before
Lieutenant Colchester turned out to be a real fucking thorn in my side.
First, there were the drills. Before Colchester, the platoons trained separately, simply because of the space limitations on the base. But after Colchester came, he convinced the captain to let the platoons drill together, which then meant that Colchester and I had to drill together. Which meant every morning, Monday through Saturday, I had to watch Colchester run faster than me, march longer, jump higher, squat deeper.
I mean, I didn’t mind the deep squats so much.
Then there were the patrols. The separatists were encroaching fast and converting many of the locals to their cause. So it was our job to walk through the five or six villages closest to the base, and shake hands and hand out bars of chocolate, or whatever bullshit the government had sent that month to try to buy local goodwill. And even though we each had our own platoon, our units were small enough that the captain had us go together, which meant that my afternoons were spent watching Colchester conversing with the villagers in fluent Ukrainian, helping them move boxes and jumping into impromptu soccer matches with the children, and overall just being so fucking helpful and likable as to be disgusting.
And even when we weren’t together, I felt his presence, as if I were magnetized and he were a slab of iron, and at night in my own room, my skin prickled with the awareness that he was just on the other side of the wall. I told myself it was because we’d fought—and I’d lost, no less—and I told myself it was because I didn’t want another fucking lecture about how to do my job. I told myself those things, even though it had been three weeks since that fight in the yard and Colchester hadn’t once tried to talk to me in all that time. But I caught him looking at me several times a day, those lake-green eyes unreadable and his expression both stern and a little amused.
Which pissed me off. Who was he to find me amusing? I was always the first to laugh at myself, to be the butt of the joke, if the joke was funny and the night full of liquor and life. But for some reason, the idea that Colchester didn’t take me seriously rubbed me the wrong way.
I was used to being rubbed the right way.
All of this irritation built and built, and I found myself growing unaccountably tense around him, around everybody. I drank more, smoked more, stayed up later at night, unable to shake the feeling that I’d outgrown my skin somehow, that there was something itchy and new inside my veins that I couldn’t escape. And sometimes, when I got very drunk and the base was silent and the cold stars winked outside the window, I wondered if I even wanted to escape it. It was an awful feeling, but it was addictive, like a cut on your lip you couldn’t stop licking just to feel the sting, just to taste the iron-salt taste of your own blood.
Maybe I could have stayed in that agitated, itchy place forever, but the universe had different plans. Merlin would have said it was destiny and Ash would have said it was God, and Greer would have agreed with both, but this wasn’t the well-ordered hand of a deity or a pre-ordained timeline. The next three months were fucking chaos.
And it began as most chaos did and still does: with my sister.
Morgan was set to arrive the day before we were going to Prague to spend my R&R week sightseeing. Well, she wanted to sightsee. I wanted to find some absinthe and fuck my way through New Town, and pretend that there wasn’t a condescending green-eyed asshole waiting for me back on base.
At any rate, she was coming to stay in the village near the base tonight and then we were taking the train to Prague together. But that day was also the day we were executing one of our worst drills—an eight-hour belly crawl through woods infested with mock hostiles, establishing a mock outpost. The mud was cold and wet, the soggy pine needles still sharp somehow, and by the six-mile mark, most of my men had bleeding fingers and runny noses. I called for a break so people could tape up their fingers and catch their breath, and that’s when it happened. Colchester’s group—our “hostiles” in the exercise—swarmed up over the lip of a nearby creek and lit into us.
The dirt around us exploded in a hail of simulated bullets—paint-filled rounds that we could shoot from our real weapons—and I screamed into my radio for the soldiers to take cover. I hadn’t been a total idiot—we’d picked a fortified place to rest, sent out a couple guys to watch the perimeter—and somehow we managed to form a coherent defense against Colchester’s men. But we couldn’t beat them back, soldier after soldier getting struck with paint and laying down to simulate death. Soon it was just me and Dag, my platoon sergeant, returning fire against six or seven of Colchester’s men. Then Dag got hit, grunting as the round hit his vest—the paint can pack a mean punch—and giving me an apologetic look as he stretched out on the ground.
I kept firing into the creek, swearing internally, fighting off that annoying magnet feeling that Colchester was here and close and probably wearing that stupid, pretty smile of his…
Something cool touched the back of my neck, and I jumped back, spinning around to see the end of Colchester’s Glock pointed right at me. He had his M4 slung over his shoulder, and with his other hand, he was holding his radio close to his mouth to tell his men that he had me.
“Goddamn fucking shit,” I said.
But you know what? I wasn’t going down without taking Colchester with me. I ducked, faster than he could move, aiming my M4 at his chest and firing. He twisted away in the nick of time, avoiding the paint and swinging his own gun around. My bicep exploded in pain as the fake bullet hit my arm. No body armor there, no sir.
