The Complete Veterans Affairs Romances: Gay Military Romances

by A. E. Wasp

  Chris leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. He rocked back and forth as if there was too much energy in his body. “It’s everything. It’s nothing. I don’t know. I hate feeling like this.” He grabbed his head with both hands, fingers tangled in his hair.

  “I can never tell if it’s a reaction to something real, or if the feeling comes first, and I’m only looking for a justification for feeling like shit. I just want it to stop. And I feel like I should be doing something, but everything I think of seems wrong, and I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do.”

  It was the first time Chris had asked for it directly, and Jay-Cee grabbed onto to the opportunity the request offered. He could see a way they could both get what they needed. “If I tell you what to do, will you listen? Do exactly what I say even if you don’t understand why?”

  “Yes.” Chris looked hopeful.

  “You shouldn’t say yes so quickly like that,” Jay-Cee said despite the small thrill it gave him.

  “I trust you. You’re not going to tell me to go out and get shit-faced or anything are you?” Chris tried to smile.

  “No. I’m not. But if I did, you wouldn’t have to listen. You know that, right?”

  “I’m tired and upset and frightened for my friend, but I’m not an idiot.” Chris gave him a look that implied that Jay-Cee might be one, though.

  “True enough.” Jay-Cee ran his fingers through Chris’s hair. “Go home.”

  “I don’t know if I can handle this alone,” Chris said softly.

  “You can. And you will. For Benny. You need to be strong for him; you need to be there for him. And you won’t be alone. I’ll be right on the other end of the phone.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” Disengaging from Chris, Jay-Cee stood up, and he walked over to the overstuffed bookcase against one wall. Searching through the books, he pulled out two books and a CD. He walked back to the couch. “This is what you are going to do. Tomorrow - not tonight - start reading these books. They’ll give you some insights into the psychology of war, the psychology of killing, and what it’s like in the aftermath.”

  Chris stared at the books as if they were venomous snakes.

  “I know,” Jay-Cee said sympathetically. “It’s not light reading. It’s not going to be easy. That’s why you aren’t starting them tonight.”

  Chris gently reached out and lifted up the top book and read the title out loud. “On Killing?”

  “Most war books are about the process of war,” Jay-Cee explained. “They focus on the strategies. The ethics and repercussions of war on a global scale. This book focuses specifically on what it’s like to be in a kill or be killed situation. But don’t read it tonight,” Jay-Cee reminded him. He handed Chris the CD. “Do you have a CD player in your car or is that too old school?”

  “I have a CD player.”

  “Then listen to this on the way home.”

  Chris took the CD from Jay-Cee and added it to the pile.

  “Do you have a bathtub?”

  “In the car?” A little of the dullness receded from Chris’s eyes, and some of his usual spark returned.

  Jay-Cee felt something loosen in his chest. He’d made the right call. “Brat. Listen to this on your way home. Try not to think of anything besides the music and driving. When you get home, start the bath. Then call me. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Chris gripped the books and the CD. “I can do that.”

  “I know you can.” He pushed Chris gently towards the stairs. “Call me when you’ve started the bath.”

  This was the perfect solution. Jay-Cee could do this much for Chris. Maybe this unconventional relationship would be enough to satisfy both of them.

  16 – If I’m alone in this, I don’t think I can face it

  Chris listened to the arias as he drove across town to his apartment on the Western edge of town. As the fear, confusion, and adrenaline drained from him, they left behind a deep mental and physical fatigue. As much he hated to admit it, Jay-Cee had been right to send him home.

  Sleeping next to Jay-Cee, even platonically, would have only added to his stress and confusion, and the next morning would have been awkward. This way, he could sleep in his own bed and face the morning with a clearer head. At least he hoped it would be clearer.

  Chris’s neighborhood consisted mostly of aging quadplexes with cracked asphalt parking lots filled with old pickups and beater cars that had seen better days. He could have afforded any place in this town, but his needs were simple. Besides, he had good neighbors who couldn’t care less what he looked like or what kind of car he drove. He liked the way they watched out for each other and the way their kids played together.

