The Lieutenants' Online Love

by Caro Carson

  Carter was silent, too, keeping pace beside her.

  Controlled confrontation. They had to work together. They had to rely on each other professionally, but right now, they were both seething in silence. This time, she was the one who stopped walking.

  He stopped walking.

  “I didn’t go to the S-3. I went to Salvatore. He liked the plan. We went to the CO together. The CO picked up the phone and called the S-3, and that’s when I met Major Nord.” It was all on the up-and-up. There’d been no subterfuge involved.

  “Why would you go to Salvatore when I’m sitting at the desk next to yours?”

  “Because, Carter, you’ve made your position toward me perfectly clear from the first ride-along. You say you’re not here to be my mentor? Fine. The kindest thing I could say is that you at least set an example, but the truth is, your contempt came through loud and clear when you told me to try to keep up.”

  “You said all work and no play.”

  “I am working. You’re just mad that I’m keeping up.”

  She turned on her heel and walked away.

  Chapter Twelve

  I wanted to talk to you today. Chloe hit Send.

  Great. I’m here. Let’s talk.

  Something happened at work, like six hours ago, and I wished I could talk to you then and there.

  You have a phone, Ballerina. I have a phone.

  Chloe stared at those words in horror. He wanted to talk? Actually speak? With voices instead of fonts?

  She couldn’t do that. She just couldn’t bare her soul on a telephone. When she saw her words written out in pink, she often had second thoughts before sending them. If they’d been live on the phone the other night, she probably would have blurted out that he didn’t need to worry about her because she had an entire police department behind her, and that would have been the end of their relationship as they knew it. Ballerina Baby would never have been the same to Different Drummer.

  I can’t call you. Talking is not the same as writing. It would change everything. I need to keep you in my life just as we are. I rely on it. She typed fast and hit Send without pausing, rushing the words as if she were blurting them out loud. Pleading out loud.

  Seconds ticked by without any blue words.

  This was why, this was exactly why, she didn’t want to speak to him on the phone. Without having a chance to think through each sentence, she would say the wrong thing.

  But blue words appeared. I meant that I write to you from my phone app, and you could do the same. I know you use your laptop, but that’s not as handy for you, obviously. If you downloaded the app on your phone, then you could write to me anytime—like six hours ago, when you needed me. If you wrote to me and I was anywhere I could possibly answer you immediately, I would. I don’t want things to change, either. I rely on our conversations, too, and this would make it easier to have those conversations.

  Chloe lifted her eyes from the laptop screen to the sunset. It was getting cooler now, past Thanksgiving and heading into December. Once the sun went down, she’d have to leave the plastic chair and table she’d bought for her concrete porch and go inside her apartment. The season was changing, and her evening routine had to change with it. Would it be so awful to change how she communicated with Drummer, too?

  If she started using her phone, he would be writing to her throughout her day. She tried to imagine sitting at her desk and getting a quick note from him. It would be...warm. Something to offset the presence of—

  Carter.

  Chloe froze in her chair as she squinted across the parking lot. She’d been looking between two buildings to see the colorful sunset, but some movement on a balcony had drawn her eye to the building on the left. A man with dark hair in a military cut, with shoulders that looked buff even from here, had walked onto his balcony, head bowed, phone in his hand. Good God, that couldn’t be Carter, could it?

  It could be any military guy. She knew Carter lived in this complex, but she hadn’t seen him around. She’d never gone back to the pool, and she’d never tried to find out which of the other five buildings was his.

  She held very still, so she wouldn’t draw attention to herself as she checked the man out. Whom was she kidding? That was Carter. She’d spent enough hours with him to recognize him anywhere.

  He lived on the third floor of his building, just as she lived on the third floor of hers, directly across the parking lot. He stopped staring at his phone, letting his hand drop as if he didn’t like what he saw on the screen, and then he looked up—or rather, straight across the parking lot. Toward her.

