Page 27

Chapter 27

Riley

A shower and a call to a local pizza place later, Nolan and I settled onto my bed to wait for our food to arrive. I’d thrown on a pair of sweats. He had on gym shorts. Still, lying together without shirts felt damn close to being naked; maybe because stripping off any clothes at all and holding each other was still so new for us. Like the novelty hadn’t even begun to wear off of knocking down those barriers.

There were still barriers, though. And tonight, when he’d tried to topple one, he’d run into it headlong again. I was relieved we’d salvaged things; he’d still seemed to enjoy what we’d done even if it wasn’t what he’d wanted at first.

As I rewound all of that, though, worry knotted in the pit of my stomach. In the moment, I’d only wanted to reassure him and promise him he still turned me on, that I wasn’t going anywhere, and that I was more than happy to keep helping him past his trauma.

But now I wondered if I’d said the wrong things.

I combed my fingers through his short, damp hair. “I, um… Just so we’re clear, when I was saying we’d keep working up to you topping me—I wasn’t trying to pressure you.”

“Huh?” He shifted onto his elbow and propped himself up so he could look in my eyes. “I didn’t feel pressured.”

Some of my uneasiness unwound, but not all of it. “I just… I was trying to make things hot, you know? But now I’m worried I was—”

“Riley.” He offered a tired smile as he took my hand. “We’re good. I didn’t feel any pressure.” He paused. “And it was pretty hot.”

“It was?”

“Well, yeah.” The smile turned to a soft grin. “Listening to you get all turned on thinking about bottoming for me?” He half-shrugged. “That’s hot.”

“Okay. It’s… That’s what I was going for. I…” Sighing, I shook my head. “I don’t know. I guess when I was rethinking it, I was afraid it sounded like I was putting pressure on you or something.” I squeezed his hand. “For the record, when I say I’m not going anywhere and we can take as much time as you need, I mean that.”

“I know.” He settled against me again and draped his arm over my stomach as he tucked his head beneath my chin. “You’re the first person I’ve ever been with who hasn’t made me feel like we’re rushing or you’ve got one foot out the door.”

I closed my eyes, anger surging through me at how many people had mistreated him. Not just that psycho who’d assaulted him, but the boyfriends and hookups along the way who’d acted like his trauma was an inconvenience or a character flaw. Running my fingertips along his tattooed shoulder, I said, “I’m glad I haven’t. If I ever do, just say so. Because it’s the last thing I want.”

“I know. And… I’m pretty sure we will get there.” He sighed, his breath gusting across my chest. “I want it. I just… I don’t know how to get past everything in my head.”

“It’s been there for a long time. It might take a long time to get past it, too.”

He seemed to think about that. “Probably. But I still don’t know how to get past it.” He paused. “Therapy’s an option, I guess. I don’t know if it’ll work, though.”

“It’s worth a try.” I kissed the top of his head. “Whichever way you decide to go, just let me know how I can help.”

“You’ve already helped more than anyone else has ever even tried to.” He lifted his head and pressed a kiss beneath my jaw. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

He settled on my shoulder again, and we lay in silence for a while. I didn’t know if he was still thinking about it all, or if his mind had wandered elsewhere. Hell, he might’ve fallen asleep, though his breathing hadn’t slowed enough to make me think he had.

“Can I ask you about something?” I ran my hand over his shoulder. “Sort of but not completely related to what happened?”

Nolan shifted again, and we faced each other on our sides. Brow pinched, he said, “What’s on your mind?”

“Well…” I slid my hand up his chest. “You mentioned before that you had a full ride scholarship before you enlisted.”

He tensed, studying me cautiously as he gave a slow nod. “Yeah. I did.”

“If things had happened differently, and you’d gone to school, what were you going to study?”

He blinked as if that wasn’t what he’d expected me to ask. Then his eyes lost focus. Turning onto his back, he gazed up at the ceiling. “It probably sounds stupid.”

“Try me.”

He slowly drew his tongue across his lips. “For a long time, I wanted to go to veterinary school. But I did an internship at a clinic during my junior year, and…” He shook his head. “I can’t do it. I can’t stomach seeing animals in pain.”

