Chapter 2: Lights Off
You learned his face the way you'd learn a map in the dark. Slowly, with your fingertips, refusing to hurry.
His forehead first: broad, a crease between the brows that deepened when your thumb passed over it, as if he was bracing. The short bristle of hair at his temples. His eyebrows, thick, one of them split by a narrow ridge of scar that ran up into the hairline. You traced it and felt him swallow.
"Shrapnel?" you asked.
"Glass. Long time ago."
You moved down. The bridge of his nose had a bump in it, an old break that had healed slightly crooked, and you smiled in the dark because Gaz owed someone a fiver. Not skull all the way down. A man, all the way down. Hollows under his cheekbones. A jaw like something cut from a quarry, rough with two days of stubble that scraped your palms. A long seam of raised scar tissue that began just under his left cheekbone and ran down along the jaw toward his chin, old and smooth at the edges.
He flinched when you found that one. Barely. You felt it under your hand like a horse shying.
"Does it hurt?"
"No."
"Then don't flinch," you said softly, and ran your thumb along the whole length of it, slow, the way you'd tell a patient this is going to be alright. "It's just skin, Simon."
He made a sound you felt more than heard. Then you found his mouth.
Wide. A full lower lip, chapped from the wind, a nick of scar at the left corner where the long one ended. You traced the shape of it with one finger, and his lips parted under your touch and his breath came out against your skin, hot and uneven, and you knew you were done learning.
"Can I kiss you now," he said. It wasn't quite a question. His voice had gone ragged.
"Please."
He bent his head and kissed you like a man who'd been starving for eleven weeks and was trying very hard to use cutlery. It was careful for about three seconds. Then you slid your hands back over his jaw and into his hair and pulled, and the careful went out of him all at once. He made a low rough noise into your mouth and his arms came around you and lifted you off your bare feet, and your back met the steel wall of the container with a soft clang that would have woken the whole row if anyone had been sleeping.
"Sorry," he breathed against your mouth.
"Don't be." You were laughing, breathless. "Do it again."
He did it again. He kissed you against the wall with your legs locked around his waist and his hands spread under your thighs, holding you up like you weighed nothing, and the stubble on his jaw burned your chin and the corner of your mouth and the side of your neck when he moved there. You heard yourself make a sound you'd never heard yourself make before. He went still, his mouth open on the pulse under your ear.
"Tell me if it's too much," he said, low.
"It's not enough," you said. "I want you to take me to bed. I want your shirt off. I want all of it. Is that plain enough for you, Lieutenant?"
His laugh was a breath against your throat, dark and surprised. "Yes, Captain."
The cot was not built for two people. It was barely built for one. Simon solved that by pulling the thin mattress off the frame onto the floor with one hand, without putting you down, and then kneeling and lowering you onto it like he was laying down something he'd carried a long way.
You pulled at the hem of his T-shirt. He sat back on his heels and dragged it over his head, and in the faint grey light coming under the door you could see the outline of him, shoulders and arms and the dark shape of the tattoo on his forearm, and nothing else. You put your hands on his chest. His skin was hot and his heart was slamming under your palm, and there were scars here too, a puckered round one under the collarbone, a long thin line along his ribs. You touched each of them. He let you.
"Your turn," he said, rough, and his fingers found the hem of your T-shirt and waited there.
You lifted your arms.
He drew it up and off you slowly and dropped it somewhere in the dark, and then he didn't touch you for a moment. You could feel him looking, even though there was nothing to see. Then his palms came to your waist, flat, so broad they nearly spanned it, and slid upward over your ribs, and you arched into his hands without meaning to.
"Christ," he said under his breath. "Look at you."
"You can't see me."
"Don't need to." His thumbs brushed the undersides of your breasts and you gasped. "I can hear you."
He lowered his head and put his mouth on you, and you stopped making sentences for a while.
He was thorough. You'd known he would be; you'd watched him strip and clean a rifle on the bench outside your tent, every piece accounted for. He was like that with your body. He kissed down the centre of your chest and took one nipple into his mouth and sucked, slow, until you were pulling his hair and saying his name, and then he moved to the other one and did it again, as if it would have been unfair to leave it out. The scrape of his stubble on your soft skin made you shiver. His hand slid down over your stomach and stopped at the waistband of your shorts.
"Yes?" he asked against your skin.
"Yes. God, yes."
He drew them down your legs. Then his big rough hand was between your thighs, and he groaned out loud when he found how wet you were, a deep helpless sound that you felt down the length of your spine.
"All that for me?" he murmured.
"Don't get cocky."
