by June Gray
Disarm is a work of fiction. Names, characters, locations and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, and events is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by June Gray. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from either the author or the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote a brief passage in a review.
First Edition. Cover design by June Gray.
DEDICATION
To the men and women married to the military:
You are the strongest, kindest, most courageous people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing and I am proud to be in your company.
Military life is tough, but we are tougher.
1 | ASSESSING THE SITUATION
It wasn’t my fault—at least, not entirely. Henry Logan, my roommate and Captain in the Air Force, was technically to blame. The guy had been acting so unusually moody for the past five weeks that I was getting desperate to see a smile on his face. So that Saturday night, I suggested we head to our favorite bar at Bricktown and just drink the night away, confident that Henry, even in his grumpy-bear state, could never turn down beer.
After parking his convertible Mustang, we walked down the street to Tapwerks in silence. I waited for him to open up, to tell me what had been bothering him, but no dice.
“What is with you lately?” I asked.
Henry stuck his hands in his jacket pocket and shrugged. “Nothing, why?”
I raised an eyebrow at him. He could successfully pull off the nonchalant attitude on anyone but me. I’d known him for thirteen years and had lived with him for two. I could decipher his every expression, sometimes to the point of reading his mind. “Come on. Are you on your period or something?” I asked with a teasing jab of the elbow. “Do you need to borrow a tampon?”
That finally got a small laugh out of him. “Elsie, you are such a brat,” he said. He reached over to ruffle my curly brown hair, but I anticipated the move and did a little ninja-ballerina maneuver to avoid him.
“Hey,” I said, “leave the hair alone.” I slipped my arm through his as we stood in line for the bar—Tapwerks was the place to be on weekends—trying to pilfer some of his warmth. He was 6’2” and built like a brick wall; he had plenty of everything to spare.
As I craned my head to study the people in line, dressed up in their casual best, I suddenly caught a glimpse of Henry, his face partially lit by the soft glow from the bar’s windows. It struck me then that he was really no longer that awkward kid I grew up with but a man, and a gorgeous one at that. I’d always known he was good-looking—hell I’d had a crush on him since my brother started hanging out with him in their sophomore year of high school—but the way the shadows played on his face rendered planes I never knew existed. His short dark hair and the scruff on his strong jaw lent a nice contrast to his olive skin, and he had a proud nose with a little cleft at the end that matched the cleft on his chin. But it was his eyes that drew my gaze, those icy blues that seemed as if they could see into my every thought.
I stared at him for a long moment, feeling a strange tickle in my chest, when I came to the realization that he was staring back.
“You okay, Elsie?” he asked in that husky, gravelly voice of his. Had he always sounded so sexy?
I gave him my best sunny smile, shaking off the confusing feelings that had snuck up on me. “Just wondering why you don’t have a girlfriend.”
His lips quirked up a little and I felt a finger tickle me on the side, but he didn’t bother answering the question.
Inside, the two floors were at full capacity and there were no available tables or chairs, so we stood at the bar, trying our hardest to get the bartender’s attention. I was only 5’6”, so Henry theoretically had a better chance at visibility, but somehow, the male bartender’s eyes just kept flitting right over him as if he was invisible.
“Let me try.” I stepped up on the brass rail that ran along the bottom of the bar and squeezed my arms together, causing instant cleavage over the low neck of my loose top.
The bartender noticed. He finished up his orders and came right to me with an appreciative smile. “What’ll it be?”
“Woodchuck Cider, Sam Adams, and two tequila shots,” I said, and straightened up.
Henry was doing the big brother scowl when I joined him back down on the floor.
“What?” I asked, preparing for the lecture. “When you’ve got ‘em, use ‘em.”
He glowered down at me with a disapproving purse to his lips but said nothing. God, was nothing going to get him to talk?
After downing our shots, Henry and I stood around with cold bottles in our hands. He continued to scowl at me and I pretended not to notice by looking elsewhere. Thankfully, I saw a few of his Air Force buddies across the room and they waved us over to their table. Henry grabbed a hold of my hand as he led the way through the sea of bodies, his large frame parting the crowds so that I wouldn’t get swallowed up.
“Hey!” Sam, another captain, raised his beer bottle in greeting.
I clinked his bottle with my cider. Henry gave a cool little jerk of the head and said, “Hey, man.” The two men exchanged a silent look before Henry gave the slightest shake of the head.
Sam’s girlfriend, Beth, gave me a hug before I could figure out what the guys were communicating. “How are you?” she asked. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“I’ve been good. Busy,” I said, keeping an eye on Henry. “You?”
Beth started to say something, but the band began to play and cut her off. For a while, we all stood there and bobbed our heads to the rhythm of the rock group, all except for the stiff corpse beside me. Sometimes Henry knew how to really kill a good time, but as his friend, it was my duty to pull him out of this funk he was in.
I stood on my tiptoe and pulled him down so I could yell in his ear. “You wanna dance?”
He looked at me then at the near-empty dance floor, then back at me again. “Hell no.”
I pretended not to hear. I grasped his hand with a cheeky smile and pulled him through the crowd and onto the dance floor.
