by Caro Carson
You’re doing better than I am, Drummer wrote. I’m halfway through a cholesterol-filled pepperoni pizza. No one can fault you for grapes. No one can fault you for anything. What would I do if I were you? I’d look in the mirror and remind myself that I’m smart enough, I’m good enough, and gosh darn it, people like me.
She snorted. Saturday Night Live (too easy).
(Of course it was easy, but you’ve had a hard day.) Then I’d come up with a plan for what to do if I should run into friends who are not really friends again.
Chloe had chickened out. She’d told Drummer that she regretted going to her party, but when he’d asked why, she’d focused on Keith’s friendliness-that-wasn’t-really-friendliness. The more she thought about it, the more aggressive she realized Keith’s poolside tackle had been. There was a time and a place for aggressiveness. Hand-to-hand combat training? Check. Slamming a woman into the water who’d just arrived at a party? Wrong.
But even there, she hadn’t given Drummer the ugly truth. It made her sound so wimpy, that she’d been dunked—hard—and left to look like a drowned rat the rest of the party, yet she hadn’t done anything to defend herself except laugh it off.
Instead, she’d told Drummer something vague, saying someone who wasn’t really a friend had gotten in a cheap shot. So much for her determination to talk to Drummer without a filter. She couldn’t imagine what Drummer would think if she told him it was an actual physical cheap shot, being tackled from behind.
It was a no-win situation, anyway. She tried to explain that much to Drummer. How do you come up with a plan? It’s not like there are many options. You either complain or you laugh it off. I went with laugh it off this time, which made everyone around me happy and kept the party mood going. If I’d complained...well, you get labeled as a complainer or a whiner and no one wants to be around that. They sure won’t line up to volunteer to take you to the airport if they think they’ll be stuck in a car with a whiner.
Give me a little more information on what went down today. I’ll help you brainstorm some options.
No. No specifics, remember? This anonymity thing is working for us.
Drummer sent her an eye-roll emoji. Okay. So, you ran into someone you thought was a friend and then they were not. What is your goal in life?
You mean my goal with this not-a-friend? I don’t have one. I’m fine with him—or her—not being my friend.
No, I mean your goal in life. All of life. Big life.
Big life? She stuffed the last two grapes into her mouth at once. They were so cold, they hurt.
Life goals she had, but they were all specific and clearly defined: to serve her nation as an officer in the MP Corps. To be a platoon leader, to take care of her troops and to set a good example for those she led. She couldn’t tell Drummer any of those goals and still keep any anonymity.
All of her previous goals had been equally specific. As a cadet, she’d aimed for grades that would rank her high enough in her class to get her first choice of branch and then her first choice of post, somewhere snow-free. Even in high school, she’d had specific goals on the school track team—earning a varsity letter was a must for her academy dream. She’d had goals on the SAT test—she needed to at least match the average of new cadets to become one herself.
She looked around her mostly empty apartment, the one that would never be inspected, as she sat on her new couch that was as red as a rose. She’d met her past goals. She felt trained and ready to accomplish her future military service goals. But what was her real goal in life? Big life?
I want to be happy. She hit Send before she could censor herself.
Good. The blue answer was immediate. Drummer thought something as vague as happiness was a good goal? That made her feel marginally better.
Let’s measure your options by whether or not they’ll make you happy. One option is to laugh it off. You tried that today, and it didn’t make you happy, right?
Nope. It was a reflex at the time, but now I feel like a doormat.
Doormats are not happy. But Ballerina, listen. Don’t be so hard on yourself for laughing it off. You tried a viable option to handling unwanted attention, one that must have worked in the past or it wouldn’t have been your default, right?
Chloe stopped crunching her grapes for a moment. How did he do that? How did Drummer know everything about her?
But that option didn’t sit well with you, so let’s move on to option two. You could ignore this person, pretend you didn’t see him/her, or pretend you didn’t hear him/her. Next time you see this person, will ignoring her make you happy?
Maybe.
Maybe’s not good enough, BB. This is your one and only life. Maybe means no, ignoring this person isn’t going to make you happy. And you already tried laughing off her joke that was really an insult. That’s a no. So, option three, you could confront this person. Will telling her off make you happy?
Maybe. It was a him, by the way, not a her. I couldn’t really respond. He just got in his hit and walked away before I could answer.
Keith had jumped out of the pool and headed for the keg.
Whatever.
Thane had gotten in his hit—Did you see her face?—and left, too.
The hurt of Thane’s hit was so fresh, still shocking in its cruelty. Chloe let the fury come in to push the hurt away, typing with hard hits on the keys. I don’t know if confrontation will make me happy, but it will keep me from feeling like I feel tonight, which is basically powerless. I’ve put up with a lot of crap so far in life, and I’m reaching a point of boiling over. She hit the send key so hard, her finger stung.
Let’s come up with a plan, then. Your default next time, if there is a next time, will be to confront him. When you boil over, you don’t want to be burned. You want to keep that steam directed to the correct target, right? The key will be confronting him in a way that won’t make you look bad to anyone else. Wouldn’t want you to hurt your reputation at your job, for example.
