by L. A. Witt
“Hey.” He flipped the page in his own menu. “Officers like comfort food as much as the next guy.”
“Fair enough. And I guess it is balanced out by all this kale bullshit.” I wrinkled my nose at the salads.
Clint just laughed.
After we’d put them aside, placed our orders, and gotten our drinks, he met my gaze. “So what do you think of the job so far?”
“Don’t really know yet. That GM2 sitting behind me is cute.”
Clint shot me a pointed look. “Logan . . .”
I put up my hands. “Nothing wrong with checking people out, right?”
“No, but . . .” He sighed. “Just be careful, all right?”
I tried not to let my frustration show. He meant well, but I still didn’t like the feeling of being on a short leash. Regardless of whether I needed that leash, which I probably did. “I said he’s cute, okay? I didn’t say I was going to hunt him down on Grindr or anything. Relax.”
Clint pushed out a breath through his nose, and some tension eased in his shoulders. “I’m sorry. I just really want this to work out for you.”
I dropped my gaze. “I know. And I appreciate it. I owe you big time.”
“No, you don’t.” His voice was soft, and that almost made it tougher to take what he was saying. “I know you’re busting your ass to straighten out your life, and I want to help. I’ve been there, you know?”
Without meeting his eyes, I winced. I still felt guilty as fuck for how much harder I’d made things for him when he’d been trying to get himself back together. I didn’t remember much about that period in either of our lives, but there were a few too many clear memories of Clint’s pained expression when he told me for the hundredth time that, no, he really didn’t want a drink. He’d spelled it out to me, and I’d gotten it when I was sober, but the minute I’d start drinking, I’d start pushing for him to join me. It hadn’t mattered how much that could sabotage his world—I’d felt like shit, and I hadn’t wanted to feel that way alone.
He could remind me over and over that he’d forgiven me, and I’d still hate myself for how I’d been when we were together. Why he ever even took my call two months ago, I’d never know. I was just glad he had.
Clint picked up his drink, and as he did, the light caught on his wedding ring again, and I fought another wince. There was no point in dwelling on what might’ve happened if I’d unfucked myself before Clint had dumped me. We were both different people now. He was happy with Travis. Sometimes, though, I wondered. If I’d been a little less of an asshole, we—
“Hey.” Under the table, he gave my foot a nudge with his boot. “Earth to Logan.”
I shook myself. “Sorry. I’m still, uh, kind of shocked we’re here.”
“It’s just the O club.” He smiled playfully, but something in his eyes told me he knew what I meant. After a moment, he sighed, shaking his head. “You’ve got to start forgiving yourself, all right? I know exactly what it’s like, destroying your life with a bottle. Believe me, I do.” He sat up and touched my forearm. “I don’t know exactly what you went through, but I get it, and I’ll do whatever I can to help you pick up the pieces.”
I had to force back a sudden lump in my throat. “Thanks.”
He gave my arm a squeeze before pulling his hand back. “I know you’re really trying. Which is why I want you to be careful with that GM2 in your office.”
“I don’t even know if he’s gay, so . . .” I shrugged.
“Still.” He paused. “I mean, there’s nothing that says you can’t date someone at work. Especially since you’re a civilian. But what happens if shit goes south?”
I inclined my head. “Says the man who married someone in the same office.”
“Same floor, yeah. But we didn’t work right next to each other. We could actually avoid each other if we needed to. You two are practically face to face, and you’ll have to interact constantly.” He chewed the inside of his cheek. “Look, I’m not going to tell you how to run your personal life, or how to interact with your coworkers. I just really want to see this work out for you.”
“I know. And I appreciate it.”
He gave me a soft smile.
I returned it, but I felt like an idiot too. Clint was right. No matter how good-looking my coworker was, I had to stay focused. If I fucked up this job, there weren’t exactly a lot of employers falling all over themselves to hire my ass. Definitely not for what I was making here.
Didn’t matter how cute Casey was. Or if he was gay. Or if he was single.
I wasn’t ready to date anyone—never mind a coworker—until I had my life back on the rails.
