by Smith, Glenn
He’d made it perfectly clear to her on more than one occasion that due to any number of circumstances, not the least of which was the fact that he was married, nothing could ever come of that attraction. But she indulged herself just the same, often to the delight of her good-humored squad mates, and Dylan had to admit that he enjoyed it as much as she did, though he kept that to himself. She could be a strikingly beautiful woman when she wanted to be, especially in civilian clothes free of uniform restrictions, and he was every bit as attracted to her as she was to him, if not more so.
He kept that to himself, too.
Besides, he reminded himself as he watched her pull off her dusty trousers and stuff them into her laundry bag with her tunic, he owed her two cups of coffee, and knowing her she wasn’t going to let him wander very far out of her sight until she collected.
Amazing. Even exhausted, sweaty, and half covered in dirt, she was still beautiful. And what a body—perfect, curvaceous figure, and not an ounce of fat anywhere, except of course where men liked it the most.
She’d already stripped down to her Corps-issue black panties and tank top when Dylan suddenly realized that his quick sidelong glance had graduated into a long lustful stare, so he quickly opened his locker door to block his view...and to block her view of him. He stripped off his own dirt-caked cammies and stuffed them, along with his boots and socks, into his canvas laundry bag. Then he grabbed his towel and a clean pair of non-issue blue boxer briefs—Corps-issue underclothes were for uniform wear only as far as he was concerned—closed his locker, and headed to the showers.
The first stall on the left was free. He stepped into the changing cubical and closed the door, hung his towel and clean briefs on the hooks, then stripped off his own black underclothes and dropped them onto the narrow seat. He set the shower for medium-warm, heavy flow, then stepped into the stall and stood still as a statue under the pulsating stream while the past two weeks’ worth of ground-in grime turned to mud and fell away from his sun-baked skin in small clumps that threatened to stop up the drain.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried to keep himself clean in the field, because he had. But there were limits as to how thoroughly a person could bathe out of a portable field basin with only a single canteen’s worth of cold water.
He cupped his rough, dry hands under the soap dispenser and held them there until the creamy white fluid overflowed and oozed down the length of his forearms. His palms felt like coarse sandpaper as he lathered up, but that didn’t bother him in the least. In fact, it felt pretty good. “Finally, to be clean again,” he mumbled. He couldn’t remember another time when a warm shower had felt so good.
“Hey, Kenny!” he called out. “You in here?”
“Yeah!” the answer came from somewhere deeper in the long, narrow shower room. The acoustics being what they were, it was hard to tell exactly where he was.
“I told you I was still a white man under all this dirt,” he kidded.
“I’ll call my great-grandfather for you,” Kenny offered. “Maybe he can help.”
Dylan laughed. Kenny’s great-grandfather was a doctor. Still practicing full time in fact, despite his advanced age, and showing no signs of slowing down.
Dylan enjoyed being able to see Kenny on a regular basis again after so many years. He’d known Ken Franklin, whom he alone had the right to call ‘Kenny,’ ever since he was six years old and Kenny was eight. His father had abandoned the family to accept his own command—the starcruiser Excalibur—so his mother had moved them to a new house that stood directly across the street from the Franklins. At the time the neighborhood had been predominantly black, which had meant nothing more to Dylan than that the neighbors’ skin just happened to be a darker shade of color than his own. Nevertheless, a predominantly black neighborhood wasn’t what Dylan had been used to at the time, and being only six years old its unfamiliarity had scared him a little bit.
Early that first full day in the new house, Dylan had been sorely missing his friends, had worked himself into a pretty foul mood, and had grabbed his most prized possession, his toy cap gun, and gone outside to sit on the porch and sulk. He’d only been sitting there for a few minutes when an unfamiliar black kid came out of the house across the street and started playing in his own front yard. Afraid that kid might someday try to take the place of those friends he’d left behind and missed so much—an intrusion that would have been unforgivable in Dylan’s mind—Dylan had raised his toy gun, taken careful aim, and squeezed off a shot. The crack of the cap had attracted the boy’s attention, and upon seeing what Dylan had done the boy had immediately slapped his hands to his chest with a loud grunt and collapsed dramatically to the ground.
