Page 51 of My Forbidden Commander

Noah goes still. It’s not very dramatic—if I weren’t paying attention to every shift of his body, I might have missed it. But his whole body locks up for just a second like he’s bracing for impact.

“What do you want to know?” His voice is careful now. Guarded, like it was before I ever heard him laugh.

“It’s alright,” I say quickly. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

He’s quiet for so long that I think he’ll let the subject die. I’m scrambling for another topic, something that would get him to relax like he was before I asked. Then he takes a deep breath and starts talking anyway.

“We were happy,” he says, not looking at me anymore. “When I was a kid. My mom, my dad, me. Nothing special. Just happy. Dad worked construction, Mom did people’s taxes on our kitchen table every spring. We had a dog that was too dumb to be useful and too sweet not to love.” A pause. “Then Mom got pregnant again. My sister. And it got even better, for a while. There was more to be happy about.”

I don’t say anything. Sometimes silence is the only thing that keeps a man like Noah talking once he starts.

“She died,” he says after a moment. “My sister. SIDS. She was four months old.” His voice doesn’t crack, but it’s somehow worse than that. It’s flat, rehearsed, like he recited this so many times, to himself if not out loud, that it has no sharp edges left. “My mom found her in the morning. I don’t remember a lot from right after. I remember the house being too quiet. I remember nobody turning the TV on for weeks.”

My chest tightens. I keep my hand moving along his spine, slow caresses to anchor him.

“She broke,” he continues. “My mom. Not all at once, though. It was a long process, watching her come apart. She started drinking. Then it wasn’t just drinking. My dad found work that kept him away longer and longer. He said it was for the money, and maybe it was, at first. But mostly I think he just couldn’t stand to be in that house anymore. Can’t blame him. I didn’t want to be there either, and I was seven.”

“Noah—”

“I found her.” He says it fast, like ripping off a bandage. “One morning. I was ten. She was in the bathtub, and I thought she was asleep at first, because she used to fall asleep in there sometimes with the water gone cold. I tried to wake her up.” His jaw ticks as he clenches his teeth. “We buried her a week later. My dad came to the funeral. That’s the last time I saw him. Found out afterward he had another family going the whole time, some woman two towns over, a couple of kids. Guess there wasn’t room in that arrangement for me.”

I don’t trust myself to speak yet. If I open my mouth now, rage is going to come out, and that’s not what he needs from me right now.

“I went to my mom’s parents after that,” Noah continues. “They were older, tired, hadn’t planned on raising a kid again at their age, but they didn’t complain where I could hear them. They died a few years apart, when I was fifteen. After that, it was foster care, and then it was the recruiter’s office the day I turned eighteen, because at least the Army had rules that made sense. Structure. Somewhere to put yourself when no one else wants the job of holding you up.”

The hut is quiet except for the generators humming outside. I feel Noah’s heartbeat under my palm, steady despite everything he just laid out. I think about the file. Top two percent in marksmanship. Insubordinate, resistant to command structure, reckless. A transfer request to the most dangerous posting on the map, volunteered. I think about the boy who found his mother in a bathtub and decided, somewhere along the way, that running toward the thing most likely to get him killed was easier than waiting for something else to take everything he loved.

It explains so much I didn’t understand a month ago. The slouch that isn’t laziness. The mouth that never backs down. The way he ran across sixty meters of open ground for a man he barely knew, because staying safe never kept anyone he loved alive, so why bother.

“The numbers,” I say quietly, my fingers finding the small block of ink on his arm.

He turns his head to look at them himself, like he needs a reminder of what they mean.

“My sister’s death date,” he answers. “My mom’s. The day I enlisted.” A faint, humorless smile. “Three days that changed my whole life. Figured I should carry them somewhere I can’t lose them.” The again goes unspoken.

I tilt his chin up with two fingers and kiss him, moving slowly, giving him plenty of time to turn away if he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t turn away. It’s nothing like any kiss we’ve had before. This one isn’t hunger, a claim, or a dare. It’s slow, and it’s quiet. I breathe him in, and he breathes me in too, and we stay like that for long minutes, lips barely moving.

When I finally pull back, his eyes are wet at the corners, though nothing falls.

“I should head back,” he murmurs, glancing at the clock on the footlocker. “Before Okafor comes knocking again, reporting that I’m not in my bunk.”

I should let him go. It’s the smart thing to do. It’s what old me would have done. Instead, I take a breath and say what I actually want.

“Stay.”

He blinks at me.

“Sleep here,” I say before he can argue, before I can talk myself out of it. “I’ll wake you before dawn. You can slip back before anyone’s up, before the base is moving. Nobody has to know.”

At first, he looks surprised. Then his face softens, making me think of the boy from his story.

“You sure?” he asks. “That’s a risk, sir.”

“I’m aware of the risk.” I pull him back down against my side, mindful of my shoulder, and he comes without argument, tucking himself in against me like he’s been doing it for years instead of weeks. “Stay, Noah.”

He exhales slowly, and some of the tension leaves his body.

“Okay,” he breathes. “Okay.”