I'm Straight Right Page 3

  “One of these days, you’re going to have to tell me the story behind you two,” Marco said.

  Dean blinked. “There’s no...story. We’re friends. He’s my best friend.”

  “And all friends have stories. Hey, don’t worry about it, I was trying to give you a hard time, okay? Text me when you have a free minute later, alright? Maybe we can compare schedules and try for date five. Might be my lucky number,” Marco offered.

  “Yeah, I can do that. Maybe you can introduce me to something I haven’t had yet.”

  “That’ll be a feat. I’m pretty sure you’ve had everything possible.”

  Dean chuckled, letting the man get off the phone so he could face the rest of the day. He knew Marco was aiming toward something more serious between the two of them. Something that wasn’t just casual dating. The thing was, Dean wasn’t sure how he felt about that and kept putting off thinking about it too hard.

  He knew there was no point in continuing to hang onto the delusions about him and Sloane, which was why he’d forced himself to start dating again for the first time since he’d left for boot camp. On the other hand, some part of him wasn’t quite willing to let go just yet. In truth, he hadn’t expected to find someone like Marco when he’d put himself back on the market, and it was complicating things in Dean’s already cramped head.

  A familiar growl echoed down the hall. “Get the hell out of the way, Troy.”

  Troy sighed. “Sloane, c’mon, just...let me do this real quick.”

  “You can sign me in without asking me the same stupid questions you ask me every time. The ones I answer the same way every time. Just put in the same answers.”

  “That’s not how this works.”

  “Sure it is, or did you forget how to write?”

  Troy sighed. “Dean?”

  Dean chuckled, stepping out of his cubicle and into the main hallway. Troy stood under the shadow of Sloane’s hulking form. Troy was looking sufficiently annoyed while still managing to look unnerved. Dean was used to people being a little put off by Sloane, who was as scary acting as he was scary looking. When Dean had first spotted Sloane in his group at basic training, he’d thought the guy was the meanest son of a bitch Dean had ever seen and pitied the man who ended up partnered with him.

  Only for it to be him.

  Dean smirked. “Problems?”

  Troy huffed. “Can you deal with this?”

  Dean winked at Sloane. “Answer the nice man’s questions so we can get on with this.”

  Sloane rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and kept them there. “I’ve been sleeping fine. No weird pain or thoughts. My mood is the same as it’s always been, and no, I haven’t wanted to kill myself. Happy?”

  Troy perked up. “And have you had any changes to your diet we should know about?”

  “Yeah, I’m a fucking vegetarian now,” Sloane said.

  Troy looked down at his tablet, nodding. “Right, no changes there. Alright, then I’ll leave you in Dean’s capable hands and go busy myself as far from your evil glare as I can without getting my ass in trouble.”

  Dean glanced down the hall toward the front door of the clinic. “You mind sweeping?”

  Troy’s steps hesitated. “Again?”

  “I’ve already done it six times today, you’ve done it once,” Dean pointed out.

  “You and your obsession with keeping the sand out,” Troy huffed.

  Sloane closed his eyes, and Dean waited until Troy had hurried out of sight before speaking.

  “You know he’s just doing his job.”

  Sloane eyed him. “If something was different, I’d tell him. Don’t know why we have to do this every time I come in here.”

  “Because the military likes their lists, and they like their lists to be followed, or we get our asses chewed up one side and down the other.”

  “You could always fill it out for me. No one would know any different.”

  “Yes, but then how would I terrorize him and annoy you?”

  Sloane grunted. “Fine, mission accomplished.”

  Dean chuckled, motioning to the nearest curtained cubicle. “C’mon in.”

  Sloane walked to where Dean had indicated and began pulling at his clothes before Dean had drawn the curtains. Dean didn’t bat an eye, used to service members and their complete lack of aversion to nudity. Basic training destroyed the majority of whatever modesty a potential soldier might have, and deployment took care of the rest. Most of the soldiers he treated or looked over were no different from Sloane, stripping down to nothing without a thought as to who might be around. The privacy curtains the clinic had, were as far from their minds as it got.

