That’s right. The plan. Whenever anyone seemed skeptical, we were supposed to act in love. “We can’t get all hot and heavy right away,” I whispered back. “It’s weird.”
Cassie leaned closer, rubbing her hand up my thigh. “You know what else will be weird? Jail.” Hot blood rushed from my head to a place it should not go, not right now.
“Fine,” I said, making sure to take her hand and put it on the table, where everyone could see.
Our server, a skinny younger guy with gages in his ears, shouted over the din, “What can I get y’all to drink?”
“Water’s fine,” I called.
“Me, too,” Cassie said.
“Seriously?” Hill, the corporal, was looking at us, his blond eyebrows raised with surprise. “Water, Private?”
“Come on, Morrow,” Armando said, lifting his beer. “Last night of freedom!”
I could go for a bump, I thought again. The same thought, like a record player. I shook it off and looked at Cassie, as if for approval.
“You’ve got an early morning, babe,” Cassie said, bright, unnatural.
“We all have an early morning, sweetheart,” Corporal Hill said. “Come on.”
I saw Cassie’s lip curl.
“I’m good, sir, thanks,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it.
Gomez’s husband knocked over a glass with a bang, and Hill’s attention went elsewhere.
One round down, I couldn’t help thinking. We were only two people out of eleven. There was no way they could care about us for long. Beside me, Cassie was listening to Clark’s wife tell her about their honeymoon. Cassie cooed and awwed at a description of mosquito curtains. Under the table, her leg was twitching.
While the rest of the group ordered another round, I checked in. “Why do you have that voice on?”
“What voice?”
I looked at her like, you know what I mean.
“I thought it seemed nice and . . . wifely.”
I almost spit out my water, laughing.
She shrugged, looking panicked. “What? I don’t know.”
“It’s cute.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t even.”
“No, I mean, cute, like the sound of a music box in a horror movie cute.”
“Gross.”
Suddenly, my name rose from the other end of the table. Shit. Another gauntlet. Cassie straightened her back.
“And over here we’ve got Morrow, the king of romance.” Armando was gesturing toward me, shaking his head. “Cassie,” he continued. She tensed next to me. “Cassie, right?”
“Right,” she said. Her voice was clipped.
“How the hell,” Armando said, his words stringing together. “How did you guys get from arguing about Davies’s drunk ass to a wedding chapel?”
All other conversations at the table died. Cassie cleared her throat. I felt Frankie’s eyes burning the side of my face, willing us forward. The story. It was time for the story. The story would make everything better. We had talked about this. Something about a walk by the river. “I took her for a walk by the river,” I said.
“He came . . . ,” Cassie started, and Armando whooped, interrupting her. “He came back,” Cassie continued, trying to keep her voice light. “To ask me out.”
“Exactly,” I said, almost too much like I had just remembered the answer to a question on a game show.
“And, and . . . ,” Cassie stumbled. I could feel her trying too hard to pick up the emotion I had dropped. She put her hand near her breast, for emphasis, like a soap opera. “And since he was deploying so soon, we wanted to make sure we had each other when he got back. I’m his rock.”
We hadn’t said anything about rocks. “She’s my rock,” I repeated, trying to make it sound like it wasn’t a question.
I couldn’t even look at Cassie, but I had to. The plan. The tip of her tongue hit her lips, waiting. I knew what I had to do. I resisted nervous laughter. I leaned in, open mouth landing on hers, which was closed. It wasn’t so much a kiss as it was just wet, and off target. We had done a much better job at city hall.
“Ow-w-w-w! Slow it down,” Armando said. “No, wait, I’ll just watch.”
Clark cleared his throat. “Still hilarious, though.”
“What is?” I could hear Gomez asking as we unlocked our lips.
“That y’all were at each other’s throats one night, and proposing the next.” Clark’s expression was doubtful. Shit.
“Means there’s a lot of passion, right?” I added.
“Sure.” Clark shrugged. “Whatever works.”
