The Lieutenants' Online Love

by Caro Carson

  * * *

  First Lieutenant Thane Carter was done being a badass—at least for the next twelve hours.

  He was almost home. His apartment building was visible through his windshield. He kept moving on autopilot, parking his Mustang, getting out, grabbing his long-empty coffee mug and locking the car. He put on his patrol cap, an automatic habit whenever he was outdoors in uniform, pulling the brim down just so, and headed for his building, a three-story, plain beige building, identical to the five other buildings clustered around the apartment complex’s outdoor swimming pool.

  His primary objective for the next twelve hours was to get sleep, and a lot of it, ASAP—as soon as possible. Perhaps he’d wake up after a few hours and have a pizza delivered to his door later tonight, but then he’d go right back to sleep until dawn.

  At dawn, he’d get up, put on a fresh uniform and return to duty at Fort Hood, where he was both the senior platoon leader and the acting executive officer in a military police company. That MP company, the 584th MP Company to be exact, was currently short one platoon leader, and Thane was feeling the pain.

  There were normally four platoon leaders in the company, each officer in charge of roughly thirty enlisted personnel. Most of the year, MPs trained for their wartime missions, the same as every other kind of unit stationed stateside, rehearsing likely scenarios, keeping up their qualifications on their weapons. But MPs were unique: roughly one month out of every three, they pulled garrison duty.

  Fort Hood was a sizable town, a military installation where sixty thousand soldiers and civilians worked and where tens of thousands lived with their families. Garrison duty required MPs to perform the functions of a regular civilian police department, patrolling Fort Hood in police cruisers as they did everything from traffic control to answering 911 calls. During that month, one of the four platoon leaders was always on duty as the officer in charge of law enforcement.

  Except there weren’t four platoon leaders at the moment, only three. Covering the night and weekend shifts among just three lieutenants meant that each of them was pulling a thirty-six-hour shift every third day. Officers didn’t get the next day off after working all night. Thane had worked Monday, then Monday night straight on through until Tuesday evening. That thirty-six hours had been followed by twelve hours off to sleep, hit the grocery store, get his uniform ready for the next day. Wednesday would be a straightforward twelve-hour day, but getting sleep Wednesday night was critical, because Thursday morning would start another thirty-six-hour shift straight through to Friday evening.

  The schedule was taking its toll. Law enforcement was important work. Necessary work. But after living the MP motto, Assist-Protect-Defend, for thirty-six hours straight, Thane was ready to assist himself right into the sack.

  Alone.

  To sleep.

  He was single. Never married, no current girlfriend, not even dating. No surprise there. He’d worked—what? Thane counted it up in his head as he trudged from his parking space toward his mailbox, each step heavy with exhaustion. Twelve, twelve, thirty-six, twelve...hell, he’d only had twenty-four consecutive hours off one time in the past week, and it had been that way for weeks now. They really needed to fill that fourth platoon leader slot.

  More downtime would help his sleep, but it wouldn’t help his love life. Having no time to date was only half the reason he didn’t have a woman in his life.

  The other half was the scarcity of women with whom he could spend that precious downtime. The US Army was an overwhelmingly male space. Maybe 15 percent of all soldiers were women, but even so, the female MPs in his unit were off-limits. Whether he outranked them or they outranked him, dating someone within the same unit was a military offense, damaging to good order, discipline and authority, according to regulations, and grounds for a court-martial. Thane didn’t need a regulation to keep him from temptation there, anyway. In the Brotherhood of Arms, the women he trained and served with were brothers-in-arms, too. Teammates, not dates. Half of them were married, anyway, which put them off-limits by Thane’s personal code.

  Of course, there were other servicewomen, single servicewomen, stationed at Fort Hood who were in units and positions that were completely unrelated to his, but there were roadblocks there, as well. Dating between an enlisted soldier and an officer was forbidden. Period. That knocked a couple of thousand women at Fort Hood right out of the dating pool. Since Thane was a commissioned officer, he could only date another commissioned officer who was not in his unit, but he rarely had a chance to meet female officers who worked in different branches of the army—that whole working thirty-six hours every third day had a lot to do with that. The police worked Saturdays and Sundays. And nights. And holidays.

