Page 3 of Red Rooster

Ashley stepped around the corner wearing what had become her patented you-can-do-better expression. She folded her arms and propped a shoulder against the wall, fixing him with a look. “Number three?” she asked, nodding toward the glass in his hand.

“Four.”

She nodded, because she’d expected to find him like this, but her jaw tightened, because she hated it. “How’d your appointment go?”

He shrugged. “It was a waste. I didn’t make the cut.”

She sighed deeply. It was the same sound that followed her six-year-old daughter’s worst transgressions: jumping off the back of the sofa, and playing with the makeup. Serious stuff. “Rooster,” she said, in that voice that made grown men – her husband among them – run for cover. “You’re fucking up.”

He let his head flop back so he didn’t have to look at her anymore. “I know, I know.”

“So do better,” she said, like it was simple as that.

She knew it wasn’t, though, and so Rooster heard the note of sadness in her voice.

He recalled something her husband, Deshawn, had said to him once, reaching up to tap the photo of Ashley he’d taped above his bed.“She’ll chew your ass out,”he’d said, his smile broad,“but it’s only ‘cause she loves you. When she stops fussing, that’s when it’s time to get scared – that’s when she’s decided she’s done with you.”

She clearly hadn’t given up on Rooster yet, so that was something.

She pushed off the wall and came into the central room of the basement, going to the coffee table and collecting empty glasses and greasy paper plates, consolidating everything so she could take it to the kitchenette in one trip.

“Ash, you don’t,” he started, half-rising. His knee, and his back, and his neck grabbed, lightning flashes of pain that forced the air out of his lungs in a low hiss.

“Sit your ass back down,” she said, her sigh fond and worried now. “Have you eaten anything? You can’t drink like that on an empty stomach.”

Slowly, sweat popping out on his temples as he fought the pain, he eased back down to the couch. “I’m fine.”

“Yeah, you look fine.” She carried the plates to the trash and dropped the glasses into the little shallow sink that he only used once he’d dirtied all his glasses and was forced to at least rinse them out before he filled them again. “I’m making spaghetti for Desiree. Come upstairs and have dinner with is.” It wasn’t a suggestion.

“Ash–”

“Twenty minutes,” she said, firmly, leaving no room for argument, and shot him her best drill sergeant glare on her way out.

Rooster listened to the gunshot sounds of her high heels going back up the stairs and knew that, somehow in the next twenty minutes, he’d get himself upright and drag his carcass upstairs for spaghetti and Desiree’s exuberant eight-year-old brand of conversation. He might drink himself to sleep every night, take too many painkillers, and be a walking disaster in general, but there were some lines he wasn’t willing to cross, and displeasing Ashley Spencer was one of them.

A year ago, Deshawn had been taking point when they infiltrated the house where they’d finally pinned down the al-Qaeda boss they’d been hunting for weeks. Rooster had heard the faint click echo off the stone walls. Had thought of the photos of Ashley and Desiree taped over his friend’s bed. And he’d grabbed Deshawn by his pack and dragged him back, thrown him around the corner, behind the wall. Had shielded him with his own body.

Deshawn had walked away with minimal scrapes and bruises.

Even now, Rooster could only remember the pain burning through his body like fire, the blurred view of faces crowding over him, shouts and curses. The thump of the rotors and the wind on his face as he was strapped down and loaded on the helo.

He’d known he was dying, and really, he was glad. He was tired of the sand box, of the death, and the blood, and the gore, and being terrified all the time. He was getting out, finally, and he’d saved his friend, had kept a good man alive to go home to his wife and daughter, and that was a sacrifice he was happy to have made.

But then he’d woken up in a hospital in Germany, the pain a restless, living thing inside him, tubes in his nose and his elbows, machines beeping all around him.

“At least your face still looks handsome,”a kindly older nurse who reminded him of his mother had said, and patted his scarred arm. Like being pretty was his biggest worry.

His home, before the Marines, had been Virginia, but his folks were both dead, and he had no other family to return to. He’d wished, for a little while, that he hadn’t survived, because he walked with a limp, was covered in scar tissue, had no support system, and no idea what to do with himself now. Deshawn had stepped in, had insisted he could live with them in Queens, in their finished basement.

“It’s not much,”he’d said,“but it’s comfy.”

It had been offered as a gift, but Rooster had insisted on paying rent.“Just ‘til I get on my feet,”he’d said, and meant it literally and figuratively.

And now here he was, dreading the effort it would take to get upright again. Deshawn was on another deployment, and Rooster was cluttering up the poor man’s basement.

Something had to change, but he didn’t know what, or how.

He leaned forward and gritted his teeth, pulled himself along by the coffee table, and got to his feet with minimal cursing and only a little swaying; Ashley was right that he needed to eat, unfortunately.