Forever With You

by Jess Mastorakos

  His voice was low and gravely as he continued. “I’ll keep it light, because I don’t want you to think I’m trying to take advantage of this situation by telling you the truth. Which is that any man who would deceive you and make you feel dumb, ruins it for the rest of us who aren’t like that. Because you’re not dumb. You’re brilliant. And you’re beautiful. And I have to tell you, if I saw you wearing that incredible wedding dress, leaving you would be the furthest thing from my mind.”

  I blinked up at him, no clue what to say to his admission. One hand still held mine, while the other hand traced a line up my arm and to my cheek, brushing a stray hair behind my ear. His hand lingered against my jaw, his thumb moving to trace my bottom lip. I knew he was waiting for a signal from me. I knew he was silently asking if he could kiss me. I could see it in his eyes, and I could feel his heart beating fast under my hand, which had found its way to the hard muscle of his chest.

  A car alarm blared from the parking lot and we both jumped, springing apart. My hand flew to my mouth to stifle a laugh, and he chuckled quietly. The moment had been shattered all over the floor around us like shards of glass.

  He ran a hand over the back of his neck. “Well, I didn’t get any work done. I should probably go. Do you need any help closing up or anything?”

  Shaking my head, I sighed. “No, it’s fine. Thank you. I’ll grab my stuff and head out, too.”

  Vince went to the table to gather his belongings and I went to the back room to get mine. When I came back out, I saw him carrying the two coffee mugs to the sink behind the counter and rinsing them out as if he worked here. When he’d settled his bags onto his shoulders, we wordlessly headed for the front doors.

  “There’s an event on Saturday that should be pretty fun if you aren’t working,” he said as I locked the doors behind us. “It’s at Balboa Park.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s called an Annual Pool Function. All of the recruiting offices in the whole San Diego area get their poolees together for a big cookout and we do some workouts and stuff. Family and friends are welcome. The drill instructors from boot camp come out and yell at them a bit. It should be a good time.”

  I nodded. “That sounds like fun. I was supposed to work, but I’m sure Zack could cover for me. He needs the hours.”

  “Cool,” he said.

  Again, we walked in silence to our cars, but I’d be lying to myself if I said I didn’t feel the electric current running between us.

  “This is me,” I said when we’d reached my car. “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight,” he said, turning for his car.

  Then, he stopped. When he turned to face me, his intentions were clear. I nodded quickly, and he dropped his bags, closed the distance between us, and grabbed my face in his hands. I threw my arms around his neck when he brought his lips to mine, reveling in the softness of his lips mixed with the fierceness of the kiss itself. He turned our bodies so that my back was pressed to the door of my car. Not only did I not stop him, but I kissed him back. And it felt good. It felt right. It felt like I wasn’t broken, after all. My hand roamed from behind his neck to the back of his hair, urging him closer as I melted into him.

  I don’t know how long he kissed me, but when he released me and looked straight into my eyes, I only knew two things. One, it wasn’t long enough. And two, it wouldn’t be the last time.

  6

  Vince

  “When will he get to call home?”

  I sighed and rubbed my hands together, already used to questions like this from parents of poolees. “Well, ma’am, the only time your son will be able to call home is during receiving week. He’ll read from a script just to let you know he’s arrived, but you won’t be able to actually talk to him.”

  “Really?” Mrs. Johnson frowned. “That doesn’t sound right. My friend Sheryl’s son joined the Air Force and she got to talk to him every weekend.”

  “Ah, I’m sorry, ma’am. That’s the Air Force. The Marines are different. But if it makes you feel any better, my platoon earned a phone call during the last couple of weeks when I was in boot camp. I got to talk to my girlfriend at the time for a whole five minutes.”

  The woman raised a brow at me and harrumphed.

  “Don’t mind her,” Mr. Johnson said. “She’s just nervous.”

  “I understand, sir. My mom was the same way.”