Cassie put her hand on mine. I leaned close to her face again, planting my lips on her cheek. I could feel her jaw harden. We’d pretty much fucked that up. I imagined Frankie was doing everything not to kick us under the table.
The food came. We repeated the story. We made out again, but better.
Elena stood with her glass of white wine, and the attention turned toward her. Cassie and I simultaneously let out our breath. This was almost over. We had almost made it through.
“Y’all, I’d like to say something real quick,” Elena called out.
“Oh, boy,” Gomez said, rolling her eyes at her husband. “Here come the toasts.”
“Just real quick,” Elena said, nervous, smiling at the group. “I just wanted to say that all of us wives and girlfriends . . .”
“And husbands,” Gomez said, putting her hand on the back of her husband’s neck.
“And husbands, of course. We’re all going to miss y’all so much. We’re going to be waiting every single night for you to come home safe. And until then, we’re behind you one hundred percent. We hope you accomplish what you set out to do, which is keep our country safe. God bless America.”
“God bless America!” the group repeated, lifting their glasses. They cheered, bumping the rims across the table, proud. I cheered with them.
“Hooah!” Armando shouted.
“Hooah!” we repeated.
Cassie looked at me, a glint in her eye. I gave her a steely look back. She was on the verge of a joke. I shook my head.
Hill stood, and started a cadence. “The Army Colors, the colors are blue . . .”
“To show the world, that we are true,” we sang back.
“The Army Colors, the colors are white . . .”
Frankie smiled at me as we sang together. “To show the world that we will fight.”
For every sidelong glance Cassie gave me, I sang louder. My heart lifted. This is the song we sang in boot camp on the track every morning when we ran. We’d sung this song as I discovered the feeling I could get from accomplishment, from dreaming.
When the song ended, Hill raised his glass, growling, “To bombin’ some mothafuckin’ Arabs!”
“Hooah!” Everyone cheered and drank.
“Holy shit,” Cassie said, in her regular voice. I tried to catch her eyes. Maybe she hadn’t realized it had slipped out. “Are you serious?”
My company members’ faces turned toward me, silent. My mouth was dry. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
“That’s fucked up,” she said, louder.
Hill sat down back at his place at the head of the table, leaning back. “Uh oh. PC police.”
“I’m just, like, trying to digest the fact that you’re celebrating taking lives. Do you always do this?”
Now she was looking at me. “Uh . . .”
“And where are the cheers about building roads and schools?” She was disgusted. She was mocking me. “Not to mention how phenomenally racist that is.”
My face burned.
Hill put his arm over his wife’s chair, a conspiratorial smile growing on his face as he looked at me, sighing. Women, right?
“Let’s not get into this,” I said, begging with my eyes. Almost done. She looked away and shrugged my hand off.
“Hey, sweetheart,” Hill said, pretending to speak gently.
She tilted her head. “My name is Cassie,” she said. “Wh
at.”
“You might not know this, but that’s our job. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but you gotta do it.” He gestured at his wife, who was staring at the table, with his beer still in his hand. “It’s not easy being an army wife. Ask Jessica.”
“I’m not a fucking ‘army wife,’ ” Cassie said, sarcastic, and stopped midbreath. She pressed her lips together.
My stomach dropped. The one thing we were trying to prove. The one reason we were even here in the first place, she had knocked down. The truth.
“Cassie,” I got out. I gestured to Cassie, confused, and to Hill. “Corporal, she doesn’t mean it that way . . .”
The only sounds were the clash of forks on plates, the ting-ting of Top 40 over the speakers, and someone, probably Gomez’s husband, saying, “Yikes.” Down the table, Frankie stayed frozen, his eyes on Cassie. He wasn’t indignant, though, or offended or surprised. He looked sad. Regretful.
Cassie stood, scooted around her chair, and folded her napkin in the center of her plate. I stood with her, my hands in fists. There was a pause, the table braced. Cassie opened her mouth, closed it into a serene smile, and walked out.
