Maybe it was time he started acting like one.
“So you quit the army?” Jane asked suddenly, waving away his offer of more eggs.
He blinked, taking a moment to adjust to the new topic. “More like the army quit me,” he finally answered, hoping she wouldn’t press matters.
“What’s next?”
Damned if he knew. I was going to go to university would make him sound like a lunatic. He was so clearly not university material that anyone with any sense would laugh in his face. And Jane was nothing if not sensible. But, his tour having ended several months earlier than planned, he had no fucking clue what was supposed to come next. “Honestly, I was planning to take a couple months to readjust to civilian life and go from there.” That sounded passable. He had savings. It wasn’t an unreasonable plan.
“And by ‘readjust to civilian life,’ you mean ‘sleep with the female half of it.’”
He would have thought she was teasing, on account of the aforementioned détente and all, but her tone was hard to read. When he didn’t answer fast enough, she said, “And where are you going to live? Jay’s condo?”
Another question he couldn’t answer.
That was probably his cue to leave. He pushed back from the table and took his dishes to the counter. She didn’t have a dishwasher, so he ran some water into the sink.
“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “That came out all naggy. I just think you have so much…”
“So much what?” he snapped. She winced, and he immediately felt bad, but he needed to know how she’d been planning to finish that sentence. “Were you going to say ‘potential’?” When she didn’t answer, he added, “That seems to be the word. Cam, you have so much potential.” He was trying not to be a bully, but he couldn’t quite keep the sneering tone from his voice. “That’s what Jay always said.”
“I had a great time yesterday.” Her voice had gone all quiet, like she was afraid of how he would respond. “You seemed…different.”
“Different from what?” he pressed. And why were they suddenly having this heavy conversation about his future?
She looked at him without speaking, but there was something in her eyes. Affection, maybe? A fondness that hadn’t been there before? Well, shit. It was better that she knew the truth about him before she started getting ideas. He wasn’t the kind of man she could go on day trips with, flirt with, and then rely on to be there, cheerfully making breakfast and solving her cosplay problems the next morning. The last twenty-four hours had been an aberration. If she was getting ideas, she needed to stop.
“When I said the army quit me, I meant I was dismissed from service. I was charged under the military’s code of service discipline, tried, and…” He held out his hands. “Here I am.”
Her eyes widened. She had probably only heard of stuff like that on TV. It hadn’t been dramatic like that, his trial. Mostly because although Becky had testified on his behalf, he had quite clearly committed the offense he’d been charged with. He didn’t even blame them—you couldn’t just contravene the code of service and walk away. He did blame them, though, for the fact that Biggs’s trial had resulted only in a demotion to lieutenant while his had resulted in dismissal. But what had he expected? Biggs was a reg force officer, and he’d been a reservist.
“What happened?” Jane asked.
“I broke the code of service: Striking or Offering Violence to a Superior Officer. Offense number 103.17.” He still remembered the number. Could even recite the relevant section from memory. God knew he’d spent enough hours staring at it, trying to think of some way to salvage his career. To explain that yes, he’d done what they charged, but it had been in service of preventing a larger crime. But the military rightly didn’t deal in shades of gray.
Her eyes got even wider and she repeated her question. “What happened?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. I attacked my superior officer. Two guys had to pull me off him.”
“But you must have had a reason. It can’t just be—”
“My point,” he said, raising his voice to talk over her, “is that you were wrong about me. I don’t have potential. Never did. All the shit people say about me is true.”
She stood there blinking at him. Good. He had finally shut her up. He reminded himself that he was doing this because he liked her. Maybe she truly believed her own story about not wanting a boyfriend. But just in case she had read too much into that kiss, he needed her to know that he was never going to be the man for the job. If she ever changed her mind about moving beyond her “fine collection” of vibrators, she deserved better than him.
“I’ll try to find out about the bachelor party,” he said as he turned to show himself out. “And if I don’t see you tonight, good luck at Comicon.”
“At least we’re not in Vegas or at a spa in the middle of the woods or something,” Wendy grumbled to Jane later that afternoon as they made their way up the elevator of Wendy’s building laden with bags of decorations for Elise’s bachelorette party. Gia was taking the bride to lunch, and then the four of them were going to a not-in-the-middle-of-the-woods salon. After that, the rest of the revelers would arrive at Wendy’s for gag gifts and drinks before heading out on the town.
“Amen to that,” Jane agreed. Elise had floated the idea of a “destination” bachelorette party, but it had only taken a little gentle manipulation to talk her down from that idea, mostly because Elise was intent on crashing the bachelor party and Jay could not be talked into moving his out of his favorite local pub, much less out of the city. “I don’t really get why she’s so keen on this ‘invade the boys’ thing. Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of a bachelorette?”
“God knows,” Wendy said. “She probably saw it in a movie. She’s got some visual in her head that we now have to bust our asses to recreate.”
“She probably saw it on Pinterest,” Jane said. “You know, all those ‘Invading Your Husband-to-Be’s Bachelor Party in Style’ boards?”
Wendy barked a laugh, which perked Jane up immensely after her weird morning with Cameron. Wendy, a take-no-prisoners defense lawyer, was usually all business, but she had a loud, infectious laugh that, if you knew her, was all the more remarkable for how incongruent it was.
“If this was anyone besides one of you girls,” Jane said, “I would have put my foot down long ago.”
Wendy unlocked her door and held it for Jane. “Agreed. If it was anyone else, I’d be staging an intervention, sitting the bridezilla down, and reminding her that the point of all this isn’t the wedding but, like, the marriage itself. But in this particular case, it’s clear that despite the fact that Elise is off her rocker, the marriage itself is going to be just fiiiine.”
“What are you talking about?” Jane asked.
Wendy dropped the box she’d been carrying on a counter and sank onto one of the stools at her kitchen island. “Have you seen the way he looks at her?”
“What do you mean? Jay?”
“Uh, yes. Hello? It’s like he’s eye-fucking her all the time. And it’s been that way since they met. It never, like, wears off.” She sighed.
“We’re talking about Jay here? Accountant Jay?”
“What planet are you on? Yes. Didn’t Gia tell you about walking in on them a couple days ago?”
“No!” God. What had she been missing by skipping all the flower arranging and calligraphy-ing? “Tell me!”
Wendy let loose a low whistle. “I can’t. It will make me blush too much. You’ll have to wait for Gia.” Jane was about to protest that nothing made Wendy blush when her friend sighed again and said, “Let’s just say that even though she’s uptight about what shade of ivory or bone or whatever her shoes are, Elise is being extremely well fucked.” She grinned. “Those two are going to have a very happy marriage.”
Wendy generally had a potty mouth, and she called things like she saw them, but…wow. It was Jane’s turn to blush, and not only because of what Wendy had said. For some reason, the image of Cameron lounging on her guest bed and talking about giving “screaming orgasms” to “his girl” had popped into her mind. She took a deep breath to calm her runaway pulse.
“So what about this Cameron dude?”
“What about him?” Jane countered, taking her time unpacking the bags so as to avoid looking at Wendy. She and Wendy had been inseparable since fifth grade, so it was totally weird that she hadn’t told Wendy about anything that had gone down with Cameron. It was also totally weird that she didn’t want to.
“Whoa. Defensive much?”
“I am not!” Jane turned around. Face your accuser and all that.
Wendy raised her eyebrows skeptically. That was another problem with the whole joined-at-the-hip thing: it also came with ESP. Jane made a split-second decision. “I do kind of have a confession.” It wasn’t an untrue confession. It wasn’t a totally comprehensive confession, either, but whatever.