  Goddamn it, goddamn it...

  Chloe got up from her chair, carrying the laptop but leaving the wineglass, and ducked into her apartment, sliding the door shut. She pulled the string to close the vertical blinds. Maybe he couldn’t tell it was her from a distance. After all, she had the advantage of being able to change her hair from a ballerina bun to loose, long hair. Maybe that was adequate camouflage.

  Her heart was pounding. She sank onto her couch and set the laptop in her lap. Her phone was where she’d left it earlier, on her footlocker-turned-coffee-table. She stared at the phone a moment. It was an instrument that could change the best thing in her life to something different. Something better. Something worse.

  Her routine was going to change, anyway. Her nightly glass of wine on the porch with Drummer had just gotten blown up. It would never be relaxing again, not when she’d have to keep an eye out for Carter. Why not download the app on her phone? It would be like having an ally in the office, someone with whom she could exchange sardonic observations whenever Carter was being especially Carter-like.

  Okay, I’m going to download the app to my phone now.

  Chloe hit Send.

  * * *

  Chloe.

  That had to be Chloe on that balcony, with that long hair swishing over her shoulders as she disappeared into her apartment.

  It’s not Chloe, it’s Michaels. But he’d forgotten how long her hair was when it was down. The door slid shut behind her, and the sunset’s golden beams hit her apartment and reflected off the glass. Michaels had made another rookie mistake by choosing that apartment. In the summer, that direct sunlight was going to overpower her air-conditioning.

  He looked down at the phone clenched in his hand. I’m going to download the app.

  He tore his mind away from Chloe, happy to be distracted from the sight of long hair swishing in the sunset. This was great news; if Ballerina disappeared again, at least every message he sent would go to both her laptop and her phone, doubling his chances of reaching her.

  More pink words demanded his attention. Have you ever gotten your dream job and then found out it’s not so dreamy?

  He glanced across the parking lot at the closed glass door with the annoyingly bright reflection. Isn’t that pretty much every job in the world?

  Uh-oh. I didn’t realize you didn’t like your job, either. Do you ever just want to go crazy and yell “Take this job and shove it”?

  (Johnny Paycheck, at every karaoke night in every bar, everywhere. Too easy.) It’s not the job. It’s the coworkers. Coworker, singular. One lousy coworker is trying to sabotage me.

  Are you okay? Is he succeeding?

  Her questions brought Thane up short. Since the night he’d worked that domestic and then hadn’t been able to reach Ballerina, she’d been repeatedly asking him if he was okay. He didn’t like Ballerina assuming he was vulnerable. It didn’t sit right.

  Maybe she imagined him as some weakling. He wished he could tell her he was a soldier—for her own peace of mind, of course. Not for his own pride.

  Of course I’m okay. Of course I am.

  He was. Although he’d been angry with Chl—Michaels at the staff meeting, Thane was coming out of the whole episode with a much better work schedule.

  This coworker won’t succeed in making me look bad. It’s just a pain in the neck to deal with. Thane refrained from using she or her to refer to
the coworker. Ballerina didn’t need to think that he was vulnerable to attacks from a girl. It had nothing to do with his pride.

  Okay, it had everything to do with his pride.

  Ballerina didn’t seem to notice. I hope it’s nothing more than a pain in the neck, I really do. This app is taking forever to load onto my phone, by the way. It says the most recent version is from 2014. I bet it’s no longer being actively updated. I hate when developers just quit maintaining their apps. I had a yoga app I really loved, and one day, it just wasn’t there. The phone had done one of those automatic upgrades overnight, and the old app hadn’t been updated to handle it. Poof! It was gone.

  Ballerina did yoga, did she? Thane smiled at the clue. He spared one second to glance down at the pool and only half a second to remember how he’d once wondered if Michaels was into yoga. Boy, he’d gotten that wrong. She probably kickboxed opponents for fun.