“The O club?” Casey chuckled as I sat back down at my desk. “Someone’s got expensive taste.”
“It’s not expensive,” I said.
“No, it’s not.” Diego was leaning against the copier and didn’t look up from the drab green file folder propped on his forearm. “Mark and I go there all the time.”
“Mark?” I asked.
“My fiancé,” Diego said dismissively. To Casey and Sarah, he went on. “He loves that place, and it’s no worse than the shit you two keep getting from the food court.” He paused, then muttered, “Fucking tastes better too.”
“Right?” My boss is gay too? Whoa. “The food was awesome.”
Casey grunted. “Well, not all of us have officers willing to escort us over there.”
“As if you need an officer to cart your ass in there.” Sarah rolled her eyes. “It’s open to everyone, remember?”
“Yeah, but I don’t like the brass looking down their noses at me while I’m trying to eat.”
“They’ll do that even if you have an officer with you, baby doll,” she said.
“Bite me.” Casey turned to me. “How did you score lunch with Commander Fraser, anyway?”
“Oh. You know.” I laughed nervously. “Exes in high places.”
Both their heads whipped toward me.
“Ex-whats in what now?” Sarah asked.
I gulped. “Uh. Exes. In high places.” I gestured toward the door. “Clint—Commander Fraser is my ex.” It wasn’t like Clint was closeted, and half the building already knew a little too well that we’d dated. Might as well own it.
She closed her eyes and forced out a breath. Casey was trying and failing to smother a laugh, his shoulders shaking with the effort. With a huff, Sarah leaned down, and I heard something rattling around. Then she plucked a Mounds bar from her candy bowl, wrapped a couple of twenty-dollar bills around it, and sent it sailing at Casey’s head. He ducked and it missed, but barely. Now he wasn’t hiding his laughter anymore, especially as he tore open the wrapper on the candy bar.
“Sweet!” He beamed. “Money and candy.”
Sarah sighed as Casey tossed the tiny candy bar into his mouth.
I glanced back and forth between them, then at Diego, who was watching me with a smirk on his lips. I gestured at my coworkers. “Am I, uh, missing something?”
“Welcome to training.” Diego laughed, closing the folder in his hand and pushing away from the copier. “Where nothing is safe from betting.”
“Oh.” I shifted my gaze toward Casey, who was trying to compose himself. “You bet that I was gay?”
He shrugged like it was nothing. “I also bet a week’s worth of filing detail that you were a Steelers fan.”
I blinked.
Sarah gave another long-suffering sigh and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Logan, so help me, if you’re a Steelers fan . . .”
“I’m, uh . . .” I cleared my throat. “No. Why would I be?”
“Yes!” She pumped her fist, then pointed at Casey. “Get filing, biatch.”
He groaned, rolling his eyes before glaring at me. “What the hell, man?”
I showed my palms. “Hey, I never said I was a Steelers fan.”
“No, but your car has a Steelers sticker on the bumper.”
I snorted. “Sticker came with the car. Sorry, man.”
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“Damn it,” he grumbled. “Now I have to do her filing for a week.” He shot me a playfully disgusted look. “Couldn’t you have at least pretended to be a Steelers fan? For like ten minutes?”
“Sorry, dude. A man has to have standards.”
He huffed, shook his head, and turned toward his monitor.
I stared at his back. Okay, so I got that he’d noticed the Steelers sticker, but was I reading between the lines about their little bet? Had they made a bet about me and Clint? Or that I was gay? How the hell would he have picked up on that? I couldn’t resist and, after a moment of stunned silence, said, “Okay, I have to know what the hell you guys were betting on and what gave me away.”
Sarah made a sound like she was trying desperately not to laugh. Casey kept his back to me, but it wasn’t enough to hide the pink spreading to his ears and the nape of his neck. Without turning around, he pointed at Sarah. “She started it.”
“What?” she squeaked. “I did not!”
“Liar.”
Something sailed across the walkway between their cubes, and Casey ducked as the pad of Post-its bounced off the cabinet above his head. He snickered and tossed it back.
I stared at them.
