before
Something had changed for me. But only for me.
Morgan and Colchester spent the rest of the week like they had before the dinner—before Colchester said those words to me—and fucked like rabbits next door. It was just as well, because finally allowing myself to think of him in that way had unlocked some hungry door inside of me, and I don’t know how I would have behaved if I’d had to face him then. As it was, I went looking for people to scratch the Colchester-shaped itch inside me. Dark-haired boys, tall boys with broad shoulders, boys that looked serious and stern even in the bright lights of a dance club. And then I’d let myself pretend as I fucked them, as I slicked up my cock and pressed into them. It was Colchester I was fucking, it was his arrogant, perfect body under mine. And when they fucked me, I pretended the same, that he’d snuck into my barracks late at night and clapped one of those large hands over my mouth as he used me. Or maybe he’d defeated me in another drill, and right there in the forest, he’d pinned me to the ground and took what was his.
But then those Czech boys would smile the wrong way or speak in the wrong voice, and the illusion would pop like a soap bubble, and I’d feel itchier and more miserable than ever. What did I think would happen? That these boys would transform as I fucked them, whisper little prince into my ear as they came?
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
And how was I supposed to live with this, this…problem, on base? I had at least nine months left of this deployment, and it was too much to hope Colchester would disappear on his own. No, I would just have to shove it down and pretend it away. That was the only answer.
Soon it was time to go back to Ukraine, and we bid Morgan goodbye at the train station. She and I shared a brief hug, and I kissed her on the cheek out of habit, but with Colchester, she lingered longer in his arms, kissing him on the mouth and keeping his face close to hers with a hand on his neck as she said goodbye. She’d traded her morning beauty routine for more time in bed with Colchester, and with her loose, messy hair and those unusually flushed cheeks, she almost looked like a different woman. A woman who smiled genuinely, who looked at the world with bright eyes. And as I paced away to have a cigarette and give them some privacy, I marveled that both brother and sister should fall so hard for the same man.
Surely he realized that. Surely he saw it, the way we both acted around him.
And it was when the wind blew around us and Morgan’s skirt fluttered up around her thighs that I saw the welts there, red and scattered, mingled with marks that looked a few days older, and I began to understand a little. Not all the way—that would take years—but I began to see that Colchester’s attention would be a dangerous, painful thing to have.
Which of course made me want it all the more.
The fighting began in earnest. They didn’t call it war for four more years, but it didn’t matter what they called in Washington, D.C. It was war.
We all knew it, our allies knew it, our enemies knew it. Even the hills seemed to know it, rain and fog turning the area around our base into a shrouded quagmire. The week after Colchester and I returned, my platoon and I were patrolling a series of paths on the other side of the low mountain closest to base. There’d been reports of separatists using the nearby valleys to hide from the Ukrainian and Romanian land forces, and it was our job to flush them out. So far, we’d turned up nothing, but the longer we stayed out there, the more time I had away from Colchester, and so I pushed Dag and Wu and the others to go deeper with me into the mountains. The trails were so steep and jagged they could only be navigated by foot, and it was while we were finding our way past a snarl of rocks and fallen trees that it happened.
It sounded like a snap, like a small branch had cracked.
Except it wasn’t a branch.
“Get down!” I yelled. “Down! Down!”
The woods lit up with bullets after that, just like our drills, but these weren’t paint bullets this time, this was real. I thought of Colchester’s words the first time we met, they don’t have fake bullets, Lieutenant Moore, and I thought of our drill in the forest when he’d shot me in the arm.
I thought about his fingers on my arm, cruel and gentle in turns.
But the drill… “They’re in the stream bed,” I shouted into my radio, thinking of Colchester and his men coming up over the lip of the creek. “Concentrate fire there.”
We did, with Dag and I leading the way. Pop, pop, pop went the gunshots as they echoed through the trees. I heard men shouting, talking, running and reloading, and I anxiously took stock of them every minute or so, shooting into the creek bed and then dodging behind a tree and counting all the crouching, uninjured bodies that were under my protection.
It was the first time I ever exchanged live fire. The first time I ever shot my gun knowing I could kill someone. The adrenaline rush was violently potent, the kind of intoxication that there aren’t words for. And once we’d driven the separatists off, found a safe place to shelter down until we could catch our breath and double-check that everyone really was unscathed, I closed my eyes and let the adrenaline take me. The fear and the exhilaration. There was no self-loathing here, no Colchester. Just me and a cocktail of hormones honed by evolution to make me see life for the pulsing, vibrant thing it was. The birds seemed louder, the wildflowers more fragrant. The fog seemed alive, sparkling and benevolent. Even the mud seemed magical.
I wasn’t the only one affected, either. Dag and Wu—normally both quiet men—were joking and laughing almost giddily. Other men sat and stared into the fog-laced trees or down at their boots, looking dazed and a little lost, as if they’d just woken up.
I wondered which kind of man Colchester would be after a fight. Amped and antsy? Quiet and stunned? Neither?
