Twenty kilometers from the Pakistan border, northwest of the Khyber Pass, northeast of the bombed-out remains of Tora Bora, Firebase Phoenix, one of the most hard-fought areas in Afghanistan, seemed at the farthest end of the universe.
Inside the fortified living quarters, Weare turned the corner and continued forward toward the room at the end of the corridor that would be home for the duration of this tour. A lone figure exited the room and approached. Weare froze where he stood.
The man was older now, with silver showing in the neat buzz of his dark hair, especially above both ears. “You,” he said around the lollypop stick hanging at a lazy angle from one corner of his mouth.
The lone word roused Weare from the spell of thoughts he’d fallen under, and vanquished years of regret. Heat raced through his blood, and his body woke from a long sleep. Red rose on his throat and cheeks. His cock stirred in his BDUs and threw itself against his underwear and button-fly. For the first time in days—maybe months—Weare smiled.
“Yeah,” he said.
What passed next between them did so through a kind of telepathy. Without warning or preparation, Weare spiraled back through time and was there again, in that brief but wonderful chapter of his secret past.
PFC Jeremy Weare made a promise to himself during the tense flight from Germany: he would hold on to the best memories, the best smells and tastes from home, once they hit the sand. He didn’t have a lot to draw upon; his personal highlight reel, at twenty-four, wasn’t jam-packed with a life’s worth of kapow moments. But he hoped what he brought with him in spirit would be enough.
Everything was different over there, and no amount of bullshitting or briefing prepared him for exactly how vast the shift went from familiar to foreign. Weare told himself that the turkey and mashed potatoes served in the mess hall really were like the best Thanksgiving meals from that other time and place, B.I.—Before Iraq. And that the fake tree with the cheap paper decorations and twinkling lights represented a real holiday. But at night, when Weare slept, if he slept, his mind drifted back to rural Maine, and, sometimes, he caught a phantom hint of sap pine before waking in a strange land where nothing made sense, a million miles from home.
Secretly, he played a private game when not dodging bullets or roadside explosives. For every new, terrible memory being indelibly recorded, he called up a better one and accentuated the positive. Weare didn’t want to be here in the heat, the filth, or the increasingly hostile climate, but he convinced himself he did, else he wouldn’t have signed up to make the world safer when one of his buddies was taking a full ride on a football scholarship and another, Donald, was working his family’s farm, likely spending long days sawing down Christmas trees that smelled of the holiday, sweet and alive.
One shower a week, if that. He looked at the time between as a way to conserve the bar of soap he’d brought with him from Maine—green, a real man’s brand according to the commercials. With his back to the rest of the men, Weare soaped up his balls, lathered his cock and jerked himself almost to completion, knowing his fellow warriors were engaged in a similar ritual, satisfying a required need destined to be repeated in the barracks after lights out. Maybe they, too, thought of pumpkin pie and cinnamon as a way to stay strong; peppermint candy canes, and turkey stuffing that was moist and savory, not tasteless and hard enough to shoot out of a tank’s boom stick.
He was showering, fantasizing of chocolate-covered cherries and the best sex of his young life, a few pumps shy of blasting his seed down the drain, where it would join the loads of so many other American infidels, eventually making it into the desert’s water table, when the scuffle of slides drew Weare’s gaze toward his right. The stall space beside him was no longer empty. Another male body, naked save the slides, ambled up to the nozzle, turned on the water and ducked into its rare, cleansing spray. Around the scent of his soap, Weare detected a man’s sweat—that mix of the fresh and athletic along with the ripe from balls and feet, armpits and asshole. And something else. Something sweet.
That was Weare’s first encounter with the new lieutenant, Christopher Collins.
He unconsciously drew a deep breath. Cherry? Taking a bold glance up, Weare noticed the lollypop stick hanging out of the other man’s unshaved mouth. Dude smelled like home.
Collins joined him at the table in the mess, and introductions were made. Freshly scrubbed and smelling the way manly Irish men were expected to, Weare picked at the pasta and meat sauce, moving the food around with his fork more than actually eating it. Pretending this slop was as good as the spaghetti and meatball dinners on cold, snowy nights in Maine almost worked—until he caught Collins staring, and Weare gazed up, connecting with the other man in a way that was both thrilling and devastating at the same time.