  By the time Dean had drawn the curtain around the cubicle to seal the space off from the rest of the clinic, Sloane’s shirt was off and he was shimmying out of his pants. Dean realized he’d left his tablet back at the desk but shrugged it off. Even at first glance, he could tell not a whole lot had changed about Sloane since the last exam, and Dean would have heard about anything abnormal from Sloane’s lips beforehand.

  “At least you wore underwear this time,” Dean commented as he waited for Sloane to hop up on the table.

  Sloane smirked. “Wouldn’t want to make Troy feel bad again.”

  Dean rolled his eyes. “That’s my favorite thing about you, how humble you are.”

  “And you had me thinking it was my sunny personality.”

  If there were anything Dean could say about Sloane, it was that his friend possessed a great deal of self-awareness. Sloane knew he was a surly bastard, he just didn’t care. Yet, he also knew he wasn’t lacking in the looks department, but didn’t particularly care about that either. Despite his beautifully bronzed skin, a mixture of his time spent in the sun and his Latin blood, a musculature that was both impressive and yet not too much, and features that were rugged without being blocky, Sloane was never arrogant or stuck on himself. In truth, sometimes Dean wondered if Sloane was even aware of just how attractive he really was.

  Thankfully, in this setting, Dean was immune.

  Dean snagged Sloane’s arm, turning it so he could look at his forearm. “Got more done?”

  Sloane glanced down, blinking in confusion before nodding. “Oh, yeah, just some shading.”

  Sloane’s entire left arm was a canvas of ink. Dean had alternated between watching the tapestry of tattoos spread across his friends arm, to not seeing Sloane for days or even weeks at a time, and being surprised by the sudden appearance of another one. Sloane wasn’t a man for symbols, so most of his tattoos were animals, snakes twined around the barrel of a firing gun, tigers leaping from the depths of vibrant flames, a huge hawk materializing from thick clouds of smoke. Just about any majestic predator Dean could think of was there, starting just above Sloane’s wrist, and working their way up the rest of his arm and over his shoulder.

  “You’ve run out of arm,” Dean noted.

  “That’s why I got another one.”

  “Mmm, and yet you elected to go over your chest,” Dean pointed out.

  “I mean, there’s space there, it works,” Sloane said.

  Dean chuckled, shaking his head as he pressed his fingers to Sloane’s wrist and counted. He didn’t need to track the second hand of the clock over the bed, but he watched it anyway to be more precise than simply making a trained guess. Sloane remained still as Dean pressed his fingers beneath the man’s defined jaw, opened for Dean to inspect his mouth and throat, and allowed himself to be carefully manhandled while Dean checked him over.

  “Is this exam part of the list they love so much?” Sloane asked.

  Dean laughed softly, listening to Sloane’s breathing. “You know it.”

  Sloane rolled his eyes, waiting until Dean was done before speaking again. “Doesn’t inspire confidence, though, does it?”

  Dean looked up, bemused. “How so?”

  “Well, if their whole thing is making sure we eat right and do our workouts, why the constant checkups?”

  Dean chuckled. “Because General Winter loves his lists more than anyone, and he wants to make sure everyone is healthy.”

  Admittedly, Dean himself wondered about the checkups, which were required more often than Dean would have thought necessary. Then again, without the frequent checkups, he wouldn’t have caught the first sign of melanoma on a captain a couple of months back.

  “General Winter is just cautious,” Dean continued.

  “Some might call that paranoid,” Sloane said with a grin.

  Dean smirked. “Some, huh? Someone like you?”

  “I would never have such an unkind thought about our General.”

  “Just like you wouldn’t eat the last of my ice cream that I accidentally left in your freezer,” Dean snorted.

  “I’m telling you, there’s a thief on this base who’s out for nothing but ice cream...and cookies.”

