by June Gray
She granted me a dreamy smile. “I like you too. You’re handsome.”
I licked my lips as I stared at her mouth. “Actually, I take that back—”
“What?” she asked. “You can’t take something like that ba—”
I leaned over and kissed her. I just pressed my lips to hers, my body on auto-pilot. For the first second, she was too shocked to respond, but then her mouth opened and invited me in. She sat up with renewed purpose and grabbed my shoulders, pulling me closer.
God, the kiss… I don’t know how to describe it without sounding cheesy or sentimental. It was just like I’d imagined, all soft and hard at the same time. Her tongue was sweet and sexy at once, and when she bit my lip… fuck. It made me hard all over. Even my toes had boners.
I pulled away and I was sure I sounded desperate when I asked, “You want to come to my room?”
“More than anything.”
I took her hand and led her through the party, making sure Jason was not around to bear witness. I pulled her into my small, cluttered room and closed the door behind us.
She kissed me again, her arms wrapped around my neck. I devoured her mouth as I gradually lowered her to the bed, pressing her into the mattress as I fought to control my body.
I had to slow down and savor this night. If I wasn’t more careful, I’d detonate in five seconds and that was something I didn’t want for our first time together. I was doing fine until she wrapped her legs around my waist and moaned against my ear. “Henry, I want you to make love to me.”
My hips moved on their own as I ground my dick into her crotch, trying by sheer will to liquefy all the fabric between us. I was this close. All I needed to do was relieve her of her clothes and plunge inside her, but like I said, I needed to slow down.
I pulled away. “Have you done this before?” I asked her as I traced the column of her neck down to her chest and ending at her bellybutton, where I toyed with the hem of her shirt.
“Yes.”
I should have been relieved—I mean, having sex with a virgin is not the best, because really, how could you enjoy yourself when you know you’re hurting the girl?—but I was mostly angry with myself. “That should have been me.”
I didn’t know I’d said that aloud until she said, “I wanted it to be you.” Her face was all regret and tenderness.
I touched her cheek. “I’m sorry.” She closed her eyes and leaned into my palm. That one little move made my heart hurt. “I love you so much,” I whispered.
“I love you too, Henry,” she said, her eyes remaining closed. “I have since forever.”
I was unable to move, afraid that if I did, the spell would be broken and she’d jump up and take those words back. I couldn’t have that.
Elsie loved me. Me. Henry Logan. Me. The dickhead who’d made her life miserable.
Me.
I opened my mouth to say something—hell, I didn’t know what, I only knew that something needed to be said to cement the moment, but the next thing I knew, she had fallen asleep, her face still cradled in my hand. So I carefully pulled the covers out from under her and tucked her in, my entire body still warm from her words. It didn’t matter that we weren’t going to make love that night. She loved me and I loved her—we would get to it eventually.
For now, the most important thing had been established. She loved me too.
I pressed a kiss to her forehead and closed the door behind me, making sure to hang a sock on the knob so that people wouldn’t come in the room.
The next morning, I woke up and Elodie was in our living room with a trash bag, picking up empty plastic cups. “Good morning, Henry,” she said much too loudly.
I sat up from the couch and promptly lay back down again. My brain was pounding the beat of a thousand magnified drums.
“Looks like you boys had a great time,” the Colonel said, coming from the kitchen with a broom.
“You guys don’t have to clean up,” I said with an outstretched arm. “Really.”
My bedroom door opened and Elsie came shuffling out, looking fresher than she had any right to be. “Morning,” she said and kissed her mom on the cheek.
“Did you have fun at the party?” Elodie asked.
Elsie nodded. “Yeah,” she said then her eyes found me. “Thanks for letting me crash on your bed.”
The night flashed before my eyes, from the kiss and how close I’d come to making love to her, but mostly to her confession of love. “You’re welcome,” I said, giving her a meaningful look.
She only shot me a confused look and turned away.
The Shermans took Elsie back to their hotel while Jason and I cleaned up. We all met up for lunch at a Denny’s afterwards. I was dying to talk to Elsie in private, but we didn’t have a chance to be alone. Finally, I pulled her aside as we were all headed to our cars.
“Do you remember what happened last night?” I asked her quickly.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t remember anything past that beer pong game.”
My stomach dropped to my feet. “So you don’t remember what you said to me last night?”
Her eyebrows drew together as she looked at me. For one moment, I thought she might remember, but she just shook her head. “No. What was it?”
I kicked at the ground as I let her go. “It was nothing. You just said you were proud of me.”
She grinned, punching me in the arm. “I am.”
Jason and I took them to the airport. I watched her going through the security gate with a glob of disappointment lodged in my belly. I had foolishly thought that that was our time but even though I didn’t see it then, I know now it was for the best. I don’t know how we would have made it work; she was in L.A. and I was getting sent to Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio for training, and then after that, who knew.
We were at different points in our lives. Still, it didn’t stop me from wanting what I wanted.
11
After graduation, Jason was sent to Lackland Air Force Base for training, which is not that far from Randolph. We were there for nine months and hung out quite a bit.