That tracked. As stressed as he’d been when Arrow had gotten sick, and as meticulous as he was about caring for his cats, not to mention how thoroughly he’d rehabbed them after finding them as starving kittens—yeah, I could totally see him wanting to be a vet, and also balking because of the suffering animals.

“That makes sense,” I said. “You obviously love animals.”

“I do. And I’d love to be able to help them like that, but I just—I’m not wired for it.” He laughed softly. “Kind of ironic, I went into a career field where I learn all kinds of ways to kill a person, and my entire job revolves around bombs and missiles and shit. But ask me to see hurt or sick animals all day? Can’t do it. I wonder what that says about me.”

“Would you be able to work in a job where hurt and sick people came to you all day?”

He turned a puzzled look on me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, in our line of work, a lot of what we’re taught feels pretty abstract. Even what I’m doing, I do a lot of drills that involve taking down suspects and active shooters, but how often do I actually go hands-on with someone? Next to never. You’re working in ordnance. You load bombs and shit on planes. The planes come back with no bombs on them. That’s… a little different than shooting someone in the face, you know?”

He squirmed as if trying and failing to mask a shudder. “It is. Still bugs me. Some of the guys I worked with would watch the videos of our bombs getting dropped. After the pilots came back from missions. I… I couldn’t do that.”

“No, that doesn’t sound like you.”

He shifted onto his side and faced me. “You said you go hands-on next to never. But it has happened?”

I nodded. “Now and then.” I thought about it, then chuckled. “A commander once gave me a black eye after the Navy Ball.”

Nolan’s eyes widened, and he laughed. “No shit?”

“No shit.” I draped an arm over his waist just because I liked touching him. “At my last command, there was a big problem with DUIs. Big problem. The year before, there were like seven after the Navy Ball, and two of them happened off-base, which is messy. So that year, we set up checkpoints at all the base gates. Nobody went off post without getting stopped.”

He grimaced. “Bet that went over well.”

“Yeah, some people were less than pleased about it,” I said. “One of the junior enlisted guys was married to a law student, and she got absolutely hammered at the Ball. At the checkpoint, she starts screaming at us, quoting chapter and verse about constitutional law, unlawful searches…” I rolled my eyes. “I finally told her, fine—we’ll take down the checkpoint. And if anyone gets killed because someone drove off-base while intoxicated, we’d bring her in as a witness to testify that she explicitly told us we needed to take down the checkpoints.”

Nolan snorted. “What did she say to that?”

“More self-righteous bullshit. And I mean, I get it. I’ve never been completely comfortable with the idea myself. Fourth Amendment and all that. But… the first time we did it, my checkpoint alone stopped three different people from driving off-base with a fuckload of alcohol in their systems. That kind of spooked me, you know?”

He nodded solemnly. “Yeah. One of my bases did it, too. It always kind of rubbed me the wrong way, but they only ever did it on New Year’s Eve, Super Bowl Sunday, and the night of the Marine Ball.” He half-shrugged. “And they even said, if you don’t want to go through the checkpoint, fine—just stay in the barracks or the on-base hotel until the next day.”

“That’s what we did, too. One of the ship’s COs got all pissy about the whole thing, too, but he shut his mouth after the Super Bowl one year. We dropped six different Sailors off on his quarterdeck, so fucked up they couldn’t even stand. Luckily only two of them had tried to drive, and we basically said, ‘they’re your problem, sir. Good luck.’” I mock saluted, which made Nolan laugh.

“You’d think it wouldn’t be a problem anymore, but there’s always someone.”

“Seriously.”

“So. How did you end up getting punched by a commander?”

“Oh. Right. That.” I chuckled, pushing myself up onto my elbow. “So, night of the Navy Ball. We stopped him just like we stopped everyone else. He rolls down the window, and I mean… a lot of the cars smelled like booze because the passengers were drunk. But it was just coming off him in waves. He was slurring. His eyes were red. There was no way this guy was sober.”

“Was he driving erratically?”