  That said, the feature that had sold him on the place was the view. The only thing between him and a clear view of the front range of the Rocky Mountains was a two-lane road and windswept field.

  He’d spent hours watching the play of light and shadow across the face of the foothills, from the pink alpenglow of the sunrise to the dark shadows of clouds flowing like mercury over the evergreens. He loved watching the edge of an approaching rain storm as it slid over the tops of the hills and across the reservoir, thunder and lightning heralding its arrival.

  Popping the CD out of the player, he climbed the steps to his apartment.

  Smaller than the condo his mother had purchased for him in Denver, his place in Red Deer was furnished with a mixture of thrift store furniture and items he’d found in the antique markets. Except for his bed. That he’d paid top dollar for and he didn’t regret a cent of it. The second bedroom he’d turned into a painting studio, and canvases in various stages of completion lined the walls.

  Exhaustion dragged him down as he walked to the bathroom without turning on the light. He pushed the shower curtain aside, turned the taps, and then called Jay-Cee. The water pouring from the faucet almost drowned out the sound of Jay-Cee’s phone ringing.

  He picked up on the second ring. “Home safe?”

  “Yeah.” Chris slumped down onto the closed toilet lid.

  “Bath running?”

  Chris loved Jay-Cee’s voice, it was warm and deep. A solid voice, one that you wanted to listen to. He tried to remember if they’d ever spoken on the phone before. “Can’t you hear it?” he asked. “I’m too tired to move out of the bathroom.”

  “Poor baby,” Jay-Cee said.

  Chris held the phone against his head. Jay-Cee’s voice in his ear was so close, so intimate; he could almost feel his breath on his skin, see the hint of a smile on Jay-Cee’s face.

  “I bet a boy like you has some fancy bath oil or bubble bath, right?”

  Chris chuckled. “I do. And so do you.”

  “Pour some in.”

  Chris stood up and opened the cheap metal medicine cabinet. “I have several. Which one should I use?” Steam swirled up from the surface of the bathwater, heating up the room.

  “Do you have any that smells woodsy? It feels like a woodsy night. Not a damp wood, like the deciduous forests of the East Coast, but dry and sharp like the pine forest we have here. Reminiscent of the scent of the sun on pine needles. Like that cologne you wear.”

  It gave Chris a thrill that Jay-Cee knew what he smelled like. Chris examined his bath oil options and picked one that seemed like it might fit. He opened the cap and sniffed. Oh, perfect. “Actually, I do,” he said into the phone.

  “Then pour it in.”

  Chris held the small bottle over the water and let a thin trickle of oil fall into the tub. It swirled in a rainbow sheen in the eddies of the water rushing from the faucet, and the scent rose on the clouds of steam. The tightness in Chris’s shoulders relaxed, and he sighed.

  “Did you do it?” Jay-Cee asked in his ear.

  “Yes,” Chris answered, dragging his fingers through the slick of oil.

  “Good boy.”

  The words caressed his ear, and Chris shivered. He wanted to hear it again. The water in the tub was getting perilously close to the top,
so Chris shut it off.

  “Is the tub full?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now take off your clothes,” Jay-Cee ordered. “And get in the tub.”

  “I have to put the phone down.”

  “That’s okay. Put me on speaker.”

  Chris undressed quickly, folding his clothes and stacking them on the toilet seat. Could Jay-Cee hear him? Was he picturing Chris stripping? He held the phone cautiously as he slipped into the hot water with a sigh he couldn’t hold back.

  “Sounds like it feels good,” Jay-Cee said, voice tinny from the phone speaker. There was the clink of ice against glass, and Chris imagined Jay-Cee with a drink in his hand.

  Chris shut off the speaker and picked the phone back up, wanting the intimacy of Jay-Cee’s voice directly in his ear.