  Dean looked up, eyes widening. “You’re the one who ate the bag of cookies off my counter? I thought I did a bit of sleepwalking or night eating and didn’t remember.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Sloane said in what Dean thought was the fakest of innocent voices.

  Dean scowled. “You’re a shit. I’m going to put your charts back and try to forget that you’re a dirty dessert thief. Get dressed, you animal.”

  Sloane’s chuckle followed him out of the room. “Yeah, but I’m your animal.”

  Didn’t Dean wish that were true?

  Sloane had dressed by the time he returned, and only the slightest flicker of regret entered the back of Dean’s mind when he saw. It was gone just like that, and he held out his hand to take Sloane’s arm once again.

  Dean looked him over. “Just come off a double?”

  “Shows, huh?”

&nb
sp; “A bit, yeah.”

  Sloane didn’t bat an eye when the needle drove beneath his skin. “Yeah, stuck with a jackass all night, too.”

  “You always say that. Simmons?”

  “Yeah. Jackass.”

  Dean chuckled. “Going back to sleep, then?”

  Sloane nodded. “I’ll get a few hours in, but then I’ve got the night to myself. You?”

  “If you can believe it, this will be my second day in a row with a normal, single shift.”

  Sloane snorted. “A miracle. Doing anything tonight?”

  “Mmm, wild orgy.”

  Sloane smirked. “Get all your slots filled?”

  “That’s kind of the point of an orgy.”

  “Alright, smartass.”

  Dean grinned, capping the injector. “No, got nothing to do, why?”

  “Maybe come on over, and we can watch some shitty action movie, drink beers and chill?”

  It had been a while since their last movie night. It was almost exactly as Sloane had detailed. The two of them found some movie, usually a bad one, and sat around, drinking beers idly and spending time together. The ritual had begun when the two of them had been on watch together, staring up at the sky and talking about their lives. When they’d graduated, it had become nights spent in the barracks, playing cards and talking. Now that they had their respective places, they could spend actual alone time together, doing absolutely nothing.

  And they were the highlight of Dean’s week.

  Dean winked, going to dispose of the injector. “It’s a date.”

  4

  Sloane

  Shuffling about in the small space that made up his kitchen, Sloane grabbed the pack of hamburger buns. As the patties sizzled away in the pan, he unwound the plastic bag and pulled out a few of the buns to spread a thin layer of butter on the inside of each. With that done, he dropped them in the other heated pan.

  He looked up at the sound of his door opening but didn’t bother to check. There were only a few people who had a key to his apartment, and out of the closest, there was only one person who would walk in unannounced.

  “Christ, that smells delicious,” Dean called, followed by the thump of his shoes being kicked off.

  Sloane sighed. “Put them...”

  “On the shoe rack, I know, I know,” Dean grumbled.

  Sloane chuckled as he listened to Dean continue to mutter under his breath. Having grown up in small, close quarters with three other people, Sloane had learned early on how important it was to keep everything tidy and organized. The less space used up, the more room there was, and that tidiness had been ingrained even further into his personality by the rigors of basic training, and then military life. Dean, however, was considerably more lax. While the man was meticulous and attentive to detail in his work, in his casual life, Dean was the sort of person who left clean laundry in a basket for a week straight, and his kitchen drawers were organized in a way that made sense only to him.

  Dean stomped into view, shaking a damp lock of blond hair free from his forehead. “Again, I say, that smells delicious.”

  Sloane glanced at him. “Raining?”

  “It was just a sprinkle at first, and then it decided to piss all over me, which was great.”

  Sloane snorted, plucking the toasted buns from the pan and laying them on plates. “You know where the towels are.”

  “Yeah, I’m not listening if I get your couch wet,” Dean huffed, turning out of sight and stomping off.

  Sloane shook his head as the man who probably didn’t weigh more than 160lbs somehow managed to make enough noise as someone twice his size. While Sloane had never worked alongside Dean in the field during their almost simultaneous deployment, he knew Dean could move with grace and a great degree of stealth. Yet, take him out of the field and put him in a casual setting, and the man stomped around like an ogre.

