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“Yeah, but you’ve got a peanut butter cup on here. What fresh hell is that? You’ve bastardized a classic.”
“I have not! You haven’t even tried it. I’ve elevated a classic. Shut up and eat your s’more.”
“Elevated a classic?” he says dubiously.
“Eat it.”
He opens his mouth and stuffs the entire thing in, chewing slowly. He tries to hide his reaction, but I can tell he likes it.
“See?” I boast triumphantly, rolling the stick in my fingers to evenly brown another marshmallow.
“Whoa,” he exclaims, finally swallowing. “Amazing! The peanut butter gives it just the right amount of salt so it’s not too sweet. How did I never think to do that before?”
“You’ve just got to trust me,” I say, lifting my right eyebrow. “I’m no Anton Arnaud, but I can make a mean s’more.”
“Trust is a funny thing, Little Bird,” he contends, shoving another s’more into his mouth. “It requires a person to feel safe.”
“You don’t feel safe with me?” I counter. My tone is meant to sound teasing, but honestly, I’m a little hurt. I honestly felt that we did trust one another and feel safe together. How are we having sex and not? Aren’t those his rules?
I sandwich another treat and hand it to him. He takes it, but doesn’t eat it right away.
“I do,” he says, a peculiar smile gracing his lips. It’s not the amused grin he typically gives me. Its meaning is deeper. “I need to know you feel safe with me, Raven.”
“I thought those were the rules,” I echo, the thought already racing through my head.
“Yes, but I’m still nervous,” Connor confesses, and offers nothing more. He tosses the uneaten dessert into the fire, then douses it and goes inside to bed. I linger outside for a few minutes longer, replaying our exchange in my head, and then join him.
An odd tension swells between us as we take turns brushing our teeth and changing into pajamas. When I turn off the light and enter the bedroom, Connor is propped up on pillows on our queen-sized bed. It always looks so small with his large body stretched out across it.
As he does each night, Connor invites me to curl up on his shoulder. His fingers slowly stroke the hair at my temples. “I do, you know,” he begins out of the blue.
“Do what?” I ask, feeling my eyelids drift closed. My fingers are at his chest, toying with his nipples. I feel them harden, but sex doesn’t seem likely. His mood is heavy somehow.
“Trust you. Feel safe with you.” He lets out a long breath. “I need you to know that.”
I nod my face against the skin of his bare torso, but offer no words. Words here feel wrong somehow. Connor needs peace and quiet and space.
His tone is darker than usual, and I’m nervous about where this conversation is going. I offer a long moment of silence. Then he begins speaking. His voice is low, just above a whisper and it sounds pained somehow.
“I met Shana at aClimaxconcert,” he begins. “I was between deployments, home for leave, and playing roadie for Ox so I could earn some extra dough and spend time with my family. She was a typical groupie. Blond, big tits and willing to do whatever a man wanted for a chance to spend a week with a popular rock band. We spent two weeks of the tour together, most of that in bed.”
This tale makes me extremely uncomfortable. I don’t want to hear about his sexual escapades with his beautiful ex-wife. I wiggle to get away, but Connor keeps me close, pressing my body to his, forcing me to hear it all.
“When I deployed again, she wrote to me. I’d call her sometimes, and we kept our thing, whatever it was, going until I got home. I thought I was in love with her, and she said she loved me. I proposed and we got married six months later. The wedding was this huge ordeal. Her family had money and threw this amazing party. We went on a honeymoon to the Caribbean and never left the hotel room. That’s pretty much all the good parts of our whole marriage.”
I sense why Connor needs me close now. His fingers stroke my shoulder. The more he talks, the faster he strokes. This conversation is painful for him. But he wants me to know. He wants the closeness that telling me will bring and he trusts me with it.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter, not knowing what else to say.
“She bitched constantly,” he continues. “She went on tour with Ox and Tori and drove them so nuts, Ox told me to come get her. She got wasted every night. I had to pick her up one night and drag her out of another man’s bed. I wanted to kill him, but I knew Shana started it.
“We always fought. Nothing I did was ever good enough. She hated I always had to go away, and I hated it more. Because I knew that when I was gone, she wasn’t alone. Our bed wasn’t empty when I wasn’t in it. We stopped having sex. I couldn’t even think about putting my dick into a place where I had no idea who’d been there before me. She disgusted me, and I disappointed her.
“Then, I got orders to go to Afghanistan. It was a bit of an unusual assignment. Usually, my whole unit would go, but this time, it was just a small detachment of us. Shana was pissed at first. Right before I left, though, she came to me crying, and she said she was sorry about all the men. She wanted to make our marriage work and promised she wouldn’t stray again. I told her when I got home, I was going to start the divorce process. She was still crying when I left. It was the first time I’d ever made her cry. I felt like shit. My mind wasn’t on the mission. I missed so much I should have seen. I should have seen it coming.
“Our mission was to support a spec ops team there for a simple snatch and grab. We were there to snag a professor who was being used to build a nuclear weapon for a particularly nasty terrorist group. He was supposed to meet his mistress at this hotel in a real shithole of a town. My team was there with a group known as the Heathen Brotherhood. Badass group of men. I’d follow those guys to hell if I had to. The whole town was eerily quiet that night. Even for the middle of the night. We all felt it — something wasn’t right.
“The Brotherhood formed a column and headed inside the building. One of their guys, Tex they called him, was on overwatch from the building next door. My unit was there strictly for cover and we were scattered in a perimeter a few hundred yards from the hotel. We could hear chatter on the comms as they talked back and forth and they seemed to be clearing their checkpoints easily. Then, without warning, there’s this explosion. The blast went straight up. Tex was knocked off the top of the building. How he survived, I have no idea. Fire, smoke and falling chunks of concrete landed everywhere. The other men from my own unit were too far back. It was Tex and me, working to get to the other members of his team.
