“You okay?” His soft inquiry brought her back to the present.
“Yeah, fine.” She shoved her mouth into a smile, but she could see Chance wasn’t convinced. She focused on their surroundings, mildly surprised to find herself in the men’s underwear aisle.
“Did you want me to pick something out for you? This beer can pattern is pretty sexy.” She held up a pair of novelty boxers, hoping they’d distract him from her feeble grin.
She appreciated his encouraging smile. “Save ’em for my birthday.”
Her heart sank with another realization. “You’ll be deployed still.”
“You remember when my birthday is?”
Of course. I spent ten months committing every handwritten letter on that marriage license to memory, like those personal details were a talisman that would draw you back to me one day. “Sure. January twenty-sixth. I card so many people, I’ve gotten good at remembering birthdays.”
His gaze held hers for a moment, then dropped to the shopping cart. “You can send them to me in a care package. They have these flat-rate boxes, and you send them to an APO address—I’ll show you later.”
“Cool,” she agreed, although celebrating his birthday via a cardboard box was about the least cool thing she could think of.
He chucked several multipacks of cheap boxers and undershirts into the cart, then tested various pairs of socks for their thickness before adding them on top. He paused to read the back of a package, and she picked up one of the sets of thin, white boxers.
“These are crappy compared to the ones you have at home,” she remarked, having noticed just yesterday when she did the laundry that Chance had a surprising penchant for designer-label woven boxers.
“This outpost where I’m headed is pretty grubby. I’d rather throw things out than try to wash them.”
“Like camping grubby? Not that I’ve ever been camping. My dad wasn’t really the vacation type.”
“I hear you. My mom’s idea of a family outing was to give us each ten dollars in quarters and leaving us in the casino arcade.” They shared a quick smile, a momentary connection. “But no, unless they’ve made major improvements to this place I’m expecting intermittent running water and burn-out latrines. And dust. Lots and lots of dust.”
“Do you sleep in tents?”
“Sort of. All of the buildings are temporary constructions, so some have plywood walls and corrugated iron ceilings, but some are like heavy-duty tents reinforced by chain-link panels. But we have real beds, with mattresses and sheets. That’s a lot better than sleeping in a hole in the ground.”
“You’ve done that?”
“Almost every night I was in Iraq.”
She chewed her lower lip as they moved toward the grocery section. “How many times have you been deployed?”
“This’ll be number six.” He held up a box of plastic zip-top sandwich bags. “I use these to hold my phone, iPad, anything else dust can get into.”
But she wasn’t listening to his deployment top tip. “Six deployments? Can they really do that?”
“I’ve been in the army more than ten years.” He lifted a shoulder. “They do try to give you at least a year off in between, but a couple times I volunteered.”
“Like this time.”
“Yeah.”
She threaded her fingers through the holes in the shopping cart, biting back an irrational wave of anger at his nonchalance. “Why did you do that?”
He studied her in inscrutable silence for a moment, then started pushing the cart toward the center of the store.
“It’s a myth that all soldiers hate deploying and spend the whole time longing to come home,” he explained evenly, keeping his gaze trained forward. “No one signs up for the army expecting to spend their career pushing a broom on post. The ugly truth your average American doesn’t want to acknowledge is that combat is a total rush. A lot of grunts couldn’t care less about good guys and bad guys and oil reserves and Islam. They love the chaos, the danger, the destruction. They’re chasing a high. Simple as that.”
“Is that why you go?”
“Of course. You think I give a shit whether some goat farmers in Kunar Province have free and fair elections? If I was a humanitarian I would’ve joined the Peace Corps. I joined the army to shoot guns, detonate explosives and patch up my brothers in arms when they take a hit. I have the best job in the world. Sometimes I can’t believe I get paid for it.”
“But you could get killed,” she said softly.
He waved a dismissive hand. “Old age is overrated.”
She watched him as he stopped by the jewelry counter, picked up the cheapest analog watch and tried it on. Unlike a lot of the big, bulky soldiers she’d seen at Fort Preston, Chance sat on the skinny side of average. He was tall and wiry. He didn’t have meaty forearms whose muscles flexed as he held out the watch—the wrist around which it was strapped was unremarkable, lightly topped with brown hair on one side, lined with faintly visible blue veins on the other.
The vulnerability of it, of his skin, his blood, his body, suddenly clutched at her heart like a greedy fist and squeezed. Without thinking she grabbed the belt loop on his jeans and held it. If she could just keep him by her side, hold him here until he realized he couldn’t leave her…
“What do you think? Green or black?”
She had to blink several times to realize he was talking about the color of the nylon wristbands. Sheepishly, she dropped her hand. “Oh, I don’t know. Green, I guess? It’s kind of camouflage.”
He nodded, dropping two green watches into the cart.
He started to say something about waiting for batteries to go on sale but she drifted over to the men’s jewelry display, not listening. She picked up a plain titanium band and tried it on. It was big enough to fit over her ring finger and the silver-set amethyst she’d worn since that day at the courthouse.
“Maybe we should get you a wedding ring before you leave,” she suggested, less than half-joking. “I don’t want those goat farmers’ daughters getting any ideas. This one’s only thirty bucks.”
He moved beside her, sliding his arm across her back as he tugged the ring off her finger and replaced it in the display case.
“Rings aren’t a great idea when you’re going to spend as much time outside the wire as I will. You risk a de-gloving injury—that’s when the ring gets caught and rips the skin off your finger, or amputates it altogether. It’s not a pretty sight, and I speak from experience.”
