Unraveled (Woodlands)

by Frederick, Jen

  "Oh no, not the ‘why one-night stands don’t make good sex’ lecture.” Bo groaned.

  "What's this?” she asked.

  "Ignore him. Bo doesn't like anything that requires thinking,” I said.

  "He's actually very smart.” She looked adorably peeved that I was saying anything bad about her boy. While I enjoyed giving both my boys shit, I was happy that Bo was with someone who defended him so fiercely. I kind of wanted that. Someday. Like in ten years, I told myself.

  "I can see you’re still in the early stages of a strong infatuation,” I teased, wondering how long it would be before Bo would carry AnnMarie off to have some dirty hot sex that we'd all hear because this house, as nice as it was, did not have enough sound proofing. I’d learned that the last time I’d come to visit. The guys in this house enjoyed the ladies, often and loudly.

  "I want to hear this theory," AnnMarie said.

  Bo flopped back and heaved a huge theatrical sigh. "Now we're in for it."

  She put her hand over his mouth. "Start talking."

  He must have licked her hand because she pulled it away with a yelp and wiped her palm on her shirt, giving Bo a dirty look. Yup, it was official. I was jealous of one of my oldest friends because of the easy relationship he had with his girl. Maybe coming here had been a mistake.

  I forced my gaze away from the happy couple and onto the growing crowd. There were a lot of gorgeous women here, and many of them were eyeing me like I was top grade prime rib at an all-you-can-eat buffet. I’d be a fool not to take advantage of an offer.

  I turned to AnnMarie to explain my theory. "It's not that hook ups aren't good but it's like the difference between a nice song and an awesome concert. One is a three-minute interlude. The other is an event. The better you know your partner, the better the sex is.” My eyes surveyed the eclectic mix of students, construction workers, musicians, and gym rats that made up the new friends of my old friends. If I did hook up, I wouldn’t want anyone who would form an attachment. My time here was temporary, after all.

  "Maybe for you it's three minutes." Bo smirked.

  "Whatever. You can't tell me it's not better with AnnMarie than anyone else."

  "I was a virgin when I met AnnMarie," Bo said loftily. AnnMarie just rolled her eyes. "Besides, just because AnnMarie knows a girl, doesn't mean she knows her medical history."

  "Why do you need that?" She quirked an eyebrow at me.

  "I'm just careful," I replied. I didn't want to go into the long, sordid story about my past brush with a serious STI due to a cheating girlfriend. I’d come away clean, thankfully, but it had been a close call.

  "Plus she has to be in the medical profession,” Bo added.

  "Jesus, she does not." I was going to have to take him to the ground because he'd forgot the kind of beating I could deliver.

  "Your last three 'companions' were in the health field." Bo held up his fingers. I grabbed a couple and twisted them back as he tried to hit me with his other fist. AnnMarie grabbed at him and he subsided. Still, her scowl was directed at me.

  "I'm not going to hook you up with any of my friends if you’re dating someone!" she said disgustedly.

  "I'm not seeing anyone," I assured her. "I'm just not into the bar hook up."

  "Why's that?" This was a question from Adam, the one who'd popped the champagne cork. He had more tattoos than some of the guys I served with. I guess it went with his rock band lifestyle.

  "Safety," I said.

  "Too many chances of putting the stick in crazy?" another roommate asked. It was Finn this time, the guy who actually owned this house.

  "No way. Crazy is awesome. Crazy in the head; crazy in the bed," Adam said.

  I shook my head. "No. Disease. Pregnancy scares."

  "Suit up, man." Adam tipped his head back and drained his beer. I waited until he was done to impart some much-needed sense. It was the same tip I gave to the new recruits.

  "You can still get herpes on your ball sack."

  Adam looked down at his lap and so did nearly every guy within listening distance. One by one, they all got up and left. Presumably to go look at their nuts. Bo gave me a nudge and high-fived me. Civilians, Marines—they were all the same in some ways.

  Grace came wandering out and sat down next to us. "Where is everyone?"

  "Checking out their balls," AnnMarie said. Her dry delivery made Bo and me crack up again while Noah looked on with a smirk.