  I watched the couple head back to their table. Their son, Sam, was set to ship out the following Monday. One thing I noticed about this job was how often it made me think back to the beginning of my own journey as a Marine. I remembered what these kids went through in the months leading up to shipping out. I remembered what a nervous wreck my mom and nonna had been when I’d told them I wanted to enlist.

  A bright flash of the sun hitting a windshield in the parking lot caught my eye, and I looked over. Sara’s car pulled into a spot. Reflexively, my hand traveled up to my chest and landed there, almost as if to steady myself. There was just something about that girl. I wondered idly if she knew what she did to me whenever she was around.

  I stuck my hands in the pockets of my cammies and made my way from the expansive ramada to the parking lot of the park. She stepped out of her car and smiled at me, her brown hair piled into a bun on top of her head, and her glasses perched daintily on her nose. She wore a bright red top and black shorts. A pair of red Converse completed the sporty look. I gave her tan legs a quick scan, realizing that it was the first time I’d seen her in anything other than jeans. My stomach flipped as I grew nearer to her, and before I knew it, she was in my arms.

  “Hey, you,” she said as she wrapped her hands around my neck and looked up at me with her bright brown eyes.

  “Hey, yourself.” I kissed her quickly on the lips, working to restrain myself given the number of poolees and parents behind us. “Thanks for coming out.”

  She unhooked her arms from around me and peered over to the ramada. “There are so many people here.”

  “Yeah, this ramada is just our station, and the other stations are at their own ramadas around the park. We’ll come together in the big field for the workouts and for the drill instructors to get involved. It should be pretty cool.”

  We started toward the ramada, and I took her hand, testing the water. She didn’t pull away, so I smiled to myself at the ease of this. Staff Sergeant Allen got on a megaphone and told everyone to head over to the field for the day’s festivities to begin. I pulled Sara over to a picnic table covered in food items. We had burgers and hot dogs in coolers ready to be grilled, and chips, pretzels, buns, paper goods, and condiments took up the length of the table.

  “You can stay and help me get all of this ready for the cookout. Perks of being a cook in the real Marine Corps is that I get to handle all of this while they get started over there.”

  Sara chuckled. “What do you mean, ‘the real Marine Corps?’”

  “Recruiting duty is nothing like the real Marine Corps. Firstly, we don’t call our superiors ‘bosses’ outside of recruiting. Or at least, I’ve never heard it. And when you’re recruiting, you’re mixing with civilians way more than normal. I know a lot of people have a desk job in the military, but this is a desk job in an office, in a strip mall, next to a bookstore. I haven’t been so immersed in civilian life in years.”

  “Ah, so you’re used to being safely behind the gates of bases, rather than out in the wild with us normal people?”

  I laughed. “Something like that. Plus, you know, the hours. I think the longest days I’ve worked as a cook were twelve on and twelve off. Recruiting is more like fifteen on and nine off. Plus, like I said, I bring paperwork home most nights.”

  She sighed. “I wouldn’t believe you if it weren’t for the fact that I see you guys already there when I open and still working when I close. It’s insane. What do you do all day? You can’t actually be talking to high schoolers about joining at ten o’clock at night, right?”

  “Nah.” I shook my he
ad, taking the wrapper off a three pack of ketchup bottles and then getting started on the mustard. “We spend business hours either looking for new applicants or working with existing ones. Then we do the paperwork at night. I can’t believe how much paperwork there is to do. But if I did that kind of stuff during the day, I wouldn’t get enough telephone calls and new contacts from canvassing the area.”

  Sara got to work opening the inner seal of the condiment bottles I’d unwrapped. “Do you go to the mall and scope people out and then approach them if they look like they’d be the right age or something?”

  “Sometimes. Other times we work off lists we get from the high schools in our area and follow up with the kids on it until they agree to come in for an interview. San Diego is huge, and the high schools are huge, so there are plenty of calls to make. Then, yeah, when we go area-canvassing, we do kinda profile people before we approach them.”

  “And if you just ran into me at the mall, what would you think?” She peeked at me over the rim of her glasses and my stomach did a weird flip.