  But Ballerina? She really did do yoga. It fit with what he knew of her. She always found something funny in their mundane conversations, because she wanted to make him laugh. And she wanted to make him laugh because she cared about him. She was the kind of nurturing person who wouldn’t want to do anyone any harm. After a day in a patrol car dealing with angry and upset people, he appreciated that. He needed that. He needed Ballerina in his life.

  If he told her so, it might sound a bit intense, coming out of the blue when the subject was entirely different. He kept it light. A yoga app? There are a million of them. You must have found another one to replace it.

  Well, yes, but it was never the same. I liked things the way they were. It would REALLY never be the same if we had to download a new conversation app. What if we didn’t have a chance to switch to a new app before this one went poof? I’d know you were out there somewhere, but I wouldn’t be able to find you. I’d have to post one of those personal ads. You know the kind, the ones aimed at perfect strangers that say, “We talked in line at the coffee shop and I fell in love with your shark-tooth necklace.” I bet those ads never work.

  Thane turned his back on the reflected sunset and leaned against his balcony railing as he typed. The sun was sinking fast. It was turning colder. That one wouldn’t work with me. I’ve never worn a shark-tooth necklace. I’m not sure where to buy a thing like that. Who makes them? Maybe the guy who answers the ad could tell you, and you could tell me.

  What kind of necklace do you wear, then?

  Dog tags.

  The desire to tell her the truth hit him with almost brutal force. He wore dog tags. He was in the service, and he wanted to change the rules of their game. He wanted real names, real jobs, real contact. Ballerina was terrific, but lately, instead of filling the loneliness, talking to her only amplified it.

  He knew what had changed. He’d met Chloe Michaels, and now he couldn’t stop wanting everything that was missing in his long-distance friendship with Ballerina. A words-only relationship meant there was no smile, no sun-kissed skin, no swish of hair, no sharing of a silly hot dog test.

  No sex.

  Long-distance relationships were a big part of the military. Couples did stay together through deployments by texting and writing letters just as he and Ballerina did, but there was one important difference. Those couples knew their letter-writing months were temporary. Even if a whole year apart stretched before them, they still knew that they would be reunited.

  Thane needed that. Ballerina was like a girlfriend, but she wasn’t. He needed to know that someday, he would go on leave and fly across the country just to meet her. He wanted to walk off a plane and be greeted with a hug and a smile. He wanted to know their relationship would continue to grow, because it was the best thing he’d found, and he didn’t want it to die a stagnant death.

  I don’t wear jewelry. Our ad would need to say something like, “My words were in blue and yours were in pink. We talked about everything and I could tell you anything, except my name. That was a mistake, because now I’ve lost you. If you don’t respond to this ad, I’ll be wondering where you are for the rest of my life.”

  A chill settled around him as he looked at the words he’d just sent. This app could stop working without warning. If he lost her, he probably would be crazy enough to try a personal ad, because he’d have nowhere else to even begin a search. Ballerina was right; those ads never worked. Where could he even place an ad aimed at the entire United States? If the app crashed, Ballerina might as well be wiped off the face of the earth.

  Thane typed quickly against that cold future. My ad was a little too real, wasn’t it? But it will happen. Sooner or later, this app will be obsolete. If we’re not going to exchange names and numbers, we should at least give each other an email address. We can keep using this app exclusively, if that’s what you want, but we should have a backup just in case. It would leave too big a hole in my life if a computer glitch stole you from me. Can we bend our rules this once? An email address so that we aren’t vulnerable?

  Thane hesitated before hitting Send. He didn’t want her to keep thinking of him as vulnerable. He hit the backspace arrow with his thumb, back, back, back.

  An email address so that we won’t have our routine upset by a computer glitch one day?

  He hesitated again. A routine. He couldn’t call a girl a routine. That was no way to woo a woman. Back, back, back, before he could fall back into his fantasy of having an actual woman to woo. Woo? Sheesh.