“Thanks for the loan of your soap in there. So, where you from?” Collins asked, his voice a deep, charming drawl from some point on the map between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the bayou.
Weare told him. “Not much there but pinecones and rocks.”
He didn’t mention that he was narrowly ahead of a tidal wave of misery over missing the world he knew while following his marching orders in this alien realm. He sensed he didn’t need to, because Collins got it.
“Hey, L-T, you gonna eat your pasta or jerk off into it,” one of the guys at the table joked, his mouth full of food.
“Already beat off—into yours, Thomas,” Collins fired back.
Thomas expelled a mouthful of his meal to a cacophony of good-natured chuckles. In that one sentence, Collins did more to lighten the general mood than anything Weare had managed on his own. He liked this dude, who’d caught him looking in the shower and had asked to borrow his soap. Oh yeah. A lot.
There was much about the dude to like. Hell, to love. And you didn’t have to search too hard for the reasons.
Collins wasn’t tall—he measured somewhere around five-eight. But he was big in other ways besides simple physical height. His smile, for starters—Collins would grin, sometimes snarl, revealing a length of perfect white teeth.
“Don’t get too jealous, amigos,” he drawled the next time Weare and he crossed paths in the showers. Collins stood at the sink in his slides and a towel, flossing. “I got a mean sweet tooth, so these pearly whites’ll be dropping out of my mug any day now.”
His teeth. His handsome face and classic jaw, which showed perpetual five o’clock shadow, regardless of the time of day. Tight, muscled body. And his scent, which Weare loved—a man’s sweat mixed with something sweet. Candy.
On patrol through Tikrit, Weare stole another hit of the lieutenant’s smell and soon understood its source: Collins had a bag of candy in his pocket, another stored in his ruck. American candy. Kisses and lollypops and little chocolate bars. Candy from home.
Finally, it all made perfect sense. The candy wasn’t just to satisfy one man’s personal sweet tooth. There was another mission, one beyond patrolling streets and maintaining a fragile peace that seemed destined to unravel and would in the weeks ahead.
Collins strutted at a safe distance from the civilians, called out something in Arabic, and was mobbed by local kids, who streamed over to him, speaking in excited voices.
“Candy! Candy!”
He doled out the chocolate bars and gumballs.
“You gotta win their hearts if you want to win the war,” he said to Weare.
The man was a genius. And by then he sure had won Weare’s heart.
When he was younger, one of Weare’s favorite things to drink was chocolate milk. You squeezed syrup into a tall glass, poured in cold whole milk, stirred it with a spoon and drank the concoction through a twisty Krazy Straw. You couldn’t reuse the straw for long, as the things tended to grow rank as the milk residue trapped inside soured. But there was something magical about that simple recipe. It defied words, logic. It was one of Weare’s happiest memories.
Weare mentioned it in passing to Collins during one of the lieutenant’s goodwill missions. The other man flashed a cocky smirk, and Weare melted on the inside, his pulse driven into a gallop by Collins’s shades, his unshaved face and the lollypop stick hanging out of that smile full of clean white teeth.
A week later, Weare found a package sitting on his bunk. He opened the simple brown wrapper and couldn’t believe what waited inside. Not only had Collins gotten him a bottle of chocolate syrup, the real stuff from home, but a twisty straw as well.
“Dude,” Weare sighed, “are you for real?”
“Maybe. No thanks though, little buddy.”
When Weare did anyway, Collins grabbed him in a playful headlock and kissed the top of Weare’s buzz cut.
“I said,” he drawled, “think nothing of it. Seriously, the pleasure was all mine.”
Night fell. Snores filled the barracks following lights out.
“Hey, dude,” Collins whispered.
Weare sat up to find the other man seated on the edge of his bottom bunk. “Huh?”
“Shhh,” Collins said, with a sweet breath that smelled of mint.
Weare drew in a deep lungful. Among the scent, he detected maleness, fresh sweat, musk. He’d woken hard and quickly grew stiffer. “What is it, man?”
“This,” Collins answered.
