Chapter Six
Dustin poured himself two fingers of scotch before he even took off his uniform back at his condo. He really wasn’t much of a drinker anymore, but some days just required it. Such as learning that his super-secret online jerk-off buddy was his newest subordinate? Yeah, make his a double. Still not looking at his phone, he stripped off the uniform and put on a pair of black athletic shorts. It was nice night. Any other night with a breeze like this, he might think about taking the boat out for a spin, clear his head before settling in for the night. But his cell reception was crap out on the channel, and he’d told Wes they’d talk.
Fuck. He took another long swallow of scotch, letting it burn all the way down. He’d been trained in hostage situations, including the sorts of torture terrorists might use to break him, and never once in all that training had they warned him that watching Wes’s first day on the team would be worse than anything a terror cell might dream up. Curly and Bacon had taken Wes under their substantial wings, leaving Dustin to learn things about Wes in little snippets of conversation over the course of the day.
Like how Wes was worried about how the movers might treat his car. Or how Wes disliked eggs. See, if he hadn’t been called away that DC weekend, Dustin might know how the man liked his breakfast...
And that way of thinking lay madness. He had to stop this. Get over his fixation on Wes.
Buzz. His phone vibrated with a new message, and he didn’t have to look to know who it was messaging him.
You there?
Dustin sighed, not that the empty living room gave a fuck. Yeah. I’m home now.
You gonna make me type or can I call?
Wes was forthright as ever. And no, Dustin wasn’t going to make him type out what had to be considerable disbelief and frustration, if Wes was being truthful about not knowing anything in advance. And really, the guy was a lot of things, but Dustin just had to flash back to how pale he’d gotten—no one was that good of an actor, and Dustin was pretty damn good at telling when someone was lying to boot.
Propping the phone on a stand he kept on the coffee table, he hit the video chat button. He could have gone for voice-only, but knowing that this was going to be his very last personal conversation with Wes made him want to at least look at the man.
“Hey, there.” Wes’s voice echoed off the condo’s hardwood floors. “Wait. Are we talking or jerking off?”
“Fuck.” Dustin realized a moment too late that he had the stand angled for their favorite video chat activity, not conversation. He angled it up to his face. “Better?”
“Depends on your definition of better,” Wes drawled. The screen showed him lounging back against a pillow. Dustin recognized the white walls and cheap blond laminate furniture of the barracks. The rooms for the enlisted men were tiny, not that the officers’ quarters—where he’d lived until recently—were much bigger.
“You look exhausted.” Dustin forgot his carefully rehearsed speech in the face of how wrung out Wes looked—his hair was at weird angles and the T-shirt he had on was rumpled, but it was the darkness under his eyes and deep lines around his mouth that really gave him away.
“Eh. I’ll live.” Wes shrugged. “You know me, I don’t need a ton of sleep anyway.”
Dustin did know, all about Wes’s awful insomnia that kept him up late East Coast time. “Guess adjusting to the time difference is going to be a bear for you.”
“Hell. I don’t want to adjust.”
“You don’t?” Dustin leaned forward. “You didn’t want this transfer?”
“Hell, no. You still thinking I’ve got some kind of superpowers and set this up?” Wes shook his head. “My whole family’s back in North Carolina. My whole life, other than BUD/S and being gone on deployments, has been back there.”
“I know,” Dustin said weakly. “I don’t think you’re lying. But you could have told me you were transferring—maybe we would have figured it out sooner?”
“How, Corporal?” Wes sneered at the camera. “I never said one way or another what branch of service I was, but you gotta admit, your avatar was a bit over-the-top marine.”
“It was a joke.” Dustin had known he was giving people on the app that impression, but he hadn’t thought it would matter this much. “My dad and grandpa both did stints in the marines. But I had this thing about wanting to be a SEAL officer, and even after I got into the Naval Academy, they tried hard to get me to make my commission for the marines. I said I’d rather be Godzilla than be a marine.”
“And so you were Godzilla the Marine. I’d laugh if I weren’t so pissed.” Wes rubbed the back of his neck. “Anyway, I was going to tell you about the transfer. I was just working out how to best do it. I had...a plan.”