“Excuse us,” I said. I swallowed.
I willed myself to follow her, though all I wanted to do was roll my eyes and watch her go. As I closed the door, I could hear the chatter of my friends rising again behind us, knowing whatever they were saying was full of relief that we were gone.
Cassie
I drove us to a motel, still seething, though Luke, staring out the passenger window at the car dealerships and gas stations whipping by, didn’t seem to notice. PC police. Sure, whatever they wanted to call it.
And then I had all but blown our cover. Was it worth it? Depended on which part you were talking about. Was being around a bunch of xenophobic, oversized children worth the one thousand dollars a month? Was calling out a bunch of xenophobic, oversized children worth throwing away the health insurance? Either way, my mother was right. This was crazy. And thank fucking God we were almost done.
“Well, are you coming in or do you want to officially call this thing?” Luke asked as we pulled into the parking lot.
Instead of answering, I parked, and followed him out of the car. He was already bounding up the motel steps.
“It’s 201,” he called out to me.
We creaked up the metal stairs to the second-level balcony.
The room was a smoker’s lung with a funguslike carpet and walls peppered with blurry watercolor prints by Thomas Kinkade.
Luke sat on the bed, unlacing his boots.
The bed. Bed, singular. There was nothing in our agreement about having to share a comforter. “Why the hell did you get a queen bed?” I asked.
He untucked his button-down and I felt my body getting hot with embarrassment, and a strange pang like lust, which I hated.
“Frankie said that’s all they had available,” he muttered.
“Oh, I’m sure.” I took off the Walmart ring and flung it on the table next to a telephone from 1992, finally able to feel my finger.
He kicked off his boots. “Yes, I’m the one who did everything wrong. Blame me.”
I slipped off my Converses and socks, switched off the lamp, and got under the covers. He slipped in next to me. It was strange to feel his weight, his breath on the back of my neck.
After a moment, Luke said, “Everything was going fine until you had to be a . . . fuckin’ . . . social justice warrior.”
“I’m not a social justice warrior.” I kicked off my jeans, trying to keep the comforter in place. “I’m a sane human who got scared to be around, like, violent chanting.”
He said nothing. I could feel him forming an opinion. “You’re not the only one who’s in this, you know.”
He sat up behind me, leaning on his arm. “It’s not the same, Cassie.”
“How is it not the same?” Silence. My palms turned clammy from sweat, heart thumping. “Tell me exactly how it’s different. If we’re caught, we’re both in trouble.”
He swallowed. “You’re going to be safe at home.”
I turned to face him. “I wouldn’t call diabetes safe. And that’s not an answer.”
He sat up, bare chested. “Can I get any respect from you?”
I sat up with him. His eyes went to my bare legs. I didn’t care. “Talking about killing motherfucking A-rabs? I think you and I have a different definition of respect.”
“I didn’t say those things,” he said slowly, emphasizing each syllable, moving his face closer to mine.
I imitated him. “But you let them happen.”
“There’s a culture, Cassie. I’m the one going overseas with these people.” Then he muttered, “And you get to stay at home and reap the benefits. So a thank-you would be nice.”
Okay. Enough. I took his face in my hands. “Oh, Luke, thank you, man.”
“Stop,” he said. He pushed my hands away.
I clapped my hands together in fake prayer. “For all that you do for everyone. Thank you so much.”
He was quiet. The skin of his chest and stomach glowed from the motel neon. I realized that when he was still, like he was yesterday, like he was now, I could see him well enough to appreciate how beautiful he was. How easy it was to forget everything in the dark and light of his eyes playing, the line of his nose falling straight to the center of sad lips. Much simpler than whatever it was we were arguing about, much easier than remembering that we were stuck in this, no matter who won the fight.
Before all our words could rush back, I kissed him hard on the mouth. I expected him to push me away.
But he didn’t. A current traveled from my lips to elsewhere, alighting my skin. When I stopped, I saw the rarest hint of a smile. It was unlike any expression I’d ever seen Luke make. “What the hell was that?”
