by Caro Carson
“Stop it.” He hissed the words out through gritted teeth, startling Helen into silence. He pressed that advantage, sitting forward in his chair, on the very edge of his seat, slipping his knee between hers. “Nothing about us began as a one-night stand. I got to know you, Helen. I loved you. I married you and then we slept together. That’s the way it happened. It was traditional, not anything as shallow as a one-night stand.”
“You make it sound like we dated for months. How long did we know each other before the wedding? Eleven in the morning until just after midnight? Fourteen hours, max.”
“Fourteen hours isn’t better or worse than fourteen days or fourteen months.” When he would have taken her hands, she withdrew them, folding them together to rest on her lap, very close to her body.
He would still say what needed to be said. “If you think I’m going to be tempted now by the idea of having a string of one-night stands, if you think for one moment that I’ll agree to file for divorce in eleven weeks so I can do some guilt-free bed-hopping or whatever this thing is that you think I want, then you don’t know what I want at all.”
“Exactly. I don’t know what you want. That’s why we should get divorced as soon as possible.”
“No, Helen. That’s why we should keep sitting here, asking each other questions.”
He drew the next card and pretended to read it. He didn’t really care what it said. He substituted a question of his own. “Has a romantic partner ever cheated on you?”
Helen exhaled, a little whoosh of air like she’d walked into a piece of furniture unexpectedly. At her desk, Jennifer exhaled in surprise, too. She knew that question wasn’t on her card, but she didn’t intervene.
“If you count a purely physical one-night stand, then yes, my first husband cheated on me.”
“I count it.” That son of a bitch. “You don’t?”
She tucked her hands under her arms, keeping them far from him, or perhaps just holding herself against a remembered pain. “He told me about it. I never would have known. He said that the old cliché that it meant nothing was quite true. It was an accident. Wrong place, wrong time. He was on a TDY assignment, out of the state for sixty days. He said he hadn’t had a one-night stand since we’d married, and that even though it was hard for guys to turn down a little no-strings-attached sex, he wouldn’t do it again.”
“That didn’t cause your divorce?”
“It was so hard for me to even comprehend it. I was sure that marriage meant one type of behavior, which made it hard to conceive of him doing the complete opposite. He didn’t tell me until six months after it happened, so it was almost like someone telling you about a dream they’d had. Not real. I didn’t kick him out or anything after he told me about it, but we did go to marriage counseling. A couple of sessions.”
At that, Tom sat back. When Colonel Reed had ordered her to marriage counseling, she must have been outraged at a different level than Tom had been. She’d already been through it once, and it hadn’t fixed her first marriage.
“It was the second time he cheated that did it.”
Son of a bitch.
“He wasn’t out of town. I walked in on him in our house.” She tapped her temple. “I’ve got that image stuck in my head forever now. My husband’s bare backside in the air, going at it with someone else. The concept of him cheating on me suddenly got very, very easy to imagine.”
She looked away, staring, unseeing, as she remembered something Tom wished she’d never known. Then she darted a glance at him and wrinkled her nose. “They were on my side of the bed. That struck me as deliberate. A slap in the face.”
Enough. Tom didn’t want to drag any more out of her. These counseling sessions were the only time he got to sit down with her face-to-face and really talk. He was sorry that any of his precious, limited time with her had to be spent recounting the tale of her cheating first husband.
He addressed their too-silent counselor. “That’s enough. I think we’ve had enough for today. We can stop here.”
“Certainly,” Jennifer said. “Just as soon as you answer your question, we’ll be finished.”
“Have I ever been cheated on? No.” He looked back at Helen and shook his head sadly. “No.”
She nodded, briefly, his answer hardly affecting her as she sat apart from him, swallowed by deep chair cushions that were hard to get out of.
Tom almost wished he had been cheated on, just so Helen wouldn’t feel so alone.
* * *
Helen washed her single bowl, her solo spoon, her one glass and put them neatly in the drainboard to dry. Diamonds and gold glittered at her as the evening sun came in the kitchen window. She wouldn’t take ownership of that ring. Tom wouldn’t take it back. She’d tried to persuade him at yesterday’s counseling session, tried to remind him that the freedom of bachelorhood was within his power to regain within a matter of weeks, but he’d steadfastly stuck by his claim that he preferred to be...steadfast.
It made her heart hurt. Everything made her heart hurt, every encounter, every conversation, even the sight of that truly pretty wedding band. She couldn’t take ten more weeks of this. There was no way she’d make six months. She needed a new plan.
She glanced at the clock. Tom wouldn’t be home for at least fifteen more minutes. She remembered well how demanding a company command was. Now that she’d completed her two years as a commander at Lewis-McChord, she had a desk job in brigade headquarters, which seemed embarrassingly easy in comparison.
She was in charge of making contingency plans on paper. Tom was in charge of one hundred and twenty human beings with all their vagaries. To ensure every one of those soldiers could execute their missions, Tom had to do more than just oversee training exercises and qualifications. A soldier couldn’t perform at his or her best if they were dealing with bankruptcy or had no child care arrangements, for example. The problems crossing a commander’s desk were as varied as the human beings that served in the military—and through it all, every minute of every day, the commander led by example mentally and physically, demonstrating the right attitude, setting the right priorities, exceeding every standard on every task.
