Relocate?

The powers that be didn't want to lose any Pacific airfield gained, however, and a holding force was to be left on Peleliu. Lieutenant Lew Harris drew a short straw on that and was assigned to stay on Peleliu to help manage the cleanup and holding of the island. Mitch was able, as a chief petty officer, to grab an assignment of Peleliu for himself, as well. I have no idea how I drew one of the short straws to stay. I was a gunnery mate. There were no big guns on Peleliu like there were on the Maryland. It sure as hell wasn't Mitch who wrangled the assignment. I've always assumed it was Harris.

That would stand to reason, because he almost immediately showed that he wasn't finished with me yet. It also lends credence to the possibility that Harris was behind the later cushy assignment relocation offer to San Diego after the war.

The lieutenant thought he was clever. He got us all in the same office—him to give commands, Mitch to paper them over, and me as the general gofer to do whatever either one of them needed. Then he developed a reason for Mitch to drive a jeep cross island every other day on a regular-basis errand. While Mitch was away, Harris would lock the office door, pull the blinds down on the windows, lay me on my back or belly on his desk, and lay me, giving it to me hard and furiously. By the time Mitch came back, Harris would be at his desk, smiling and whistling, and I'd be hobbling around the office with a silly grin on my face, doing whatever gofers did.

I don't know if it was the lieutenant's smile and whistle or my grin and hobble, but Mitch added two and two together. And one day he didn't take that jeep trip across the island. The lieutenant also didn't take into account that Mitch had a key to the office door, since it was Mitch who opened up the office in the morning.

I was on top of the lieutenant, doing a crab position, when the door opened. Harris was on his back, his legs hanging down the front of his desk, his hands gripping my waist, as I hovered above him, looking up at the ceiling, my fists propping up my shoulders by burying themselves beside his shoulders, and my legs bent and my feet leveraging off the desk top on either side of his thighs. I was raising and lowering my channel on his buried cock and he was helping by pushing up and pulling down on my waist with his hands.

We were well into the fuck when Mitch opened the door and stood in the doorway. He obviously had expected to see what he did see. He had a gun in his hand.

It was Harris's quick reflexes that had him pushing me off to the side and taking the bullet in the lower abdomen. He later said the bullet was meant for him. I was the one who saw Mitch's eyes when he burst in. I knew the bullet was for me. The first two bullets missed both of us. The third one got the lieutenant. The fourth through the seventh bullets I heard fired got Mitch in the back. It was his short-sightedness, caused by his blind jealously, that made him forget that the office of the Military Police contingent was just next door.

It must have been obvious to higher authority what had been going on in the office and why Mitch had gone crazy and tried to shoot us—although I still think it was only me he was trying to kill—but they cleaned it all up. The lieutenant went directly into sick bay and then back to the States, and I immediately had orders that got me back aboard the Maryland and steaming toward the Ulithi Atoll. From there, it was on to the hell that was the invasion of Okinawa and I was given little opportunity to think about Lieutenant Lewis Harris.

* * * *

After tiring of balling Ned in the Del Coronado Hotel room, Lew rolled out of the bed and went into the bathroom. The sailor waited until he heard the shower running and then searched for Harris's trousers and then for the pocket his wallet was in. Ned had to be sure of the Navy officer who seemed so anxious for Ned to be relocated to San Diego, and Ned didn't think Harris would tell him the truth if he asked the lieutenant commander outright. All the time Ned had known Harris, the Navy officer had deflected any attempts to find out what was in his background. And there was the nagging question of why he didn't invite Ned to stay with him if he was so anxious to get Ned here and into bed—and why Harris told Ned that the next time they'd meet was when he picked Ned up the next morning to go to the naval station.

They were there, in his wallet, just as Ned knew, in the base of my mind, that they would be. Ned found a photo of a smiling woman about Lew's age, and of a young girl old enough to have been born before the war and of a baby, obviously not conceived until after the war had ended.

He wasn't going to be any part of that sort of setup. He quickly pulled on his dress blue service uniform, stuffed everything else in the room that was his back into his duffle bag and walked out of the room. He didn't ask for a cab at the concierge desk but walked out onto the street and managed to reach a bus stop as a bus was pulling up. He had no idea which direction it was going. He didn't really care. Three stops later, he got off. He was near the waterfront in a seedy part of town. He was more comfortable here than he'd been at the Del Coronado. He had no trouble finding a fleabag hotel, where he spent the night, changing into civvies to go out to find dinner.

He found more than dinner. In a hole-in-the-wall bar on the waterfront, he found companionship. He was in a funky mood, and the straightforward propositioning from a brute of a sailor in the bar matched his mood. He didn't tell the guy he was a sailor too. He let himself be taken to a hotel even seedier than then one he'd checked into, and he blew the sailor and got blown by the sailor. And he laid on his back and opened his legs, and let the sailor pound his channel, making him forget the lie Lew Harris had been asking him to live and fucking the Navy officer out of his system.

The next morning Ned shouldered his duffle bag and walked to the train station. He walked rather than splurging for a taxi or trying to find a bus going in that direction as penance for what he almost had done—almost had been seduced into doing again. It was a long way back to Maryland. He figured it would be a good thing for him to walk the first two miles back toward the East.

The gods in the heavens smiled on him, though—and thereafter he always thought it was because he had done the penance of the first two miles on foot. When he entered the waiting room at the train station to buy his ticket back East, there was Tom—The ex-Marine Tom from the family garage back in Hagerstown.

After the first surprise for both of them and an explosive meeting of the bodies and lips that, without a doubt, upset and outraged many around them in the station waiting room, Ned managed to ask, "How . . . why?"

"We need you at the garage, Ned. I need you there—with me. I came here to fetch you back."

Ever the submissive, Ned had heard just the right thing to bring him into line and under Tom's control.

"But how would you have found me?"

"I'm a Marine, Ned. Why would you even think to ask that question? There's an ocean here, ain't there? And there are Navy bases. A Navy swabbie would be found where the Navy is, wouldn't he? But the war's over, buddy. Time for you to get the Navy out of you. Time to come home."

Not just the Navy, Ned thought. It was time to get Lieutenant Commander Lewis Harris out of him—and he loved the way that Tom said the word "home." The only relocating he planned on doing now was back in Hagerstown, Maryland, and underneath an ex-Marine, not a naval officer. It had been a hell of a war—not just the fighting, but also the fucking. But the fighting was over now . . . unless, of course, Tom wanted to make him fight for it as a game.