Page 38 of Trigger Discipline

And for what?

The country he left was the same as the one he touched down on. People were still oppressed. Extremists still hated those they didn’t understand. And innocents were caught in the middle, profiled for the color of their skin or the God they served. Every day, more people he couldn’t save. Just like those dead in the streets here.

Wars waged. People hated. Guns were fired. And none of it made a difference.

That soldier was someone he could have saved. He could have seen the hollow look in her eyes. After all, he was familiar enough with it, wasn’t he? The same look he had seen reflected back at him for years. The dead-eyed stare of a mind too young to process what she’d seen. It was an innocuous visit—she didn’t need to see him for it. He’d waved her off without reading between the lines. Without understanding the way her hand lingered on the doorknob, or how her lower lip wobbled.

She came looking for help, and he had grown so jaded that he forgot the reason he wanted to serve in the first place. The one time he could help, and he failed.

If Phin hadn’t seen between his own lines, read the flickers in his eyes, he wouldn’t be here either.

He still wasn’t sure if he deserved to be.

Six years. It had been six years since he had been locked in that bathroom. Six years of sobriety, and he still felt the desire. The burn that would silence it all. Drinking was so much easier than sobriety. Sometimes he wondered if he’d left that bathroom at all. Still curled around his toilet in a heap of self-pity punctuated with moments of heavy loathing and anger.

The irony of his coming out of the closet only to be locked in a bathroom wasn’t lost on him. He just wished he found it funny.

Blake would find it funny. He would take it for what it was—truth. Life was ugly and cruel, shades of gray that were sometimes hard to distinguish from one another. But truth was truth, and there was comfort in that.

Gabriel pinched his nose. He needed to get a hold of himself. To focus. His past didn’t matter here. Neither did his confusing feelings for the paramedic. Blake was a civilian. He was only part of the mission in so much as he needed to be evacuated. To be set down somewhere safe so Gabriel could continue on. So he could seek the forgiveness he didn’t deserve with the barrel of a gun.

Withdrawing the wet wipes from his pocket, he opened the door to the bathroom only to hear a gentle splashing.

“Oh, sorry,” he said as his eyes adjusted to the almost dark of the room.

A bundle of birthday candles stuck with melted wax bases to the sink provided the only light. They flickered in the stagnant air, casting shadows across the shower in the corner and the toilet opposite it. The single cloudy window set high in the ceiling was covered with a taped-up garbage bag.

Blake was hovering beside the toilet, one arm raised and the other pressing a wet rag to his chest. His hair was slicked back from his face. Fingers clenching around a soaked rag, water sluicing down his chest to drip past his belly button. It pooled in the low-slung tactical pants, soaking through the canvas belt that held the large pants on narrow hips.

Gabriel’s eyes dropped to that waist.God, it was so narrow.He bet his hands could wrap around it, fingers touching as he?—

Dragging his eyes up like he’d been slapped, he tried not to focus on the way the heated light dragged shadows across the toned planes of Blake’s abdomen. Not ripped, but there was definition in his torso. The faintest of V’s leading down to those sinfully low-slung pants and delicate hairs only visible in the cast light.

Studying his face was almost as distracting. His face was hard and soft; his lips pillowy and expressive, jaw defined and sharp. In the dim light, he could see twin spots of pink across Blake’s cheeks.

“Kinda gross, I know.” He jerked his head to the back of the toilet. He’d taken the top of the porcelain upper deck off and was using the clean water there to give himself a sponge bath.

Gabriel’s dick wanted to take this moment to remind him that he was, in fact, soso gay.

He twisted, trying to cover his hardening dick.

Blake swiped the rag across the back of his neck, and Gabriel had to look at his feet to stop from watching the water sliding down his back. He took to reciting his serial number, over and over in his mind until his upstairs brain regained some semblance of control. Because if he let his dick take over, it would go along the lines of acting like some kind of horny caveman.

If he was going to be honest, his dick was making averypersuasive argument for it.

“Here.” Blake tossed him a dry cloth. “There’s enough water left if you want to. I know it’s not exactly pleasant, but at least you won’t smell like Phin.”

Gabriel laughed. “I think that ship has sailed. I’m starting to grow my own fungus.”

Blake wrinkled his nose. Gabriel nearly audibly groaned—it was so cute it should be illegal.

“Um,” Gabriel took a deep breath and fingered the hem of his shirt. Just like back in high school when he was changing in a locker room with a bunch of other guys, he didn’t know how to act. Normally, he would just plow ahead. He wasn’t some kind of horny asshole (despite what his dick claimed) and was perfectly capable of being in the same space as naked men. But it always felt like he needed their consent or something.

And with Blake? It was doubly complicated.

“Water’s clean,” Blake assured him, taking his silence for disgust.

“I’ve bathed in worse; I’m not worried about it. It’s just…you don’t mind? Being shirtless and bathing with me?”