  AFTER ADAM HAD CONVINCED HIMSELF his gonads were in good health, he showed me where I’d be staying for the few weeks I’d be here.

  "You sure I'm not putting you out or anything?" I threw my seabag and backpack down near the door in case Adam had changed his mind about letting me use his room. The place was pretty clean for being the bedroom of a twenty-five-year-old musician who lived with four other guys. Not military clean. There was shit everywhere, like two guitars in the corner and a mess of woven bracelets, heavy silver rings, guitar picks, and what looked like four or five different pairs of headphones on a dresser. But there weren’t any empty pizza boxes on the floor or half-filled beers on the nightstand. Instead, it looked like the room of a guy who lived in his music.

  "Nah, I'm going to bunk in the garage. It's where most of my instruments are anyway." Adam went over to the dresser and shoved everything off the top and into the drawer beneath it—presumably clearing space for my shit. "This is the bathroom." Adam opened the door to what I'd thought was a closet. Inside was a decent-sized bathroom with a shower, a toilet and a sink and another door. "Closet's through there. I tried to clear a little space for you." The closet looked like a denim factory. There were dozens of jeans piled on custom shelves and another full set of shelves with an unholy amount of boots and shoes.

  "Not to be offensive, man, but you’ve more clothes and shoes than any guy I've ever met."

  Adam gave a negligent shrug. "I like clothes. So sue me."

  "I'll just leave my stuff in my bag.” I didn’t feel comfortable setting my gear up beside Adam’s. I was only here for a short while and I’d had plenty of practice living out of my pack.

  "Your call," Adam said. "Use what you want. The cleaning crew comes on Wednesdays at three. We all try to get out of here and leave them alone.” He paused, looked around the room again, and then gave me another shrug.

  The cleaning crew explained the decent state of the room. The shrug, however, was weird but I let it pass without comment because it wasn’t any of my business. If Adam had been in my platoon, I would have probably had to ask nosy questions to make sure he wasn’t fucking up his personal life so bad that it would affect his performance in the Corps. But he wasn’t, so I shut my mouth, showered off the travel grime, and shrugged on a fresh T-shirt, cargo shorts, and sandals. Downstairs, the party seemed to be in full swing, with people littering the patio outside and some poorly playing a first-person action game on the big screen in the living area.

  “You allow these atrocities to occur without retribution?” I asked Bo, who was leaning against the wall grimacing as the video game players missed kill shot after kill shot.

  "I don't know them but we can dunk them out in the pool later."

  "This is just a normal everyday occurrence here?" I waved at the mass of people moving in and out of the house toward the back patio and into the pool. Bo's gaze traveled around the room, stopping at AnnMarie talking animatedly to some girl I hadn’t met. I had to nudge Bo out of whatever fantasy he was concocting. He jerked a little and then punched me in the arm. "The fuck?" I said, punching him back.

  "I was having a moment." He scowled. Like he hadn't had a moment earlier when he'd dragged AnnMarie away from the pool for some private time.

  "Let her be for a minute and maybe she'll miss you," I retorted. This riled Bo up and soon we were grappling on the hard wooden floor. He struck me twice in the ear. Bo had big fists but his larger body also made it easier to maneuver around him.

  I’d gotten a choke hold around his neck and was pulling his h
ead away from his shoulders when a huge stream of cold water hit my face. "Motherfucking what?" I yelled, dropping Bo. AnnMarie stood there with an empty pot, looking both exasperated and amused.

  "You guys are acting like you're five." She tapped her foot by my head.

  "Nah, I was still fighting like this when I was fifteen." I smiled, getting up and pulling her in for a hug. I pressed my wet body against hers for all of one second before Bo pulled me off. He and Noah picked me up and proceeded to throw me into the pool.

  I kicked off my shoes and stripped off my T-shirt and shorts, throwing the whole lot up on the pool deck.

  "Keep your panties on," Bo shouted as my clothing hit the concrete.

  "No worries, man, I won't embarrass you by showing my package to all the girls here."

  "No one wants to see your pasty white ass."