The days were long. A supportive spouse was a real asset to a company commander. Russell Gannon had not been that spouse.
I’m not that spouse for Tom, either.
She didn’t need to be. She was a three-month roommate. Besides, Tom didn’t need a wife to be a good commander. She probably would have been better off without a husband. She believed she’d been a good commander despite being married to Russell, not because he’d been any kind of support. Judging from the commendations she’d received, the army agreed that she’d done well. And now, perhaps as a little reward or a little downtime, she had a cushy desk job. Fortunately.
Her desk job enabled her to keep her life from becoming entwined with Tom’s. Helen left promptly at 1700 hours, or five in the evening, immediately after retreat sounded and the flag was lowered. Tom didn’t make it home for at least an hour after she did, often an hour and a half. That gave her a chance to take care of her dinner and dishes and laundry, so she’d be back in her room and out of his way when he pulled into the drive. She was the ideal roommate.
“Oh, my gosh. I’ve been doing this all wrong.”
She turned her back on the wedding ring and paced into the living room. There was no trace that she lived there at all. She didn’t leave a basket of laundry that needed folding over there on the coffee table. She never left a dirty plate on the dining table. She didn’t hang her patrol cap on the rack by the front door.
No wonder Tom wasn’t the least bit disturbed at the idea of having her for a roommate for six full months. He never saw her, and yet all his bills had been cut in half. She was going to pay half of the rent, half of the electricity, half of the internet. Who wouldn’t want to keep an invisible roommate like that for as long as possi
ble?
Living with her needed to be so awful he’d go running to the courthouse the day those twelve weeks were up.
She needed to become the roommate from hell.
She turned in a slow circle in the living room. It was a bachelor pad, arranged around a large television and dominated by a black leather couch, but it was clean and neat. Orderly. Uncluttered. There wasn’t even a single crumb on that black leather.
The man was a neat freak, then. It would be easy to drive a neat freak batty, wouldn’t it?
She turned on the television for the first time since she’d moved in. It was tuned to a sports channel, exactly as Tom had left it. She flipped through the guide and chose the sappiest chick flick she could find.
She left the television on, girls weeping over wedding gowns, and left for the store. A bag of messy, crumbly, orange-dusted cheese puffs was calling her name.
Chapter Eight
“Have you seen the new captain at brigade S-3?”
Tom stopped short. He’d just been about to walk into his own office, where his four platoon leaders had already convened for their weekly meeting, their last task before they could go home for the day. He listened beside the door, an eavesdropper in his own company.
“If you mean who I think you mean, hell, yeah.”
That was Salvatore, a lieutenant who was single.
“Hard to miss her.”
And that was Phillips, who was married.
“I heard she’s divorced.”
Not yet, she isn’t.
“Is she or isn’t she? Does she have a wedding ring?”
“No, but not everyone does around here. Safety hazard.”
“Well, yeah.” Phillips laughed. “It’s hazardous for your health to make a move without knowing if someone is married or not.”
“No, I mean rings are a safety hazard,” Salvatore said. “When I was in ROTC, I saw this one cadet jump out of the back of a truck, catch her ring on a wood slat and have the flesh torn right off her finger. She was left with this bone sticking out. It was disgusting. We had to pick up the skin coating.”
“Gross.”
“One of the cadre had a Big Gulp in his vehicle. We dumped out the soda and kept the fleshy part of her finger on ice until she could take it with her in the ambulance.”
“That is so sickening. Where do you get these stories?”
That was Chloe Michaels, his wife’s little Friday night mentoring project. Tom waited for Chloe to give her peers the scoop that the S-3 was their commander’s roommate.
She didn’t. Whether she was being loyal to him or to Helen, she was obviously not going to be the one to spread the current gossip, not even accurate gossip. What happened at the pub stayed at the pub, he supposed.
Thane Carter, Tom’s most senior platoon leader and executive officer, steered the conversation back to army business. “That’s why they changed the regulation last year, allowing soldiers a single tattoo on one finger of one hand. Basically, they endorsed wedding ring tattoos. Soldiers were getting them, anyway, especially if they’re about to deploy to somewhere they might see action. Nothing to get stolen overseas. Nothing to catch on a wood slat. That was a soldier-driven change in the regulation. A tattoo ring is smart.”
“Only if you’re sure you’ll never, ever get divorced, and what are the odds of that in the army?” Salvatore asked. Then he must have realized only three of the four were single. “Besides your marriage, Phillips. I mean, you can get a tattooed ring. You’ll beat the odds.”
Tom let the silence last a moment. It said something about military life that even young, single officers were aware that if they ever got married, their relationship would face unique strains in addition to all the usual things that could tear apart civilian couples.
As Tom walked into the room, the lieutenants came to their feet. At age twenty-seven, Tom was both the oldest and the highest-ranking. He’d been deployed twice to combat theaters. He’d seen firsthand the flurry of divorces that seemed to happen within the first few months after the unit returned. Still, he’d bought no ring in Vegas for himself, because he and Helen had planned on having his wedding ring tattooed permanently on his finger. If he skipped the gory, combat-related reasons why ink was practical, then that left the fact that it was permanent. He wanted one because he liked the very permanence of it.