"Too late." His fingers moved, slow, exploratory, mapping you the way you'd mapped his face. When he found the place that made your hips jerk off the mattress, he stayed there, circling, patient, maddening, his mouth hot at your throat and his breathing as uneven as yours. "There?"
"There. Simon. Don't stop."
He didn't stop. He pressed one thick finger into you, then two, curling them, and worked you with his palm grinding exactly where you needed it, and when you came it hit so hard and so fast that you turned your face into his shoulder and bit down on it to keep from crying out, and he held you through it with a low voice in your ear telling you that's it, that's it, good, I've got you.
You lay there shaking. He kissed your temple, your cheek, the corner of your mouth. He was so hard against your hip through his trousers that it must have hurt.
"Your turn," you said, when you had breath for it, and reached for his belt.
He caught your wrist. Gently. "You don't have to."
"I know I don't have to. I want to." You turned your hand in his grip and laced your fingers through his. "I want you inside me, Simon. Have you got anything?"
A pause. Then, with real embarrassment: "Wallet."
"Since when?"
"Since about week three," he admitted, and you laughed so hard you had to put your forehead against his chest.
When he finally pushed into you, he did it slowly, his weight on his forearms either side of your head and his forehead resting against yours. He was big, and he knew it, and he made himself go carefully, an inch at a time, stopping whenever your breath caught, until you hooked your heels behind his thighs and pulled him the rest of the way in. You both groaned. For a moment neither of you moved. You could feel him trembling with the effort of holding still.
"Alright?" he said. His voice was wrecked.
"More than alright." You slid your hands up his back, over the hard ridges of muscle and the old scars, and held on. "Move."
He moved. Long, deep, deliberate strokes, rolling his hips into you so that each one dragged over the place his fingers had found, and you heard yourself start to make soft broken noises on every thrust and couldn't stop. He kissed them out of your mouth. His hand came up to cradle your jaw, his thumb at the corner of your lips, and in the dark you turned your head and kissed the scar on his palm you hadn't known was there.
"Never," he said, ragged, driving into you, "let anyone. Touch my face. Never."
"I know."
"Fifteen years."
"I know, Simon." You put both hands on his face again, holding it, your thumbs on his cheekbones, the long scar under your fingers. "I've got you."
That undid him. He dropped his head into the curve of your neck and lost the rhythm, fucking you harder, faster, one arm going under your back to haul you up against him, and you wrapped yourself around him and took all of it and wanted more. The mattress slid on the steel floor. The fan turned its disapproving head. You came again with him buried deep, clenching around him, your nails dragging down his back, and the way you said his name tipped him over. He thrust once more, deep, and shuddered, and groaned into your shoulder, long and low and unguarded, a sound you would hear in your head for weeks.
Afterwards, he didn't leave.
You'd thought he might. You'd half braced for it: the mask going back on, the door, Captain in that flat voice in the morning as if nothing had happened. Instead he lay on his back on the floor mattress with one arm under your head and the other resting on your hip, and his chest rose and fell under your cheek, slower and slower. You traced the scar under his collarbone with one finger.
"Gaz owes Soap a fiver," you said into the dark.
His chest jumped. "What?"
"The pool. Gaz bet you had no face. You do. Quite a lot of one, actually." You walked your fingers up his throat to his jaw. "Nose has been broken at least twice."
"Three times."
"Three times. Scar, here. Another, here." You touched the eyebrow. "Strong jaw. Lips." You traced them. "I'd put money on handsome. But that's not why I'm smiling."
He was quiet. His thumb moved on your hip.
"Why're you smiling, then?"
"Because I'm the only one who knows."
He turned his head and kissed your fingertips where they rested on his mouth. You felt him breathe in, like a man about to step off a ledge.
"Hereford," he said. "When we rotate home. Three weeks. I've got a flat."
"Is this you asking me out, Lieutenant?"
"It's me asking you over." His hand tightened on your hip. "With the lights on."
Your heart turned over. Before you could answer, the radio clipped to the vest he'd dropped by the door hissed into life, loud in the little room. Price's voice, clipped and urgent.
"Ghost, Bravo Six. We need you. Gaz's team's pinned down in Sattiq. Wheels up in ten."
Simon was moving before the transmission ended. You heard the rasp of the balaclava going back over his head in the dark, the clatter of his vest.
At the door, he stopped. The floodlight from outside outlined him, the skull back in place.
"Three weeks," he said. "Don't lose that pool money, Captain."
Then he was gone, and you lay on the mattress with your lips still stinging from his stubble, and listened to the helicopter take off into the night.
At 04:20 the casualty klaxon went off across the base.