  Thane’s brother, still living back home in South Carolina, was head over heels for a woman he’d met at work, one of his clients. But Thane’s only “clients” were women who called 911 for help. Victims. Or they were women on the other side of that coin—not victims, but perpetrators. Two of the soldiers in his platoon had served a warrant on a woman suspected of check forgery today. Or was that yesterday? The days were all becoming one blur.

  The odds of him meeting a datable woman at work were pretty much zero out of a million. Thane would’ve shaken his head in disgust, but that would’ve taken too much energy. One foot in front of the other, trudging past the apartment complex’s swimming pool, that was all he had the energy for.

  Building Six’s mailboxes were grouped together in the stairwell. So were several of his male neighbors, all checking their mail at the same time, all in the same uniform Thane wore. At least one person in every apartment here was in the service. Everyone left Fort Hood after the American flag had been lowered for the day and everyone arrived home around the same time, an army rush hour. Everyone checked their mail before disappearing behind their apartment doors. They were all living off post in a civilian apartment complex, but the military influence of Fort Hood was impossible to escape in the surrounding town of Killeen.

  As Thane used a key to open his little cubby full of two days’ worth of junk mail, he exchanged greetings with the other men. To be more accurate, Thane exchanged silent lifts of the chin, the same acknowledgment he’d been exchanging with guys since the hallowed halls of high school. That had been eight years ago, but still, that was the level of closeness the average guy reached with the average guy. A lift of the chin. A comment on a sports team, perhaps, during the NFL playoffs or Game Five of the World Series. Maybe, if he saw someone at the mailboxes whom he hadn’t seen in a while, they might acknowledge each other with a lift of the chin and actually speak. “You back from deployment?”

  The answer was usually a shrug and a yeah, to which the answer was a nod and a yeah, thought so, hadn’t seen you around in a while, followed by each guy retreating to his apartment, shutting a door to seal himself off from the hundreds of others in the complex, hundreds of people roughly Thane’s age and profession, all living in the same place.

  He had no one to talk to.

  Thane started up the concrete stairs to his apartment, each boot landing as heavily as if it were made of concrete, too.

  He lived on the third floor, a decision he regretted on evenings like this one. Thane hit the second-story landing. One more flight, and he could fall in bed. As he rounded the iron banister, an apartment door opened. A woman his age appeared in the door, her smile directed down the stairs he’d just come up. Another man in uniform was coming up them now, a man who wouldn’t be sleeping alone.

  “Hi, baby,” the man said.

  “You’re home early,” the woman said, sounding like that was a wonderful gift for her. “How was your day?”

  “You won’t believe this, but the commander decided—” The door closed.

  Thane slogged his way up to his floor.

  Bed. All he wanted was his own bed, yet now he couldn’t help but think it would be nice not to hit the sheets alone. He had an instant mental image of a woman in bed with him. He
couldn’t see her face, not with her head nestled into his shoulder, but he could imagine warm skin and a happy, interested voice, asking How was your day? They’d talk, two heads on one pillow.

  Pitiful. What kind of fantasy was that for a twenty-six-year-old man to have? He was heading to bed without a woman, but it wasn’t sex he was lonely for. Not much, anyway. He wanted someone to talk to, someone waiting to talk to him, someone who cared what he thought after days full of people who broke laws, people who were hurt, people who were angry.

  Better yet, he wanted someone to share a laugh with.

  He scrubbed a hand over the razor stubble that he’d be shaving in less than twelve hours to go back to work. Yeah, he needed a laugh. There was nothing to laugh at around here.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket—two shorts and a long, which meant he had a message waiting in his favorite app. The message had to be from his digital pen pal. The app had paired him up months ago with someone going by Ballerina Baby. He didn’t know anything about her, not even her real name, and yet, she was someone with whom he did more than nod, someone to whom he said something meaningful once in a while. He could put his thoughts into words, written words in blue on a white screen. He got words back from her, hot pink and unpredictable, making him feel more connected to the woman behind them than he felt to anyone else around here.

