HORIZON MC

by Clara Kendrick

  We were so successful that the Navy pulled us in with one of its intelligence operatives in Iraq, just as things were getting dicey, really falling apart after the fall of the regime that had been in place for so long. They needed our experience in dealing with these often-delicate situations. But we needed the intelligence of someone who had been working in the region for a long time to help acclimate us to the various layers of the mission.

  And that was how Margo Fletcher entered my life.

  “We’re never going to fuck.” Those were her first words to me, as she looked at me appraisingly, up and down, like a very hungry person might eye a steak.

  “What makes you so sure?” I asked her, fighting the urge to strike a more dramatic pose, flex my muscles, or suck in my stomach. It felt like she had X-ray vision. That if she couldn’t at least see through my clothes, she could definitely see right down to my soul, knowing just what I was made of. Currently, at least at that point, I was made of bravado. I was a dangerous sort of team leader because my team had never failed. I didn’t understand what it took to bring my teammates back together after a loss because we only logged wins. As sick as it was to say, I sometimes had the feeling that my superiors halfway wished we would suffer at least some kind of setback so they could gauge how I would bounce back from it. Of course, what none of them knew was that I was terrified of losing even a single mission objective. I was frightened at the prospect of failure, and that’s why I pushed myselfand everyone else in the team so hard.

  But Margo couldn’t tell that just by looking at me, could she? She was in naval intelligence, but she wasn’t like a mind reader or anything, right?

  “I’m not that kind of girl,” she informed me, making me jump.

  “Not what kind of girl?” I asked, cautious, testing the waters.

  “The kind of girl who fucks around,” she said, exasperated. “Look, I know I’m hot and shit, but you are never going to get to hit this. Ever. You will dream about it day and night, awake and asleep. You’ll probably even jerk off about it, as much as it disgusts me to say it. But you will never, ever get to taste these goods. Do you understand me?”

  “Slo-Mo’s not in the habit of fucking teammates, Fletch,” Raj said easily, slapping me on the back as he passed by. His interaction immediately dispelled any tension that had been brewing.

  “He looked at me like he’d never seen a girl on the battlefield before,” she complained, even though she’d only just met Raj, who we liked to call Razzle Dazzle. All of us on the team went by nicknames, and it sounded like Raj had just picked Margo’s for her.

  “Of course he hasn’t,” Raj fired back. “You look like you’re all woman.”

  “Oh, are we really doing this?” Margo asked, cracking her knuckles. “I am about to see some action, looks like.”

  “You think you can take me?” Raj danced around in a playful mimic of boxing footwork. “I bet you’ve been riding a desk all your career, analyzing numbers. I bet you’re not even a little bit spooky.”

  “That information is on a need-to-know basis,” she informed him. “And good luck ever trying to work your way up that ladder.”

  So the whole thing might’ve started off a little rocky, but Margo quickly became one of the guys. We trusted her from the get-go mostly because we didn’t have a choice and she rewarded us with excellent intel. We found the people we were looking for almost exactly where she said they would be nearly every time.

  “Where, exactly, do you get your intel?” I asked her one time after yet another notch on my belt of successes. “And how? It’s uncanny.”

  “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” she said, flicking the tip of my nose. “I give you good intel, you give me good results.”

  “I give the Navy good results,” I reminded her. “The Navy and the United States of America.”

  “And me,” she added happily, as if she was my supervisor or something. It could’ve been true. She was always so guarded about her chain of command that I wouldn’t have really been surprised if she had been further up on the pecking order than she let on.

  But none of that mattered. She was so firmly one of the guys that it was easy to forget that she wasn’t a SEAL. She liked to wig us out as regularly as she could manage, spinning yarns about stories we were a little too scared to believe in. Margo held her own against any of us, and if she really had ridden a desk before coming out to Iraq, she’d probably been just as much of a badass then as she was now. I grew to trust her with my life as much as I would trust any of my fellow SEALs.

  When she wasn’t trying to scare us shitless at night withstories of intrigue and just what the government really did put in the water I didn’t believe that one because I refused to  Margo and I became quite close. Even when the rest of the guys would finally turn in for the night, we’d stay up through it. Many was the number of sunsets we’d accidentally seen peek over the horizon, both of us laughing, dazed that it was possible to lose time like that.

  She confided in me about all the workplace horrors she’d had to endure as a successful woman in a male-dominated line of work. I told her, finally, about my fear of failure. How I was particularly afraid that someone would figure it out that I wasn’t good at what I did because I actually had some skills or talent. I was only good because I was so scared all the time. She was comforting without making me squirm, just watching me with her clear blue eyes, nodding at all the right moments, and just patting my shoulder when it was all done.

  “You know we’re still not going to fuck, right?” she asked me one night. It was before a big mission, and we honestly both should’ve been long asleep, like the rest of the team, but we both suffered from pre-mission jitters. Pacing around the camp had been one of the first ways we’d found out we had that little flaw in common.

  “Believe me,” I said, laughing softly. “You made that abundantly clear the first time we met.”