Despite having preoccupied himself with wallowing in self-pity, Dylan had laughed at the other boy’s antics, and five minutes after he committed his cold-blooded, brutal act of mock-murder, he and Kenny became instant friends. They got along well and within days became the very best of friends, always together and absolutely inseparable, and as they grew older even their girlfriends couldn’t come between them.
But like so many other childhood friendships, theirs had been tested by early adulthood. They’d grown up and had inevitably gone their separate ways. Kenny had enlisted in the United States Aerospace Force as a communications specialist immediately after he graduated from high school—two years earlier than Dylan—with the hope of qualifying for a position in Solfleet after his initial enlistment. When Dylan graduated two years later, Solfleet had changed its enlistment policy and started allowing high school graduates to join the fleet directly, so Dylan and another friend had signed up to become Solfleet Military Policemen. Life’s journey had torn Kenny and him apart and had squeezed billions of miles between them, but in the end they’d passed that test with flying colors.
Despite the vast distances that had separated them for years, they’d managed to maintain semi-steady contact with each other. Despite the odds against them, they’d kept their nearly lifelong friendship alive. So it was much more than just a pleasant surprise for the both of them when they ended up assigned to the same Ranger platoon together. It was the culmination of a plan, quickly outlined as soon as the opportunity presented itself and carried out across those billions of miles. Now Kenny served as squad sergeant of the second squad, equal to Dylan in rank but with almost two years more time in grade, and was on the verge of being promoted into the platoon sergeant’s slot. And he was still Dylan’s very best friend in the world. Any world.
Dylan heard the door to the next stall slam closed with a sharp crack. Was maintenance ever going to adjust the tension on that thing? Then he heard Marissa—he’d know her angelic voice anywhere—humming a soft melody that he didn’t recognize. When she turned the water on the sound drowned her out, but then her haunting melody exploded into a reverberating moan of such ecstasy that everyone in the showers, and probably in the locker room as well, had to have heard it.
“Oh!” she cried out, sounding as though she were on the very brink of orgasm, eliciting assorted snickers and various comments. “Oh yes! Yes! Oh, it feels so good!”
The snickering graduated into open laughter.
“You said a mouthful, Ortiz,” someone shouted.
“I wouldn’t mind giving her a mouthful,” someone else remarked.
“Watch your mouth out there!” Dylan warned, stopping in mid scalp scratch.
The ruckus stopped for the most part, but he could still hear someone snickering not quite under their breath. Then someone hollered out, “You don’t even have a mouthful!”
“Only because you won’t give it back!” the response came.
Then someone else yelled, “Damn! Even my schlong is dirty!”
“Yo! Your schlong’s always dirty!”
“Screw you, Pauly! At least I have a schlong!”
“Trust me, so does Pauly!”
That last was Sweeney, no doubt about it. Dylan dropped his arms to his sides and just stood there shaking his he
ad. They were all fine Marines, every last one of them, but they could be mercilessly brutal with each other when they wanted to be. “I think I’ll just stay in here forever,” he mumbled.
“Great! I’ll stay with you.”
And that was Marissa. He glanced at the ugly yellow-tan block wall that separated his stall from hers—how the hell had she heard him through that?—then stepped back under the water to rinse the shampoo out of his short, dark brown hair. She’d said a mouthful all right. The lukewarm water felt so good pouring down over his body that he almost wished he really could stay in there forever.
Once satisfied that he was finally clean and thoroughly rinsed off, he tapped the button to stop the water and then threw the forest-green plastic curtain aside and grabbed his towel off the hook. Then, when he’d dried off, he stepped back into the changing cubicle, hung the towel back on the hook, and stood naked in front of the full-length mirror on the wall to look himself over.
