Until the World Stops - L.A. Witt Page 0,4

be investing in a couple of cheap-but-convincing wedding bands.

Chapter 2

Tristan

I woke up the next morning with a throbbing head full of all kinds of surreal things that had to be dreams. After a minute or two, reality started separating itself from the alcohol-blurred dreams, and with a sinking feeling in my already queasy stomach, I realized I hadn’t dreamed the part where the Navy had told me to go fuck myself. Well, okay, the CO actually saying I could go fuck myself had been a dream, but the gist… Yeah, that had been real.

Damn. I’d known it was a risk, making that public post, but I hadn’t thought it would actually cost me my eight-year Navy career. Apparently I’d overestimated how useful I was to the Navy and underestimated how many bootlickers were in my chain of command.

Which… I really should have thought that through. This hadn’t been my first trip to Captain’s Mast, something the CO had made sure to mention multiple times. Getting drunk six months before I turned twenty-one and showing up to work three hours late and hungover had gotten me an ass-chewing and a month’s restriction, and my pay had been docked for two months. It hadn’t been fun, but whatever. I’d been living on a ship at the time, so it hadn’t hurt that much.

The second time, my boss had tried to claim I was UA because I had again drunk myself into a stupor. The CO had ripped into him when I’d handed over the chit from medical that said I’d had a hellacious fever and shouldn’t have gone to work at all. In the end, my boss was lucky he hadn’t been the one going to Mast, and I was pretty sure he still blamed me because he didn’t make chief for like two years after that.

But this time, I hadn’t been drunk. I hadn’t been sick. And I really hadn’t done anything except say troops shouldn’t obey orders to commit war crimes. Apparently that was inciting mutiny, disobeying a lawful order, and violating a few Department of Defense regulations that… I don’t know, said it was against the rules to tell other service members to obey the UCMJ? Plus they even tried to nail me for “contemptuous speech” even though that reg literally only applied to officers. It was bullshit. The JAG lawyer assigned to me when the CO said they were going to boot me said it was bullshit.

But now here I was, and somehow I was supposed to be grateful they hadn’t charged me criminally?

Fuck that. Losing my job and all my veterans benefits sucked, but if this was how the Navy responded to someone saying “obeying an order to commit a war crime is against the UCMJ,” then the Navy could go fuck itself. The entire DOD could go fuck itself. Including the commander in chief. Especially the commander in chief.

But even if I walked away from the base with middle fingers held high, I still didn’t have a job, and that sucked. The repercussions for this were going to haunt me for a while.

Sighing, I rubbed my eyes, got my butt out of bed, and pulled on a pair of sweats before shuffling into what passed for a kitchen in this shoebox studio apartment. I put on some coffee, then went to take a shower while it was brewing, and when I came back, it was ready.

Leaning against the counter and sipping my coffee, I was closer to awake now. Still hungover, but awake, and I tried to wrap my pounding head around everything. I had two months to get my ducks in a row and figure out my post-Navy life, and that was not nearly enough time.

It was also too fucking long because, oh, hey, I still had to take my ass to work five days a week until this was over, and two months of that was some bullshit.

Just let me stay home so I can figure out how to move on.

Another blurry memory filtered through the haze of my hangover, and I stared out the window at nothing.

Had… Had MA1 Parker really offered to get married?

And had I really been ready to take him up on it? Maybe I had been last night, but now that my head was clearer, I wasn’t so sure about this whole thing, and not just because Parker and I barely managed to tolerate each other at work.

I appreciated the offer, and it was incredibly tempting, but it would