  “Recruiting-wise, or just in general?”

  She tilted her head, considering. “Both.”

  I put down the plates I’d been unwrapping and leaned my hands on the picnic table between us. “I’d love to say that I’d think you were hot first. That your pretty smile would hit me right in the gut and I’d come up and talk to you whether you wanted to join or not. But, I’m such a robot recruiter at this point I would probably just look for visible signs of tattoos and try to guess your age.”

  She laughed and threw the small round seal from the ketchup bottle at my face and I ducked to miss it. “Well, I’m probably too old now, anyway. You seem to be after high school girls for the most part.”

  “Hah. Another thing that separates recruiting from the real Marine Corps. They encourage talking to high school girls over here.”

  “That could be taken very wrong, you know.”

  “I know, I know. But, you’re wrong about being too old. You’re what we call a ‘grad female,’ and my office actually needs one really bad to make mission this month.”

  “Oh, really?” She dragged the words out with a raised brow. “Now I know why you’re giving me so much attention. You’re just trying to sign me up.”

  “Wrong again.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “You mean to tell me that if I said I wanted to join right now, you wouldn’t want to be my recruiter?”

  I glanced around to make sure we were a safe distance away from everyone else and slowly rounded the table to stand close to her. I brushed a hair behind her ear. “There are so many things I want to do with you. Paperwork isn’t one of them.”

  Her eyes flashed with heat and a blush crept up her cheeks. “You’re too smooth.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “I’m not sure yet. But I’m leaning toward ‘yes.’”

  I tapped her nose with my finger and retreated around the table. Yes, it was fun flirting with her. But the last thing I wanted was for her to think of me as ‘too smooth’ or like I was trying to pull one over on her. It didn’t take a genius to understand a guy like that would be a trigger for her, given her past. I made a mental note to flirt with caution. I wasn’t like her ex, and I hoped she’d see that, eventually.

  “Sergeant Moore?”

  I turned to see Spencer and Ellie walking toward the ramada from the field. “Hey, Hawkins. Ellie. What’s up?”

  “Staff Sergeant Allen told me to tell you to get the grills fired up because we’d be done by the time you’re done grilling. And he told me to help, if you need it.”

  “Sounds good,” I replied. “Sara, this is Spencer and his friend, Ellie.”

  “Nice to meet you both,” Sara greeted them, having just finished slicing the tape on the boxes of plastic cutlery. “Ellie, do you want to help me open the rest of this stuff while they grill?”

  “Sure,” Ellie said, crossing to the table and getting to work.

  I grabbed the black case that held my grilling tools and the lighter fluid off the table and placed them on the top of the cooler containing the hotdogs, then nodded my head at the other cooler. “Hawkins, grab that cooler and a bag of coals and follow me.”

  We brought the coolers to the grills just off the edge of the ramada. I put some fresh charcoal in a pyramid shape under the grill rack, opened the vents, then sprayed lighter fluid on the coals. Spencer did the same actions on the grill next to mine. I liked that he knew how to take action without needing to be told. That was a good quality. Most of these kids were afraid to breathe without being told to. I wondered if his proactive side would help him or hurt him in boot camp. I knew it would make him a good leader someday, but the drill instructors might knock him down a couple of pegs just for sport.

  “Do you grill?” I asked him, handing him the matches so he could light his set of coals like I had.

  Spencer shrugged. “Here and there. We have a lot of cookouts at Fiesta Island.”

  Once the coals were hot, I used the metal end of my grill brush to spread them out in a line across the bottom of the grill, then lowered the grate so it was nice and close to the heat. I handed him the tool so he could do the same on his grill. Then, I dug into the coolers and loaded hotdogs onto the smoking grill. Spencer had the cooler of burgers, so he followed suit with those.

  “Everything’s ready over there,” Sara said as she and Ellie joined us at the grills. “Here’s a couple of platters for those.”