“And on that note . . .” Casey got up and stuffed some binders and papers into his backpack. “Some of us have to go teach.” He pulled the pack onto his shoulders. “I’ll see you guys in a bit.”
“You didn’t answer my question, though,” I protested.
“Yeah, I did.” He settled onto his crutches and nodded sharply at Sarah. “It was her.”
Sarah growled something I didn’t understand.
After Casey had hobbled out of the office, I turned to her and raised an eyebrow.
She put up her hands and shook her head. “Don’t look at me.”
“But he—”
“Oh, I know. But he’s a lying rat bastard.”
“Uh-huh.” I drummed my fingers beside my keyboard. “So, what tipped him off?”
“Hell if I know, honey. You’ll have to ask him.”
I rolled my eyes and groaned.
Sarah laughed. “Welcome to training, baby.” She paused. “And listen, the three of us do get a little crazy sometimes. Ripping on each other and shit like that. If it’s too much or it bugs you, just say so.”
Diego came out of his cube, his jacket on and a thick stack of folders under his arm. “What she said. We’re just having a little fun, yeah?”
I nodded, but smiled. “I spent three years in Iraq with a platoon of Marines. I’m pretty sure I can handle it.”
Diego sobered a little. “You did?”
“Yeah. Long time ago.”
“Me too. Well, Afghanistan, not Iraq. But still.”
Our eyes locked. There was something about combat vets, I’d been learning since I’d started actually dealing with my past. That telepathy, like we didn’t even need to talk about where we’d been or what we’d done. He got it. I got it. That was all that mattered. I hadn’t realized Diego was a vet—though it made sense if he had a DOD position—and now that I was looking at him, I realized he had some scars next to his eye. I wondered if those had come from his combat days. Or if his knee injury had.
I didn’t ask, though, and he didn’t say.
“Anyway.” He adjusted the folders under his arm. “Fraser and I have a meeting with the CO. Hopefully I’ll be back before five, but if not, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I smiled. “Yeah, see you tomorrow.”
I switched on the kitchen light and flinched away from the blinding brightness.
The clock on the microwave said 2:37 a.m. I had to be up in T-minus four hours, and I desperately needed to be awake and not dragging ass for my second day on the job, but I didn’t go back to bed. It wasn’t like I’d sleep anyway.
Instead, I grabbed the black nylon bag of pencils off the top of the microwave. They rattled in my hand while I contemplated the sketchbooks stacked between the microwave and coffeepot. It only took a second to settle on which book to use tonight. No doubt about it—this was a black sketchbook night.
I pulled it out from halfway down the stack. My hands were still trembling from the nightmare, but just touching the fake leather eased some of that shaking.
I sat at the table, flipped to the first blank page, and started drawing. Didn’t think. Just drew.
The scratch of pencil on paper was one of the most soothing sounds on the planet. Fast. Slow. Hard. Soft. It settled me down, and I didn’t question it. The smell of pencil shavings had a weirdly calming effect too.
I sketched quickly. The details and shadows would be slower, but not the lines. People told me it looked chaotic when I was at this stage, but it didn’t feel that way. It was controlled. Freeing. Organic. Calculated. Hell, it was all over the place, but whatever.
My hand moved faster as everything took shape on the page, but I had to pause occasionally to wipe my eyes or sniff. Sometimes I just had to catch my breath. Mostly, though, I kept drawing and tried to ignore the cold sweat on the back of my neck.
Finally, I sat back and shook the fatigue out of my hand as I pushed the drawing away with the other. With a little distance between it and me, I looked it over and let the image sink in.
Tonight’s dream had been about a patrol that had gone to shit. It hadn’t happened exactly the way it had in real life—dreams took liberties with details sometimes—but the sketch was the way I remembered it. The narrow alley littered with broken chunks of stone and concrete. Lance Corporal Cooper’s back a foot in front of me. The sweat-stained bandage sticking out on the left side of his neck. The way one shoulder was slightly higher than the other because of how he was holding his rifle.
The sleeve of his blouse was torn. He’d ripped it while we’d cleared a building. Snagged it on a piece of broken rebar or something. The fabric had still been hanging limply, flopping while he walked with its frayed threads billowing uselessly in the desert heat.