“Oddly enough, no. The way he approached and then pulled up alongside where I was standing, I figured I’d be letting him go, same has most of the people who stopped. As soon as he rolled down the window, though…” I grimaced, my eyes damn near watering just from the memory of the alcohol fumes coming through that window. “I told him to step out of the car, which sent him straight into belligerent.”

Nolan chuckled. “Did he try to pull rank on you?”

“Oh, he tried. And I told him that the two-star admiral who’d left an hour earlier had cooperated because she understood that the law outranks all of us.”

He whistled. “How did that go over?”

“Well, let’s just say my next tactic was to tell him that if he didn’t get out of the car, I would show my bodycam footage to that admiral, and she could decide what to do with him.”

Nolan’s eyes widened. “Oh, fuck. What did he say?”

“A whole lot of misogynistic stuff that I won’t repeat. But he did get out of the car at that point.”

“I bet he did. Was the bodycam thing bullshit?”

I nodded. “Which also told me he was definitely drunk—I knew for a fact he was one of the officers who wanted us to wear bodycams, and he was pissed that we didn’t.”

“Ooh, you got him dead to rights, didn’t you?”

“Yep. So I ran him through a field sobriety test, which he failed so hard, we had him do a few more just because—I mean, fuck it, he was being belligerent. Why not make him do a few more human tricks?”

“Shame there were no bodycams.”

“No, but my LPO was there, and he filmed it on his phone. He told me, ‘Ain’t no fucking way we’re hemming up someone like that without bulletproof evidence.’ Between the videos and the Breathalyzer—dude was fucked.” I chuckled at the memory. “And since I was the one to get him out of the car, I got to be the one to tell him he was under arrest, at which point…” I gestured at my left eye.

Nolan whistled. “Tell me they got that on camera.”

“Every second. Last I heard, they’re still using the video train new guys on how to take someone down and cuff him.”

“Oh, yeah?”

I grinned proudly. “I was pissed and my face fucking hurt, but muscle memory kicked in and I got him to the ground by the book. And it was a damn good thing it was filmed, because he tried to say I was too rough, that I pulled his arm too hard, and—dude, the only reason anyone grabbed or pulled your arm was you were trying to grab another officer’s ankle.”

“Wow. I’m guessing he’s not in the Navy anymore.”

I barked a bitter laugh. “ Noo . I’d love to tell you he went to the brig and got demoted so far he had to salute enlisted recruits, but…” I shook my head.

“Oh for fuck’s sake. They force-retired him, didn’t they?”

Rolling my eyes, I nodded. “I guess the CO didn’t want to deal with a court-martial and all that, especially since there were criminal charges. I don’t know all the details—it kind of filtered down from the chiefs. But at the end of the day, he was told he could take a demotion to lieutenant commander and retire immediately, or he could stay in and face a laundry list of charges. He took the demotion and bailed.”

“Of course he did,” Nolan muttered. “I know enlisted Marines who got hemmed up worse than that for a hell of a lot less.”

“Me too. It’s such bullshit. But at least he didn’t kill anyone that night. Hopefully he doesn’t now that he’s a civilian.”

“One can hope,” he grumbled.

“Right? Anyway, I didn’t mean to derail—we were talking about you, not me.”

“It’s okay.” He flashed a quick smile before fixing his gaze on the ceiling again. “Anyway, when I realized being a vet was off the table…” He swallowed, and though the light was low, I thought he blushed. “I wanted to teach.”

“Did you?”

He nodded, avoiding my gaze. “I did some tutoring when I was in high school, and I think I was pretty good at it. I guess—I mean, one of my teachers told me I was good at reframing things so a student who was struggling understood it.” He seemed to cringe inwardly, as if he were expecting me to laugh at him or tell him he was an idiot.

“I think you’d be a great fit for that,” I said softly.

His expression shifted to one of surprise. “You… You do?”

“Well, yeah. Some people definitely aren’t wired for it, but you seem like you’ve got the patience, and you’re good at explaining things.” I half-shrugged. “Seems like you’d be good at it.”

He studied me like he hadn’t heard me right.

I opened my mouth to say something, but my phone picked that moment to ping. I reached for it. “I think that’s our dinner.”

“Oh, good.” Nolan sat up. “I’m starving.”

