Chapter 3: Lights On
Gaz walked in on his own two feet with a field dressing on his thigh and a face grey with dust. Two of his team came in on stretchers, conscious, swearing, which was the kind of swearing you liked to hear.
The fourth stretcher was Simon.
Soap had one end of it and a corporal had the other, and Soap's face was white under the grime. "IED on the way out," he said. "He was on top of Gaz when it went. Took it in the back and the head. He was talking in the bird. Stopped about five minutes ago."
You were already moving. Pupils first: you couldn't see them. Airway: you couldn't see that either. Under the black skull, a dark wet patch was spreading at the mouth, and his chest was moving fast and shallow, and when you said "Simon" sharply, close to his ear, his hand twitched on the stretcher and then went still.
"I need it off," you said.
Soap stared at you. "Captain..."
"He's got blood in his airway and a head injury and I can't see either of them. It comes off. Now." You looked round the tent: two medics, the corporal, Soap, Gaz on the next bench, the casualties. Every one of them was looking at the mask. You saw it on their faces, even Soap's, even now: the pool, the board on the door, the question. "Everyone who isn't treating a patient, out. Gaz, you're a patient, face the other way. Lamb, Okafor, take the stretchers and pull the curtain."
"With respect, ma'am, protocol..."
"Protocol is I'm the senior medical officer and I said out." You didn't raise your voice. You didn't need to. Soap looked at you for one second longer and something in his face changed, understanding, and he took the corporal by the arm and went. The curtain rattled closed around the bay.
You picked up the trauma shears. Then you put them down again. You'd promised him, once, that you wouldn't need them.
You slid your gloved fingers under the hem of the balaclava at his throat and drew it up, carefully, over his chin, his mouth, his broken nose, his eyes, and off.
There he was.
You'd had his face under your hands. You'd thought you knew it. You hadn't known his hair was the colour of wet sand, cropped close. You hadn't known his skin would be so pale where the mask had always covered it, paler than his throat, almost never touched by the sun. You hadn't known that the long scar on his jaw was silvery and fine, or that there were faint freckles across the bridge of his nose, or that with his eyes closed and his face slack he would look so much gentler and so much more tired. There was blood in his mouth from a split lip and a cut on his tongue, not from anywhere worse. You suctioned it and he coughed, hard, and his eyes flew open.
Brown. You'd known that. You hadn't known what they'd look like with nothing around them.
He looked at you. He looked at the light above you, the white glare of the treatment lamp, and his hand came up off the stretcher, fast, toward his face.
You caught it. You held it.
"Just me," you said. "Curtain's closed. It's just me."
His eyes found yours. You watched him understand where he was, what had happened, that his face was bare in the brightest light on the base. You watched him decide whether to panic.
"Lights on, then," Simon croaked.
You laughed, and it came out wet. "Follow my finger, Lieutenant."
He had a moderate concussion, a split lip, two cracked ribs and a back full of grit you spent an hour picking out with tweezers while he lay face down and grumbled. When you were done, he asked for the mask, and you gave it to him. You'd washed the blood out of it in the sink while he slept.
When you drew back the curtain, Soap was sitting on an ammo crate outside the tent, waiting. He looked at Ghost, masked and upright and scowling, and then at you.
"Well?" he said. "What's the verdict?"
You stripped off your gloves. "Gaz loses."
"That's it?"
"That's all you get, Sergeant."
Behind you, Simon made a sound under the mask. It took you a second to recognise it. He was laughing.
His flat in Hereford was on the top floor of a red-brick building near the river, two rooms with bare walls and a kettle and a bookshelf of paperbacks that surprised you. Thrillers, mostly. A Wainwright guide to the fells, cracked along the spine. You were looking at the books when you heard him lock the door behind you, and then he didn't move, and you turned around.
He was standing just inside the door, in jeans and a black hoodie and the plain black balaclava he wore off base, and every light in the flat was on. The overhead. The lamp by the sofa. The bedside lamp through the open door. He must have done it before he came to pick you up from the station. Every single one.
"You've been planning this," you said softly.
"Three weeks."
"Ribs?"
"Fine."
"Liar." You crossed the room to him and stopped close enough to feel his warmth. You didn't reach for the mask. You waited. "It's yours to take off, Simon. Not mine. It always was."
He looked at you for a long moment. Then he reached up, took the hem at his throat in one fist, and pulled it off over his head in one movement, the way you'd rip off a plaster. He dropped it on the floor between you, and didn't look at it, and stood there in the full yellow light of his own front room with nothing on his face but his face.
