I was used to being rubbed the right way.

All of this irritation built and built, and I found myself growing unaccountably tense around him, around everybody. I drank more, smoked more, stayed up later at night, unable to shake the feeling that I’d outgrown my skin somehow, that there was something itchy and new inside my veins that I couldn’t escape. And sometimes, when I got very drunk and the base was silent and the cold stars winked outside the window, I wondered if I even wanted to escape it. It was an awful feeling, but it was addictive, like a cut on your lip you couldn’t stop licking just to feel the sting, just to taste the iron-salt taste of your own blood.

Maybe I could have stayed in that agitated, itchy place forever, but the universe had different plans. Merlin would have said it was destiny and Ash would have said it was God, and Greer would have agreed with both, but this wasn’t the well-ordered hand of a deity or a pre-ordained timeline. The next three months were fucking chaos.

And it began as most chaos did and still does: with my sister.

Morgan was set to arrive the day before we were going to Prague to spend my R&R week sightseeing. Well, she wanted to sightsee. I wanted to find some absinthe and fuck my way through New Town, and pretend that there wasn’t a condescending green-eyed asshole waiting for me back on base.

At any rate, she was coming to stay in the village near the base tonight and then we were taking the train to Prague together. But that day was also the day we were executing one of our worst drills—an eight-hour belly crawl through woods infested with mock hostiles, establishing a mock outpost. The mud was cold and wet, the soggy pine needles still sharp somehow, and by the six-mile mark, most of my men had bleeding fingers and runny noses. I called for a break so people could tape up their fingers and catch their breath, and that’s when it happened. Colchester’s group—our “hostiles” in the exercise—swarmed up over the lip of a nearby creek and lit into us.

The dirt around us exploded in a hail of simulated bullets—paint-filled rounds that we could shoot from our real weapons—and I screamed into my radio for the soldiers to take cover. I hadn’t been a total idiot—we’d picked a fortified place to rest, sent out a couple guys to watch the perimeter—and somehow we managed to form a coherent defense against Colchester’s men. But we couldn’t beat them back, soldier after soldier getting struck with paint and laying down to simulate death. Soon it was just me and Dag, my platoon sergeant, returning fire against six or seven of Colchester’s men. Then Dag got hit, grunting as the round hit his vest—the paint can pack a mean punch—and giving me an apologetic look as he stretched out on the ground.

I kept firing into the creek, swearing internally, fighting off that annoying magnet feeling that Colchester was here and close and probably wearing that stupid, pretty smile of his…

Something cool touched the back of my neck, and I jumped back, spinning around to see the end of Colchester’s Glock pointed right at me. He had his M4 slung over his shoulder, and with his other hand, he was holding his radio close to his mouth to tell his men that he had me.

“Goddamn fucking shit,” I said.

But you know what? I wasn’t going down without taking Colchester with me. I ducked, faster than he could move, aiming my M4 at his chest and firing. He twisted away in the nick of time, avoiding the paint and swinging his own gun around. My bicep exploded in pain as the fake bullet hit my arm. No body armor there, no sir.

I staggered back with a gasp, but not fast enough. A boot hooked around my ankle, and with one quick jerk, I was flat on my back, blinking up at the tired, threadbare pines.

“I win,” Colchester said. His other boot was gently pressing against the wrist that held the gun I tried to shoot him with. “Now don’t move.”

“Fuck you.”

Colchester smiled, that dickhead, his firm mouth parting into a grin and revealing the faintest dent of a dimple in his left cheek. His boot pressed harder against my wrist—not hard enough to truly hurt me, but hard enough to be uncomfortable—and he used the muzzle of his M4 to nudge at the paint splatter on my arm. “You okay, Lieutenant? I know those things sting.”

It did sting. It stung like a motherfucker, and I didn’t even want to think about the ugly bruise it would leave on my arm. But when I glanced up into Colchester’s face, I couldn’t bring up the right words to tell him that. I couldn’t even muster another fuck you. In that instant, I felt the viscid weight of every moment leading up to this, of all the itchy nights I’d spent drinking and staring at the stars. I felt unmoored from myself, from everything that wasn’t Colchester’s boot on my wrist and green eyes on my face.

And I didn’t imagine what happened next. At least, I don’t think I imagined it, but it’s hard to tell with everything that happened afterward, what Rubicons were crossed when and how. But Colchester looked down at his boot on my wrist, at my panting chest as I struggled to regain the breath that had been knocked from me by the fall, and something unshuttered in his face. For a single moment, it seemed like we were breathing in tandem, as if he were mirroring my gasping breaths or maybe I was trying to mirror his steadier ones, and then he moved his boot off my wrist, replacing it with his knee as he knelt down next to me. The pine needles rustled under his boots. From somewhere in the trees came the plaintive churr of a turtledove.

Colchester took off his helmet, and the gesture felt strangely medieval, like a knight taking off his helm. A prince kneeling next to the glass coffin of a sleeping princess…if that princess were a spoiled playboy from the west coast.