  An email address so that a programmer’s laziness doesn’t tear us apart without warning?

  He hit Send.

  The cursor blinked in silence.

  He hadn’t been persuasive enough; she was taking too long to think about it. She didn’t want anything to change. She’d been crystal clear about that, but exchanging email addresses really wouldn’t have any effect at all. It was just extra insurance that they’d be able to remain online friends. He wanted more, true, but he also couldn’t lose what they had.

  Thane gave in to the evening chill and went back inside his apartment to try again. Don’t be afraid that I’ll start spamming your inbox. It’s only to have in case the app crashes. Trust me, an email address won’t change a thing.

  Pink letters spelled out an email address, highlander@ctx.com.

  Thane tapped the email address quickly, as if it were going to disappear, and created a new contact for it in his phone. First name: Ballerina. Last name: Baby.

  There, she was safe in his phone. Adding her to the list of people he interacted with every day made her more real than ever. She was a contact he could reach with an email address that ended @ctx.com, the same as half the soldiers in his platoon.

  Half his soldiers?

  They had that same ending on their email addresses because ctx stood for Central Texas. The suffix @ctx.com was a popular internet provider’s domain name, a company out of Austin.

  Ballerina lived near him.

  Thane slowly sat on his couch, keeping his eyes on his phone, not daring to adjust his grip on the device. It was like a grenade that was about to go off.

  This changed everything. Thank God.

  He hesitated, thumbs over the screen. She was afraid of change; he needed to break this to her gently.

  Hey, BB, you know how we’ve wondered whether this app matched us up by design or by pure luck?

  Yes?

  I think it was by design.

  Why?

  Because I recognize the @ctx.com part of your email address. We both live in the Austin area.

  Nothing, just a white screen.

  He typed in his email address for her. It ended with @gmail.com. That domain name could be from anywhere in the world. If she’d had one of those email addresses, too, a gmail or even an old aol.com, they’d never know they lived in the same state.

  But she’d used ctx.com, so she was either in Austin or somewhere reasonably close, like Temple or Waco.

  Or here in Killeen.

  Thane stood to pace. She was his closest friend, his favorite person to talk to, and now...s
he could be more. This was incredible. This was fantastic.

  This is awful, she wrote.

  Thane stopped pacing. It’s a lot of things, but not awful.

  She didn’t reply. He ran one hand up the back of his neck as he waited.

  Hey, Ballerina? You there? Don’t go silent on me. Please. As soon as he hit Send, he regretted it. That had sounded too much like begging, like a vulnerable man begging. He needed to keep it light. If you disappear now, I’ll have to take those personal ads out all over Austin.

  Silence.

  He tried again. The only quotes I can think of about silence are from Simon & Garfunkel. Please don’t make me write out the lyrics to “Sound of Silence.” Short version: silence sucks.

  At last, she responded. I can’t catch my breath. Don’t you see? This feels like the app crashed, after all. Ballerina and Drummer as we knew it just changed. Forever.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chloe chucked the live hand grenade as far as she could, then dived behind the dirt berm with the NCO in charge of this position on the firing line. The explosion vibrated the earth. Dirt sprinkled from the sky onto her Kevlar helmet.

  For the first time in forty-eight hours, she smiled. Sometimes, when everything was going wrong, a girl just needed to blow crap up.

  “Nice throw, ma’am.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant.”

  “Most women don’t throw that well.”

  And...poof. There went her good mood. “Seriously, Sergeant? Should I give you the formal lecture on gender bias, or should I just point out that the only person who’s failed to qualify so far today was a guy?”

  The soldier to their right threw his grenade. Chloe and the sergeant stayed crouched behind their berm with their heads down, but they knew the grenade hadn’t gone very far and hadn’t gone very straight, because the explosion shook the earth hard and dirt rained down on them.

  They cussed in unison.

  “Make that two men who failed,” the sergeant muttered.