His jaw was tight. His eyes were on yours, braced, waiting for something. You thought about fifteen years of nobody, and how many people had looked at him and only seen the skull.
You put your hand on his cheek. "Hello," you said.
His breath went out of him in a rush, and he kissed you.
It wasn't like the dark. In the dark it had been hunger and touch and the thrill of not knowing. In the light you could see everything: the flush coming up his throat, the way his lashes lowered when you kissed the scar at the corner of his mouth, the look on his face when you pulled back and peeled his hoodie up over his head, careful of his ribs, and saw the yellow-green bruising across them and the dressing on his back and the tattoo on his forearm, a skull of course, and you laughed at it, and he grinned back at you. A real grin, crooked, a little shy. You'd never seen him smile. You'd never imagined he could look like that.
"What?" he said.
"Nothing. You're very handsome. Whoever bet on that is going to be insufferable."
"Soap," he said. "It was Soap."
"Of course it was."
He backed you into the bedroom with his hands on your hips, kissing you, and undressed you under the lamp slowly, piece by piece, looking at everything he uncovered with an expression so open that you had to close your eyes for a second.
"Don't," he said, rough. "Don't you close your eyes. Not tonight."
You opened them. He was looking at you like you were the thing he'd been waiting three weeks to see, and you realised that you were.
He laid you down on the bed and knelt between your thighs and kissed his way down your body in the full light, and this time you watched him do it. You watched his mouth close over your nipple, his cheeks hollowing. You watched his eyes flick up to your face to see what it did to you. When he went lower, settling between your legs with his broad scarred shoulders spreading your thighs wide and his big hands curled around your hips, you watched him look at you, all of you, and then lower his head and lick you, one long slow stroke, and groan into you like he was the one being touched.
You buried your fingers in his short sandy hair and held on. He ate you out like he had all night and intended to use it, his tongue flat and then pointed, circling, his stubble rasping the soft insides of your thighs, two fingers pushing into you and curling until you were rocking against his mouth and swearing at the ceiling. When you came, you came looking down at him, his eyes on yours over the length of your body, and the sight of it, his bare face between your thighs, wet and flushed and fierce, made it go on and on.
He crawled up your body and kissed you, and you tasted yourself on his mouth.
"Ribs," you said, breathless, and pushed at his shoulder. "On your back, Lieutenant."
He went, with a look on his face that was half protest and half delight. You straddled his hips, wrapped your hand around him, hot and hard and thick, and stroked him slowly until his head pressed back into the pillow and his hands fisted in the sheets and he said your name in a voice like gravel. Then you rolled the condom down him, lined him up, and sank down onto him inch by inch, watching his face the whole time.
You'd never seen anything like it. His mouth fell open. His eyes went dark and unfocused and then sharpened on you, and his hands came up to grip your hips, not guiding, just holding, as if he needed something to hang on to.
"Look at me," you said.
"I am." His voice cracked. "I'm looking. God, I'm looking."
You rode him slowly, rolling your hips, taking him deep, and he watched you do it with an expression you'd remember for the rest of your life, wrecked and reverent and completely unguarded. You leaned down and braced your hands either side of his head and kissed him and kept moving. He thrust up to meet you, careful of his ribs and then not careful at all, one hand sliding between your bodies to rub tight circles where you needed it, and the lamp was on and you could see every flicker of feeling cross his bare face, every one.
"I love you," he said.
It came out of him like it had been knocked loose. He looked startled by it. Then his jaw set, stubborn, the way it did when he'd decided on something, and he said it again, slower, holding your eyes. "I love you. Should've said it in the dark. Wanted to say it where you could see me."
You came apart on top of him. You couldn't help it. You came with your forehead against his and his name on your lips, shaking, saying I love you, I love you too, you idiot, and he wrapped both arms around you, ribs be damned, and drove up into you through it until he followed you over with a groan you felt all the way through your body, his face open and helpless and close enough to kiss.
So you did.
Later, much later, you lay tangled in his sheets with the lamp still on, and he lay on his side facing you, tracing the shape of your mouth with one finger the way you'd once traced his.
"Soap's going to ask," he said.
"Let him."
"He'll ask you every day. He'll never stop. He'll try to get you drunk."
"I'm a doctor, Simon. I've got patient confidentiality." You caught his finger and kissed it. "Your face is mine. Nobody else gets it unless you hand it to them."
He was quiet for a while. His thumb brushed your lower lip.
"Might hand it to them," he said, finally. "One day. If you're stood next to me."
You looked at him, at the bare, scarred, ordinary, extraordinary face on the pillow beside yours, in the full light, and you smiled.
"I'll be stood next to you," you said. "Leave the lights on."