  “That’s the thing, though,” Margo said, her eyes troubled. “You would be surprised how often it really is necessary to say that to men I’ll be working with. They think that just because a vagina in fatigues shows up, they’re going to get to have sex with it whether the owner of that vagina agrees, or not.”

  I blinked at her. “That sounds like a truly horrific situation.”

  “Girls don’t have it all easy,” she confessed.

  “Have you ever thought about going to your superiors about it?” She looked away, and I tried again. “No one should have to work in such a hostile environment.”

  A startled laugh burst its way out of Margo’s body. “Have you seen where we work? We wouldn’t have jobs if we weren’t comfortable with working in a hostile environment.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do, I do. But you just don’t understand.”

  “I’d like to try, if you want somebody to talk to about it.”

  “You’re sweet, Sloan.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Still doesn’t mean we’re going to fuck.”

  I laughed louder this time. “I hear you. Don’t worry about that. Let me be your one less thing to worry about, okay?”

  “It’s because men and women can exist in the same environment without having to smash their genitals together,” she said. Margo was getting on a roll, now. Her eyes would always blaze like there was a blue fire behind them. She was beautiful like this not that she wasn’t usually good looking, or that I noticed that kind of thing anyway. But I wasn’t about to head her off when she was about to get really going.

  “People don’t think men and women can be platonic friends, but that’s their own insecurities showing,” she continued. “God forbid if someone’s wife has a nice guy friend. Her husband automatically assumes that she’s fucking him. That they’re having an affair. Why does it have to be that way? Can’t we all just be friends without fucking one another?”

  “Amen, Margo. Amen.”

  She gave me a funny look. “What?”


  “Sorry, did I say that wrong?” I gave her my best chagrined look. “My parents never really took me to church. Is it ‘a’ as in ‘hay’ or ‘ah’ as in ‘palm?’”

  “No, I mean that you…well, it doesn’t matter.”

  “What? Tell me what’s wrong.” Because there was obviously something wrong. I’d done or said something to make her feel uncomfortable, and the last thing we needed the night before a big mission was some kind of rift in the team. This wasn’t good at all. I needed to figure it out immediately.

  “It’s just that you’ve never called me Margo before,” she said, looking sheepish. “Not even when we first met. That’s all. It sounded funny. Your lips saying my name.”

  “Your name’s Fletch,” I reminded her. “As long as you’re on this team, that’s your true name. Your true calling.”

  “Okay, Sloan. So why do they call you Slo-Mo?” Margo raised both of her eyebrows and crossed her arms over her chest before leaning forward and staring intently on me. I wasn’t going to be able to get out of explaining this one, and I wished Raj were here so I could strangle him for putting me in this impossible position.

  “It’s about, uh…well, I mean…if you don’t take it to seriously, it’s kind of funny, actually though not to all members of the population. It’s certainly not appropriate in a professional setting, which we kind of are, and I think we should both hit the bunks and grab some sleep before tomorrow. Yeah, I think that’s the plan.”

  A strong hand on my arm held me in place. It electrified my skin like it always did, like I always shut down inside my mind. Because Margo and I were never going to fuck. It was never going to happen. I would be letting her down if I let her know how I really felt. She was right. Too many people doubted that men and women could be platonic friends. We were going to prove the entire world wrong about us.

  “You’re going to tell me how you got your nickname, first,” Margo informed me. Even my rambling attempts at sidestepping and issuing orders had been eviscerated. “Come on. It’ll be my bedtime story. I bet it’ll put me right to sleep.”

  “It’s about a sex move,” I said, eventually, after much more hemming and hawing. I was mortified, glad that the dark hid my blush. “Raj and I were discussing sex moves, and that’s what came up.”

  Margo blinked at me, her face completely devoid of emotion. “You and Raj discuss sex moves?”

  “It was a rare occasion,” I assured her. “Boredom on a stakeout. You have to know the feeling.”

  “Sure I know the feeling. I just didn’t know people tended to spice it up with talk about their time between the sheets.”

  “It’ll never happen again,” I said, halfway wondering why I was trying to reassure her. I didn’t answer to her, even though that didn’t mean I wasn’t looking for a good working relationship with every single member of my team.

  “Sloan, I don’t even know what the ‘slo-mo’ sex move is.” She raised her eyebrows. “Do you care to enlighten me?”

  “No. No, I do not care to enlighten you.”

  “Please don’t make me google it.”

  “It’s exactly what it sounds like,” I said, my face on absolute fire. “Just going through the motions, only slowly.”

  “Has this move brought you…success in the bedroom, then?”

  “No,” I said, unable to stifle an embarrassed giggle. “I was just trying to impress Raj, of all people. I’m sure he knew it, too. That’s why he gave me the nickname.”

  A chortle slipped out of Margo’s mouth before she could clap a hand over it to keep it inside.

  “Are you laughing at me?” I asked her, dumbfounded.

  “Only at how idiotic all of you are,” she said, but she couldn’t help her grin. “Sloan, you’re a good friend.”

