Page 18 of My Forbidden Commander

Okafor’s mouth does something that on any other man would be a smile.

“I know exactly who’s available, sir.”

“Get them.”

They file into the command hut ten minutes later. I can tell that Hayes has already constructed theories about why they’ve been summoned, because he walks in mid-sentence.

“All I’m saying is, if it’s a medal ceremony, I want it noted I’ve been carrying this unit emotionally⁠—”

“Quiet,” Okafor says, and Hayes shuts up.

They line up along the wall. Delgado. Spencer. Petrillo. Hayes. And Reyes at the end, hair pushed back off his forehead, collar half a degree off regulation, standing in a way that’s, as always, technically correct and somehow still insolent.

I keep my eyes on the middle of the line.

“Tomorrow at 1400, Kestrel receives eight additional personnel,” I say. “Two elements. A second patrol unit under a Staff Sergeant Callahan, including a designated marksman. And a four-man team under a Staff Sergeant Maddox. Command’s response to the range card.”

“Backup,” Hayes says, brightening. “Actual backup. Sir, I want to go on record that I’m choosing to find this reassuring instead of terrifying.”

“Noted. Your task.” I tap the map where the four empty huts sit in a row. “These have been vacant since spring. They need to be habitable by tomorrow noon. Cleaned, swept, bunks assembled, stove pipes cleared, wiring checked. All four.”

Silence.

“The mouse huts,” Hayes finally says instead of ‘yes, sir’.

“The vacant huts,” I correct.

“Sir, with respect, one of those huts has an ecosystem. Delgado saw a mouse in there that looked at him like he was trespassing.”

“It was fine,” Delgado says.

“It was the size of a boot.”

“A chewed-up boot.”

Petrillo raises a hand halfway. “The stove pipes I can do, sir. I re-lined the ones in the med hut.” Diplomatic as always—volunteering for the worst job before anyone can be assigned it.

“Good. Spencer takes the wiring.” Spencer nods once, which I’ve come to learn is Spencer’s version of a speech. “Hayes, Delgado, bunks and floors. Reyes…”

I make the mistake of looking at him when I say his name.

He’s already looking at me. He’s not grinning. Not smirking. Steady, patient brown eyes hold mine across the map table like he’s got all day and knows I don’t. Like he knows I want to look away.

It’s been six days since the run, since I doubled back along the supply huts to find my missing soldier and stopped dead at the mouth of a gap between buildings, because the sound coming out of that gap was unmistakably the sound of a man getting off. And by the time Noah Reyes came around the corner and ran chest-first into me, flushed and loose-limbed with his eyes bright as flares, I was already hard enough to hammer tent stakes. He jogged off, but then he turned and looked at me and saw, and I stood there in the mud performing the greatest feat of discipline in my career, which was walking back to the formation like a colonel instead of limping back like a teenager.

It didn’t last long. And it hasn’t since. Every night now, in the dark, with my forearm across my mouth, I grip my cock as I replay the sound Reyes made in that gap. Yesterday it got so bad I locked myself in the latrine at 1300 like a private, one fist braced on the plywood wall, hating myself in real time and coming anyway with that sound in my head.

And tomorrow, eight new soldiers arrive under my command. Eight new sets of eyes on this base. On me. On him. On whatever this is that I’m apparently no longer able to keep off my own face, because the corner of Reyes’s lips quirks up into a smile.

My fist closes at my side, nails biting into my palm.

I look away first. Again. I pick up Callahan’s file like it contains something urgent and flip it open to a page I’ve already read.

“Reyes takes the fourth hut solo,” I say to the paperwork. “It’s the smallest. Inventory the bunk hardware from supply and distribute to the others.”

“Yes, sir.”

Soft. Devastating.