The Last Stall, II
It happened the first time in the shower, which I think both of us always knew it would, because the last stall was the one place the building had ever given anybody to be a person in.
It was a Thursday night near lights out and the bay had cleared and I was in the last stall, the end one, washing off a field day, telling myself that’s all I was doing, and I heard the curtain and it was Tanner, of course it was Tanner, stepping in behind me into a stall built for one, and there wasn’t any pretending about it this time, no azimuth to talk about, no wall to look at, just the two of us crammed into four feet of steam with the water running and the bay empty and a curtain that didn’t quite close between us and the end of our careers. He put his hand flat on my chest and turned me around and looked at me, checking, the same as he always did, and I nodded, and he kissed me, and this time nobody came through the door.
We were quiet about it. We had to be. That was the whole architecture of it, that the worst thing we could do was make a sound, and so everything got pushed down into how we touched instead. He got a hand on me and I was already hard, stupid hard, weeks of it with nowhere to go, and the second another person’s hand was on my cock instead of my own I had to bite down on a sound that would’ve carried down the whole bay. He worked me slow and watched my face the whole time in the steam, his forehead down against mine, water running off both of us, and I got a hand around his cock and felt how hard he was too, how much he’d been carrying it the same as me, and we stood there in the last stall jerking each other off with our foreheads together and our breath shaking and not making a sound, two guys who’d have died before they let anybody hear, and it was the filthiest and the most tender thing that had ever happened to me at the same time, and I didn’t know a thing could be both until him.
He came first, into my hand, with his teeth set in his own bottom lip to kill it, his whole body going tight against me, and feeling him come apart silent like that was what finished me, and I came a few seconds after with my face shoved into his neck and his free hand spread flat on my back holding me up, both of us shaking, the water taking it down the drain, the bay still empty, nobody the wiser, the regulation still intact on paper and broken all to hell in a steel stall at the end of a hallway in Oklahoma. He held onto me after for a second longer than he needed to. That was the part that got me. Not the hand. The second after, the holding, his mouth against my temple, breathing. Then we cleaned up fast and got out one at a time, him first, me a minute behind, and I walked back to our room with my heart going and lay down five feet from the actual him, both of us pretending to sleep, both of us wide awake in the dark, and for the first time since I’d gotten to Fort Sill I wasn’t doing my arithmetic. I was lying there in the dark, terrified and wrecked and happier than I’d been in years, listening to him breathe, knowing he was listening to me.
Adjust Fire
After that it was a thing we were doing, and the doing of it took over my whole life in the quiet way a secret does, running underneath everything, costing more attention than the training did.
We got careful and we got reckless at the same time, which I’ve since learned is just what it’s like. Careful in the daylight, in front of people, better actors than ever, two battles, nothing to see. And reckless in the cracks, the last stall on the nights the bay cleared, the back of a deuce-and-a-half on a long ride out to the range, once in a stairwell during a fire drill that wasn’t a drill for us. We learned each other in pieces, in the four-minute windows the Army left lying around, and every piece made the daylight harder, because now I knew things about him, how he sounded when he was trying not to make a sound, the face he made, how he said my name when there was nobody to hear it, and I had to carry all of that around in formation and not let it show on me.
What nobody tells you about a secret is how much room it takes up, how it crowds everything else out to the edges of the day. I’d be down in the prone on some hill with the binos up and the radio handset against my jaw, calling a mission for real now and not a drill, reading the grid and the target description off the map and waiting on the round, fire mission, over, and the whole time some back third of my head would be running its own mission underneath the real one. Where Tanner was. Who was watching us. How long we’d held a look at chow. Whether Hicks had clocked anything. The arithmetic, always the arithmetic, running under the actual job the Army was paying me to learn. And here’s the thing, I got good at the job anyway. That’s what being good at hiding does to you. It makes you good at doing two things at once, the true thing and the cover, and I did them both well enough that nobody ever looked at me twice, and I’ve wondered plenty since what it cost me, getting that good that young at not being seen.
And the training went on around us, indifferent to all of it. It always is. We ran in the mornings in the cool dark before the heat came up, the whole platoon in formation, calling cadence, and Tanner ran next to me because we always ran next to each other now. We did land nav until we could’ve found those points blind. We learned to call for fire, which is the whole reason a Forward Observer exists, the radio drill of it, the words in their fixed order, the grid and the description and the method, fire mission, over, and I loved it, honestly, the cleanness of it, how there was a right answer and you either had it or you didn’t. We sat in the bleachers in the heat and watched the rounds come in downrange on the impact area and felt the ground move under us, this enormous indifferent power we were learning to reach out and pull down out of the sky onto a spot on a map, and I’d sit there next to Tanner with our shoulders not touching because we were in formation and I’d think about how the most dangerous thing in my life by a mile wasn’t the artillery. It was the kid next to me, and how much I’d started to need him, and how I’d stopped, somewhere in there, being able to imagine the rest of the cycle without him in it.
Weekend Pass
We got our first real weekend pass in the back half of the cycle, once we’d phased up and earned some rope, and Tanner and I did what half the platoon did, which was get off post as fast as humanly possible, and what no one else in the platoon did, which was get a motel room with two beds and only use one.