Keith was not her target. Chloe had dealt with him and his kind for years. But if she ran into Thane someday in the parking lot, she didn’t want to pretend she didn’t see him and skitter away.
Right. Plan C—controlled confrontation. I’m ready.
Chapter Six
“Good evening, ma’am.”
“Good evening, Sergeant First Class.” Chloe set her black bulletproof vest on the edge of the watch commander’s desk. The police station was built for efficiency, not beauty, especially here in the back of the building, with the briefing rooms and holding cells. The decor was little more than metal lockers and functional, plain furniture.
There was something exciting about it, though, with its hot links to fire stations and its wall maps delineating all their areas of responsibility across three counties in Central Texas. Everything was plain and boring, yet everything was in a state of readiness. There was a palpable sense that all the calm and order could change in a moment, and the people in this building knew they would be the quickest to respond, the first to help. Assist-Protect-Defend.
Calm and order were very much the order of the day—or evening. Sunday evening at the police station was far quieter than Friday night had been. Chloe was ready to go, though. Tonight was her second ride-along with the duty officer, her chance to keep learning the post’s layout—really, to keep learning the whole job. She knew all the official radio communication standards, for example, but on Friday night, she’d had a hard time following the sound of the dispatcher coming over the radio at real speed in the patrol car. The most important thing she’d caught was that the officer on duty was 310, or three-ten. When dispatch said the words three-ten, she needed to pay attention. When another MP requested that three-ten come by for support, that meant her.
Well, it meant the duty officer. Plus her, the ride-along. And their driver, of course. Friday night the driver had been a specialist from first platoon. A specialist was the next rank up from a private first class, making him an enlisted man with a couple of year
s of service under his belt. With the driver and the real duty officer in the front seats of the patrol car, she’d sat in the back, trying not to think about how many drunks or drug addicts had sat where she was sitting. It was hard to see exactly which streets the patrol car was taking and hard to hear the radio as well from the back seat, but that was the only option there was. She’d just suck it up and keep doing her best from the back seat tonight.
It was a relief to be working at a real-world task tonight. Memorizing the layout of an entire town would surely keep her mind busy. She’d had too much time to think since yesterday’s pool party. Talking to Drummer hadn’t even been a distraction, because whether Drummer knew it or not, Thane had been the subject of their conversation. There was nothing she could do alone in her apartment that kept her mind off Thane.
She’d tried. The army had provided shipping for her move to Texas, and her stuff had arrived. But unpacking boxes when she’d been looking forward to a date with a handsome man had been depressing. From school, she’d shipped to herself a footlocker of cadet uniforms that she’d never wear again and the world’s heaviest boxes of textbooks that she’d never read again. The army had authorized one shipment from her “home of record,” too, which was her parents’ house. Her parents had given her the dresser and bed she’d had since childhood. It was another twin bed, of course, but one that didn’t have to be made up with a gray blanket in hospital corners. She’d bought a new bedspread at the PX, a grown-up coverlet in soothing shades of blue and green, but still, her childhood bedroom furniture made her a little homesick.
Her mom had also given her some spare pots and pans, so Chloe had tried cooking to keep herself busy. She’d moved from healthy grapes to the ultimate comfort food, hot and rich macaroni and cheese, yet eating straight from the casserole dish as it sat on a footlocker was a poor substitute for dinner at a restaurant, sitting across a real table from a handsome man.
And, damn him, Thane was a handsome man. A jerk, but handsome. He had dark hair and light eyes, a mouth that she’d imagined kissing hers, plus shoulders and biceps and chest muscles all deliciously defined.
“Lieutenant Carter is the officer on duty tonight, ma’am.” The watch commander was a senior NCO, the most senior one working tonight, the same man she’d met on Friday’s ride-along. The watch commander stayed at the station to oversee everything from walk-ins to the holding cells to the dispatchers. “I told him you’d be riding along. He said he’d wait outside for you. Just through the briefing room and out that back door.”
Chloe put on her protective vest, getting it situated above the thick black belt that held her sidearm in its holster. “No briefing today?”
“The NCOs handle that, ma’am. It’s up to the lieutenant if he wants to be there or not.”
Lieutenant Salvatore had stood in the back of the briefing room Friday. Chloe guessed this Lieutenant Carter did things differently. She nodded at the watch commander and headed through the empty briefing room, tugging the black vest down. The bright white letters spelling Military Police across her chest made it clear to good guys and bad guys alike exactly who she was on any scene, something that could otherwise be confusing when law enforcement and perpetrators were often all wearing the same camouflage uniforms. It gave her the odd sensation of wearing a half shirt, because the heavy part of the vest didn’t cover the lower part of her stomach.
She pulled her patrol cap out of her pocket and slid it on so it sat properly, just above her low ballerina bun. Then she was out the door, into the twilight. A patrol car was parked off to the side, a male lieutenant leaning against it, arms crossed over his chest, studying the ground at his feet. She adjusted the brim of her hat just so with one hand and tugged down the black vest quickly with her other, still annoyed at that bare-belly sensation.
“You must be Lieutenant Carter,” she said in a voice to carry over the several paces of asphalt between them.