  “Feels amazing.” Chris closed his eyes and leaned his head against the cheap fiberglass enclosure. Taking a deep breath of the sweet-smelling steam, he let his mind go blank. Jay-Cee was quiet on the other end, but even the silence felt intimate.

  “Talk to me,” Chris asked.

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. I just like your voice. Read to me?”

  “Hmm. How about a poem?”

  “Perfect.”

  Back in his apartment, Jay-Cee stretched out on his couch, head resting on the arm, and pictured Chris soaking in the water, hair curling from the steam, cheeks flushed from the heat. A poem. He could do that. Anything to keep the connection. He picked one he knew by heart, one that made him think of a younger Chris, crawling through city streets, searching for something eternally out of reach.

  “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,” he began.

  “‘ngelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” Chris continued, surprising Jay-Cee, “who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.”

  But then again what about Chris didn’t surprise him? Jay-Cee would never get tired of discovering new things about him. “I should have known you would know Ginsberg.” Jay-Cee sipped his whiskey. Lately, he’d felt the call of it more and more. Not for oblivion, but for the sense memories that came with the smoky aftertaste. The memories of shared drinks with long gone friends in places far away.

  “We lived it,” Chris said, voice soft but not sad. “Some things never change. ‘Who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls.’” Chris had a beautiful speaking voice, clear and warm.

  It seemed it was a night for old ghosts for both of them. Jay-Cee heard the water slosh softly, and Chris made a pleased sound. “What?”

  “I like the way the water beads up and rolls down my arm because of the bath oil. It tickles.”

  Jay-Cee could picture Chris rising from the tub, water beading on skin pink from the heat, sweet smelling, and soft from the bath oil. Drops would run down his body, tracing the outlines of his muscles and catching in the dusting of blond hair between his legs. He took another sip.

  He recited some more lines of “Howl” until Chris made a comment about the repetition of Denver in the poem, and the conversation veered off to Kerouac and the ubiquity of the highway in the American mythos.

  “I think my toes are turning into prunes,” Chris finally said.

  Jay-Cee checked the time. They’d been talking for half an hour. He’d lost track of how many times he’d heard Chris add fresh hot water to the bath. “How do you feel?”

  “Amazing. Thank you.”

  “Think you can sleep?” Jay-Cee wished he could tuck Chris, all clean and fresh smelling into his bed.

  “I’m half asleep now,” Chris admitted.

  “Go on then. Get out. Go to sleep.”

  “Hold on.”

  Jay-Cee heard Chris get out of the tub and the thump he imagined was Chris putting the phone down while he dried off.

  “Jay-Cee?” Chris asked into the phone. He sounded closer than if he had been sitting on the couch next to Jay-Cee.

  “I’m still here.”

  Chris sighed in relief. “Will you stay on the phone for a while longer?”

  “Until you’re asleep?”

  “Yes,” Chris whispered as if he were embarrassed to ask.

  “Of course.” How could he not? This was the perfect intimacy. He could give this to Chris, without tainting him with the blood on Jay-Cee’s hands. With the distance, he could rebuild the boundaries between them.

  There was a rustling and the creak of a mattress. “I’m back,” Chris said.

  “All tucked in?”

  “Um-hm. Tell me a story?”

  Jay-Cee smiled at the request. “Won’t that keep you awake?”

  “Nothing could keep me awake right now.”

  Jay-Cee got up from the couch and walked over to his bookcase. “How’s your French?”

  “N’est pas très bonne.”

  “Not good is excellent.” Jay-Cee ran his fingers along the spines of the books, finding the one he sought more by feel than by sight. He pulled the thin paperback off the shelf. As he walked back to the couch, he picked up a pair of reading glasses he was starting to need more frequently.

  “I suppose you’re fluent in it?” Chris asked.

  “Mais oui.”

  “You must have paid more attention in school than I did.”

  “I had to take it at West Point, as well as prep school. Plus Jason and I were stationed in Brussels with NATO for a while.” Oh, crap. Why had he mentioned Jason?