  Thane took the last few stairs two at a time. He wanted to get home. He had twelve hours ahead to sleep—but not alone. There was someone waiting to talk to him, after all.

  He unlocked the door and walked into his apartment, tossing his patrol cap onto the coffee table with one hand as he jerked down the zipper of his uniform jacket with the other. He tossed that over a chair, impatient to pull out his phone from his pocket the moment his hand was free. A real friend, real feelings, conversation, communion—

  Today, I was desperate for tater tots.

  He stared at the sentence for a long moment. What the hell...?

  And then, all of a sudden, life wasn’t so heavy. He didn’t have to take himself so seriously. Thane read the hot-pink silliness, and he started to laugh.

  The rest of his clothes came off easily. Off with the tan T-shirt that clung after a day of Texas heat. Thane had to sit to unlace the combat boots, but he typed a quick line to let Ballerina know he was online. You crack me up.

  And thank God for that.

  He brushed his teeth. He pulled back the sheets and fell into bed, phone in one hand. He bunched his pillow up under his neck, and he realized he was smiling at his phone fondly as he typed, I’d miss you. It was crazy, but it was true.

  The little cursor on his phone screen blinked. He waited, eyes drifting idly over the blue and pink words they’d already exchanged. You killed them? he’d written, followed by words like murder. Jail.

  He was going to scare her away. She’d think he was a freak the way his mind went immediately to crime and punishment. Did normal guys—civilian guys—zing their conversations right to felony death?

  She must think he was a civilian. His screen name was Different Drummer, after all, nothing that implied he was either military or in law enforcement. They weren’t supposed to reveal what Ballerina called their “real, boring surface facts,” things like name, address, job. During one of those marathon chat sessions where they’d spilled their guts out, they’d agreed that anonymity was part of the reason they could write to each other so freely.

  He hoped the way he used so many law enforcement references didn’t give away his real profession. It wasn’t like he was dropping clues subconsciously. Really.

  He read her words. She made him smile with ketchup, mustard and salt. He wondered if she’d kept a straight face when she wrote that, or had she giggled at her own silliness? Did she have a shy smile or a wide-open laugh?

  Then she told him she had to go. He had to act like that was perfectly okay. They’d talk some other time. But before closing the app he remembered the couple downstairs—Hi, baby, how was your day?

  Ballerina Baby was the woman who’d greeted him after a long day of work.

  Looking forward to it, Baby.

  A subconscious slip? He’d never called Ballerina Baby just Baby before.

  She didn’t reply. All his exhaustion returned with a vengeance. If Ballerina couldn’t talk, what good would it do to go out to exchange nods and grunts with everyone else?

  He tossed his phone onto his nightstand and rolled onto his side, ready for the sleep that would overtake him in moments. But just before it did, he thought what he could never type: You mean more to me than you should, Baby.

  Chapter Two

  “Friday night. Almost quitting time, Boss.”

  At his platoon sergeant’s booming voice, Thane tossed his cell phone onto his desk, facedown. He should have known that if he decided to check his personal messages for the first time in twelve hours, someone would walk in.

  Thane could have stayed on his phone, of course. This was his office, and he didn’t have to stop what he was doing and stand when a noncommissioned officer, an NCO, walked in. But he didn’t want his platoon sergeant to see any hot-pink words that would encourage him to start giving Thane hell about women. As a commissioned officer, Thane outranked sergeants and other noncommissioned officers, but Sergeant First Class Lloyd had been in the army more than twice as many years as Thane. A platoon sergeant was a platoon leader’s right arm. The platoon didn’t run well without either one of them—and no NCO let his lieutenant forget it, either.

  Sergeant First Class Lloyd was older, more experienced—and married, too. In other words, he’d enjoy razzing his bachelor platoon leader about his love life. Thane wasn’t going to give him a pink-fonted excuse to do it.