He’d sketched it out on the back of a cocktail napkin. Helen’s name lent itself to block letters really well, HELEN-HELEN-HELEN. She’d loved his design.
He sat, so the lieutenants sat. As Thane started running through the roster of soldiers who’d requested leave for the upcoming Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year’s holidays, Tom glanced at his bare ring finger. Helen’s name should have already been wrapped around it, in ink, forever. Forever hadn’t scared them. After all, she was army, too, so they were going into this with eyes wide-open. They understood the demands. His marriage wasn’t going to fall apart no matter how much distance or time separated him from his bride.
He’d had no idea what was in store for him the morning after his wedding.
If you had three wishes...
If she remembered Vegas...
She thought if she remembered, she’d know how to undo things. She was wrong. If she remembered, there’d be no divorce, because she’d be as crazy about him as he was about her. They’d begin their married life with confidence: no divorce, no cheating—it wasn’t in either of their natures. There would be a diamond ring on her finger and ink on his.
There would be love.
He didn’t need three wishes. He only needed one.
* * *
When he got home, it seemed for a moment that his wish had been granted. His house was different. Lived in.
He had a wife, her hat by the door, her boots on the floor. Signs that she lived here; he wanted more.
Her car wasn’t in the drive. When she returned from wherever she’d gone, she’d have to walk through the living room to get to her hermitage of a bedroom. He didn’t want to miss her, so he stretched out on the couch, picked up the remote for the TV and waited for the chance to say, for the very first time, “How was your day?”
* * *
Tom’s car was in the driveway.
Helen took her keys out of the ignition, took the groceries out of her back seat and took a very deep breath. This was it. Time for their living arrangement to change.
Roommate from hell. Roommate from hell. I’m going to be the roommate from hell.
She held the straps of all her reusable grocery totes in one hand and stuck the house key in the door with the other. It wasn’t until she’d turned it that she realized Tom had left it unlocked for her. She walked in to the all-in-one living and dining room space and shoved the door shut with her butt. Not quite a slam, but not a quiet closing, either.
Her eyes went straight to him, a great big man, stretched out full length on the couch, sound asleep. Instantly, she felt guilty for slamming the door. She intended to drop the groceries on the dining table with a clatter, she really did, but she set them down gently—and looked at Tom some more.
He had one arm thrown over his eyes. Even in sleep, the muscles of his arm were carved in delicious curves. The man was pure eye candy. He wore a soft-looking T-shirt, a heathered navy blue. She’d better brace herself. That shirt was going to do amazing things for his eyes when he woke up.
She needed to wake him. Nobody would want to live for six months with someone who never let them catch a nap. She needed to push his feet off the end cushion and grumble that he was hogging the couch.
Or... I could just kick off my shoes and perch right there by his feet...and lie down, sliding up his body until I’m nestled next to him. The side of my face would fit right in that warm space between the curve of his neck and the bulge of his shoulder.
She just stood there like an id
iot, watching him sleep.
His whole body is really warm. I could just slip right in there. Maybe he wouldn’t even wake up...
She didn’t trust herself to sit on the couch at all. Feeling genuinely grumpy, she marched over to the couch and sat on the floor in front of it, facing the television, leaning back against the couch with a thunk.
Tom shifted a bit and peeked at her from under his forearm. “Hi. How was your day?”
She had to look away from those blue eyes. Her boots were still lying where she’d tossed them. He hadn’t felt any neat-freak compulsion to move them out of the middle of the floor.
She scowled at the television. He’d put it back on the sports channel, but it was muted. “I was watching something else, you know. I just had to run to the Shopette and grab some stuff.”
“I paused it for you and hit Record.” He stretched his arm over his head and felt around the end table for the remote control. “Here you go. Hit this button and you’ll see the list of recorded stuff. There’s your show. You can un-pause it and pick up where you left off.”
“Oh.” She felt...she felt irritated. “I suppose you want to watch the rest of this game right now, though.”
“Nope.” He hit the button to go back to her movie. When he half smiled at her, she noticed his five-o’clock shadow, the way his lips looked softer in comparison to the bristle. “I’m not really invested in a cricket match in Australia. That’s one sport that puts me to sleep. As you just witnessed.”
“Oh.” She felt irritated at herself for having no other brilliant comeback than oh.
He turned up the volume for her. The characters on the screen resumed weeping over a wedding gown, gushing over its perfection, crying when the bride’s mother advised her to enjoy every moment, for this was a once in a lifetime day. “You’ll only wear a beautiful white dress once in your life.”
Awkward.
Helen had worn a white dress twice. Not the same one, of course. The first one had belonged to Russell’s mother. Both of Russell’s sisters had worn it at each of their own weddings. It hadn’t been anything Helen would have chosen for herself, but a Gannon bride was expected to wear Mother Gannon’s dress, Russell had told her. She should be honored to be given the opportunity.