I looked at his lips again. “I don’t know.”
This time, he kissed me.
While our mouths were still connected, I pushed him until he was lying flat, opening my mouth to his, placing my hand on his stomach.
He grabbed my leg and pulled me across until I was on top of him. His skin smelled like Frankie’s house, like expensive soap, like the cool, dark basement where they did the laundry.
He grabbed me and I let him, but when his hands started to move down my sides and onto my hips, I pulled them off and pressed them above his head. We locked eyes again. His muscles tensed under my weight. Between my legs, I could feel the flesh of his stomach get harder. He could flip me like a pancake if he wanted to.
But he didn’t move.
“You like this, don’t you?” I heard myself say.
He raised his eyebrows. “And you don’t?”
I let go of his hands. His tongue met my tongue. I tasted tap water and salt, felt his solid arms, moved my hands across his chest, down his stomach. While we kissed, the line his fingers made on my thighs reached the cloth of my bikini cuts. I curled my finger around the elastic, and felt his fingers follow mine.
I scooted back inch by inch until we could both see the brass button on his Levi’s, his zipper.
His right hand made a slow path up my shirt to my left breast, scooping under the fabric of my bra, stroking my nipple with his rough thumb.
“Fuck it,” one of us said.
He went to unbutton his shirt while I yanked on the waistband of his pants. When I looked up I found Luke sitting, pulling me to his lap, his mouth on mine, unable to wait. With his back against the headboard, I lifted my hips to meet his, and though we both knew what was coming, our eyes met, amazed.
Luke
I woke up to nothing, which was more jarring than waking up to a sound. My brain just snapped on, like an old refrigerator sputtering to life in the middle of the night. My arms were around Cassie, her thick, black hair loose all over my chest, under my chin, her hand resting on my stomach. The hours after we left Chili’s snaked across the dark ceiling; the compressed silence of the car, losing my temper, and then on the bed,
her eyes on mine as she pushed my hands above my head into the scratchy motel comforter.
The sight of her on top of me, unhooking her bra.
Looking down at her antler tattoo, lifting her by the small of her back.
My mouth in the crook of her neck, tasting her, propping her on the bathroom countertop as I found the space between her legs.
For a moment, I was at peace, remembering. Then the elephant of anxiety sat on my chest. Unrelenting, the sound of nothing but everything pulsing. Heart and skull in sync, too hard to hear or think, needles in my eyeballs, my tongue a bitter, foreign object.
What time was it?
I shot off the bed, picking up pieces of clothing off the ground, dropping them when I realized they weren’t mine. Found my Levi’s, my dead phone.
The motel clock said 6:00. I didn’t trust that. What if it was just stuck on 6:00? I had to be at the airport to deploy at 0800.
Cassie stirred.
“Where’s your phone?” I hissed, grabbing her jacket, her purse.
“Purse,” she muttered, her voice hoarse.
I dug through lighters, cylinders, journals, pens. Found it: 6:01. All right. I could get there if I left now. I googled cab austin with shaking hands. We’d had exactly three hours of sleep.
“What are you doing?” she asked, yawning.
“Getting a cab. I should have left an hour ago,” I said, hearing the click and snappy voice of the operator after two rings.
Cassie pulled open the curtains, flooding the dingy room with white morning sun, dust lifting from the furniture where we had draped ourselves last night, hungry for each other, forgetting.
I’d be cutting it close. But TSA would let me through quickly if they saw I was active duty. I went into the bathroom, washed my hands, my face, wishing I could pierce a hole in my head and empty out the thoughts stampeding through. You’re late. You’ll miss your plane. You’ll slip up and use again. This woman hates you. She’s embarrassed.
Cassie appeared behind me, fully dressed. Her eyes still had puffy sleep in them, her hair matted at the ends.
An image hit of her unbuckling my pants. Half lust, half nausea shot to my gut.
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