In front of Cooper, Sergeant Parker—Checkers, we’d called him—was signaling. Left hand upraised and patting the air. Stay quiet; I think I hear something.
The building up ahead on the right was still intact. An old shop of some sort. I couldn’t remember the Arabic lettering clearly enough, so I’d just blurred the writing.
I could still hear the sound of my own breathing as we’d walked down that eerily quiet alley. My heart had been pounding because I’d known. I’d just known. You grew a sixth sense out there. You had to. It was how you stayed alive. Mine had been pinging ever since we’d stepped off the truck, and again right then, with Cooper walking ahead of me and Checkers sounding a silent alarm.
The drawing froze that moment in time. The camera stopped a split second before everything went to shit. And it stayed there. Nothing moved. The shop didn’t explode. Chunks of concrete didn’t pelt us from all directions. Cooper didn’t scream. Checkers didn’t die. Samuels and I didn’t have to shoot a couple of insurgents and watch them crumple in the street of the village they were protecting from invaders. From us.
In the silence of my kitchen, I hugged myself and pushed out a ragged breath. It was funny how staring at the image—rather than just seeing it in my mind’s eye—didn’t send me crashing down all over again. It was the polar opposite, actually. Putting it on paper had a way of defanging it. Making it less of a thing I’d actually lived and more . . . inanimate. The process of drawing it had been cathartic, and seeing it contained on paper was soothing. I’d felt crazy explaining that to my therapist, telling her how I’d started drawing instead of drinking, and I’d expected her to look at me like I was nuts. To my surprise, she’d encouraged me to buy pencils and sketchbooks and dive in whenever I needed to.
And it helped. A lot. So I kept doing it. It kept me out of a bottle and let me sleep. Couldn’t really ask for more than that.
I exhaled hard. Now that everything was out of my system, fatigue was setting in fast. My eyelids and shoulders were getting heavy, and it
was getting harder to focus. I rubbed them, then looked at the microwave. It was 4:17 a.m. Still time to get a little sleep before work.
I closed the sketchbook, trailed my fingertips over the black cover, and then shuffled back to bed.
And I actually slept for what was left of the night.
“Oh my God.” I closed my eyes and groaned. “That feels amazing.”
The corpsman laughed. “Yeah, well. Don’t move too much, okay?”
It was just as well she’d said something—I’d almost bent my knee just to test my newly freed joint. Opening my eyes, I stared down at the lower half of my leg, which I hadn’t seen in weeks. I’d lost some serious muscle tone. The skin looked like hell too, but I tried to ignore that. A long bath later and that wouldn’t be an issue anymore.
A bath. Oh Jesus. That tub in my apartment had been driving me crazy for weeks, and now I could finally use it. Kick back with a beer in my hand and soak like a normal person instead of just staring pitifully at the empty tub. A fucking bath.
The muscles . . . well, I’d add leg day back into my workouts soon enough.
While the corpsman updated my chart, I inspected the damage. The lower half of my shin and part of my ankle were a mess of scars from the three surgeries. Well, not much from the second and third—those had been laparoscopic. The first doc had pretty much flayed my leg open, which the next guy had thought was overkill, but whatever. They were the experts, and I didn’t want to get between two dick-waving doctors. As long as they fixed my shit, I really didn’t care what it looked like.
On either side of the two-inch incision were some smaller ones where the scopes had gone in. They were little more than angry insect bites at this point, and my leg generally looked like ass, but the whole scene was a hell of a lot better than it had been a few weeks ago. The puffiness and bruising were gone, thank God. Maybe now that I wasn’t in plaster I could let my skin regain some of its tan. Right now I had one normal leg and one that might as well have come from a bleached corpse. I wondered how long it would take to even that out.
The corpsman helped me into the walking cast, showing me how to put it on and remove it. It was still annoying, having something around my leg, but it was a million times lighter than the plaster one they’d just cut off, so I didn’t bitch. Plus I could bend my knee now. The doc had decided to immobilize it while some of the tendons were healing, and now it was free again.
