The Better Brother

“Please fuck me.”

His eyes connected with mine and, slowly, he lined himself up with my entrance. I held my breath, scared to utter another word lest he punish me with loneliness. The grin that slid across his cheeks was nothing short of devilish.

The Guardian of Lust was taunting me and I was playing right into his hand.

Chapter 1

Liam

Let’s get this shit show on the road.

It didn’t matter that it was my discharge party, or that soldiers like Santiago were genuinely going to miss me. I wanted to get the fuck out of there.

“Are you sure we can’t convince you to stay?” asked Santiago.

“I’m sure,” I said. “This is the right move for me.”

“Fuck man. Good soldiers like you don’t come along every day. Your replacement has some serious shoes to fill.”

“Well, give him hell, just not the hell that was given to me.”

My platoon was throwing the party, and Paxton told me I had to make an appearance. Callen Paxton had been my right-hand man through some of the most treacherous shit.

Hell, Paxton saw it all through with me. He wasn’t trying to convince me to stay in the navy. Unlike everyone else, Paxton understood why I didn’t want to “put in my twenty,” then retire and do whatever the fuck I wanted.

The truth was the last tour altered my life forever.

I didn’t want to bullshit everyone, and pretend to be unhappy about leaving, but I knew I’d regret not seeing my platoon one last time, so I stuck it out.

Those men and I were thick as thieves, all of us. We’d been through hell and back, pierced stormy waters with the bows of our Navy ships, and bunked in beds that almost didn’t hold the muscle we’d all put on toward the end of the last tour. Working out was how all of us relieved the tension and stress from the bullshit that was thrown our way.

It was how I kept my heart pumping when it no longer wanted to.

The night was filled with mindless goodbyes. You’d think a soldier would be good at saying goodbye, but we were the shittiest at it. We said it so often that it became a knee-jerk reaction, but when the goodbye actually meant something, we couldn’t get it out.

I blamed it on the fact that we lost more people than we brought home sometimes.

“You’re a hell of a medic, Canter,” Tom said. “I don’t know what we’re gonna do without you on those ships.”

“I’m sure you’ll train someone just as fine as me to do the work,” I said.

“Highly doubt that. You’re one in a damn million. You gonna try to be a doctor out there in the civilian world?” Lamar asked.

“I’m not really sure. Gonna take some time to figure it all out.”

The Navy was all I knew, ever since I enlisted the moment I turned eighteen. They trained me to be a medic so I could save lives, while simultaneously teaching me how to take a life in case I needed to. It was a dichotomy I’d lived with for fourteen years, and I simply couldn’t handle it anymore. My fuel tank was empty.

Not that I’d let any of these fuckers know it.

“You okay, Canter?” Paxton asked.

I turned my eyes over to him, the man I’d come to consider my best friend, as he walked up toward me. His face was smiling, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes; a side effect of the bullshit wringer we’d gone through not so very long ago.

“On the record? Yep,” I said.

“Off the record, while drinkin’ a beer with your buddy??

? he asked.