When training was done we were both sent to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. That was some seriously freaky shit right there. We said goodbye to each other after college, thinking that our road would fork and I’d go one way and he’d go another. Eventually, we knew we’d see each other again somewhere in the world. The Air Force family is actually quite small, and you’ll run into the same people even when you’re in backwoods BFE. We never actually thought we’d get stationed at the same place so soon.
We both landed in Oklahoma around the same time and we rented an apartment together in the south side of the city. For a while there, we had it made. We had a really nice apartment, we had our brand new cars—mine was a convertible Mustang, cherry red, just like I’d always dreamed, and Jason’s was a black Camaro—and we had our brand new jobs. We threw parties every weekend, met friends in each other’s squadrons, dated some cute honeys we met in the clubs.
We really lived it up in OKC. I can’t say that that the life of a bachelor officer sucks. We lived like little kings. Two years in, we pinned on first lieutenant. God, we had it made.
And then Elsie showed up.
Shit, I hate that I’m even saying this, but she really put a damper on our bachelor lifestyle. After graduating she tooled around Monterey for a while before she accepted a web design job in Oklahoma of all places. It felt like high school again, when she’d follow Jason and me around.
It really drove me up the wall because, for one, I can’t very well bring dates to my apartment when there’s a girl living there, and two, because I still had feelings for her. I mean, there I was ready to let loose and live a little and she was in my space all over again, taking up my thoughts and shit.
She said she only needed a place to stay for a few weeks while she looked for a place of her own, so I at least had that to look forward to. But Jason was a douche and made her sleep on t
he pull-out couch instead of offering her his bed so every time I came out of my room in the middle of the night, I had to see her laying there, wearing her tiny shorts and a tank top with no bra on. I developed a sudden case of dehydration after that, so I had to go to the kitchen and get a drink of water every night. I was just so thirsty.
One night, while I walked past her on the way to the kitchen, she turned to her side and—I swear I tried to look away—her breasts just about fell out of her shirt. She was asleep so she didn’t do it on purpose, but the neck of her shirt was really low and when she lay on her side, I could almost see everything. God, I could have stayed there all night just looking at her but I eventually slapped some sense into myself and pulled the sheets over her shoulders. Then I went to my room and jacked off.
The next morning, I went on a hard run and brought back a newspaper. I scoured the classifieds, ready to find a place of my own. I wasn’t going to be the bad guy and kick out my best friend’s kid sister but there was no way I could live there anymore. My self-control was going to snap sooner or later, and who knows what would happen then.
When I got back from work that day, she had her stuff all packed up by the door.
“Where are you going?” I asked her.
She held up the newspaper with my highlighted ads of available one-bedroom apartments. “I’m going. I can take a hint.”
I grabbed the paper out of her hands. “That’s not—”
Jason chose that very moment to walk in the door and announce that he was going to deploy. That guy had interrupting down to an art form.
“What?” Elsie asked, her attention completely to her brother. “Where?”
“They’re sending me to Afghanistan.” Jason looked so proud, so excited. Hell, I was excited for him. This was the first time either one of us did anything that actually meant something. I mean, we go to work every day, we do our jobs, but for the most part, it’s just training. We’re just working in preparation for deployments, for war.
That’s my job: going to war, and to pretend otherwise is to lie. Our job is to start and end conflicts. Peace means we will be out of a job.
But you know what? Peace is just an idea. There will never be peace on earth, at least, not the kind of kumbaya-harmony people envision. There can be ceasefires and treaties, but we will never know true peace. That’s the sad truth of the world.
So Jason getting called from the dugout to play in the big leagues, now that was the job we had both been training for.
We went out to celebrate that night and we all got drunk. We took a taxi home and drank some more at the apartment. I relaxed a little around Elsie but before I could tell her that I was the one who was moving out, Jason asked her to stay, to take up residence in his room for the six months that he’d be gone.
Elsie didn’t even hesitate. She said yes.
12
I know I haven’t said much about Jason lately. I can pepper his name into conversations easily enough but to talk about him, to really say something about what kind of guy he was, is hard.
So today, I’m going to try. I’ve been delaying talking about his death but I’ve arrived at the point when it can’t be put off any longer.
It’s so hard to define a friendship, to pinpoint in words what makes you want to spend all of your time with someone. I’ve thought about it and I can say some generic things like he’s funny or he’s loyal, but that’s not the entirety of it.
He and I just clicked. That’s the best way I can describe it. Jason was a good guy down to the core. I would do anything for him, even take a bullet for him, and I know without a doubt that he would have done the same for me.
That’s what war buddies become after they’ve spent time together in the trenches, when you learn to really trust that the person beside you has your back, that even if you’re dying on the battlefield your buddy is going to run back and drag your bleeding ass back to safety. It’s not something you ask of each other; it’s just an understanding. They don’t call GIs brothers in arms for nothing, except in our case, Jason and I were brothers long before we joined the military.