  Thane kicked back in his government-issued desk chair and put his booted feet up on the gray desk that had probably served all the platoon leaders who’d come before him since Vietnam. Maybe even further back. The battleship-gray metal desk was old but indestructible. He liked it.

  “I take it you didn’t come here to tell me the CO went home.” Retreat had sounded, the flag had been lowered, all the enlisted soldiers dismissed, but the lieutenants were still here because the company commander—the CO—was still here. It wasn’t a written rule, but Thane was old enough to know that it wasn’t wise for platoon leaders to leave before the company commander did.

  “It’s Friday, sir. I wouldn’t still be here if the CO had left.” Just as the platoon leaders didn’t leave before the company commander, the platoon sergeants didn’t leave before the first sergeant did. Since the first sergeant didn’t leave before the company commander did, here they all were, waiting for Friday night to begin.

  Thane watched his platoon sergeant head for the empty desk next to his own. Was the man going to take a seat and settle in for a chat? It wasn’t like him. Sergeant First Class Lloyd was a man of few words.

  “Do you have any big plans for the weekend, sir?” asked the noncommissioned officer of few words.

  “Just the usual.”

  “Kicking ass and taking names?”

  “Not tonight. Lieutenant Salvatore has duty.”

  The man started pulling out desk drawers, then slamming them shut. “Whiskey and women then, sir?”

  “Also not happening tonight.” Thane leaned back a little more in his chair and tucked his hands behind his head. “Sleep. Nothing but sweet sleep.”

  His platoon sergeant spared him a quick glance. “You pulled another thirty-six hours, sir?”

  An affirmative grunt was enough of an answer.

  Without further comment, Sergeant First Class Lloyd sat in the desk chair and started testing its tilt and the height of its armrests.

  “What are you doing?” Thane finally asked. “You planning on buying that chair after this test ride?”

  “No, sir. Just seeing if I should permanently borrow it before the new platoon leader arrives.”

  Thane sat up, boots hitting the floor. “Don’t get my hopes up, Sergeant First Class
. Is there a new platoon leader coming in?”

  “Yes, sir. In-processing on post.”

  “About damn time.” Thane didn’t like the look on the sergeant’s face, though. “Let’s hear it. I can tell you got more intel.”

  “Brand-new second lieutenant, fresh out of Leonard Wood.”

  Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, was the home of the Military Police Corps. All new second lieutenants had to go through the four months of BOLC, Basic Officer Leadership Course, there. If that was all his platoon sergeant had on the new guy, it hardly counted as intel.

  Thane leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head once more. “It’s that time of year. The college boys all graduate in May and complete BOLC in the fall. It would be too much to hope for to get someone with experience. It’s butter bar season.”

  The term butter bar referred to the yellow color of the single bar that denoted the rank of second lieutenant. As a first lieutenant, Thane’s rank insignia was a black bar on the camouflaged ACUs he wore almost every day, or a silver bar on the dress uniform.

  “Sergeant First Class Ernesto has broken in his fair share of lieutenants,” Thane said. “I’m sure he’ll handle this one. I just want someone to throw into the duty officer rotation. A butter bar will work.”

  Sergeant First Class Ernesto was the platoon sergeant for fourth platoon. He’d been running fourth platoon without a platoon leader for three months, attending all the first sergeant’s meetings for NCOs and then the commander’s meetings for the platoon leaders, as well. Thane would bet money that fourth platoon’s sergeant felt the same way he did. Even a wet-behind-the-ears butter bar would be better than nothing.

  “Well, sir, you’ll get to update that duty roster soon enough. The new LT already had one ride-along. A couple more ride-alongs this weekend, and you can add that name to your schedule.”

  “Do you have a name yet?”

  “Second Lieutenant Michaels. I’ll be right back.” Lloyd rolled the office chair out the door. Each office in the headquarters building held two desks. While fourth platoon had no lieutenant, Lloyd had been using the desk next to Ernesto, two NCOs doing their NCO thing, but the new platoon leader would be in Ernesto’s office now. Thane would have to get used to having his own platoon sergeant sharing this room again.