  “Thanks.” I took the platters and set one on the table next to my grill and handed the other to Spencer. “Did you see any cheese over there? I don’t have any in the coolers.”

  Sara shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Amateurs.” I sighed. “Who doesn’t get cheese for burgers?”

  “The struggle is real. You must be super happy getting to cook for a big group of Marines again,” Sara observed.

  Spencer held up a finger. “Almost Marines. Almost. And what does she mean?”

  “I’m a cook when I’m not on recruiting duty. I’ve cooked for huge squadrons, on boats, and for smaller groups of officers. So, she’s right. I’m super happy to be over here on the grills instead of running PT over there.” I winked at Sara and she blushed. If she only knew what that blush did to me.

  “That’s pretty sweet,” Spencer said. “Were you a cook before you joined, too?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. I was a high school dropout. Got my GED just so I could join the Marines, then did well enough on my ASVAB to pick from some cool jobs. I grew up in the kitchen with my mom and nonna, so it seemed like it’d be fun.”

  “What job are you going to have, Spencer?” Sara asked him.

  “I won’t know specifics until boot camp, but it’s either going to be Crash Fire Rescue or loading bombs and other weapons on aircraft.”

  “Oh, wow. Both of those sound really interesting. And do you want to get stationed here after you graduate?”

  Ellie smiled sadly, but turned her face so Spencer couldn’t see. He shrugged. “Who knows? I’m just excited to see what happens next. I’ve got about nine months of hanging out with Sergeant Moore before I leave though.”

  Sara’s eyebrows furrowed for a moment like a thought just occurred to her. I started to ask what it was, but something told me to get rid of our audience for a minute first.

  “Hawkins, can you and Ellie go ask Staff Sergeant how long they’ll be? We should be finished with all of these in about twenty minutes, so I want to make sure he times it right.”

  “Yes, sir.” Spencer and Ellie took off for the field, leaving us alone.

  I turned to Sara, flipping dogs, trying to seem casual. “What’s up? I saw your face for a minute there.”

  She cleared her throat. “It was actually her face that did it for me. She looked like she didn’t want him to leave.”

  “Yeah, those two think they’re just friends.” I gestured at their backs with the tongs I was using to flip the dogs, then wen
t over to the burger grill and flipped them with the spatula. “We’ll see how long that lasts. But are you sure that’s all it was?”

  “Uh, I’m not really sure how to word it. It sounds weird in my head.” She shuffled her feet a bit, hands in the pockets of her shorts.

  “Try me.”

  “I know we only just met, but I like you. A lot.”

  My chest tightened at her words. “Same here.”

  “Well, Ellie’s face just kind of reminded me you’d be leaving, too. I don’t even know how long you’re here for. I don’t like that it bugs me already.” She shrugged as if to blow it off, but her tone was heavy like she meant what she was saying.

  “Come here,” I said, crooking my finger at her over the heat of the grill.

  She walked over to me and I hooked my arm around her lower back, drawing her close. I kissed her lightly on the mouth, savoring the flavor of her sweet breath and the warm San Diego sun on her lips.

  “I have 998 days left on recruiting duty. Let’s make them count.”

  She pulled back and gaped at me. “You know exactly how many days you have left?”

  “We all do. I’ve never met a recruiter who didn’t use a countdown app on his phone to count down the days until the end of RD.”

  Sara snorted and kissed me on the cheek. “Well, here’s hoping we can make this time a little better for you.”

  7

  Sara

  Three months of dating Vince had gone by faster than I’d thought it would. If you’d asked me the day I’d moved back to San Diego if I was ready to jump into another relationship, I probably would have tossed a cup of coffee in your face. And then Vince appeared, did something similar, and I’d been completely smitten ever since. He hadn’t rushed me into it either, which I appreciated. I could tell he took my issues after Derek seriously, and every time I pulled away from him, he didn’t chase me down. Just waited patiently for me to figure out my emotions. But I was just drawn to him, and as much as I logically wanted to question how I could trust him after everything that happened, I just did. It was simple.