Page 44 of My Forbidden Commander

“What are you doing here?” I ask. It comes out flatter than I intend, exhaustion doing most of the talking.

“Had to see you were okay,” he answers. “With my own eyes. Command channel and Okafor’s face weren’t cutting it.”

I close the door behind me with my good hand, and the weight of the day finally catches up all at once—the shoulder, the walk, the twenty stitches, every conversation I’ve had since dawn that required me to sound like a man in control of anything.

“I’m not in the shape to fight with you about last night,” I say, crossing the small room slower than I’d like. “About what you did out there. Running at an ambush, running at a jammed rifle like your life’s negotiable. We’re going to have that conversation, Reyes, but not tonight.”

“Okay.”

“And I’m definitely not in the shape to get you off, or myself, or whatever you came here expecting,” I continue.

He smirks at me then. It’s small, it’s tired, but it’s real.

“Those two things are best done together, sir,” he says. “The fighting and the other thing. I’ll wait for both.”

I sit down beside him because my body’s officially done with standing.

“Lie down,” he says quietly, giving me the order like I don’t outrank him.

I do it anyway, groaning, my stitches pulling tight and complaining. Reyes kneels at the foot of the bunk and starts working on the laces of my boots, quick and efficient.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know.” He pulls the first boot off and sets it aside, then starts on the second. “I’m also not in the mood to fight about it, so you’ll have to accept it.”

He gets both boots off and lines them up against the wall, then he stands and looks down at the bunk, at the narrow strip of mattress not currently occupied by a colonel with one working arm.

“Be a tight fit,” he comments.

“You don’t have to stay either.”

“Also not fighting you on that one.” He climbs in anyway, careful of my shoulder, folding himself into the space along my good side. The bunk wasn’t built for two men. It groans under us as his body presses into mine, warm through our thin shirts, and that tightness in my chest, the one plaguing me since the ambush, finally unclenches.

We lie there in the lantern light, not talking. His breathing settles as I think about what’s happening right now. About the fact that I’m an adult man lying next to another adult man in a very narrow bed and… it feels the opposite of wrong. It feels too fucking right.

“Tell me about your life,” he says quietly after a moment.

I raise my eyebrows. “That was not a question.”

“Wasn’t trying to make it one.” He turns his head against my good shoulder, just enough that I feel it more than I see it. “I don’t know anything about you. Not really. I know how you run PT and how you hold a rifle and what you sound like when you come. That’s not the same as knowing a person.”

I hate that my dick twitches at his words. So I start talking before it makes me do something that’ll pull my stitches.

“My father was career Army,” I say instead of entertaining my cock. “Infantry, then armor, retired a lieutenant colonel after twenty-six years. Strictest man I’ve ever known, before or since.”

Reyes puffs air out of his nose, just a small scoff of amusement. “That explains a few things,” he says, but there’s a smile in his voice.

“He ran the house like a firebase. Boots by the door, lined up. Bed made before school, corners you could bounce quarters off. He didn’t yell much. Didn’t need to. He had a way of saying things that scared me worse than shouting ever could.”

“Sounds familiar,” Reyes murmurs. I ignore it, mostly because he’s not wrong.

“My mother kept everything else standing while he was gone, which was most of the time. She never wore a uniform, but she ran that house like a command post. Bills, school, neighbors, all of it, alone, for months at a stretch, and never once complained where I could hear her.” I breathe easier, thinking about her. She always had that effect on me. “She used to leave the porch light on every night when he was deployed. Didn’t matter if it was raining, or if the bill came high that month. Said it was so he’d always know which house was his, no matter how dark everything else got.”

“That’s…” Reyes clears his throat. “That’s actually kind of beautiful, sir.”

“She was better at this life than either of us will ever be,” I say. “I had no brothers or sisters, just me in the house while she waited for a man who came home changed a little more every time.”

Reyes doesn’t say anything for a while. His hand finds mine, careful not to jostle me, and just holds it, no agenda in the touch for once.