Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 70630 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 283(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70630 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 283(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Now here I was, back in the US, crashing on Sabrina’s couch, staring at the walls and wondering how I was going to function in the civilian world with no orders to guide me. I was more lost than I’d been during the first few days of boot camp. Many guys in my position found a job in security or applied for the police academy, but I was done carrying a gun every day.
I didn’t have a lot of other options though, not with only a high school education. I’d learned a hell of a lot of things in the last eight years, but marching twenty miles in the desert heat while carrying a hundred pounds of gear wasn’t a highly desirable job skill here in the regular world.
But one morning, while I was cleaning Sabrina’s apartment—partly because the lack of order was making me twitchy and partly because it was a small way to repay her kindness—realization struck. I could earn money as a housecleaner. I could make a room spotless, and I could do it fucking fast. That was one skill the Marines had taught me that was marketable in the civilian world. Cleaning houses wasn’t glamorous, but it would earn me some good, honest money.
2
Jeremy
Istood on the massive front lawn, watching movers carry the last of my boxes into my aunt and uncle’s house. Or rather, my house now, though I couldn’t imagine ever thinking of it that way. My lease had been up on the cabin I’d been renting, and I needed to be here to go through everything, so I was making the move.
I hadn’t visited the place in years, but the lawn was just as I remembered it. Huge magnolia trees dominated one side, and a large oak tree sat close to the road on the other. My aunt and uncle had also owned the lot behind them, and the backyard was nearly as large as the front, with a small apple orchard near the back fence and a cluster of spruce trees to one side. I’d spent as much time as I could hiding among those spruces when I was a kid, reading, building forts, and making up worlds where my mom was still alive and I was free to be myself.
The tall man who’d supervised the team of movers strode toward me while the other men hopped into the truck. “That’s the last of it.”
All my worldly possessions didn’t seem to amount to much when stacked in the large rooms of my new/old house. “Thanks. Do I pay you now?”
“The office will send a bill for the remainder. I just need your signature saying everything was delivered.”
I glanced at the clipboard in the man’s hand. The top page was a form with tiny type and a space marked with an “x” where I was supposed to sign. I knew I should look over it carefully. I could almost hear my best friend David scolding me for signing something I hadn’t read—David was a lawyer and a stickler for checking out the fine print. But David himself had recommended the moving company, so I scrawled my illegible signature on the line and thanked the man again.
I walked up the steps to the porch, then watched the moving truck until it disappeared down the street, anything to avoid facing the chaos inside. I watched people walking by with their dogs, children, or both. Across the street, a woman was being dragged along by an eager French bulldog. She waved, and I waved back. If I remembered correctly from a trip earlier that week to bring small boxes to the house, she lived a few houses down on the other side of the street.
A group of boys wearing backpacks walked by, laughing and pushing each other. They had probably just gotten off the school bus. What did all these people think of me, standing there staring across the largest front lawn in the neighborhood? Something inside me didn’t want to part with the lovely old house. It held good memories along with the bad. But like Thoreau, I’d gotten used to my small cabin in the woods, away from the bustle of people. Maybe the house would sell quickly, and I’d be able to pick out something that suited me better, a place where I could hide.
I could only imagine David’s reaction to that idea. For months, he’d been trying to make me go out more, asking questions like, “What kind of gay man spends his nights alone in a cabin surrounded by dead poets when he could be out getting laid?”
My kind did. Yes, I lamented the fact that it had been ages since my cock had enjoyed the feel of anything besides my own hand, but most of the time, getting laid felt like too much work. The men I met when I went out were typically not that appealing, either full of themselves or dumb as a stump. When I did go home with someone, they usually couldn’t kick me out fast enough once they’d shot their load. I never brought men back to my little cabin in the woods, at least not since I’d broken up with Silas the Asshole—my only long-term relationship and an utter failure. I’d never felt so naïve in my life, not even when I was a first-year PhD student who thought the merit of his work actually mattered.