“Captain Harris, do think you can find your way to the enlisted man’s bar?” Private Roark asked me. I’d noticed Roark on the way down to Terraneau, he was one of those life-of-the-party types.
I heard what he said, but it sounded like he had spoken in a foreign language. Go have a drink with the men, always a good move for morale …assuming they want to have a drink with you. Why would they want to drink with me? I was the man who sent them out to die.
Just a day earlier, I’d told Hollingsworth I would smuggle these men into the officers’ club. Now I wondered if he took that as a reward or a punishment.
I looked up at the kid but did not speak. This shook his confidence. He waited several seconds, then added, “We’re going to celebrate, sir.”
The Kamehameha’s two thousand enlisted Marines shared a single bar, a drinking hole I knew well. These men had fought hard, now it was my turn to make a show of strength. “Are we talking a one-shot deal, or are you boys planning to pull an all-nighter?”
“I can’t speak for anybody else, but I’m staying till I’m too drunk to find my rack,” Roark said.
“I may be late,” I said. Now that I thought about it, I liked the idea of downing a few beers with the boys, but the drinks would have to wait. My priorities might have been all wrong, but they were all mine.
Roark nodded and went back to join his friends.
I heard the sigh of the boosters and knew that we had entered the docking bay. My heart thumped in my chest. Adrenaline coursed through my veins. So did testosterone, I suppose; but the reflex I was experiencing had nothing to do with combat. The landing gear clanked and groaned as we landed, and I sprang to my feet.
“Thomer, see that the gear is unloaded,” I said, as we taxied through the locks.
“Yes, sir.”
“If anybody asks for me, tell them I will handle debriefings tomorrow.”
“Aye, aye.”
The miserable doors of the kettle ground open so slowly. I did not wait until they slid all the way apart. As soon as I could squeeze through the gap, I trotted down the ramp and out the docking bay. My men probably thought I needed to get to a bathroom.
And, in a way, I did.
Men saluted me as I rushed down the hall. I returned their salutes and hurried on. I was a Marine on a mission. I reached my quarters and opened the door to find an empty room with a neatly made bed. The door closed behind me.
“Ava,” I called in a soft voice.
Nothing.
For a moment, and just a moment, I worried that something had gone wrong. That thought passed quickly. I opened the bathroom door and switched on the light. Hearing a faint gasp, a sound so soft I could easily have missed it, I turned toward the shower.
The bedroom appeared clean and completely untouched, but the bathroom looked lived in. A bouquet of empty MRE pouches filled the wastebasket, a set of utensils lay in the sink, and a shadow moved behind the glass of my shower stall door.
“If you don’t come out of there, I’m going to have to come in,” I said.
I heard a soft giggle, and the water in the shower began to run.
“So that’s how it’s going to be,” I said. I pulled the shower door open, and there she was, dressed in a tank top and panties, allowing the warm water to splash her hair and back. She looked at my combat armor, and said, “Honey, I was hoping you would be hard, but this is ridiculous.”
We showered together, and we made love. Afterward, we lay in bed. I stroked her wet hair and kissed her. Dreading her reaction, I told her I needed to go to the bar for drinks with my men, but she just cocked an eyebrow and smiled.
“You’re not upset?” I asked.
“I will be if you come back empty-handed.”
I drank with my boys and grabbed a few beers before leaving the bar. On my way back, I stopped by the mess hall and picked up food for two. By the time I made it back to my quarters, I had a small salad, sandwiches, fruit cocktails, cheese-cake, and four beers.
Always cautious, Ava remained hidden in the bathroom when I entered. Instead of calling out to her, I spread our meal across my desk.
I called out, “I hope you’re hungry,” and out she came.
She looked at the food, then looked at me with her “this is better than sex” smile, and I knew that I had graduated from benefactor/lover to friend.
Ava and I ate together and talked. She wanted to know everything that happened on Terraneau. I told her about Herrington first, then about the rest of my men. She squeezed my hand and stopped eating, but said nothing.
I thought that was the perfect response. If she had tried to empathize with me, she would have driven me away. I had been through something she could not possibly comprehend.
When I asked what it was like hiding out in my quarters, she said, “I talked to myself. I hid in the bathroom talking to myself, and I never ran out of things to say. It beat living with Teddy. At least I had somebody to talk to.”
“What did you talk about?”
“With Teddy?”
“When I was gone,” I said.
“I talked about you,” she said. “I talked to myself about every man I have ever been with, and I compared them to you.”
By this time we were in bed, both of us naked. I had my arms around her. She felt warm. “How did I do?”
“Uhm?” she purred.
“How did I do?” I asked.
“Now, what kind of question is that?” she asked.
“An honest one,” I said.
“Harris, I never thought of you as the insecure type.”
“I have my moments,” I said. I pulled her in even tighter than before, so that everything from our shoulders to our thighs pressed together.
“Ouch,” she cooed.
“Are you going to answer me?” I asked.
“I don’t know why I would,” she said. “If I say you are better than any of them, you won’t believe me. If I say some of them were better than you, you’ll get jealous. I think I’ll just plead the First.”
“The right to free speech?” I asked.
“The right to tell you to shut the speck up, Harris.”
“Oh,” I said. We lay there in each other’s arms. I wondered how I matched up with Ted Mooreland. When I began to feel insecure, I thought about how I compared to General Smith. As my thoughts drifted, I started to fall asleep.
“I wasn’t telling you to let me go,” Ava complained. I had not actually let her go, but I had loosened my grip around her. “What is it like down there?”
I told Ava about the building with the orphan girls. I told her how my men found it and how Doctorow had tried to protect it. When I finished, she laughed, and said, “It sounds terrible, like a monastery.”
When I did not respond, she said, “Oh God, you’re not thinking about …”
“You’ll be safe there,” I said.
“With the latter-day vestal virgins?” she asked. “That’s not safekeeping, Honey, that’s solitary confinement.”
“You wouldn’t need to stay there long, just until we get the planet sorted out. It can’t be any worse than hiding in the shower and talking to yourself.”
She started to say something and stopped. She shifted on the pillow until our faces were only three inches apart, then she reached up and stroked my eyebrow with a finger. “How did you get this scar over your eye?”
“Are you trying to change the subject?” I asked.
“No,” she said in a childlike, flirtatious way. “How did you get that scar?”
“I got it in a fight,” I said.
“But Marines wear helmets. Wouldn’t your helmet protect you?”
“It was a fight, not a battle.”
“Like in a bar?”
“Not in a bar, in a ring,”
“Oh?” She reached around my back, where four parallel scars ran across my ribs. “How about these scars.”
“Same fight,” I said.
“These must have hurt,” she said.
“They did,” I said.
“How many men were you fighting?”
“Just one,” I said.