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“A thousand percent.” I was smiling now, matching the one on Jonah’s face. “We used to say back during deployment ‘The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.’ So good on you for knowing what you had to do and going through with it. Not a lot of people have the courage to do that, and that’s when life gets really fucking miserable.”
“Wow, that’s pretty deep.”
“Yeah, well, we also used to say ‘drop your cocks and grab your socks,’ so not everything is really that elegant in the army.”
Jonah laughed loud at that, his eyes crinkling with his smile.
“And what’s that mean?”
“To drop whatever it is you’re doing and get ready. The drill instructor would shout it at the top of his lungs every morning during boot camp. That was fun.” My tone was dry, but my grin was wide.
“I’m going to start using that.”
“I think you should.” I looked at him, admiring for a moment the sharp planes of his face and the softness in his lips, and the… shit. I was staring. I coughed, sat up a little straighter. That’s when I got an idea.
“Come,” I said, slapping a hand on his table. “I’ve got a few beers. We can walk down to the beach and sit by the water. Get your mind refocused. It usually helps me when I’m going through shit.”
Jonah nodded, standing up as he did. “All right, let’s do it.”
With a grin, I said, “Drop your cocks and grab your socks, buddy,” and we left Jonah’s office laughing, going to the kitchen and grabbing a couple of beers before heading out. We walked the short way up to the beach, past the still-busy Ocean Drive and onto the warm sand. We took our shoes off and held them in our free hands as we walked through the sand, the soft grains filling the spaces between our toes. We made it as close to the water as we could before getting to the wet sand.
There, we looked at each other, and without saying a word, we plopped down onto the sand. In front of us, the open and dark ocean stretched out for an infinity, the moon dancing with its reflection across the small waves that crested and crashed on the shore.
The air was sweet, the breeze cool, and my heart, as shielded as it was, began to feel as bottomless as the ocean ahead.
And I was beginning to get a strong idea as to who I wanted it to be filled by.
10 Gabriel “Fox” Morrison
During my deployment, there was a man. He was straight, and he was in my platoon, and we were falling hard for one another with every passing day. It was a strong feeling that was impossible to deny.
Except he did deny it. He continued to deny it until one day, when the two of us were alone underneath the star-blanketed Iraq sky, he turned to me and told me what I had been waiting so damn desperately to hear. He was feeling something. The words rocked me. I lost all sense of logic and reacted purely on gut.
Instead of answering him with words, I was rushed away by the romance of the situation, and I kissed him. I leaned in and I kissed him.
And he freaked. Fists flew, kicks were landed. It was a really rough fucking night, regardless of how romantic it all seemed.
And now? Well… shit. Now I was living out a romance-filled wet dream.
Don’t think about how romantic this is. Don’t think about it.
Don’t think about it.
Stop. Don’t do it. Don’t.
…Fuck, this is romantic.
No one else was around. The neon lights of Miami Beach were behind us, but in front of us, there was nothing but the water and the darkness and the warm magic that combination entailed. The blanketing sound of the waves crashing onto the shore only added to the sensation of being secluded from the rest of society, even though there was an entire city at our backs.
For a while, we drank in silence. The cold Corona was refreshing, and the soft scent of salt water was soothing. We were sitting with our legs crossed, and our knees only separated by a needle-thread width of space.
“It was a gunshot wound.”
Jonah’s voice startled me, shocking me out of my lull. Away from the dangerous waters I was beginning to wade into. “Huh?”
“The reason why I’m not on the police force anymore… why I sometimes drop things, and why I sometimes have a hard time finding my words. It was a gunshot wound to the back of my head. I was on a domestic violence call, talking to the girlfriend… she was clearly shaken and in need of help. I was offering her a ride to a shelter and talking to her about some other resources… It was then that her boyfriend comes running out of the apartment with a gun, shouting about how he’s ending them… He shoots at her. I managed to push her just in time. The bullet missed her and instead grazed my brain, leaving a scar right over my parietal lobe. Doctors said that if I had moved even a nanometer more in the wrong direction, the bullet would have shredded me… Thankfully, it only ‘kissed’ me. One of the doctors actually said that to me once… she was having a hard time making jokes. I also got the feeling she was trying to cover up how bad I really was at the time, so I let it slide. Either way, the bullet kissed the back of my brain and caused swelling for months that kept me in bed. A couple of hour-long surgeries, a lot of painful physical therapy, and some intense emotional therapy sessions later and I’m clearly doing better.” He looked at me, his crystalline-blue eyes catching the moonlight, a sheen to them. “And… that’s that.” He took a swig of the Corona, and I tried popping my eyes back into my skull.