As usual, he felt generally pleased with what he saw. His muscles weren’t particularly large like Sergeant Running Horse’s—certainly nothing like a bodybuilder’s—but they were well defined, hard and strong, more like those of an accomplished martial artist. That, of course, made perfect sense. He’d been a student of the martial arts off and on since he was twelve years old and held advanced black belts in two separate disciplines.
“Looks good to me.”
Dylan yanked his towel down so hard that he broke the hook and held it in front of him as he spun to face the door. “Marissa!” he exclaimed quietly, looking her in the eye but seeing a lot more. She was holding the smoke-gray plastiglass door halfway open and standing there in the narrow doorway. Her long black hair was still dripping wet and clung to her bare shoulders, and the bright red towel she’d wrapped herself in barely reached the tops of her thighs.
“Hello, Dylan,” she said, smiling flirtatiously at him.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” he asked, being careful not to let his own towel drop too low in front as he hastily wrapped it around his waist.
His gaze fell to her athletic legs as she stepped over the four inch high water stop and into the cubicle, slowing the door with one hand as it closed behind her, and he saw that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath her towel. But then...so what? He’d seen her naked before. Hell, as Marines serving together in a Ranger platoon, they’d all seen each other naked before. More than a few times, in fact. In squad tents, field showers, Nuclear-Biological-Chemical decontamination stations, a certain oasis lake in the middle of The Great Cirran Desert... Aw hell. This was different and he knew it. Trying to rationalize it wouldn’t change that fact one little bit.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she answered, stopping barely three feet in front of him.
“Couldn’t you have waited until I came out?” he asked as his eyes met hers again. “This isn’t exactly the most appropriate place for us to be talking.”
“It’s all right,” she assured him. “There’s no one else here. I made sure we’d be alone.”
“That doesn’t matter,” he countered. “In fact, that’s the point. I’ve told you before...”
“I know what you told me before,” she said as she began slowly approaching him again, “but I’m not buying it anymore. I saw you watching me undress by the lockers and I’ve known for months that you feel the same way about me as I do about you. You try to hide it, but you can’t. Not from me. Not anymore.”
“I wasn’t watching you,” he told her as she inched closer. He knew he should back away from her and not let her get too close. But he didn’t want to back away. He wanted to hold her. He wanted to kiss her. Hell, he wanted to f... No. No, not that. That was different. That was something a guy did to a girl he didn’t care about—something he paid an escort for. He didn’t want to do that to Marissa. He wanted to make love to her.
“Yes you were watching me,” she insisted as she touched her generous, towel-covered breasts lightly to his chest. “I saw you.”
“I just happened to glance your way for a second. That’s all.”
“Sure you did,” she said, making it perfectly clear that she didn’t believe him for a second.
She placed her hands on his shoulders, then gently slid them together and laced her fingers loosely behind his neck. Dylan kept his arms at his sides and nervously clenched his fists.
“I like that you were watching me undress,” she told him, smiling seductively. “You should’ve kept watching. I might have given you something more to look at.”
He swallowed. “Out there in front of everyone? You’d have been asking for trouble.”
“What about in here?” she asked.
“Marissa...”
“I know you want me, Dylan. And we both know I want you.”
Dylan licked his lips and swallowed hard as he gazed into her deep brown eyes. “I won’t deny that I’m attracted to you,” he said. “You obviously know that I am. But you also know...”
She surprised him with a kiss. Nothing more than a quick peck on the mouth, at first. But when he didn’t protest or pull away, she pressed her lips to his and kissed him more intimately, much more intimately, and still without any resistance from him.
He felt a stirring deep inside as he began to reciprocate. A stirring that caused his heart to pound and his breath to grow labored. An old, familiar stirring that he’d long thought dead. Then he felt himself responding to her on a more carnal level.