He lifted his head and looked at her from under the brim of his patrol cap.
She stopped walking.
The silence between them went on too long as a thousand thoughts raced through her head.
Someone had to say something. She did. “Are you kidding me?”
He just kept his eyes on her, those light-colored eyes, his expression as grim as a man at a funeral. Grim, but not surprised.
Drummer’s advice was fresh in her mind. Option one: she could be polite, say gee, isn’t this awkward, laugh, and pretend everything was okay. It didn’t sit well with you, Ballerina.
Option two: she could ignore him. Impossible, since he was an MP and on duty tonight. It won’t make you happy.
Option three: controlled confrontation.
She didn’t think happiness was really going to be the outcome, but Drummer had been right, the other two options would leave her seething with resentment toward Thane and disappointed with herself. She wasn’t going to smile and pretend everything was okay.
Her heart was pounding underneath all the layers that were supposed to protect her: vest, armor plates, ACU jacket, tan T-shirt, sports bra. There was no protection against emotions. Her heart still took the hit of seeing his handsome face again, so unexpectedly, the face she’d smiled with, flirted with, trusted...all while he’d been finding her face not good enough. He’d made her hope for more. He’d made her want him.
Bastard.
She let fury squash the heartache and took a minute, gaze locked with his, to consider what to say. She’d been caught off guard, but Thane was not shocked to see her at all.
She started there. “You’re not surprised to see me.”
“Hi, Chloe.”
“You knew? You knew we were both MPs? We’re both—hang on. Are you in my company?” She was pretty certain Salvatore had said that just the lieutenants from the 584th were taking shifts this month.
He nodded solemnly. “I’m first platoon. You’re fourth.”
She saw red. But she also saw the white badge on his black vest, the white and green patrol car he leaned against, and her awareness of her situation kept her in control. That, and her four years of military training. She was standing outside a police station, in uniform. Soldiers, other MPs, were coming and going through the same side door she’d used. She could have happily gotten in Thane’s face like she was hazing a plebe, but she wouldn’t do anything to draw attention to the two of them. She wasn’t going to boil over and burn herself.
She took those last steps to stand in front of him and crossed her arms over her chest as he uncrossed his. He stayed where he was, leaning against the driver’s side door. In silence, she stared him down, using the same iron glare she would have used if he’d been a plebe, and she’d ordered him to stand at attention with his back against a barracks wall, braced as he struggled to recite a long passage of General MacArthur’s words correctly to the last syllable.
Thane looked away. He took his patrol cap off, smoothed his hand up the back of his hair, put the cap back on. “I didn’t know you were riding with me tonight. I’m just glad someone mentioned it in time for me to get out here before you arrived. I didn’t want anyone in the station to see your shock.”
“You sunovabitch.”
He looked back at her.
She kept her voice low, just between the two of them. “You know what would have prevented a lot of shock? If you’d introduced yourself properly at the pool.”
“I didn’t know who you were. Not right away.”
“When did you know?” Was it before or after you decided my face was too ugly for you?
“You mentioned Leonard Wood while we were talking.”
“And you kept talking to me?”
“I—” Whatever words he’d been about to say got stuck in his throat.
“You kept talking to me. You never bothered to say you’d been to Leonard Wood, too, or that you were an MP, too.”
“I was going to.”
“But you didn’t. Didn’t fraternization occur to you?”
&nbs
p; “Yes.”
“You were toying with my career.” And my heart.
Thane pushed away from the patrol car and stood over her. She wasn’t a short woman, but he still was taller by several inches. If he thought she was going to be unnerved by the way he looked down at her, if he thought she’d blink or back away even a half step, then he truly had no idea where she’d lived or what she’d been through to make second lieutenant.
“I can’t toy with your career without toying with my own,” he said.
“True. I don’t know what makes a person take the kind of risk you took, but I didn’t choose to take that risk. Maybe it gives you a thrill to push the envelope and not get caught, but I worked too hard to be standing right where I am today to risk it all like that. Your little game isn’t fun when it can hurt someone else.”
“There was no game. I didn’t know the new LT’s name was Chloe, only Michaels.” He paused. “It was never a game.”
She blinked. It was never a game? He spoke so sincerely, trying to soothe her feelings now, wanting her to think the only reason he’d dumped her stone-cold was because he’d figured out they were going to be in the same unit.
Oh, how she would have loved to have believed that. Her heart wouldn’t hurt so much if she could fool herself into thinking his heart had been involved, as well. She would’ve been gullible enough to believe him right now, too, if she hadn’t opened a bathroom door and heard the truth. When all I do is talk to a woman, there’s your clue. I had to take what I could get.
He’d been playing games, all right. He’d left without a backward glance once she’d agreed to go out with him. He was the kind of man who was all about the chase. The hunt. The kind of guy who would win a woman’s heart just to prove he could, then dump her. How many Monday mornings in the cadet mess hall had she spent listening to the guys describe their weekend conquests, bragging about how they’d charmed a woman, how they’d looked her in the eye and used the line I really love you just to get her into bed? Chloe knew that game.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...