“I said no,” he said and turned to leave.
But I still had a hold of his hand, so I jumped in front of him and danced to block his way. I pulled his arm around my waist and gave him my most seductive smile as I began to sway my hips to the music.
He rolled his eyes but I kept on dancing, sure that sooner or later he would relent. He knew how to have a good time; he just had to be pulled out of that scowly shell of his.
The crowd on the dance floor swelled and I was unexpectedly pinned to Henry, my hips grinding in to his before my brain could tell it to stop.
The effect was instantaneous and twofold. Henry’s expression changed at the same moment I felt something stir in his jeans. My face went up in flames, but when I tried to pull away, his arm tightened around me and pulled me closer.
“Where are you going?” he asked in my ear, his warm breath tickling my neck. “I thought you wanted to dance?”
My heart was pounding a million miles a minute through my chest, but I had teased the beast out of hiding and I now had to face him. I looked up at him, acting as if having an erection against my stomach was not a big deal, and tried to take advantage of our close proximity. “Why won’t you talk to me?”
“I don’t want to talk tonight,” he replied, his eyes focused solely on my mouth. The breath hitched in my throat when he ran his tongue along his lower lip. “I’d rather do other things.”
That was about
the time I lost my cool. This was Henry, my closest friend, my roommate, my surrogate big brother. He was a great many things to me, but he was definitely not someone I made out with. I’d stopped hoping for that a long time ago, when he’d made it clear that he saw me as nothing more than a little sister.
Now here he was, bowing his head with a dark look on face, his arm tight around my back. The fifteen-year-old me was squealing with glee, but the twenty-six-year-old was, admittedly, a little flustered.
I twisted out of his embrace and took a step back. My face was overheating, my heart was trying its hardest to hammer its way through my chest, and my body was tingling with that special kind of sexual exhilaration.
Henry’s face broke out into an impudent smile. “Are we done playing this game?” he called out to me over the music.
I nodded. Yes, we were definitely done. For now.
~
Here’s something you should know about Henry and me: we never meant to live together. He and my brother, Jason, met in high school and attended college together. For as long as I could remember, Jason had always intended on joining the Air Force—it was kind of a given as my father and grandfather were both retired pilots. My guess was that Henry hung out with Jason enough that he too became convinced the military life was for him. So they had gone through ROTC together and eventually were sworn in to the Air Force, Jason as an Intelligence officer and Henry as a Security Forces officer. Not surprisingly, they were both sent to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, and of course, lived together in an apartment on the south side of the city.
I was always the outsider, the third wheel. I was two years younger and was a bit of a pest, always asking to join them in their adventures. Besides that, I was a girl and had cooties, so I was almost always left behind, rejected and heartbroken. Very early on, even before his braces came off, I was convinced that Henry and I would get married. In my Disney years, I pictured him as my Prince Charming. Then in my rebellious years, he was my imagined bad boy who would whisk me off in his motorcycle. But they were nothing but the daydreams of a girl who then grew up to realize that the boy of her dreams was far from perfect. The sobering reality was that Henry was a flawed guy who oftentimes tiptoed into jerk territory, as all men are wont to do.
After graduating from college, I accepted a web design job in Oklahoma and crashed on their couch for a few months while I saved up enough money for an apartment. Henry was not keen on the idea and, in fact, tried his hardest to find me another place to live. I still remembered coming to the table on Sunday mornings and finding the newspaper opened to the classifieds with some listings already highlighted, his not-so-subtle way of telling me to stop cramping his bachelor pad.
Henry inspired me to find a place faster, but then Jason was deployed to Afghanistan and asked me stay in his room for the six months that he was gone. To save money, I jumped on the offer.
Little did I know that my brother would never come back.
He was gathering intel, walking around a Kabul neighborhood talking to the nationals, when someone started shooting out of nowhere. Jason never even had a chance. Even now, his death makes no sense to me, and I still hold onto the hope that, one day, they’ll find him somewhere in the Afghan mountains, roughed up but still alive.
It’s a long shot, but the ability to fool myself is one of my best talents.
So it was with a smile that I walked out of my room the next morning, pretending that nothing happened at Tapwerks the night before. I shuffled to the kitchen in my flannel pajamas and turned on the coffee maker. Henry came out of his room, still committed to that sullen persona, and reached for the coffee mugs. I started frying some eggs and he put the bread in the toaster. When the coffee was done, he poured and fixed mine the way I like it and took our mugs to the table. I slid the eggs onto two plates, placed a piece of buttered toast on each one, and joined him at the table.
We ate quietly, hiding in our own thoughts to avoid talking about last night. I wasn’t sure if it was even worth talking about, if maybe he had just been playing around to teach my nosy ass a lesson. But my, what a long, hard lesson it was.
I had to gulp down coffee when the toast stuck in my throat, chalking my impure thoughts of Henry down to sex deprivation. I just needed a good lay, that was all.
The last time I’d had sex was over a year ago, when my relationship with a guy from work fell apart a few months after Jason’s death. I hadn’t been able to cope with the grief and Brian had been inept at offering comfort, so the relationship ended. Still, even though Brian hadn’t been the best lover, he’d been a step up from The Rabbit.
