Page 32 of Better Late Than Never

The train filled up quickly. Usually did on the weekends. Still, we found a pair of seats facing each other.

“Do you have any preference?” I gestured at the seats. “Moving forward or backward?”

He shrugged. “Nah. You?”

“Nope.” I took one of the seats, and though there was room on the overhead rack for both our backpacks, I kept mine at my feet. Connor did the same; couldn’t be too careful.

He settled into his seat, and we both played on our phones for a little while until the train started pulling out of the station.

Connor pocketed his phone and pressed back against his seat with a sigh. “This was a fun weekend, but I’m ready to head home.”

“Tired?”

He exhaled. “Just a bit. I’m getting too old for this.”

Laughing, I nodded. “I feel that. I usually go do tourist shit on the weekends instead of clubbing. It’s still tiring, but it doesn’t fuck up my sleep pattern quite as much.”

“Maybe I should try that.” Connor gave a soft, self-deprecating laugh. “Who knows? I could get lucky and meet some random English-speaking tourist on a guided tour.”

Jealousy flared hot in my chest. I wasn’t even surprised this time, and I didn’t have any trouble schooling my expression or my tone; practice makes perfect, apparently. “Stranger things have happened, right?”

“I mean…” He half-shrugged. “I have zero experience with meeting people as an adult, so it’s as good a place to start as any.”

“Right, you said you got married young.”

He laughed dryly, gazing out the window as the train picked up speed. “I got married young even by military standards.”

I straightened. “Oh yeah?”

“Uh-huh. We started dating when we were fifteen, had our first son during our senior year, and got married six months after we graduated.” He paused, then murmured, almost more to himself, “Waytoo fucking young.”

I whistled. “Jesus. But we all think we’re adults at that age. I look back at the version of myself who thought he was all badass on the way to boot camp, and I just think,you dumbass.”

Connor laughed with some more feeling, meeting my gaze again. “Yeah, I remember that from boot camp. All the guys in my company were exactly like that.”

“Not you?” I furrowed my brow. “And wait—boot camp? Were you prior enlisted?”

He nodded. “I was a teenager with a wife and a kid. I needed job security with health insurance, so… I enlisted. And no, I wasn’t one of the guys who thought I was hot shit and all grown up because they handed me a gun. I was still fucking terrified from when a hospital sent me home with a baby two days after I took a history midterm.” He huffed out a laugh. “Thatwas a humbling experience, let me tell you.”

“Oh my God.” I actually shuddered. “I panicked enough over those tests. A baby? When I still couldn’t parallel park to save my life? Fuck no.”

Connor’s laugh this time made my spine tingle. He was just gorgeous when he smiled. “I mean, I still can’t parallel park to save my life? But I survived the kid thing.” His expression turned a little sheepish. “Though… I was gone for some of it. Boot camp, then A-school. I, uh… I don’t think my wife ever forgave me for being gone when our second son was born.”

“It isn’t something you can control, though.”

“No, but I get it. She was stressed out just taking care of our almost-two-year-old. Then things got a little scary in the delivery room with Landon, and she was shaken up from that for a while, and…” He sighed. “She knew it wasn’t my fault that I was gone, but I think she still resented me for it.”

“That seems to happen a lot,” I said quietly. “I know people who tried to time their babies around deployments, but if the Navy changes its mind about something…”

“Right?” He pressed back against the seat and let his gaze drift out the window again, watching the scenery pass by as the train took us out of Sevilla. “When I enlisted, we figured it would be a six-month deployment every couple of years, you know? So maybe once during my whole four-year enlistment? But I ended up doing two twelve-month tours downrange during that time.”

I stared at him. “No shit?”

“No shit. I don’t know if it was just bad luck or what. The Navy needed corpsmen really badly in both Iraq and Afghanistan, so…”

“Wait, you were a corpsman?”

He turned a slight smile on me. “Well, yeah. Did you think I went from being an aircraft maintainer to a physician?”

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