Both men agreed.
“So what if someone isn’t available?”
Hunter cleared his throat. “I’d think it would depend on why and how long they were gone. I don’t think you two should skip meetings if I’m in the field for a month. Or more. But if it’s just a couple of days flex, just move the meeting.”
Liam cocked his head. “Meet without whoever is missing if they’re gone for more than a few days, and catch up when they get back.”
“Why not?”
They looked at Kat. She considered. “What if you’re deployed? That would be months, maybe a year.”
“Yeah,” Hunter agreed. “I could maybe Skype a little, but there’s no privacy, so no relationship stuff.”
Nothing? The idea of it hit Kat in the chest and reverberated with painful truth. She didn’t know if she could handle that level of impersonal interaction for that long. She was almost certain she knew the answer, but she had to ask. “What about mail, or phone, or email?”
“Phone and mail are definitely the same rules. Which was one of the things I wanted to talk about.”
“The rules? Yeah, we got those. No PDA or whatever,” Liam confirmed. His tone edged toward irritated. Kat wondered if he was irked with the rules or having to talk about them. It gave her some level of satisfaction that she wasn’t alone in her ire.
Hunter leveled a look at Liam. “That, too. But right now I mean the texts and email.”
Liam crossed his arms over his chest. Kat blinked, realizing she’d done the same. Uncrossing her arms, she put her hands back onto the table.
“What about them?” Liam demanded.
“While I’m at HQ, I’m more available than pretty much any other duty. Even so, I can’t keep up with the level of texts and crap you two send. And not all of it is appropriate.”
Kat winced. She might have crossed a line there with some of her texts.
“What are you getting at?” The flat tone of Liam’s voice caught her attention and reminded her of his earlier frustration with Jen.
“Just that the two of you text all the time. I can’t do that, not even in the best of circumstances—which is now. In the field, you won’t hear from me for days or weeks at a time. Even on base, I’ll be on the firing range or doing weapons testing or training. I don’t have an office job, and you both need to cut back on what you send.”
Kat dropped her hands to her lap and twisted her fingers together. She lived and breathed communication, it was the one thing she’d found when she’d searched over the last week. And that meant she needed to speak up now.
“That may be an...issue.”
Liam whipped his head around and Hunter leaned forward, looking at her in that focused, singular way he had.
“How?”
“You asked for a week to think about hard stops, and you told me
to think, too. I did. The one thing I kept coming back to was that I need to know what’s going on.”
She raised a hand to forestall Hunter’s objection. “I don’t mean I need to know everything you’re doing every minute of the day. I mean I need to know what’s going on in your head and in Liam’s head and what that means for us. I had no idea what was going on with you and Liam and me before, and that screwed everything up. I don’t want to be in that place again, and the only way I know to avoid it is communication.”
Liam sighed. “I agree there. At the time I didn’t realize how hard it would hit you, so I fucked up.”
Hunter sat back. “I don’t mean we can’t talk or text, but you can’t expect the level of engagement from me that the two of you have.”
“How can we work as a relationship if you aren’t engaged?” Panic started to rise in her throat, and she deliberately pushed it down. No reason to panic.
“I won’t be able to respond most of the time, and even if I can, I have to be careful. And just the amount of stuff you two send distracts me from what I need to be doing.”
“Fine,” Liam muttered. “We won’t text you while you’re at work unless it’s important.”
“Good. That works for me.”