Page 20 of My Forbidden Commander

So you don’t need to run off to get some alone time.

He said it. Out loud.

That was his opening.

If I’d read it wrong—if he were just a colonel who caught a specialist beating off behind the generator shed on a perimeter run—I know exactly what happens next. I’ve seen what happens next. There’s a counseling statement. There’s a speech about conduct and discipline delivered in that voice that could strip paint, maybe an Article 15 if he wanted to bury me, at minimum a week of the worst details on the base and a permanent entry in the long ledger of Reyes, Noah A., problem soldier. That’s what officers do with deviants. They document you. They make an example.

He did none of it. Not that day. Not the six days after. He didn’t even pretend to chew me out for falling off the run, which would’ve been free—I handed him the infraction gift-wrapped, and he didn’t open it.

Instead, he stood on that track staring at the gap between the buildings, hard enough to show through his shorts, and then he spent six days not looking at me, and then today he assigned me a hut alone and told me why with a straight face.

Did he want me to jerk off? Did he want to think about me possibly jerking off in there?

The water sluices down my back, and I think about the way his eyes went almost silver when I paused in the doorway, and the way his fist closed at his side when I smiled, and the tone of his voice when…

And that’s about when I notice the situation developing south of my navel.

No. Absolutely not. Abort.

I am standing in a communal shower with four men who have known me for under two weeks, one of whom narrates everything he observes at full volume, and my body is drafting a press release about my commanding officer. I crank the tap toward cold, put my face directly into the spray, and start naming weapon components in my head. Bolt carrier group. Firing pin. Cam pin. Buffer spring. The cold bites my skin, and the situation de-escalates. Slowly.

“—Reyes agrees with me. Reyes. You agree with me.”

“What?” I say into the water.

“The mouse. Hazard pay. Are you even listening?”

“He’s been in the water ten minutes,” Delgado observes. “Standing there like a load-bearing beam.”

“It’s called hygiene, Rafael. The man cleaned a hut alone, he’s earned a long shower.” Hayes shuts his tap off and grabs his towel. “Which, by the way, we’re circling back to. The solo hut. Everybody else works in teams, and the Colonel gives our boy his own private hut, that’s day five of the pattern, I’m keeping a chart⁠—”

“It was the smallest hut,” I say, and I’m proud of how bored it comes out.

“It was the nicest hut. It had the least mice. I checked.”

“You inventoried the mice,” Delgado says deadpan.

“I did a threat assessment.”

Petrillo kills his water. “The new people get here at 1400 tomorrow. Anybody else find it strange that eight bodies is command’s answer to a range card?”

That kills the mouse talk. Spencer wraps his towel around his waist and says, “Means command thinks the card’s the start of something.”

Nobody has a joke for that. Even Hayes just works his towel over his blond hair and lets it sit for a whole three seconds, which for Hayes is a moment of silence with full honors.

“Well,” he says finally, “eight new people, fresh audience, and a sniper who’s supposedly some kind of wizard. I say we let Wilder deal with whatever’s on the ridge and I focus on my strengths.”

“Which are?” Delgado asks warily.

“Morale, Rafael. Morale and the mouse saga.”

I shut my water off and towel down before getting dressed. My body is tired, but my mind is still racing.

Everyone files out with the shuffle of tired men.

“Coming?” Delgado asks at the door.

“In a minute,” I reply. “Gonna get some air first.”