And then the new lieutenant leaned down and crushed their mouths together. The kiss was sweet in taste, bitter in concept because it was also forbidden. Weare tensed, broke their liplock and cast a worried glance around the barracks room filled with sleeping phantoms.
“I thought…” Collins said, and moved away.
The distance grew to what felt like kilometers. Weare panicked—more from the fear of losing Collins, less over worries of being found out. “You thought right.”
Weare hooked a hand around the lieutenant’s neck and pulled him back. This kiss was equally awkward and verged on painful, but necessary in painting them both as criminals guilty of the same crime. Collins’s tongue tested Weare’s boundaries. Weare opened wider, inviting access. A low, happy growl rose up from the other man’s throat. Weare’s hand slipped down and caressed the rough stubble of cheek, chin and throat en route to the lieutenant’s chest.
“Dude,” Collins sighed. “I can’t fucking stand this. Not another second.”
“I know. I want you, too, man.”
“Well, here I am. Let’s you and me do this, all right?”
Collins’s touch boldly sought other flesh. Weare bit back a moan as fingers walked over his stomach and under the elastic waistband of his underwear. Collins gripped his cock, and Weare worried he’d either come from that connection alone or pass out.
“You like that?” Collins taunted in a lusty whisper.
Weare muttered an affirmative.
“If that’s so, you best prove it, dude.”
Collins released his grip and straightened. Before he could think clearly, Weare reached for the other man’s crotch. The front of Collins’s shorts stood tented in the near dark. Weare tugged downward. The lieutenant’s erection snapped out—an uncircumcised beaut wreathed in dark curls, with two fat balls hanging loose and full beneath. No more lusting from afar in the showers; Collins was his, all his. And he was the lieutenant’s.
Collins planted a hand on top of Weare’s head and guided him down. Lips met cockhead and noose of foreskin. A funky tang ignited on Weare’s tongue.
“Suck it,” Collins urged. “Oh, dude, suck my fucking dick…”
The smell, the taste, was as much home to Weare as Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas trees, candy bars and ice-cold watermelon at the height of August dog days, the fragrance of mowed summer lawns and the smoky haze in the air that telegraphs snowstorms are on their way during long, cold Maine winters.
He opened wider and swallowed the other soldier’s cock deeper, almost to the balls. Those he tickled, rolling the meaty pair around in their sac and stirring their sweaty smell.
“Oh fuck, yeah, keep doing that, dude,” Collins sighed.
Weare tugged. Collins responded with a grunt and shifted on the lower bunk. Weare sucked harder, faster. The sleeping bodies elsewhere in the dark added a level of excitement he hadn’t dreamed possible. But on this night, all things were.
The taste of the lieutenant’s precome strengthened. Nothing, Weare thought, could make this memory better, because eventually the sun would rise and they’d still be in this arid wasteland superimposed over the same space as the cradle of civilization, and neither man would be able to speak about the rebirth of sorts that had happened here because of rules, regulations and rhetoric over what could be asked or told.
Liquid warmth exploded across Weare’s tongue, salty and slightly sweet. Weare swallowed it down. The pressure and hot male stink in the air intensified. Time froze. The world held its breath.
Eventually, Collins spoke. “Turn around.”
Weare exhaled and shifted on the bunk. “What—?”
“Trust me.”
Collins yanked down the younger man’s shorts, baring his ass to warm breaths and more of those possibilities. Before Weare could comment or protest, cool, dense liquid drizzled over his most private flesh. Joy replaced worry. Weare shoved his face into his pillow to bury the laughter.
After setting down the bottle of chocolate syrup, Collins lowered his mouth to Weare’s asshole and feasted.
Now they stood together in a different country, a different time and political climate. They were the same men, however.
Collins smiled. “You’re here.”
“Couldn’t keep me away,” Weare said. “And now that I am…no more secrets. No more lies.”
“Great to see you,” Collins said.
Weare leaned closer. “Truly, dude. I’ve missed you. Oh, how much…”
Collins reached into his front pocket. The motion of his fingers captured Weare’s focus, and his mind drifted. From that wonderland between his legs, Collins produced a fresh lollypop and handed it over. Cherry. “Welcome home.”
Weare accepted the gift. Home? It sure felt like it.