  "I think you're more afraid that AnnMarie will see my giant dick and leave you." Predictably, Bo jumped into the pool. We started trying to drown each other, but I'd had too much training for that.

  Bo's entry into the pool prompted the rest of the crowd to jump in and soon I was too interested in all the honeys around me to want to wrestle with Bo anymore. Noah tossed me a pair of swim trunks, and I changed under the water. We played pool games until I was too hungry to be distracted by all the bikini-clad coeds in the water with me.

  "You really know how to press Bo's buttons," AnnMarie commented as I threw together a sandwich and wolfed it down in three bites.

  "When you spend a few years stuck next to a guy 24/7, you get to know him pretty well,” I explained. She handed me a soda and I drained that too.

  "Did you hate it? Is that why you want to get out?" she asked, sipping at her drink.

  I made up another sandwich before answering her. Part of me resented the question, but that's why I was here, and I guess everyone knew it. Answering their questions might help sort out the confusion in my own mind. "Everyone says you don't miss the service, you miss the men you served with. So no, I don't want to get out because I saw your man far too much in the desert.

  “When you're deployed, you are always busy doing something, and you feel like you’re doing something worthwhile. Whether it's going to look for insurgents or handing out aid. At home, some guys get to do embassy duty or presidential assignments, but a lot of us stay on base. When you're on base, you train, but it doesn't feel as..."

  I paused, unsure of the word I was looking for. "Important?" I still wasn't sure what was making me feel out of sorts. "My pops—grandfather—says that the reasons for getting out will always outweigh the reasons for staying in." I laid my sandwich down, my appetite kind of gone.

  "Sounds tough." AnnMarie made a clucking sound of sympathy, and I gave her a wry smile in return.

  "Kind of a downer of a discussion for such a nice day."

  She patted me on the arm. "Nope, not a downer at all."

  She was lying, but we both left it at that. If I’d known the answers to AnnMarie’s questions, then I wouldn't be here; I'd be in sunny Southern California with my boys at the beach. I picked up my sandwich again because I couldn't let it go to waste. I ate the whole damn thing methodically, without enjoying it. I was afraid that no matter what decision I made—getting out or staying in—it’d be the wrong one.

  "How come you refer to Bo and Noah as Marines even though they've been out of the military for a couple of years now?" AnnMarie asked.

  "Once a Marine, always a Marine," I explained. "It's the oldest, best fraternity in existence. I could be anywhere and if I yelled Marine in trouble, I'd have every Marine in the room lending me a hand. It's a brotherhood like no other."

  "Sounds like you love it." Her eyebrows were raised in challenge.

  “Yeah, I guess I do." I sighed. I did love my brothers. They would be the thing I missed the most about the Corps, but I also would miss the sense of purpose and the idea that I was involved in something bigger than myself.

  Thankfully, I wasn’t allowed more time for my dilemma to mess with my head because Bo sidled up to me with the fat grin that he wore when he was about to get us all in trouble.

  “Want to go to a bar?”

  “What about all this?” I nodded toward the crowd.

  “Mal’s going to stay here.” Mal was another roommate.

  I shrugged. Party here, bar there. Made no difference. “I’m going to trust that you have good things planned for me.”

  “Don’t doubt it,” he said, giving me a hard slap on my back.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Samantha

  I FELT LIKE I WORE a scarlet letter. Not “A” for adulterer but “W” for widow. I thought the defining moment of my life was going to be when I married or maybe when I had kids. Instead, it came two months after the wedding, when the “casualty team” showed up at my door, expressing the sorrowful regrets of the Secretary of the Army. I doubted the Secretary of the Army knew who my nineteen-year-old husband was, and I seriously doubted the sorrowful regrets.

  My reaction wasn’t very graceful. A real Army wife would’ve stood stoically by while the two Army men in their service class “A” uniforms somberly delivered the news at the door of my condo. My response was first screaming at them followed by an ungraceful collapse on the floor and finally spewing snot all over their wool jackets.

  Bitsy, my sister, tried to cheer me up months later by reading Internet articles of all the other ways I could’ve embarrassed myself. “At least you didn’t stab anyone or try to burn yourself,” she pointed out. I didn’t question the veracity of those reports because it actually did make me feel better that there were a handful of people that took the news worse than I did.