It was about forty days into his deployment, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, when my commander called me into his office with a grave expression on his face and told me that I’d lost my only brother to a fucking sniper on a rooftop.
I honestly couldn’t tell you how I functioned that day. How I didn’t get into an accident when driving home was a miracle. All I remember is walking in the apartment and seeing Elsie at the dining table, doing something on her laptop, her life still untouched by the news.
I must have looked like complete shit because she immediately stood and asked, “Are you alright?”
I considered telling her right then and there but I couldn’t for a multitude of reasons. First and foremost, my commander had asked that I wait until the Shermans were notified through official channels. Honestly though, I just couldn’t find the courage to tell her, to extinguish that light behind her eyes.
If I haven’t made it obvious, Elsie loved her brother. They fought a lot but at the end of the day, she adored the hell out of him. She followed him to Oklahoma, for crying out loud. I knew that if she found out about Jason’s death she would crumble. I know now that I didn’t give her nearly enough credit, that she is far more resilient than I thought, but at the time I just couldn’t bear the thought of devastating her life. Everything she knew would change and I wanted to delay that for as long as possible.
As the only brother she had left, I was going to use everything in my power to protect her from pain. That’s what Jason would have wanted.
I don’t know how I managed to smile through the storm inside me. “I’m just tired,” I lied and went straight to my room. I tried to sleep but my brain wouldn’t shut off. I paced around the room but I just felt caged. I went to the gym and ran on the treadmill and even that didn’t seem enough. The punching bag in the corner caught my eye so I pounded on it until the pain had moved from my chest to my knuckles. I think that was really the only way I was able to get through the next seven days, to hurt my body enough that it superseded the hurt in my heart.
I avoided Elsie as much as I could and just shook my head whenever she asked me if I’d heard from Jason. I told her that work was stressful, a story that she bought until the day her parents called.
For as long as I live I will never forget the look on her face when she was on the phone; her face crumpled and then her eyes landed on me. The hurt on her face made the weight of Jason’s death nearly unbearable. It nearly broke me.
I wanted to talk to her right away but she took the cordless into her room and stayed on the phone the rest of the night. The next morning she was gone, leaving only a note on the counter to say she’d flown to California to be with her family, making it abundantly clear that I wasn’t part of that.
She was only gone five days but those one hundred and twenty-some odd hours felt like a lifetime. For the first time since I met Jason, I was completely alone. It was… unsettling.
I was prepared to grovel and beg when I picked her up at the airport but the moment she emerged from the gate she just fell into my arms and pressed her face into my chest. I couldn’t hold it together anymore. I hadn’t cried about Jason’s death until that moment, when I finally admitted to myself that my best friend was really gone. So I held close the only person I had left, hugged her so tight to me I was sure I was crushing her, but she clutched me closer. I could feel her tears soaking right through my shirt and wetting my skin, and my own were running off my cheeks and onto her hair. We must have looked like long-lost lovers, hugging and sobbing in the middle of the airport, but we didn’t care. We were in our own little miserable bubble, two people glued together by our heartache and tears.
It wasn’t until a day later when her sadness turned into anger and she aimed it straight at me. She was so livid that I hadn’t told her the day I’d found out. I endured her angry words and accusations quietly, not only because
I deserved it, but also because being angry was easier than being miserable. I needed at least one of us to stop being miserable.
Jason’s funeral was held a month later. Elsie and I flew to California together this time and we sat in the limo with her family as we followed the funeral procession. Elsie squeezed my hand throughout it all—the draping of the flag on the casket, the firing of the volleys, the bugling. When they folded the flag and presented it to the Colonel, I finally broke down. I couldn’t play the stoic guy anymore, not when what was left of my best friend was laying in a box a few feet away, and especially not when his sister was falling apart beside me.
There have been very few times in my life when I allowed myself the luxury of being sad, but when they lowered my buddy into the ground that day, I had no control of anything. It was as if a floodgate opened up and I was completely engulfed with grief.
Jason was really gone.
The first night Elsie had a nightmare, I ran into her room and found her flailing around in her bed, screaming Jason’s name. Not knowing what else to do, I sat beside her and rubbed her back until she calmed down. She was a trembling mess and she cried in her sleep.
When she woke up, she didn’t say anything.
“Having a bad dream?” I asked gently.
She nodded. “I dreamt about Jason walking around in a neighborhood and he stopped to pet this dog. And then…” She couldn’t choke the rest of the words out.
“Come here,” I said, wrapping one arm around her shoulder and pulling her to my chest. I leaned back into her headboard and held her like that until she fell asleep. It didn’t matter that I had a kink in my neck the next day. All that mattered was that I was able to give comfort to Elsie.
The next night I was back there, soothing her again after a nightmare. I could say I was being altruistic but the truth was it was for my sake too. Holding her close gave me a sense of purpose and made me feel a little less alone. She started to sleep on my bed when she had a bad night. Sometimes we’d talk until we fell asleep; sometimes we didn’t need to say anything at all. Just being near someone else was enough.