But there wasn’t time to think about it after that. I went from seeing Colchester every day to seeing him not at all as our captain struggled to adjust to the new level of hostility. Getting shot at became a regular pastime of ours, our walks through the villages became shadowboxes of jumpy distrust and tension, and the whole company was scattered in those early days, doing patrols, establishing outposts, spooking the rebels in the woods. We still thought we could scare them off back then. A few bullets, the might of the U.S. military standing behind the allied forces in the region, cue a few fighter jets flying overhead, and we thought they’d just drop their ancient Russian guns and run.
They didn’t.
Three months of this blossoming hell had worn deep paths in the hills and scarred the tranquil groves with grenades and artillery shells, and still nothing had essentially changed. The separatists hadn’t gained any ground, but they hadn’t lost any either. There had been countless firefights and a handful of hospital-worthy injuries, but no deaths. The civilians in the area kept doggedly living their lives as usual—farming sugar beets and oats, logging trees and mining coal. We doggedly shot and were shot at and nothing made any difference.
We all lived in a Mobius strip of a life—press forward, fall back, fight in the valley, fight on the mountain, fight in the valley again. I slept on the ground more than I slept in my bed. I got good at smelling danger; I got smarter about protecting my men. And if there were moments when I closed my eyes and thought only of Colchester reaching across a train table to touch a bruise, then no one needed to know.
The Mobius strip tore one day when the captain called me into his office and I saw Morgan sitting there, looking as polished and expensive as ever. I nearly laughed to see her there in her nude heels and cigarette pants, looking all ready to shoot a Chanel ad (or Dior or whatever the fuck it was she said.) But she was also the prettiest, cleanest thing I’d seen in three months, the first non-war thing I’d seen in three months, and even without all that, she was kin, whatever coldly loyal thing that meant in our family. I stopped my laughter.
Instead, I dropped into a chair next to her and crossed my legs. “Only you would show up in the middle of a war dressed like this.”
Morgan arched a perfect brow, crossing her legs to match mine. “I’m here on business actually. Well, and I wanted to see you.”
But the way her foot traced anxious circles in the air betrayed her. She wouldn’t be anxious if this were about business—hell, she wouldn’t be anxious if I dragged her out on a patrol right this minute, armed only with her Burberry trench coat and a slingshot.
No. She was here for Colchester. I was certain of it.
The captain interjected then, explaining how Morgan’s surprise visit came to be, that her father’s—my stepfather’s—lobbying firm represented one of the largest suppliers of Army munitions, and the supplier wanted a liaison to make sure that field use was going smoothly now that hostilities had escalated. It was bullshit, and what the captain didn’t say was that everyone up and down the ladder had greased the wheels because they knew Morgan’s stepmother was Vivienne Moore, and if Vivienne Moore’s children wanted to do anything at all, then by God, you let them, unless you wanted her to rain hell down on your head.
Vivienne Moore scared everyone. Even me, and I was her son.
The captain stood. “And now I’ll leave you two alone for a moment. While she has a visitor’s pass for the daylight hours during her stay, Ms. Leffey is sleeping down in the village, and I’ve arranged for us to give her a ride back this evening, for safety reasons.”
“I’ll do it,” I offered. I gave Morgan the sweetest, biggest, fakest smile I could. “Anything to spend more time with my sissy.”
The captain smiled, not seeing the way Morgan wrinkled her nose at me, and then he left us alone.
The moment the door closed, I leaned back and examined my nails, ragged and dry from all the fighting and patrolling. “You won’t be able to have another fuck-fest with Colchester, you know. Did you hear those booms twenty minutes ago? Those are mortars. Not ours. Word is that this is the week the separatists are going to move into the valley in full force.”
Her nose wrinkle didn’t go away. “Then just bomb them.”
I stared at her. “Did you not see all those fucking farms and cottages and tiny little hamlets with their tiny little churches? That’s where the separatists do most of their hiding. Hell, half of them live here. We can’t bomb them without bombing the innocent people too.”
“They’re not innocent if they’re sheltering rebels,” Morgan said indifferently. “We agreed to help these countries suffering from the Carpathian problem, so let’s help them and get out of here.”
“I didn’t realize you were so hawkish.”
She turned her pretty head away from me, as if bored, and I observed the delicate line of her jaw, the way muscles tensed in her cheeks.
“Or maybe you’re not that hawkish,” I said slowly. “Maybe you’re just upset that you can’t run away with Colchester and have lots of little Colchester babies with him while he’s fighting a war?”
Her eyes flashed. “Fuck you. And for your information, I didn’t come here for a fuck-fest. I came because I wanted to talk to Maxen, that’s all. He hasn’t answered any of my emails.”
I laughed at that. “Did you really just listen to all that I said about mortars and rebels and feel like we have lots of extra time for answering emails?”
“Everyone has time to answer emails, Embry. If the Pope has time to write blog posts, then soldiers have time to email.”
