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About This Story
Danger Close is an autobiographical M/M military short story set at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in the summer of 2000. It opens with the words "This one is true," and everything after that sentence is written to earn them. The narrator is twenty-two, older than the kids around him, and he enlisted in the spring for reasons he told everybody and one reason he told nobody—he needed to be somewhere with rules loud enough that he couldn't hear himself think.
He arrives for training already knowing exactly what he has to keep buried. He learned the cost the hard way, back home, from watching it happen to the only other person who knew about him. So he shakes hands with his new roommate and gives himself an order. Not him. Not this. Not here.
The roommate is Tanner, twenty, a farm kid from West Virginia with an accent thick enough to slow a sentence down and a way of looking directly at you that the narrator is nowhere near ready for. The Army then does the cruelest thing it knows how to do, though it takes a while to feel like cruelty. It assigns them to each other as battle buddies. You do not go to the latrine alone. You do not walk to the PX alone. From the first day, the narrator is almost never more than ten feet from the person he came two thousand miles to stop wanting.
This is a Don't Ask, Don't Tell story, which means the stakes are not embarrassment or trouble. Discharge under that regulation did not put a mark on a man's record so much as it put a word there, and the word followed him into every job he applied for afterward. The narrator understands this the way you understand weather. He has seen it land on someone else.
What the story is actually about is the arithmetic a man performs when wanting somebody has become a liability he carries in his own chest. It is about proximity as a form of torture and a form of grace, about how much can pass between two people in a room with no door on it, and about what it costs to become expert at going somewhere behind your own eyes.
Readers who like military M/M romance, forced proximity, slow-burn tension, first-person literary fiction, Don't Ask Don't Tell-era stories, and writing that trusts restraint over declaration will find those things here. The heat is real and so is the fear, and neither one gets to cancel the other out.
Danger Close runs in four parts—Reception, Land Nav, Adjust Fire, and Call for Fire. It is a story about basic training, brown Oklahoma hills, a room with two beds five feet apart, and two young men learning that the thing you work hardest to hide is usually the thing another person notices first.