I staggered back with a gasp, but not fast enough. A boot hooked around my ankle, and with one quick jerk, I was flat on my back, blinking up at the tired, threadbare pines.
“I win,” Colchester said. His other boot was gently pressing against the wrist that held the gun I tried to shoot him with. “Now don’t move.”
“Fuck you.”
Colchester smiled, that dickhead, his firm mouth parting into a grin and revealing the faintest dent of a dimple in his left cheek. His boot pressed harder against my wrist—not hard enough to truly hurt me, but hard enough to be uncomfortable—and he used the muzzle of his M4 to nudge at the paint splatter on my arm. “You okay, Lieutenant? I know those things sting.”
It did sting. It stung like a motherfucker, and I didn’t even want to think about the ugly bruise it would leave on my arm. But when I glanced up into Colchester’s face, I couldn’t bring up the right words to tell him that. I couldn’t even muster another fuck you. In that instant, I felt the viscid weight of every moment leading up to this, of all the itchy nights I’d spent drinking and staring at the stars. I felt unmoored from myself, from everything that wasn’t Colchester’s boot on my wrist and green eyes on my face.
And I didn’t imagine what happened next. At least, I don’t think I imagined it, but it’s hard to tell with everything that happened afterward, what Rubicons were crossed when and how. But Colchester looked down at his boot on my wrist, at my panting chest as I struggled to regain the breath that had been knocked from me by the fall, and something unshuttered in his face. For a single moment, it seemed like we were breathing in tandem, as if he were mirroring my gasping breaths or maybe I was trying to mirror his steadier ones, and then he moved his boot off my wrist, replacing it with his knee as he knelt down next to me. The pine needles rustled under his boots. From somewhere in the trees came the plaintive churr of a turtledove.
Colchester took off his helmet, and the gesture felt strangely medieval, like a knight taking off his helm. A prince kneeling next to the glass coffin of a sleeping princess…if that princess were a spoiled playboy from the west coast.
And of course, no fairy tale prince ever said what Colchester uttered next.
“It’s a shame I’ve already shot you,” he said softly. “I would have so liked to hear you beg.”
All around us, soldiers were stirring, chafing at their new bruises or laughing or playfully shoving the brothers who’d just “killed” them moments earlier, but Colchester and I were worlds apart from them, existing in a bubble of time that had been frozen in that forest for centuries.
I was too apart from myself to be anything other than truly honest. “You’d have to hurt me much worse than this if you want to hear me beg.”
I expected bluster, I expected a snappy, aggressive response where he’d promise to hurt me the next time he had the chance. Hell, I almost wanted it. But he didn’t do that. Something in my words seemed to turn him inward, upon himself. He blinked, bit his lip. It was the first time I ever saw him uncertain and without answers.
“I want to do more than hurt you,” he finally said, looking troubled as he said it. And then he stood up and walked away, leaving me to puzzle over what he meant by those words…and what I wanted them to mean.
I went straight to the showers. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. I went straight to the showers and stripped off all the sweaty, muddy clothes, stood under the spray turned up as hot as it could go, and tried to rinse off the smell of pine needles and gunpowder. Tried to rinse away the feeling of Colchester’s boot on my wrist.
I would have so liked to hear you beg.
Make me, I should have said. Or maybe that would have been the wrong answer too. But I didn’t know the right answer.
And the problem wasn’t that I had a certain kind of appetite that excluded Colchester—I had every appetite. I went to an all-boys boarding school and had sex with the boys there; I came home and slept with the rich girls summering on the coast. I was lucky with my parents, lucky in the Northwest—no one seemed to mind. Once or twice there had been the insinuation that I wasn’t able to “make up my mind” about who I liked to fuck, but that was ridiculous. I knew exactly who I liked to fuck, and it was everybody.
So it wasn’t that I found Colchester attractive that bothered me. No.
It bothered me that he was perfect.
It bothered me that I hated him.
It bothered me that I hated him and he still made me feel itchy and out of control.
It bothered me that he put his boot on my wrist and I liked it.
Curtained stalls lined the shower room and I heard more men come in, joking and complaining about the mud and chill, and I couldn’t bear to think about Colchester while surrounded by other people. I finished up and went back to my room to be alone.
But there was no solitude to be had. When I opened the door, there was a woman sitting on my bed.
I dumped my dirty clothes on the floor and walked over to the cheap wooden dresser where my clean clothes were stored, tugging the towel off my waist so I was completely naked.
“Really?” Morgan asked with distaste.
“This is my room,” I reminded my stepsister. “If you don’t like it, don’t look.”
She rolled her eyes, but ended up turning around. “I don’t even get a hello? A ‘how was your trip?’”
“Hello, how was your trip, why are you here? We agreed to meet tomorrow at the train station.”
“I wanted to see you.”
“Wanted to see the other soldiers more like,” I said, pulling on a pair of pants and a sand-colored T-shirt.