  As Sloane dropped the burgers onto the buns and grabbed the bag of chips, Dean reappeared. During the handful of times Dean had been over and ended up using one of his towels, the sight always amused Sloane. Due to his own size, Sloane made sure to buy the biggest and usually fluffiest towels he could find. They suited him, but on someone of Dean’s stature, they looked like blankets wrapped around him, or in this case, a cape that started as a cowl.

  Dean rubbed at his head vigorously. “I’m really surprised they haven’t yelled at me for my hair yet.”

  Sloane raised a brow. “I keep meaning to ask you who you’re bribing to let your hair grow more than a few inches, let alone even longer.”

  Dean shrugged. “I keep forgetting, and no one has corrected me on it yet. I think I’m the only guy on base that has actual hair instead of just the suggestion of hair.”

  “A suggestion, huh?”

  “I mean, it’s better than saying everyone else is wandering around with nothing more than peach fuzz,” Dean said.

  Sloane held out one of the plates. “That’s pretty heavy criticism coming from you. Especially since I distinctly remember a certain drunk medic telling me all about how he got into the military because he really liked men in uniform.”

  Dean hummed, curling his lip as he took the plate. “You’re not going to let me live that night down, are you?”

  “Not so long as I still have a functioning memory and mouth,” Sloane said with a grin.

  “Well, I guess I have no choice but to find a way to stop one or both of those things,” Dean said.

  Despite his smaller frame, Dean had a surprisingly strong tolerance to alcohol. In the few years Sloane had known the man, he could count the number of times he’d seen Dean more than buzzed on both hands, and he’d only seen him wasted the once. Sloane suspected it had only been the one time because that night had been so full of stories with which Sloane loved to regale him. Well, and some part of him wondered if perhaps Dean just hated the idea of Sloane seeming like that too.

  “And then I asked you how you manage to get through a normal day if you like men in uniform so much,” Sloane continued.

  Dean sighed, turning to walk away. “I hate you.”

  “And you said…”

  “Hate, hate, hate!”

  “That like a good little private, you stand at attention all day.”

  “Hate.”

  Sloane trailed behind Dean, still chuckling as they stepped into the living room. The apartment was the first place Sloane had ever been able to call his own. On most bases, he probably would have been out of luck finding a place on site. There were typically more soldiers than there were living spaces, and generally, those homes went to married servicemen. Fort Dale, however, wasn’t a densely populated base and possessed not just homes but apartments as well for its soldiers. There was enough space that Sloane was able to snatch one up for himself with little problem, save for all the tedious paperwork.

  The only downside for Sloane was that the place wasn’t all that large. Not that Sloane had a lot of things, but for someone his size, small spaces felt a little confining. Especially when he had to invest in a huge armchair and couch combo for him to be comfortable in his own home. His bedroom was no different, with the majority of the room taken up by a huge bed, for which he’d paid good money. Sloane hadn’t bothered with decorating much, a few pictures of his family lay scattered about, and a few posters of movies and sports teams he liked. The main focus in the living room was the huge TV and sound system, which he’d spent a great deal of money on so he could enjoy his time at home.

  And, well, he thought it added to the movie and game nights he and Dean shared.

  Dean flopped down on the couch, forced to scramble a bit as his plate almost tipped up, dumping its contents in his lap. Just as Dean was graceful and focused when on the job, so he was lurching and a little clumsy when he wasn't working. It was a strange dichotomy that most people didn’t get to see. Sloane wasn’t sure Dean was even aware of it, but his friend’s true personality didn’t tend to show itself until he was comfortable and away from prying eyes.

  “Please don’t spill shit on my cushions,” Sloane said, easing himself onto the couch with more grace.

  Dean held the plate out. “Not a single crumb or drop of grease has left the plate, see?”

  Sloane ignored him, powering up the TV. “You heard me.”