’m going to say it again, I’m sorry. I’ve been saying that a lot lately. Someone had to be here for my brother. Lindon could’ve sent me home on leave. He didn’t. Well, not a temporary leave anyway. That doesn’t mean we can’t still assemble for leisure time. We’ll just have to catch planes, suffer through jet lag, and hope you get used to flying with others soon because you can’t fly worth a damn.”
Andre’s trust issues made him insufferable on a flight. If he didn’t know the pilot personally, which he never did, he’d rather be at the helm of the plane. The problem was he didn’t know how to fly. By the end of the flight, everyone on it knew how he felt about flying with a stranger at the controls. It was downright irrational. Nobody was perfect, though, with the exception of Cherise. She was perfection personified even if she answered my questions with a question most times.
“I want us to fuck off here in Hawaii, Tobin,” Andre’s masculine but snippy tone reverberated throughout the truck. “The beach with floss for bikinis-wearing Hawaiian women are here. How was Greg’s funeral? I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.” Rant over, he was ready to move on to the next topic.
That was fine by me. “Even more sadder without you there. Thugs and shady women came out in droves to attend. I didn’t know ninety-nine percent of them. The one percent I knew, I wanted no dealings with even when we were making money together. So yeah, I miss you too. I need a better class of friends to hang with here.”
“You said friends, but you didn’t include women. You’re a man, so that might mean you’ve met someone. If you have, who is she?” Damn, he was quick to pick up on that.
“My dream girl for the second time,” I said plainly.
“Oh!” he bellowed, damaging my eardrums. “My boy is about to break his ‘no fun’ streak.”
I wished for that too. “Negative.”
“What?” he droned, and I could almost see his enthusiasm as it took a nosedive. “Why?”
I tossed my head back on the seat, inspecting the ceiling of the truck. “She’s my psychiatrist with a switch for professional conduct that she never turns off.”
“Damn,” Andre lamented. “That’s a great and equally bad thing for you.”
“Right. I can’t help but think our wonderful beginnings on a dark street during Martin’s murder had a lot to do with that switch being permanently on.” Somehow, I’d get used to that even if it killed me. It probably would.
“Wait, Tobin. Your dream girl and psychiatrist are one and the same? The one you and Shane were going to kill if she snitched? How the hell did that happen?”
“Yep, one and the same. He’s the one that would’ve killed her by the way, which I was not going to let go down. My fucked up luck from birth is still fucked up. That’s how I think the whole dream girl/unattainable doctor therefore non-dating thing happened. And now, someone is after her, and she won’t tell me who.”
I let my gaze wander to the glass windows of Cherise’s waiting room. They were darker than the ones in her office, harder to see through. Another great and equally bad thing when she was talking with her receptionist about something. It registered with me that dead silence had invaded the line. Andre should’ve said something by now. Maybe the call had dropped somewhere along my explanation.
“Andre?”
An explosion of movement detonated on his end, so he was still there. “I was just being politely quiet while waiting for you to finish explaining.”
I thought I had. “I was finished, Andre.”
“No, you wasn’t. You didn’t explain the ‘someone was after her’ part.”
“That’s the part I can’t explain, and I specifically said she won’t tell me who’s after her, which automatically means I don’t know the reason why. Nothing to explain.”
“But, you haven’t just been sitting on your ass doing nothing about it. That, I know.”
I had to chuckle at his know-it-all attitude. “You know me well. I’ve been watching her back all week for her. Pretty much stalking her for her own good. I hope she’ll see it that way if she ever finds out about it.” With my luck, it was when she found out about it.
“Need some help with stalking for her own good?” he offered.
“Company would be cool. What you gonna do, go AWOL?” There was no way they’d let him go on leave if they wouldn’t even let me attend my brother’s funeral without a fight.
He sneered, “A general or two owes me a favor. I’d have used it for you if you’d have given me the chance, oh destroyer of furniture and career.”
“I’d have destroyed the Sergeant Major if you hadn’t intervened. You didn’t tell me that I had the option of benefitting from your favor with the ones in charge either, so I took my own path. It worked. I’m here, aren’t I?” And about to embark on a new career if there was a God in heaven. God knew I could always use all the help I could get.
