Dangerous Territory: An Alpha Ops novella by Emmy Curtis Read Free Book Online Page B

always be the monster in the dark room waiting to spring. Forget ‘forgetting’ and try dealing.”
    Silence.
    “You think I don’t know how you feel about it? You think I don’t know the images that flick through your mind when you’re on a date, or at the movies, or having Sunday lunch with your folks? I know. I’ve lost”—
shit, this got real, fast
—“too many people. Friends. People I knew only to salute or nod at. Men I hadn’t ever seen before. And each one of them is in my head for good.” Where had that come from? So much for allowing her to chat so he could make a plan.
    A small voice came through the dark. “How do you manage? How do you cope with watching the life slip out of someone’s eyes?” She sniffed quietly, and the knowledge that she was in peril yet crying about someone she lost felt like a tiny piece of shrapnel had lodged in his heart. An overwhelming need to comfort and protect her flooded through him.
    “Sweetheart, where are you? Come here.”
    “I don’t want to. I’m fine,” she said.
    “You don’t sound fine. It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to miss her and want to punch someone when you remember she’s not coming back. It’s normal. Just embrace it. That’s what I do. Hit something or someone. But you have to talk about her, right? Otherwise it’s like she never existed. Come here. Tell me about her. What was her name?”
    He felt her sit next to him. Close, but not close enough. Shit. What was he thinking?
Keep your mind on the plan, idiot
.
    “Sarah. She was a supply person at Bagram. Everyone loved her. I mean everyone. It was my first time embedded, and she took me out on a few supply runs, you know, before I braved the actual patrols. For the best part of a year, I hung out with her. And then one time, we were just heading into the gym when I realized I’d forgotten my weight gloves. I turned back, telling her I’d meet her inside. I made it maybe twenty steps when a mortar came over the fence and blew up at the entrance to the gym.” He winced in the dark, remembering the incident.
    “Bits of her just weren’t there anymore. I pulled her onto my lap, and the last thing she said to me was…” Her breath started coming in shorter and faster, and he wondered if he should try to calm her down, but he knew she needed this.
    “What did she say?” he asked.
    She gave a choked sob and laugh. “She said, ‘Anything to get out of exercising.’ And then she… left.”
    “Come here,” he whispered.
    She shuffled closer to him, and he slipped his arm around her shoulders, letting her head rest on his. He held her until she stopped crying. He wondered how she could feel so much and do what she did for a living. And how she had the courage to come back to the war after experiencing that. And how good she felt tucked next to him.
    And how she could live with herself, doing what she did for a living.
    Enough
.
    He withdrew his arm from her shoulders and grabbed his water bottle. “Do you want to rehydrate?”
    “Sure. I drank all my water in the MRAP.”
    “Here.” He reached up into the darkness, and his hand collided with bare skin. He felt farther up and encountered more bare skin. “What the…?”
    “Oh! That’s embarrassing. When you brought me in from the bathroom, I had only put my panties back on. My jeans are still out there.”
    “What? You take your pants off to pee?” He was getting a strange insight into women here, and he was incredibly uncomfortable and intrigued. Not about the pee, but about the type of woman who felt comfortable enough to take off her clothes in the middle of a war zone.
    “I don’t have a dick, you know. How did you expect me to pee?”
    “You might not have a dick, but you have balls,” he said grudgingly. “Do you want me to get your pants?”
    “It’s okay. I’ll get them. I know where I left them.” Her voice trailed off as she went around the corner toward the entrance to the cave.
    “No. Wait!” he