The shame whipped me to the bone. I was no better than Mark. And yet…
“It wasn’t wrong,” I whispered against the pillow.
Or rather, it may have been wrong, but it felt perfectly natural. Inevitable. As if I’d been waiting for Weston for months.
Finally.
Kissing him was cheating on Connor, but it didn’t feel like cheating. It felt like a completion.
What is happening between us? The three of us?
But it was too late to ask.
We said our goodbyes in the gray light of dawn. I felt sluggish and slow; last night’s drinking hanging over me like a fog, and what I’d done with Weston feeling like a dream that was both wrong and perfect. Part of me wanted to run away from the porch in shame, and the other wanted to go back to sleep for more.
Weston’s mother cried loudly. Connor’s mother stifled her tears behind her wrist. Paul shook Weston’s hand and was visibly shocked when Weston pulled him in for a hug. They slapped each other’s shoulders, then held still a beat. Weston pulled back and said something to Paul. Paul shook his head at first, his expression grim, but Weston was insistent. Finally, Paul nodded and then they shook hands, as if sealing a deal.
“I promise,” Paul said.
Connor hugged me and I was petrified, positive he’d sense Weston’s lingering presence all over me. When he craned down to kiss me, shame burned my skin.
“Be safe,” I whispered.
“I will,” he said against my hair.
Ruby took her turn hugging Connor and then Weston. She gave him a pat on the cheek.
“Behave yourself.” She smirked. “No, I take that back. Give’em hell.”
He smiled faintly. “Will do.”
Then it was only Weston and me. Everyone watching two friends say goodbye.
I moved slowly into his embrace and ringed my arms around his neck.
“Take care of him,” I said, my voice cracking. “And you. Take car
e of you.”
And come back to me.
“I will,” he said. When he drew back, his eyes were drowning in a blue-green ocean of pain and regret.
When the Army van arrived, my heart didn’t break—it tore in half. A vicious rip with sloppy, jagged edges. No defined boundaries, no territory lines indicating which part belonged to which man.
Weston’s kisses still burned my swollen lips and I wanted him. I wanted Connor’s letters and Weston’s conversations. I wanted Connor’s poetry and I wanted Weston’s electricity that set my blood on fire.
“Come back to me,” I whispered, as the Army van drove away with the men I loved.
Weston
“Anyone else feel like some shit’s about to go down?” Bradbury deadpanned in his nasally, low voice. “No? Just me? Carry on.”
We were hunkered down against what was left of the stone structure. This village had been bombed long before we found it, its inhabitants long gone, fleeing as refugees to Turkey. We weren’t here for the village, but the road leading out of it to Al-Rai. An escape route from the regimes’ forces in Aleppo and northwestern Syria. They wanted to cut off this refugee line. We had one job: keep it open.
Connor sat beside me, our backs to the wall. Bradbury and Erickson crouched kitty-corner. We were all smudged, bloodstained and sweating in our sand-gray camouflage. War was indeed the great equalizer and the antagonism of boot camp was long forgotten. Erickson, Bradbury and I were closer than brothers. Here, under the relentless sun and never-ending stress, I wasn’t the Amherst Asshole. I was Iceman, because nothing rattled me. How could it? A man who knows his own fate has nothing left to fear.
As for Connor and me… I didn’t have a word for what we were. Something beyond brothers. We were bonded at a molecular level. And in my mind, my one job was to make sure Connor got out of here alive.