It wasn’t about what it turned into, not at the start. That’s the thing I want to get right. A weekend pass meant civilian clothes and off post and a night that belonged to us, and after a summer of belonging to the Army that was the whole prize by itself. We caught a cab into the town outside the gate, the strip of pawn shops and tattoo parlors and bars that exists outside every post in America to take a soldier’s money, and we did young-guy stuff, we drank cold beer nobody carded us too hard over, we shot bad pool, we fed a jukebox, we talked to nobody but each other and didn’t even notice we were doing it. It was the first time since reception either one of us had gotten to be a person instead of a number, and neither of us wanted the night to end and put us back in the bay under the fluorescent lights waiting on an 0500 that belonged to somebody else. So when it got late, we didn’t head back to post.
We got a room at one of the cheap motels on the strip, the kind with the AC unit roaring under the window and a bedspread you didn’t want to think about and two double beds with a nightstand between them. And when the door shut behind us and the deadbolt went over, that sound, the bolt, I felt something in my chest let go that had been clenched since reception. A door that locked. A door that locked from the inside, between us and the entire United States Army, for one whole night.
There were two beds. I want to be clear about that because it mattered, it mattered then and it mattered every time I’ve thought about it since. We didn’t have to share. There was a whole second bed, made up, three feet away. And we didn’t even talk about it. Tanner sat down on the one bed and I sat down next to him and we didn’t talk about the other one, the empty one, because the empty one was the whole point, the empty one was the thing we were saying without saying it, that this wasn’t the four minutes in the last stall, this wasn’t grabbing what you could in the cracks. We had a bed we didn’t have to share and we were going to share it anyway, all night, on purpose, like it meant something, because it did.
And here’s the thing I’ve never told anybody. It didn’t start as anything. We were tired and a couple beers in and it was late, and we turned off the light and got into the one bed without talking about it, stripped down to our shorts to sleep, and we said goodnight, and for a while we honestly tried to. Two guys in one bed with a careful stripe of sheet between them, both lying there in the dark wide awake and pretending not to be. That’s the truth about how these things actually go. There’s no decision in it. There’s just two people in the dark, each one waiting to find out what the other is going to do, each one able to call the whole thing an accident in the morning if it went wrong, and the not-deciding is its own kind of held breath, and it can go on for an hour.
He moved first, or I decided afterward that he had, so I could tell myself he had. His arm came over my waist in the dark, heavy and slow, and settled there, and we both held still and kept up the fiction that we were asleep, that an arm had just landed where an arm lands, that it didn’t mean the thing we both knew it meant. I lay there with his arm over me and my heart slamming and didn’t move for the longest time, because moving meant admitting I was awake, and admitting I was awake meant admitting I wanted it, and wanting it out loud was the one thing a whole summer of Cole’s warning had trained me never to do. So I did the cowardly brave thing instead. I scooted back. An inch, and then more, slow, pretending it was nothing but a man turning over in his sleep, until my back was full against his chest and there was no gap left anywhere, his front to my back, the whole warm length of him, and I felt him hard against me, against my ass, felt him grow there while neither of us said a word or admitted a thing, both of us still playing asleep with his cock pressed up against me and my own breath gone ragged in the dark.
And then I couldn’t do the asleep thing anymore. Neither of us could. I rolled over inside his arm, in the dark, until we were face to face with an inch of air between us, close enough that I could feel his breath and he could feel mine, both of us finally done pretending, and I kissed him, and that was the end of the fiction and the start of everything else.
I’d never done the whole thing with anybody. I need to say that, because it’s part of what that night was. I’d had the furtive stuff, the scared stuff, the cracks, with Cole once, before, and a stranger one time I don’t like to think about. But I’d never had a person and a locked door and a whole night and somebody who looked at me like Tanner looked at me, and I was nervous in a way I hadn’t been since I was a kid, and Tanner felt it, because he felt everything, and he slowed us back down. He kissed me slow and long until I stopped shaking, and we got the rest of it off, our shorts, the dog tags, everything the Army leaves you in, until there was nothing between us at all. We took our time because for the first time we had it, no water running to hide under, no curtain that didn’t close, no listening for a door. And then he reached over to the duffel for the bottle of lotion off the sink because that’s what you used, that’s what there was, and he asked me, right up against my ear, real quiet, he asked me how I wanted it, and I told him the truth, which was that I wanted him, that I wanted all of it, that I’d wanted it since the hallway.
So he opened me up with his fingers, slow, patient, his mouth on my neck, his other hand laced through mine on the pillow, while I shook apart under him and tried to stay quiet out of pure habit, and he told me I didn’t have to be quiet, not here, not tonight, the door was locked.
“Let me hear you.”
And when he finally pushed his cock into me it was slow and deep and it hurt and then it didn’t, and I held onto him and made every sound I’d been swallowing all summer right into his shoulder, and he fucked me slow in a cheap motel bed with the AC roaring and his name in my mouth and mine in his, and it wasn’t the four minutes anymore, it wasn’t stolen, it was given, it was the most given thing of my whole life. He came inside me with his face dropped down against mine and my name coming out of him broken, and I came between us a second later with his hand on me and his eyes on me, and then he didn’t pull away. That’s the thing about that night. He didn’t get up, didn’t clean up fast, didn’t go to the other bed. He stayed. He pulled the questionable blanket up over both of us and got an arm under me and we lay there in the roar of the AC, sweaty and wrecked and ours, and the empty bed three feet away stayed empty all night long, and that, more than anything we did with our bodies, was the thing I knew I’d never get over.