Until the World Stops - L.A. Witt Page 0,82

at least be consistent and do the same for a man violating the actual regulation against adultery.

I could. I was tempted.

But I didn’t and I wouldn’t.

The guy had a wife and kids. His wife couldn’t stand him, and for all I knew, she was cheating on him too. What I did know was that she’d lost her job recently thanks to the pandemic, and she’d struggled to find work in the first place because, like many military spouses, she moved around so much that employers didn’t want to hire her. If Chief got booted out of the Navy, she and her kids would lose their only income and their health insurance. She probably wouldn’t even be able to afford to divorce his slimy, cheating ass, which I’d suspected for a long time she was waiting to do after he retired so she’d get part of his retirement. That was kind of how divorces worked in the military. It wasn’t right, but it was how it played out, especially for spouses who’d sacrificed years of earning potential by bouncing from entry level job to entry level job while the service member transferred all over the place. Especially for those in our rate, who rotated overseas and back every three or four years.

So if I pulled the trigger and showed the command proof that Chief was committing adultery, it was quite possible I’d be fucking over his family. And maybe she was as awful as he was and they deserved each other and everything they did to each other. I had no idea. I just knew that I couldn’t make the decision to kill his career and add to his family’s misery. My entire chain of command deserved to be professionally fucked over the same way they’d fucked over Tristan, but…their families.

Goddammit. No wonder I was never going to climb the ranks in the military. I actually had a conscience and didn’t believe in clawing my way to the top on the backs of other people.

And I’d signed up for another six years of this shit? Five of which I still had to serve? Hell, even more than that—now that I’d already served beyond the ten-year mark, and my current enlistment would take me to sixteen, there was no point in getting out before twenty. Might as well stick it out to retirement.

Ugh. That thought exhausted me. One more year sounded like too much. Stay in to twenty? Fuck.

At least I wouldn’t be at this base for much longer. Transfers were on hold right now thanks to the pandemic, but sooner or later, people would start PCSing again.

With any luck, my next command would be better than this one.

But after over a decade of the Navy’s bullshit, I wasn’t holding my breath.

Chapter 22

Tristan

I had to get out of this house and away from Casey.

It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling, just not one I was used to anymore. It felt weird. Worse than it had been before when we’d just been two guys who didn’t like each other trying like hell to live together.

Because I did like him now. I liked him a lot. I wanted to be close to him, touching him, sleeping next to him, killing time by playing board games with him… It wasn’t that I wanted to be away from him. I just couldn’t handle being around him now that things were so tense and weird. Not even when I wanted to be there for him while his mom was sick three thousand miles away, or when I wanted to say “fuck it” and jump back into bed with him or just talk about something stupid so things would feel normal for a while.

Goddammit. How did we go from something that miserable to something that good to something this miserable?

It didn’t matter. We had. And I needed to be someplace else for a little while.

I didn’t have a lot of money, and I really couldn’t afford to be spending it, but one fast food meal wouldn’t break the bank. After double-checking my account to make sure I actually had enough and my debit card wouldn’t embarrassingly decline on such a miniscule purchase, I slipped out of the house, got in my truck, and left.

I wasn’t all that hungry, but I swung into the Dairy Queen drive-thru, ordered a burger, some cheese curds, and a blizzard, and parked in the empty parking lot. With the window open and the engine off, I opened the bag, and…

Damn. This wasn’t the same without