Page 31 of My Forbidden Commander

Never mind. The question is worse than the silence.

“Was there a tasking issue, Sergeant?” It’s a miracle I manage to sound unbothered.

“No, sir.” He doesn’t move, doesn’t even blink. “Just an observation.”

He turns and walks out into the last of the daylight, and I sit there with my hands on the desk on either side of a report I didn’t read a word of.

I could have denied it. I didn’t. It’s a kind of confession, and we both know it.

I look at the map, at the wire, at the four hundred meters of mud and gravel between my hut and his, and I finally grasp what’s been eluding me all day. You can’t outrun something on a base this small.

I should have known that since that first briefing, when those warm brown eyes held mine too long and I told myself it was nothing. Fuck, I’ve been telling myself it’s nothing for weeks, and instead of growing, the distance between us has only closed.

I run. He chases. It’s a war, and I’ve never, not once, been on the losing side of an engagement.

But tonight, I don’t know whether I want to win or lose this one.

16

NOAH

Iwake up smiling at the ceiling like an idiot, which feels like it should be illegal at 0535. But yesterday I made my colonel unravel with just my hand, made his voice sound like nothing the voice that gives orders on patrol would.

I give myself a few seconds more of basking in the glory of last night as Hayes snores like a diesel engine, then I make myself sit up. I need to be smart. Okafor walked in on me jerking off in the showers, and he already thinks I’m a live grenade with the pin pulled out. I don’t need to give him proof.

And Gabriel…

Gabriel is not going to wake up this morning feeling powerful like me. He’s going to wake up feeling like the floor dropped out from under him. The Colonel knows very well that what happened yesterday is evidence of something that ends careers, and he spent two decades building his.

I lace up my boots and think about the two ways this goes. He’ll either panic and bury this for good. He’ll go cold, regulation, treat me like any other specialist on this base and pray I do the same. Or he’ll panic and snap, do something reckless hoping to make the feeling stop.

Either way, it’s not a question of whether he wants me anymore. He wants me. I had my hand on the proof. The only real question is if Gabriel Wolfe is going to run.

He barely looks at me during formation. It’s painfully obvious that he’s trying hard not to.

“Warm up,” he says, eyes moving down the line like he’s counting rifles instead of men. “Then we run the wire. Twice.”

Hayes makes a noise like he’s being shot. I don’t make a sound because I’m too busy watching Gabriel’s gaze skip past me like water skips a stone, landing on Okafor, on Delgado, on Walker, on anyone who isn’t standing in the second row wearing my face.

He finally speaks to me during push-ups. “Reyes. Elbows in.”

My form’s fine. My form’s been fine since basic. But he says it anyway, voice flat, just like any superior officer correcting a soldier he’s not thinking about at all. So I fix my elbows and don’t give him the satisfaction of arguing.

“Yes, sir,” I say, no double meaning in it at all.

He sets the pace on the wire run like he’s trying to outrun something, and I know exactly what, because I’m the something. Two laps of gravel and mud, and he stays up front the whole way, and every time the file bends around the perimeter road, he manages to end up on the far side of it from me, like there’s a piece of invisible wire strung between us that only he can feel.

It should sting. And it does a little. There’s a version of me that wanted him to look at me during the stretch, the way he did that morning at the range, like I mattered. Instead, I get his back, and Hayes’s wheezing, and Quinn’s dry commentary about pussies who can’t take a beating.

But mostly I feel recognition. I’ve seen that kind of panic on men’s faces before. Sometimes fight and flee aren’t two very different responses. They’re the same animal wearing different faces. Gabriel’s not avoiding me because he stopped wanting me last night in that latrine. He’s avoiding me because he wants me so badly it scared the rank right off him, and now he’s punishing his own body for it by running four kilometers like the mud owes him money.

Scared men fight. Scared men run. Gabriel Wolfe is currently doing both at the same time, and I’m the only person on this base who gets to watch it happen.

By 0900 tasking, I’ve decided distance is a game I can play too, except my version involves getting closer.

“Sir.” I raise a hand before Okafor can hand out the route reconnaissance assignments. “I’ve got a question on the north leg rally point.”

It’s not really a question. I could answer it myself. But questions mean briefings, and briefings mean standing across a map table from him, close enough to see the muscle working in his jaw.