The hangar was empty. The night crew was on break. The only witness was a sleeping loadmaster fifty yards away, earbuds in, dead to the world.
Hunter stared at it. His throat tightened. This was the part the manuals didn’t cover. The part that didn’t go into the official log. The part where two enlisted men, both gay, both active duty, both terrified of a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ world that had technically ended but never really left, had to decide if the thing between them was just deployment pressure or something that survived a C-130 flight into a combat zone. Active Duty - Hunter And Bailey -Gay- - Checked
Fort Hood, Texas. 0300 hours.
Then he handed the pen back.
“Talk to me, Bailey,” Hunter called out, his voice muffled by the landing strut. The hangar was empty
Bailey didn’t move. He just watched. Hunter felt the weight of that gaze—not a supervisor checking on a subordinate, but something older. Something that had survived two deployments, a dozen near-misses, and one night in a FOB barracks when the mortar alarm had turned into something else entirely. Hunter stared at it