That was around the time my friendship with Henry was tested and cemented, when we fought and made up in cycles due to our grief. But at the end of it, Henry and I emerged with an unshakable bond forged out of loss. He and I became family.
“What are you up to today?” he asked, scratching at the dark hair on his chest.
“Just going to run at Earlywine,” I said, finishing my eggs. “Why, did you want to do something?”
“Nah,” he said, holding his head in his hands. “I’m just going back to bed. Sleep off this hangover.”
“You’re hungover?” I asked. We had left Tapwerks soon after that charged moment on the dance floor. He had only had the shot and one beer.
He gathered the empty dishes and placed them in the sink. “I had a few more beers after you went to bed last night.”
I raised my eyebrows. This was the third time in so many weeks he’d been drinking alone. Something was definitely bothering him. “Henry,” I began, leaning against the sink. “Do you want to talk?”
He scratched the scruff on his face, considering me for a moment. “Maybe some other time,” he said and walked back to his bedroom.
I threw some laundry in the washer and tidied my room, giving Henry plenty of time to come find me and spill his guts. At around three o’clock, I finally admitted that he was really not going to talk, so I put on my workout clothes and drove to the park to run my worries away.
Earlywine is a large grassy area that spanned three blocks with a waterpark in the center as well as a YMCA building. A two-lane running track bordered the park, and, as usual, was busy on a warm Sunday afternoon. Everywhere I looked, families were grilling, kids were playing soccer, and people were running or power walking. As I watched the activity, I was struck with a sudden bout of homesickness. I hadn’t made it back home to California since Christmas and I was starting to miss my parents, but going back home meant going back to the place I knew Jason best and it still hurt, even after all this time.
I eyed the cute guys as I ran to take my mind off things, and God help me, I couldn’t help but imagine each good-looking guy running naked. It was all Henry’s fault, rousing my sex drive with that little stunt he pulled last night. I’d suppressed my appetite for so long that I’d become comfortable with it, but it had awakened and boy, was I ravenous.
A guy ran past me, wearing shoes, shorts, and little else. As he zipped by, I was able to give his backside a nice lookover. He had nice, sweaty muscles on his back, and his calves were well defined as he ran. He must have sensed my ogling because he looked over his shoulder and flashed a toothy grin, urging me to catch up.
I geared up to run faster when I heard someone calling my name. I stopped when I saw Danielle, the girlfriend of one of Henry’s buddies, coming my way.
“Hey!” I greeted, casting one last glance at the guy, hoping he’d do one more lap of the park. I turned my attention back to Danielle, noting her running outfit. “You look great.”
She smiled widely. “Thanks. I reached my goal weight last week, so I bought a new outfit to celebrate.”
I gave her the thumbs up. Danielle had been overweight when we met at a party several months ago, but now she was wearing capri pants and tank tops and looking healthier than ever. I suddenly felt frumpy in my running shorts that bunched in the middle and old UCLA t-shirt with a hole in one of the armpits.
&
nbsp; “So are you ready for the deployment?” Danielle asked as she began her leg stretches.
I froze. “What deployment?”
“Didn’t Henry tell you?” she asked, a look of trepidation crossing her face. “The squadron is leaving in two weeks.”
“What?” My heart, which was already trying to recover from running too fast, was now thundering again. “How long have they known?”
“Mike knew two months ago,” she said with an apologetic shrug.
I tried to rack my brain for reasons why Henry wouldn’t tell me about the deployment and only one thing came to mind. “They’re headed to Afghanistan, aren’t they?” I asked through the lump in my throat.
Danielle’s shoulders slumped. “Why wouldn’t he tell you? Aren’t you roommates?”
My nose was flaring unattractively, I was so mad. “Yes, we are.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stir up trouble.”
I gave her the feeblest smile I could manage under the circumstances. “It’s not your fault.” I said my goodbyes and headed to my car. Henry wasn’t going to have the chance to die in Afghanistan like my brother because I was going to kill him first.
2 | LOCK AND LOAD
I wasn’t overreacting to the news of the deployment. At least, I didn’t think so. It’s just that, when it comes to secrets, Henry and I haven’t had the best track record. First there was the Bobby Santos incident in high school. Bobby was a sweet—if a little too shy—guy who had solicited Henry’s help to ask me to the senior prom, knowing that Jason would have likely said no. Somehow, Henry had managed to forget to tell me, and I’d only found out about it after the event, when Bobby’s cousin confronted me in the hallway for standing him up. Henry had apologized, saying he simply forgot, that he had other things on his mind. Forgot, my ass.
Then there was the secret to end all secrets, the one that almost prompted me to move out. Henry had known about Jason’s death pretty much the same day it happened, but he didn’t tell me until much later, when the official word came out and family and friends were notified. He told me he was trying to protect me, that he wanted to delay the moment when my life changed. Now I’m able see it for the thoughtful gesture, but back then, I had been so livid I had left without a word and hadn't come back from California for an entire week.