Page 2 of Better Late Than Never

The single life could wait a little longer.

* * *

An hour after I left work, I was more optimistic that I had, in fact, made the right choice in taking orders to Spain. The dating/hookup pool was still discouraging, but the pool I was sitting beside? The one in the walled villa I was renting for a song out by the ocean in Sanlúcar de Barrameda? It was perfect.

I’d enjoyed a quick swim to unwind from a long day, and now I was relaxing in the shaded cabana with an ice-cold beer in my hand. The beautiful house, manicured garden, and turquoise swimming pool didn’t solve the issue of how to put myself out there in this country, but I really couldn’t complain.

Thumbing through one of the dating apps I’d found, I hemmed and hawed about how to do this. The only non-military profiles I’d found so far that indicated they spoke English were students at the nearby university in Cádiz.Waytoo young. Once I filtered out anyone under thirty, the well dried up substantially.

I sighed and put my phone down beside me on the table. Gazing out at the sparkling cerulean water, I took a pull from my beer. Maybe I needed to work a little harder on learning Spanish. The base had a few classes. The one I’d taken had been helpful for day-to-day life, but it hadn’t taught me much about connecting with men for sex or dating.

¿Cómo se dice, I want to try sucking dick?

The thought made me snort.

But then my gaze drifted back to my phone. Maybe I was going about this the wrong way. Maybe instead of figuring out how to approach guys, I should put myself out there and see if anyone came to me. Then I could follow their lead. Hell, I could come right out and say I was new to this, had never been with a man, and really wanted to find out what it was like.

In my job—both the military and as a physician—I’d always had the attitude of “take charge and get it done,” but maybe in this situation, I needed to fall back into the mindset I’d had as a medical student: when in doubt, defer to someone with more experience.

Fuck it. Why not?

I put my beer down and snatched up the phone again. I pulled up the app that had seemed the most promising. Or, well, the one that had seemed most intuitive to navigate, anyway. After a couple more second thoughts, I finally bit the bullet and made an account.

I was a free man.

And now, for the first time in my adult life, I was putting myself out there.

Please don’t let this blow up in my stupid face…

CHAPTER2

ALEX

God, these apps were trash.

Okay, that wasn’t entirely fair. They were great when I lived someplace where I was fluent in the common language, and where the people who spoke the same language as me weren’t all military or military-adjacent.

Rota… did not qualify aseitherof those things.

There were fewer than 10,000 Americans here, and a pretty good portion of those were dependents. Of the actual service members and civilian contractors, a whole lotlessthan 10,000 were both singleandgay or bi men. Of those vanishingly rare unicorns whowere, an irritating number were off limits because the Navy was a goddamned buzzkill sometimes.

Take, for example, the commanding officer of one of the airwings. He was jaw-droppingly hot—all the swagger and sexiness of a fighter pilot, and well into his silver fox era. Like me, he wasn’t out. The only reason I knew he was queer at all was because I’d run into him in, of all places, a club in Barcelona. That had been one of the hottest nights of my life, after which we’d sworn each other to secrecy, gone our separate ways, and never even let ourselves make eye contact in the produce aisle at the commissary. If anyone ever found out about that, our careers would bedone.

Fuck’s sake. Maybe I should’ve been an officer after all. At least then I could hook up with another officer.

Not that I made a habit of hooking up with anyone who wore a uniform. Though Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was a distant memory, it had been firmly in place when I’d first enlisted, and I was still spooked by the experiences of some friends who’d had bad experiences coming out in the post-DADT military. Most had been fine—I knew several who were quite openly married to same-sex partners without any fuss, including the CO of the hospital where I worked—but it had only taken a few to commit me to staying in the closet until I retired.

That commitment to keeping my sexuality and my personal life private had been galvanized last year. I’d had an ill-advised fuck-buddy-turned-boyfriend-I-guess arrangement with a civilian contractor for a little over a year before it had gone tits up. The less said aboutthatshitshow, the better, but it had definitely spooked me away from getting involved with guys on-base. Americans, anyway; the Spaniards all seemed happy to keep things discreet, and the American and Spanish forces—for all we shared a base—didn’t interact as much as people thought. So I could fuck my way through the Spanish Marines and no one in my chain of command would ever know.

Fine by me. Those guys werehot.

I glanced up from my phone to make sure no one had slipped into the waiting area while I’d had my nose buried in the app. Nope. Slow day in Radiology, which was never a bad thing. I’d spent enough time in combat zones to eagerly embrace the boredom of a lull, considering I knew all too well what the alternative was. Sitting here with my boots on my desk and a hookup app on my screen was not the worst way I could spend my day.

I could’ve done without the sexual frustration, though. At least when I was busy, I wasn’t thinking (much) about how empty my bed was these days. Some of that was my own fault; lately I hadn’t been putting a lot of effort into fishing in my very, very limited puddle. Some of it was… Well, that very limited puddle.

Eighteen more months, I reminded myself as I pointlessly scrolled the stupid app. Eighteen more months, and then I’d be retired. I’d be a civilian, and I’d be stateside, and I’d be?—

Whoa, wait, what the fuck?

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