Too much, too soon. Too open.
And yet, she didn’t want to play games with Dakota.
Didn’t want to waste precious time.
Didn’t want to pretend not to think difficult thoughts or that she only wanted fluffy conversations. She and her friends had these kinds of talks, but most of the men she dated weren’t up to the rigor.
As she and Neesa agreed on their way to Macadoo’s, brainiacs were sexy as hell.
And the sight of the books in Dakota’s house was a definite aphrodisiac.
“Forgive me,” Dakota rubbed his hands over his face. “I left the conversation for a second as I was using that lens to look back at my own experiences. There’s a lot to unpack with what you said.”
Rylee sat quietly to invite more.
“My life experiences … Sex,” he paused. “Can we talk about sex for a moment?”
Rylee’s body reacted with enthusiastic waves of horny.
“Let me narrow that topic because that’s too broad, and I’m not throwing you into the sea without a life jacket. Sex as it applies to intimacy.” His face flamed red with his hair-trigger blushing mechanism.
Rylee laughed. “Go ahead.”
“Thank you. So I had a lot of time to think about a lot of things while deployed to Afghanistan.”
She nodded. “Vast vistas of nothing lead to belly-button-lint thinking.”
He chuckled. “For the most part, yeah. It was boring with spikes of adrenaline. With my fellow crewmen, I was in a brotherhood. We put our lives on the line for each other. We talked through everything. We laughed. We drank way too much. We roughhoused. We were obnoxious as hell. But the one thing I can say is that there was a deep intimacy that I had—obviously, outside of sex—with my team. And up until that time, all through school—”
“High school or college?” Rylee asked.
“High school for sure, where I was an athlete and got the perks that can seem like a movie trope. But also during my time at the Naval Academy.”
“I interrupted you to get a timeline in my head. So I imagine you finished USNA and then qualified as a crewman. We’re talking about your early twenties here.”
“Exactly. Before I was removed from a society where I had access to relationships with women, I spent little time considering intimacy. And I got my intimacy needs met through sex.”
“But that changed?”
A slow smile spread across his face. “I like sex. And I really like the closeness and intimacy I get from being with someone physically. But now I understand that sex is only one way to get my intimacy needs met.”
“I like this,” she said. “Keep going.”
“So intimacy with my brothers came from deep sharing and commitment to everyone’s well-being. If something hit my brother’s leg, it impacted everyone's capacity to fight. I needed to protect my legs and not become a burden to the team becausemy injury could make or break a mission and could be the difference between life and death. His leg was the same as my leg. All legs needed to be functioning.”
“Why did you leave the Navy?” Rylee asked.
“This AWG gal I knew was involved in figuring out how best to train and configure the special forces for future realities.”
“What did she come up with?”
“That everything we know about fighting was about to come to an end,” Dakota said. “On the ground, we were about to have drone warfare. In the sky? Potential space warfare where satellites had the capacity to take out other satellites, which could shut down communications and GPS coordinates at strategically delicate times.”
“When did she come up with all this?” Rylee extended her hand. “Sorry to be bouncing around like this. It’s that I want all the answers at once.” She laughed.
“Drone warfare, especially using night vision to look for soldiers? Ten years ago. DARPA started working on uniforms that would thwart the drones from hunting our soldiers.”
“That’s not new, right? Those have been part of the uniforms for what, forty years or so?”