He unclenched his fists, and despite his better judgment, slid his hands slowly up under her towel and over her smooth, curved hips. Their kiss burned with passion.
What am I doing? he asked himself.
He wanted her. He wanted her badly. He’d wanted her ever since he met her. She was so beautiful. So beautiful. And she was giving herself to him—all of herself, if that was what he wanted—because she wanted to. How could he not take her?
Pulling him along with her, she backed into the wall. She untucked his towel and dropped it to the floor, then eagerly wrapped her legs around his waist as he held her up and pressed her against the wall.
What the hell am I doing? This isn’t allowed! I have to stop. I have to stop!
“Make love to me, Dylan,” she whispered.
The brunette-tufted flesh between her thighs felt warm and soft against him, moist with fervent anticipation, and it took all the will power he could possibly muster not to cross that ultimate, heavenly threshold.
He let her down and pulled back from their kiss, but still held her close. He gazed into her beautiful brown eyes and whispered, “I’m sorry, Marissa. I can’t do this. I want to more than you know, but...”
“I know,” she regretfully agreed.
“I’m a married man,” he reminded her again. “Unhappily married, but married just the same. And more importantly, I’m your squad sergeant.”
She reached up and gently stroked his cheek. “I know. But I can’t help that I’m so in love with you.”
“You’re not supposed to be in love with me.”
She grinned, just slightly. “I know that, too.”
“Then why do you let yourself be?”
“Why are you in love with me?” she asked in return.
He started to answer—started to deny that he loved her, but he found that had no words.
“I don’t know, either,” she told him. “I just know that I love you.” After a moment, she added, “I’m sorry.”
“No. Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I’m not.”
A smile appeared on her sweet, tender lips, even as tears of joy began to well up in her eyes. “You’re not?” she asked.
He heard the cautious delight in her voice—the joy that was building inside her. But it was a guarded joy, he knew. It was as if she wanted so much to believe him, but was afraid that he might not really mean what he said. And that meant that he had one opportunity to qualify his words. One last chance to do what he knew was right without tearing her heart out in the process.
And this was it. The moment was upon him. If he was going to stop their relationship from moving to another level, he was going to have to do it right now.
He gazed deeply into her beautiful eyes once more and found his answer within them, but it wasn’t the answer he knew he should give her. He shook his head, ever so slightly, and told her instead, even as he warned himself not to, “No. I’m not sorry.”
Her chin began to quiver. “It makes me so happy to finally hear you say that,” she told him as her tears flowed freely down her cheeks.
Shit. He’d really stepped in the deep pile now. Might as well dive in head first. “And it makes me happy to finally say it,” he told her. Then he went even further down what he still knew to be the wrong path and admitted, “My marriage hasn’t been any good for years. I can’t even remember the last time my wife said she loved me, or the last time I actually meant it when I said it to her.”
“I love you, Dylan. And I do mean it.”
“I know you do, Marissa.” He reached up with both hands and gently brushed away her tears. “And I think, I know, that in time I could love you, too.”
She kissed him again and hugged him tightly to her. “God, I love you so much,” she whispered.
He returned her embrace and asked, “So what are we going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Then she cleared her throat and looked up at him. “But right now you owe me some coffee.”
They shared a quiet laugh together. Then, after one more gentle kiss, Marissa slipped out from between him and the wall and quietly stepped out of the cubicle, glancing back and smiling at him once more as she closed the door.
Dylan looked back at the mirror and sighed. “You’re an idiot,” he told his reflection, now that he was thinking a little more clearly.
He’d wanted her something awful. He’d resisted that final act of consummation, though just barely, but that didn’t make any difference. As far as he was concerned, he’d just cheated on his wife. No, worse than that. He’d confessed his attraction to another woman—to the other woman. This wasn’t just cheating. This wasn’t just a one-time encounter. This was only the beginning. This was first step toward having an affair. Perhaps even a long-term relationship, complete with all the emotional baggage that such a thing would inevitably create.