"Alive. Caffeinated. Hostile."
"So, your type."
"I don't have a type."
Holden laughs, the low, knowing sound of a man who used to make this exact denial and lost the argument. He's settled now, solid in a way he wasn't six months ago. Fallon did that, or Fallon gave him permission to stop pretending he didn't want it. Either way, he moves differently these days. He's less coiled. Like a man who stopped running surveillance on his own life and decided to live in it.
"I walked past the comm building last Tuesday," he says. "Heard her laughing. Your voice was the only other one in the room."
"She wasn't laughing. She was mocking me. There’s a significant difference."
"Is there?"
Holden stops walking. He waits until I stop too. "Griff." He holds my gaze with the patience of someone who's earned the right to say whatever comes next. "I did this exact thing for months with Fallon. The denial, the deflection, the insistence that professional interest is just professional interest. I'm not giving you a speech because you'd hate it and I'd feel stupid. But the fact that you time your Tuesdays around that security sweep tells me more than anything coming out of your mouth right now."
"I time my Tuesdays around the duty roster. She happens to be on it."
"Sure."
"I'm serious."
"I know you think you are." He claps my shoulder and starts walking. "Fallon's making dinner Thursday. Come by. Bring beer. Don't bring excuses."
He heads toward the SEAL compound without waiting for a response, because Holden doesn't argue past the point where he's already won. It's an infuriating quality in a best friend. A useful quality in an operator.
The rest of the day grinds through routine ops, the kind of methodical busy work that fills hours and keeps hands occupied and should keep my head from circling back to a pair of green eyes and a mouth that turns every sentence into something I want to answer. It should. It doesn't.
My loft sits a short drive off base, a converted warehouse on the waterfront. Second floor, exposed brick, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the bay. It's an open plan with minimal furniture. People who visit call it curated.
What they actually mean is empty. A couch, a bed, a kitchen island, a flat-screen mounted to bare brick. There are no photographs on the walls. Nothing that says someone built a life here rather than just parked one temporarily.
I didn't design it this way. It just happened, the same way everything in my life just happens. Temporary posting, temporary quarters, temporary arrangements with women who understand the terms upfront and don't stick around long enough to leave evidence.
I approach, I assess, I render safe, I walk away. The same philosophy that keeps my hands steady on a wire keeps everything else stripped to essentials.
I've been at Tidewater for years and the walls are still bare. That used to feel like discipline. Lately it's started to feel like the inside of an empty casing. All the right dimensions, all the right structure. Nothing at the core.
I drop my gear by the door, pull a beer from the fridge, and settle onto the couch with my phone. A base-wide personnel update has been sitting in my inbox since noon, the kindof administrative email nobody reads but everyone receives. I scroll through out of habit and stop on a familiar entry.
Staff Sergeant Griff Morrison assigned permanent EOD position effective immediately.
Staff Sergeant. Morrison.
I'm a Lieutenant. My last name is Holland. Admin has butchered it on every update since I transferred to Tidewater, and at this point correcting them feels like defusing the same device twice. The month before, I was "Sergeant First Class G. Holloway." Before that, "Chief Warrant Officer Griffin." The only thing they consistently get right is the EOD part, and even that had a typo once.
I set the phone on the armrest and let the grin sit for a while, staring at the wall across from the couch. Bare brick, same as the day I moved in. There's a nail hole about halfway up where a previous tenant hung something. A picture, a clock, a mirror. Something that said this is where I live and I intend to stay. I bought a framed print once, a black and white aerial shot of the Texas Hill Country that reminded me of the view from my uncle's ranch. It's still leaning against the wall inside the bedroom closet, wrapped in the brown paper it came in. I told myself I'd hang it when I had the right hardware. That was over a year ago, and the hardware store is ten minutes from my front door.
Bay light shifts amber through the windows, then copper, then the deep blue-gray of a Virginia coast evening. A gull screams somewhere over the water. The refrigerator hums.
This used to be the best part of the day. No obligations. No entanglements. No one on the other side of a door waiting for something I'm not built to give.
Tonight the quiet just feels like quiet. The kind with nothing in it.
My phone buzzes on the coffee table, and the caller ID reads CMDR HARTWELL. I sit up, the beer abandoned, because Hartwell doesn't dial personal phones after hours for anything routine.
"Holland."
"Lieutenant. I need you at the comm building in thirty." Hartwell's voice is tight, stripped down to an operational minimum. "We have a situation."