“Me too.”

It was indeed our pizza, and I went down to the lobby to pick it up. When I came back, we put the box between us on the bed and dug in.

After Nolan had finished a slide, he put his plate aside and pushed out a long, heavy sigh. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a mess since we got here.”

“You’re not a mess. You’ve had to play nice around your—around someone who hurt you. And act like nothing ever happened.” I touched his face and pressed a soft kiss to his mouth. “I don’t know how you’ve managed to be as strong as you have.”

“I didn’t have much choice,” he whispered.

The words “you did” threatened to jump off my tongue, but I bit them back and just pulled him in close. Closing my eyes, I stroked his short hair.

I got it. I’d been trained to deal with victims of every kind of abuse, and this was a painfully normal response. There were absolutely options for sexual assault victims, regardless of gender, but how many victims were accused of lying? Or mocked? Or just ignored?

And hadn’t I listened to people I worked with—fellow cops, for fuck’s sake—laugh and snark about men who’d been raped, especially by women? There’d been times I’d actually worried one of them would respond to a call for that kind of assault. Would they laugh in the victim’s face? Dismiss them? Because these guys were already dicks about women who’d been assaulted. In their eyes, a man was either gay (because he’d been raped by a man) or a pussy (because he’d been “raped” by a woman); there was just no empathy or sympathy at all.

“You got it up, dude. You were into it.”

“You just told me you had an orgasm, but now you’re telling me you didn’t want it? Which is it?”

“Regretting it after the fact doesn’t make it rape.”

I swallowed bile. I wished Nolan had reported it to the police, but I was nauseous imagining him being dismissed and mocked. Especially when he was as young and vulnerable as he’d been back then.

And now, in his thirties, he had to quietly tolerate the presence of his rapist. It wasn’t fair, damn it.

There also wasn’t anything I could do about it, no matter how much that frustrated me. All I could do was support him and have his back, and hopefully he could get through this so we could go home.

“Listen.” I took his hand and looked in his eyes. “The next few days are going to be tough, but it’s almost over. We just have to get through the rehearsal and the wedding, and then you won’t have to spend time around her.” I ran the pad of my thumb along his. “We’ll get on a plane, get back to Okinawa and the cats, and be done with it.”

The mention of his cats brought a weak smile to his lips. “It’ll be nice to see them again.”

“Yeah, it will. I miss those little fuckers.”

“You do?”

“Well, yeah.” I shrugged. “They’re your cats, but I live with them. I miss Arrow hogging my pillow.”

Nolan laughed for real. “Oh, so that’s where he disappears to at night.”

“Every night.”

He chuckled. Then his expression turned a little more serious, though he was still smiling. Clasping my hand in his, he said, “Well, he might have to learn to share. I’m sure it’ll get crowded with all five of us, but… we can make it work.”

My heart fluttered. I’d worried we were only staying together because he needed support on this trip. But maybe…

I swallowed. “So you want to keep… when we get home…? Sleeping in the same bed?”

“Do you?”

“Definitely,” I whispered. “Even if, you know, we have to teach Arrow some boundaries.”

Nolan laughed again, this time with a hint of relief, as if he’d thought I’d want us to go back to our separate bedrooms at home. “I think we can convince them to move.” He sobered a little. “It might not hurt for you to keep your room the way it is. In case I have a rough night or you need some space.”

The thought of leaving him to weather a bad night made my stomach turn.

“We’ll leave my bed where it is,” I said. “Then the cats can go sleep there if they run out of room in yours.”

He laughed again, letting a little more relief into it. “Sounds like a plan. I, um…” He gestured at the wall between us. “Should I cancel the other room? No point in paying for it if we’re both staying here.”

My heart went absolutely wild. “Yeah. Yeah, good idea.” I smiled. “But we can probably finish eating first.” I gestured at the forgotten pizza. “It’ll keep.”

Nolan glanced at the box as if he’d forgotten all about the food. Then he pulled another slice onto his plate. “Sounds like a plan.”

Yeah, it did. Share a hotel room. Get through the next few days. Move into the same bedroom.

Sounded like the perfect plan to me.