The Lieutenants' Online Love. Caro Carson
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twelve hours off to sleep, hit the grocery store, get his uniform ready for the next day. Wednesday would be a straightforward twelve-hour day, but getting sleep Wednesday night was critical, because Thursday morning would start another thirty-six-hour shift straight through to Friday evening.
The schedule was taking its toll. Law enforcement was important work. Necessary work. But after living the MP motto, Assist-Protect-Defend, for thirty-six hours straight, Thane was ready to assist himself right into the sack.
Alone.
To sleep.
He was single. Never married, no current girlfriend, not even dating. No surprise there. He’d worked—what? Thane counted it up in his head as he trudged from his parking space toward his mailbox, each step heavy with exhaustion. Twelve, twelve, thirty-six, twelve...hell, he’d only had twenty-four consecutive hours off one time in the past week, and it had been that way for weeks now. They really needed to fill that fourth platoon leader slot.
More downtime would help his sleep, but it wouldn’t help his love life. Having no time to date was only half the reason he didn’t have a woman in his life.
The other half was the scarcity of women with whom he could spend that precious downtime. The US Army was an overwhelmingly male space. Maybe 15 percent of all soldiers were women, but even so, the female MPs in his unit were off-limits. Whether he outranked them or they outranked him, dating someone within the same unit was a military offense, damaging to good order, discipline and authority, according to regulations, and grounds for a court-martial. Thane didn’t need a regulation to keep him from temptation there, anyway. In the Brotherhood of Arms, the women he trained and served with were brothers-in-arms, too. Teammates, not dates. Half of them were married, anyway, which put them off-limits by Thane’s personal code.
Of course, there were other servicewomen, single servicewomen, stationed at Fort Hood who were in units and positions that were completely unrelated to his, but there were roadblocks there, as well. Dating between an enlisted soldier and an officer was forbidden. Period. That knocked a couple of thousand women at Fort Hood right out of the dating pool. Since Thane was a commissioned officer, he could only date another commissioned officer who was not in his unit, but he rarely had a chance to meet female officers who worked in different branches of the army—that whole working thirty-six hours every third day had a lot to do with that. The police worked Saturdays and Sundays. And nights. And holidays.
Thane’s brother, still living back home in South Carolina, was head over heels for a woman he’d met at work, one of his clients. But Thane’s only “clients” were women who called 911 for help. Victims. Or they were women on the other side of that coin—not victims, but perpetrators. Two of the soldiers in his platoon had served a warrant on a woman suspected of check forgery today. Or was that yesterday? The days were all becoming one blur.
The odds of him meeting a datable woman at work were pretty much zero out of a million. Thane would’ve shaken his head in disgust, but that would’ve taken too much energy. One foot in front of the other, trudging past the apartment complex’s swimming pool, that was all he had the energy for.
Building Six’s mailboxes were grouped together in the stairwell. So were several of his male neighbors, all checking their mail at the same time, all in the same uniform Thane wore. At least one person in every apartment here was in the service. Everyone left Fort Hood after the American flag had been lowered for the day and everyone arrived home around the same time, an army rush hour. Everyone checked their mail before disappearing behind their apartment doors. They were all living off post in a civilian apartment complex, but the military influence of Fort Hood was impossible to escape in the surrounding town of Killeen.
As Thane used a key to open his little cubby full of two days’ worth of junk mail, he exchanged greetings with the other men. To be more accurate, Thane exchanged silent lifts of the chin, the same acknowledgment he’d been exchanging with guys since the hallowed halls of high school. That had been eight years ago, but still, that was the level of closeness the average guy reached with the average guy. A lift of the chin. A comment on a sports team, perhaps, during the NFL playoffs or Game Five of the World Series. Maybe, if he saw someone at the mailboxes whom he hadn’t seen in a while, they might acknowledge each other with a lift of the chin and actually speak. “You back from deployment?”
The answer was usually a shrug and a yeah, to which the answer was a nod and a yeah, thought so, hadn’t seen you around in a while, followed by each guy retreating to his apartment, shutting a door to seal himself off from the hundreds of others in the complex, hundreds of people roughly Thane’s age and profession, all living in the same place.
He had no one to talk to.
Thane started up the concrete stairs to his apartment, each boot landing as heavily as if it were made of concrete, too.
He lived on the third floor, a decision he regretted on evenings like this one. Thane hit the second-story landing. One more flight, and he could fall in bed. As he rounded the iron banister, an apartment door opened. A woman his age appeared in the door, her smile directed down the stairs he’d just come up. Another man in uniform was coming up them now, a man who wouldn’t be sleeping alone.
“Hi, baby,” the man said.
“You’re home early,” the woman said, sounding like that was a wonderful gift for her. “How was your day?”
“You won’t believe this, but the commander decided—” The door closed.
Thane slogged his way up to his floor.
Bed. All he wanted was his own bed, yet now he couldn’t help but think it would be nice not to hit the sheets alone. He had an instant mental image of a woman in bed with him. He couldn’t see her face, not with her head nestled into his shoulder, but he could imagine warm skin and a happy, interested voice, asking How was your day? They’d talk, two heads on one pillow.
Pitiful. What kind of fantasy was that for a twenty-six-year-old man to have? He was heading to bed without a woman, but it wasn’t sex he was lonely for. Not much, anyway. He wanted someone to talk to, someone waiting to talk to him, someone who cared what he thought after days full of people who broke laws, people who were hurt, people who were angry.
Better yet, he wanted someone to share a laugh with.
He scrubbed a hand over the razor stubble that he’d be shaving in less than twelve hours to go back to work. Yeah, he needed a laugh. There was nothing to laugh at around here.
His phone buzzed in his pocket—two shorts and a long, which meant he had a message waiting in his favorite app. The message had to be from his digital pen pal. The app had paired him up months ago with someone going by Ballerina Baby. He didn’t know anything about her, not even her real name, and yet, she was someone with whom he did more than nod, someone to whom he said something meaningful once in a while. He could put his thoughts into words, written words in blue on a white screen. He got words back from her, hot pink and unpredictable, making him feel more connected to the woman behind them than he felt to anyone else around here.
Thane took the last few stairs two at a time. He wanted to get home. He had twelve hours ahead to sleep—but not alone. There was someone waiting to talk to him, after all.
He unlocked the door and walked into his apartment, tossing his patrol cap onto the coffee table with one hand as he jerked down the zipper of his uniform jacket with the other. He tossed that over a chair, impatient to pull out his phone from his pocket the moment his hand was free. A real friend, real feelings, conversation, communion—
Today, I was desperate for tater tots.
He stared at the sentence for a long moment. What the hell...?
And then, all of a sudden, life wasn’t so heavy. He didn’t have to take himself so seriously. Thane read the hot-pink silliness, and he started to laugh.
The rest of his clothes came off easily. Off with the tan T-shirt that clung after a day of Texas heat. Thane had to sit to unlace the combat boots, but he typed a quick line to let Ballerina know he was online. You crack