“As always, Morgan, you’ve found a way to dredge up the most selfish possible lens for any situation. Have you considered that maybe he doesn’t want to talk to you?”
I didn’t know why I said it. I didn’t have any proof that Colchester regretted anything that had happened with Morgan in Prague; in fact, the few times we’d spent more than a few minutes in each other’s presence, he seemed to have nothing but a fond nostalgia for their liaison.
“Remember Prague?” he’d say when we were waiting in line at the canteen. “Remember how the fog moved over the river?”
I remember how the fog moved over you, I’d want to say, but I wouldn’t. I’d just nod. “It was a good trip.”
“It was,” he’d say, staring at his tray. “Lots of beautiful nights.”
Or, when we were unpacking a week’s worth of dirty clothes in the laundry room, he’d say, “I need another dance lesson, Lieutenant Moore. Think someone has a Viennese waltz CD around here?”
“It’s 2004, Colchester. Who still has CDs? Haven’t you heard of iPods?”
“Or I could hum the music,” he’d suggest and I’d snort.
“You can’t hum shit.”
And then he’d try to hum something, the theme song from Friends or the chorus to Usher’s “Yeah!” which had been playing non-stop from the rec room for weeks, and I’d start throwing my balled up socks at him to get him to stop. And then he’d say again, quieter, “I still want to learn how to dance.”
“Sounds like an excellent chapter title for your memoir.”
Colchester had wrinkled up that sweet forehead. “Why would I write a memoir?”
“For when you run for President. You can’t be a President without a book first.”
And those wrinkles would get deeper, and he’d look so puzzled and handsome at my joke that my ribs would fracture from the pressure of it. And then to make that fracturing stop, I’d change the subject and say, “Bet you miss those nights in Prague.”
And his look would grow thoughtful and soft. “Yes,” he’d say. “There are things I miss about Prague for sure.”
All this is to say, I was certain that Colchester enjoyed every moment he spent with Morgan, but I didn’t want to tell Morgan that. It was petty of me, especially because she looked so downcast after I said it, and then I felt a resurgence of the guilt that chewed at me every night, the guilt that said, you’re selfish, you’re evil, you shoot guns at people and you don’t care if they live or die. And now it said, you can’t have Colchester, he doesn’t want you. Are you really going to deny Morgan and him a chance to be happy?
“I don’t know why I said that,” I said quickly. “I’m sure he does. If I see him before you do, I’ll make sure that he knows you’re here.”
“Good.” She breathed out a long breath and looked at me with an uncharacteristically vulnerable look. “I just need to talk to him is all. Not even long, if he doesn’t have long. But I just…” She looked down at her lap and twisted the belt of her trench coat around her fingers. “Please, Embry. I know it was just a week, but I can’t stop thinking about him. About us—how I want there to be an us. And he needs to know…”
How could life get any worse in the middle of a war?
Why, having to match-make for Colchester and Morgan again, that’s how.
“Okay,” I said, scrubbing at my face. “I’ll take care of it.”
But it ended up being harder to take care of than I thought. Colchester was on patrol in the next valley over, and I couldn’t exactly radio in to tell him my sister was here and wanted to fuck him. I finally managed to convey it, awkwardly enough, by radioing him and telling him he had a visitor from Prague.
“A visitor from Prague?” Even through the static, he sounded doubtful.
Sigh. “You know, man. An old friend from Prague. She’s here on base to see you. She misses you.”
“Oh.” Even though the response was short, I could hear Colchester’s men laughing at him over the radio. “Tell her I’ll see her soon.”
But soon took a while, and after two days, Morgan was downright fretful, pacing in my room as I packed up my bag for my own patrol in a few days.
“Why won’t he come back? What are they doing out there?”
I had folded the same blanket five or six times, just so I didn’t have to look at her flushed face and be reminded of how powerful her feelings were, which only reminded me of how conflicted I was about all this. “Morgan, please. He has a job to do. I have a job to do. You, on the other hand, are only pretending to work. Why don’t you go to Kiev for a few days? Go to a museum, see some old Soviet shit.”
She sat on my bed, chewing on her lip, seeming to turn over this idea. There had been a time when she’d been an architectural studies major, before the redoubtable Vivienne had pressured her to switch to poli-sci. Deep inside this baby lobbyist was still a girl who dragged me to every museum in every place we ever visited.
“The guidebook in my hotel room says there’s a medieval church in Glein. Maybe I’ll go see that tomorrow.” She sighed, closing her eyes. “I just need to talk to him. Is that so much for the universe to give me?”
I grew up in Seattle. Whenever white girls in their twenties started talking about “the universe,” I knew the conversation had reached the end of reason.
“Go to the church, Morgan. Take some pictures for Mom and your dad. I bet by the time you get back Colchester will be done with his patrol and you can talk to him, and sneak him back to your hotel for more spanking sessions.”
She glanced up at me with a sharp look, but she didn’t respond.
And when I kissed her goodbye, I had no idea that the next time I saw her she’d be bleeding from a Carpathian bullet and surrounded by flames.
