I’m not sure why he’s blushing, but he responds, “Good to know. Hey, is that your brace in the locker room?”
I laugh. “Sometimes I’m too lazy to go back to my apartment to shower, and some of these classes have me sweating my balls off.”
The mention of my balls seems to have flustered him, which makes me want to, I dunno, ease him.With my dick.
“Makes sense. I mean, you make going up and down the stairs look easy, but I’m sure it’s a pain in the ass with an above-knee amputation.”
I look at him funny. Most people just see that part of my leg is missing. They don’t much consider the loss of the knee and how that creates a whole additional layer of suck. “It can be. With the older models, the knee mechanism would sometimes get stuck, so then I’d find myself halfway up a flight of stairs, usually in front of a hot guy, wiggling my peg leg around to get the joint to engage. Little embarrassing.”
Not sure why I mentioned a hot guy. Maybe to remind myself I have plenty of options, or to remind him that I like dick. Probably a bit of both.
“Is that a cabernet?” he asks, snapping me out of my increasingly undone thoughts.
“Uhh, yeah.” I nod like a dumbass and turn to the cabinets to check for some wineglasses since I’d left those upstairs. Jelly glasses will have to do. My hand shakes a bit as I pour the wine, but I manage to keep all but a drop or two in the proper place. I take a breath to still my hands so that I look calm, cool, and collected when I set the glasses on the table.
Get real.I’m in a cramped kitchen with a beautiful guy and an expensive bottle of cabernet in cheap glasses with fuck-me hormones swirling in my head. I’m a ways off from calm, cool, and collected.
“Ilovea good cabernet. Way better than beer,” he says, reaching, then overshooting the glass of wine, nearly spilling the entire thing. I catch the glass and set it upright and slightly out of the flight path of his expressive hands.
He’s so earnest, and the flush up his neck has me raising my hand to rifle my fingers through his hair. I stop midcourse, then bite my lip to prevent myself from laughing. Or groaning. Thankfully, the microwave dings with our tasty steak leftovers, giving me a chance to wrestle down my control before I embarrass myself. I split up the meat and the salad, then add potatoes to his plate before setting it down in front of him. His eyes practically glaze over, and he starts going to town before my butt is even in the seat.
“Oh my god, this is the best steak I’ve ever had,” he says, a gob of sirloin still in his cheek.
I laugh, “Yeah, I microwave steak like nobody’s business. Don’t choke on that, man.”
He closes his mouth, cheeks a little pink as he chews and swallows carefully. He next forks up a big bite of salad, and his little moany noises of contentment are… dangerous.
I’m not that hungry after the huge lunch we had, so I take a couple of slices off my plate and slip them onto his. He smiles shyly and eats them along with half of the extra stuffed potato. As he wipes his mouth with a paper towel, his eyes land on my prosthetic, then shift away. I’ve noticed over the last several days that he’s curious about it but holds back, probably out of respect.
“Go ahead,” I say, clinking my jelly jar wineglass against the metal. “Ask me anything.”
“Um,” he says, rubbing the back of his head. “How did you lose it?”
“Afghanistan. Had a building fall on me during an incursion.”
His eyes go wide and kinda… wobble. “Ouch.”
I smile, no big deal. “You’re tellin’ me. Roly wouldn’t leave me behind. Little guy saved my life.”
“Roly was in the military? Mouthy guy, about yea tall,” he says, approximating Roly’s height with his hand. “Bear killer? That Roly?”
I laugh, rolling the jelly glass between my hands. “Yep. Navy SEALs, both of us.”
His mouth is agog, and his gestures get a little broader. I move his wineglass a little farther away. “SEALs?” he asks on a squeak. “I mean… you, I get. Youlooklike a Navy SEAL. But Roly? I mean… not to be shitty, but… isn’t there, like, a…heightrequirement?”
I laugh, knowing Roly would get a kick out of his questions. “You know, there’s not. You just have to be able to finish the BUDs training.”
“Yeah, that’s all. No big whoop. So, what? Y’all were deployed together?”
“Yep, deployed together, though I have a few years on him. He was taken by some pretty gnarly dudes for a couple of days. He’d’ve gotten away if he’da just left me. But he wouldn’t listen.”My voice goes a little thin at the end there. Always does when I think about those three days and how big those guys were. I remember the terror in Roly’s eyes as he was being dragged into the beat-up minivan those assholes were driving. Fuck, I may have drifted.
“Wait, what? Roly waskidnapped?” Elijah is… angry. He dry swallows, and my eyes track his Adam’s apple. I hear the bones in his hand crack as he fists them into tight balls of rage at his side.
I nod and whisper, “Yeah.”
Elijah goes quiet for a moment, then, seeming to read my standoffishness about the subject, moves off the trigger. “Wow. Still having a hard time picturing him as a SEAL, but he’s pretty stubborn, so maybe it’s not that weird after all.”
“Probably what made him so effective. A lot of what we were doing over there was beyond classified, and he has the element of surprise.”