  “How in the world am I a good friend? I just explained a probably non-existent sex move to you in relation to what my team members call me. This is that hostile work environment thing we were discussing earlier.”

  “I mean that you’re a good friend because you make me laugh. You take my mind off things I was worried about.”

  “What’s there to worry about? We make a hell of a team, right?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I mean, it’s probably nothing. Just one of my sources has gone dark. Probably just moving around, in and out of service. They always tend to do that. Nothing to worry about.”

  “If you want to postpone the mission”

  “That is the last thing I want to do, and you know it.” She looked at me. “You’re with me. You and your team. I know everything will turn out the way it’s supposed to.”

  “Good. It’s past time we turned in, then.”

  “Sloan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That thing about men and women not being able to be platonic friends?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m glad you’re my platonic friend.”

  “I’m glad to be your platonic friend.”

  “Okay, but that other thing about men and women being platonic friends?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I wish we could fuck sometimes.” With that gem to leave me with overnight, Margo pushed herself up off the blanket we’d been sprawled on and slipped inside to her bunk. I sat there until I realized I was cold and the horizon was brightening, thinking about what she said. Did she honestly want to sleep with me? Take our already close relationship to the next level? It wasn’t as if it was never done. I had plenty of friends who shacked up for their tours of duty. I just never wanted to pursue it, especially when Margo was so adamant about keeping ourselves on a close but professional level as professional as camaraderie in the armed forces got. I did have feelings for her, that much I knew for certain. I just didn’t want to push her into something she didn’t actually want.

  As it turned out, though, I needn’t have worried about whatever relationship there was between Margo and me. Life conspired to keep us apart.

  The mission the next day was a beast and an utter failure. It didn’t help me that it was my first and only failure. I didn’t know how to regroup after suffering such a catastrophic loss. It was possible that I still didn’t have the ability to do that, to this day.

  Because she’d been concerned about her source ghosting her, Margo had decided to accompany the rest of the team on the mission. She rarely did this, opting to stay back at an impromptu command post, issuing directives and suggestions and orders remotely, away from any real action. We didn’t think any less of her for doing that, though. She was always our eyes in the skies, so to speak, looking out for us and offering details about the bigger picture that we couldn’t see at the time, since we were too busy addressing the details.

  I didn’t like having Margo with us. Something didn’t feel right. I wasn’t sure if it was the source ghosting or her presence with a vest and assault rifle or what we’d talked about over the past few hours. But when shots started popping off, I knew that a terrible mistake had been made. This wasn’t a mission with missing parts. This was a trap, and they’d laid it for Margo.

  A kid ran up to her, and instead of leveling her rifle at him and ordering him to stop, she opened her arms.

  “Where in God’s name have you been?” she demanded, her face angry but relieved, like a mother’s might be if her child had spent too long walking back from the neighbor’s house after playing.

  It was then I saw the explosives strapped onto the kid’s vest.

  Things slowed down for that moment, as things tended to slow down for all formative moments. The explosives vest was rudimentary, but they didn’t need sophisticated systems to cause some real devastation with a couple of sticks of dynamite. It was partially hidden beneath a loose shirt, which was why Margo didn’t see it. But she knew this kid well enough to offer him a hug, and that gave me some pause. How did she know him, especially if she didn’t go out in the field with us very often? We knew loads of kids in the surrounding villages by sight. It wouldn’t be inco
nceivable if she did, too.

  “Get back!” I shouted, shoving the kid backward before he could reach Margo. There was still the explosives vest we had to deal with. That was priority one.

  “I know him,” Margo protested. “That’s my source.”

  And when the kid ran back toward her, an expression of either determination or fear on his face, I shot him. I shot him down to keep him from getting to her, and the moment he hit the ground, his shoddy vest exploded and got Margo anyway. She took the brunt of the explosion as shots continued to rain down around us, some of my team members falling trying to get Margo out of the line of fire. That’s how much they loved her, how much of a de facto member they considered her to be. The kid’s face stuck with me just long enough to propel me into action. Well, that and Raj screaming at me to help him get Margo to the village entrance, where our vehicles were parked.

  “You’ve been using children as your sources?” I asked her, outraged as we carried her too outraged to see just how damaged she was by the blast, too outraged to understand that my men were dying.

  “Now’s not the time, Sloan,” Raj said quickly. “Come on. We have to get her out of here.”

  He was right, but I couldn’t stop gaping at Margo, and she couldn’t stop trying to mouth words at me. Were they explanations? I wasn’t sure. I just knew that I was appalled, perhaps in shock, myself, at what I’d done. I hadn’t even hesitated for a single moment. I had seen what that child was capable of doing and I had tried to end him before he could give it a shot.

  It had been all too late, though, anyway. The vest had gone off, Margo might bleed to death before we could get her evacuated, and I didn’t even know where the rest of my team was. They had been left in there because I had feelings for Margo and she had feelings for me, even if I couldn’t reconcile what I’d done, what she’d been doing all along.