“Can’t blame a girl for being interested.”
“We’re going to the party capitol of Europe. I can blame a girl for being impatient.”
“And what about you, Embry?” She turned back to look at me now that I was fully dressed. “How patient have you been?”
“If you’re asking if I’ve fucked anyone on base, the answer is no,” I said. “I know this may seem like an alien concept to you, but I have to follow the rules of my job or else I’ll get in trouble.”
Morgan smiled. She was twenty-three and had been working for my stepfather’s lobbying firm since she graduated from Stanford. There were no rules for her since she worked for her own father, at least none that mattered. “Whatever you say, bubby,” she cooed, using the name she used to call me as a toddler.
I walked over to the bed and took her elbow in a firm hand. Morgan and I had a certain kind of brother-sister relationship…as in: it wasn’t really a relationship at all. We respected each other because we understood each other, but any affection between us was logical, cold, and born of a clan-like pride. I never knew familial love to be any different.
But right now? I just wanted to be alone.
“I think it’s time for you to go back to the village. I’ll meet you at the train station tomorrow. Sissy.”
She gave me a fake pout but allowed me to escort her out of my room and down the hall, where of course we encountered Colchester coming out of his own room, a towel slung over his arm.
Keep walking, I willed him. Just keep walking.
He didn’t. He saw me and paused and then he saw Morgan and stopped altogether. And suddenly I saw my stepsister through his eyes—the silk-black hair hanging to her waist, the emerald eyes, the long throat and slender frame. Something inside my chest tied itself into a knot, loose and hard, like a cherry stem.
“Lieutenant Moore,” he said cheerfully. “Who is your friend?”
“This is my sister—”
“Stepsister,” Morgan corrected.
“—and she and I are going to Prague tomorrow. But as for right now, she’s going back to the village.”
“You’re going to Prague tomorrow?”
“Yes, Colchester, and it’s all been squared away with the captain, so don’t even try—”
I broke off as he pushed the door to his room open and took something off a small desk inside. He emerged holding a paper rectangle printed with dates and times and train stations, and the edges of his mouth curled in an amused smile.
“Oh good,” Morgan said, batting her eyelashes.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
I stepped closer to make sure. And yes, it was definitely a train ticket to Prague. For tomorrow, from the same station. And even at the very same time.
“We should all ride together,” he said, his gaze flitting to Morgan and then back to me. “When I scheduled my R&R, I really had no idea where I wanted to go. It was too expensive to go back home and I’d heard good things about Prague…” He lifted one shoulder and smiled an innocent kind of smile. I stared at it, at his mouth. How could he smile innocently like that when just an hour ago, he’d had his boot on my wrist and told me he wanted to hear me beg?
Morgan caught his drift immediately. “I’ve been twice, and Embry’s been once. We’d be happy to show you around.”
Colchester looked pleased. Morgan looked pleased.
I was the only one who was not pleased.
Somehow, I made it through the rest of the evening. I managed to pry Morgan away from Colchester and see her off the base. I swallowed a dinner I didn’t taste. I went to my room and laid on my bed fully clothed, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to sleep, knowing that so many sleepless hours lay between now and being stuck in a train car with Colchester and my sister…
And then I woke up. I had slept, dreamlessly and deep, and now it was time. I told myself I dreaded it, spending the trip with that smug asshole, I knew I dreaded it, except the way my heart pounded and my stomach flipped didn’t feel like dread. I got dressed quickly, used the bathroom quickly, as if I could outrun my own agitation.
I couldn’t.
And when I stepped outside the barracks, he was already waiting, the early morning light brushing a glow against the high lines of his cheekbones, the bridge of his nose. He was squinting a little in the bright light, those thick eyebrows pulled together and those green eyes narrowed, and I saw him before he saw me. And for a moment—just a moment—I knew the awful, stupid truth. That if this gorgeous bastard really tried, he could snap my cherry-stem heart in an instant. He could chew it up and spit it out and I’d be as helpless as any cherry swirling in the bottom of a whiskey glass.
But why? I demanded of myself. Why? Why? Why?
No. This had to stop. It was only because he was so pretty, so stern, his body so firm, and in Prague there would be hundreds of boys like him, not to mention all the warm, sweet girls. I didn’t need to be knotted up over someone who only noticed I existed so he could shoot me in the arm. I was putting down this feeling once and for all, and I knew exactly how to do it.
I walked toward him, slinging my bag over my shoulder. “We better get a move on,” I said, walking past him as he grabbed his own bag. “The train won’t wait.”
And after we’d left the base in silence, I took a deep breath and forced myself to do it. “Which hotel are you staying at?”
“I haven’t booked one yet,” he admitted.
“You should stay with us,” I said, hating myself for the twisting in my chest. “Morgan is really excited to get to know you better.”