  At the funeral, the chaplain had held my hand, repeatedly murmuring, “You’re so young.” That was the refrain of my life now. Samantha Anderson, widowed so young. I heard it everywhere. At the grocery store, the library, and even at the stupid bar where I worked.

  It seemed like people in my life placed themselves into two general camps. There was the camp, which included my family, that was ready for me to move on from the death of my best friend, only lover, and husband of two months. The other camp wanted to enshrine me as Will Anderson’s widow forevermore. I wasn’t at all sure what camp I fell into, but I knew I was lonely. I was tired of being a widow, and I was tired of bartending for a living, and I was tired of having to serve as Will’s avatar for the family he left behind. I guess I was in the tired and lonely camp.

  But I set that sentiment aside today to endure my monthly luncheon with Will’s parents—David and Carolyn. Sometimes my brother-in-law Tucker showed up, but more often than not, it was just me. Last night, Tucker had called and explained earnestly that he just wasn't up for it this month—again. His inability to have any kind of emotional investment in his family was irritating on most days, but it was enraging on days like today. As if I looked forward to the monthly lunch.

  "I'm so glad you came today, Sam." Will's mom patted my hand. That made one of us. It was a strained meal, what with Carolyn drinking her lunch, David criticizing her for it, and both of them wondering what I was doing to uphold Will's memory. The slight ache at my temples that had hummed in the back of my head when I woke up was spreading across the entire surface of my skull and face. I lifted a shaky hand to my temple in an effort to relieve the pain.

  "Have you registered for your classes this fall, dear?" Carolyn handed me the butter dish.

  "I did. I'm taking eighteen hours."

  Carolyn tsked. "That sounds overly ambitious. Will wouldn't have wanted you to work that hard."

  I slid a dollop of butter in the shape of a flower onto my bread plate and swallowed a sigh.

  "Smart to try to catch up for lost time," interjected David. “Since your dad gets you free tuition, you might as well take as many credits as possible.” If Carolyn had said the sky was blue, I swear David would have told her it was green. Mom said that David was a great law partner, but a sucky life partner. Lucky for Mom she got David a
s a law partner. It was Carolyn who had to live with him every day. He continued. "If you do eighteen credit hours every semester and at least twelve in the summer, you'll be on to law school in two years. You got a full year under your belt before you quit the first time."

  I gave David a tight smile. He couldn’t resist getting his jabs whenever he saw an opening. "Let's just take one semester at a time."

  "You should start planning now what prerequisites you'll need to get your major and when's the best time for you to take those classes." David buttered his own roll and then pointed his butter knife at me. "Otherwise you'll be stuck waiting around an extra semester trying to finish out your degree. No need to waste more time. After all, wasn't going to college the reason you stayed here instead of moving to Alaska?"

  Yes, David, stick the knife in deeper. Twist it around. I don't think you've caused enough pain yet.

  "Will would be so proud," Carolyn added.

  I fought back a grimace. He would not be proud. He hated school. Why else had he escaped to the Army right out of high school? What other reason was there to spend more and more time in the ROTC during high school, playing at drill on weekends? It was because he couldn't stand school. And he didn't want to be a lawyer like his dad. Like my mom.

  "It'll be nice to finally have one of you kids join the firm." Carolyn smiled at me.

  "If I don't," I demurred, "then Bitsy for sure will."

  "Bitsy is whipsmart, but she's only fifteen. It'll be eight, nine years before she can join. You can be there in five, maybe even four if you apply yourself." David waved his knife at me again. The likelihood of anyone finishing college and law school in four years was so low that I wasn't even going to respond.

  Not that it mattered to David. He could argue both sides of a topic for hours on end. I guess it made him a great lawyer, but he was a shitty dad. Reason two why Will had hightailed it out of here before the last high school bell had rung.

  David must have recognized the ridiculousness of his statement because he set down his knife and leaned closer to me. "We're just anxious to get some young attorneys in so your mom and I can take some time off."