Page 97 of Sanctuary

“That you’d never go out with someone like me, someone who’d been part of a cheating thing, just like your ex.” Gabe rolled her glass between her hands. “But I also thought that I couldn’t tell you about my past in case that meant you didn’t even want to be my friend.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t face that. Shay is my best friend, and I’m close to the other guys, but not in the same way. I’ve only ever shared my past with Shay…and then you. Because it felt so easy, so natural to talk to you.”

Lori gripped her glass tight. “But they all knew about you and the sergeant major’s wife, didn’t they?”

“Everyone on our base knew about that eventually, and that wasn’t because I was bragging about it. It’s not something I was ever proud of doing.”

“So why did you do it? Surely there were enough single women on base that you didn’t have to pursue a married woman. Don’t those vows mean anything to you?”

Gabe ran her hand through her hair and leaned forward. “I didn’t pursue her at all. I resisted her advances for?—”

“For how long, Gabe? How long was it before you hit fuck it and fucked her?” Lori pushed back in her chair, surprised by her colorful outburst. From Gabe’s expression, it was clear she shared her reaction. “Well, how long?” she asked when Gabe didn’t answer.

“About six weeks.” She paused, perhaps expecting another indignant interruption. “Every night, Cynthia sneaked into my tent, sometimes when I was already asleep, and tried to…y’know.”

“Seduce you?” Lori laughed at the images Gabe’s story was manifesting in her head. “A big tough soldier like yourself was intimidated into sex with the older woman? I assume she was older, just to be that little bit extra cliché.”

Gabe shook her head. “I wasn’t intimidated, no. She was a beautiful woman, and yes, she was a decade or so older than?—”

“How old were you?” Lori asked, remembering that details like that mattered. She should probably have made a checklist, but it wasn’t like she would actually forget any questions.

“It was five years ago,” Gabe said. “I was thirty-two.”

“Have you done it to anyone else since?”

“No.”

“Had you done it to anyone else before?”

“No.”

She thought about asking Gabe how many women she’d been with but decided she probably didn’t want to know, not really, and that didn’t have anything to do with the cheating aspect anyway. Lori took another sip of the neat vodka and wished that she’d asked Gabe to add some of the Coke Zero which was sitting on the top shelf. Everything that Gabe had said so far indicated that she wasn’t a serial cheat or homewrecker. She recalled her mom’s words, “I’m giving you context, sweetheart. These things don’t happen in a vacuum. Circumstances are very important.”

“Why did you eventually do it after six weeks?”

“The sergeant major was a piece of work. Sexist. Homophobic. Racist. He was a good ol’ boy from Birmingham, Alabama. He’d been messing with all of us for one reason or another?—”

“All of you?”

“Shay, Solo, Woody, and RB. But especially Shay. Being a Black, gay woman, she represented everything he hated.” Gabe put her drink on the table. When she sat back, her fists were balled so tight her knuckles went white, and her jaw clenched and unclenched repeatedly.

“You couldn’t report him?”

Gabe gave a small laugh. “Not really. Not if we didn’t want to be shipped off to shit duty in BFE. But we supported each other, and we were handling it.”

“But?” Lori edged forward on her seat, gripped by Gabe’s tale and torn between wanting to hear it and dreading what Gabe was about to say.

“He went too far with Shay.” Gabe glanced over at Lori. “I’d rather not share the details. It’s not my story to tell. Suffice to say, it was bad.”

Lori held up her hand. “Of course not.” She’d seen far too much cruelty over the years, and all of it stayed with her in vivid technicolor; selfishly, she didn’t want Shay’s experience forever in her mind.

“I didn’t hold any power to do anything about it outright. None of us did. So I did the only thing that I could to hurt him. That night, and every night for three months, when Cynthia came into my tent, I gave her exactly what she asked for.”

“Why did she choose you?”

Gabe shrugged. “I never asked her.”

“And he found out somehow?”

Gabe shook her head. “He was too self-absorbed to have suspected, and he’d probably never have found out. Which was no good to Cynthia, who was doing it for the same reason I was in the end. To hurt him. So she told him. Everything. How often. How long. How many. How good. All of it.”

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