  “Jason?”

  Jay-Cee sighed. “Another time. I promise.” He settled back on the couch, flicking on the reading lamp. His reflection stared back at him from the night-mirrored window. “Ready for your story?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Close your eyes.” Jay-Cee opened the book, though he could almost quote the first part from memory. “Le Petit Prince.”

  “Oh!” Chris said, pleased. “I love this one.”

  “Hush. Just listen.” Jay-Cee slipped on the reading glass and started reading.

  “Lorsque j’avais six ans j’ai vu, une fois, une magnifique image, dans un livre sur la Forêt Vierge qui s’appelait ‘Histoires Vécues’. Ça représentait un serpent boa qui avalait un fauve. Voilà la copie du dessin.”

  (Once when I was six years old, I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal.)

  Melting ice and a few golden drops of whiskey was all that remained of Jay-Cee’s drink by the time Chris’s breathing became deep and even.

  Jay-Cee stayed on the line for a few minutes, listening to Chris breath, and trying to will away the soft ache of longing in his heart.

  17 – There’ll never be a better chance to change your mind

  Jay-cee’s hands trembled slightly on the steering wheel as he sped towards the hospital. His rational mind knew Chris wasn’t hurt, but apparently, his body hadn’t gotten the memo yet. Just hearing the words ‘Chris’ and ‘hospital’ in the same sentence had made his head spin and his heart lodge in his throat.

  Benny was who he should be worried about. He had collapsed on the sidewalk outside the studio and some strangers called 911. It had to be related to the brain damage Chris had mentioned. There was more going on than Benny had let on.

  Why was this one mild incident affecting him so much? How many men had he seen in hospitals, bent and broken by roadside bombs and enemy attacks? This was nothing like that. Benny was alive and as whole as he had been yesterday. They just knew more about what was wrong with him now.

  Jay-Cee’s imagination supplied him
with a dozen possible scenarios of the explosion that had caused Benny’s injuries. In every one of them, his mind’s eye replaced Benny’s face with Chris’s.

  He pulled into the hospital parking lot and parked his SUV in the first open spot he saw.

  Cool air brushed across his skin as the automatic doors to the lobby slid open. His eyes scanned the room until he found Chris in the middle of a crowd of people. When their eyes locked, some of the tension left Jay-Cee’s body.

  The boy took a few tentative steps towards him, and then stopped as if he wasn’t sure what was allowed.

  Jay-Cee waved him over impatiently, and Chris closed the distance in a flash, wrapping Jay-Cee in a tight hug. Jay-Cee’s hands hovered awkwardly over Chris’ back for a second, then he returned the hug. “It’s okay,” he said. “Everything is going to be okay.”

  Chris trembled under Jay-Cee’s touch, so he kept his arm around Chris’ shoulder as he introduced himself to Mikey. “Very nice to finally meet you. I’ve heard many good things about you.”

  “I’ve heard the same about you. Benny talks about you all the time. He loves working with you.” Mikey glanced quickly at where Jay-Cee’s arm wrapped around Chris. Jay-Cee couldn’t bring himself to care. All he wanted was to get this over with and get Chris home and take care of him.

  Oh God. He was in love with Chris.

  His heart kicked hard against his breastbone at the thought, and he absently rubbed his chest as he tried to convince himself otherwise.

  Mikey asked him a question about insurance, and he spent a few minutes getting that straightened out. He could feel his patience running out as Chris introduced him to the others. It was good to put faces to names, and they seemed to care about Chris and Benny, but it was hard to concentrate on anything other than Chris’ body next to his.

  “Do you need me to stay here?” he asked Mikey.

  “No. Thank you. We’re good. There’s no point in everybody waiting around.”

  “Will you call me when you have some information?” Jay-Cee needed to know.

  “I promise.” Mikey shook Jay-Cee’s hand. “Thanks again for bringing this by.”

  “No problem.”