BECKETT
I did not see her socially again for six days. Not for lack of effort.
I discovered her first name immediately, which she found less flattering than I expected when I finally admitted how much asking around had been required.
I invented reasons to cross ground I had no operational need to cross. She recognized every one. She let me do it anyway.
One night of both of us being alive had not meant she had chosen me. That came later. Slowly.
Coffee when neither of us had slept, grit in the last swallow. Arguments over routes.
A paperback she loaned me and then interrogated me about because she did not believe I had actually read it.
Her discovering that I hated olives and placing three on my plate whenever they appeared at chow.
Me learning that the formidable Lieutenant Curry hummed when she cleaned her weapon and denied it under direct questioning.
“You are humming.”
The slide was off her pistol and in the rag, the recoil spring laid out on the towel beside it. She did not look up. “I’m cleaning my weapon.”
“You are cleaning your weapon and humming.”
“That’s a serious allegation, Lieutenant. You want to put it in writing?”
She fitted the spring back without looking at it. Two bars later she was humming again.
The chow hall was where I learned we were not getting away with anything.
She came through the line on the fifth day and set three olives on my tray without breaking stride. Bleach and reheated eggs. Trays going into the rack like dropped rifles. One olive rolling against the tray divider and stopping.
I filed it as a private joke between two people in a room of four hundred. I was a competent officer at twenty-four and a slow study at everything else. A private joke performed daily in a dining facility is not a private joke. It is a broadcast with a very small vocabulary.
My platoon sergeant began finding reasons for me to walk the long side of the lot, which took me past the provost building. I assumed he was managing my time. He was managing my longing, which he had worked out inside a week and never mentioned, because he was better at his job than I was at mine.
There was no shortage of men who had noticed her. The version where I was the only one who saw her is flattering and false. A gunnery sergeant with eleven years on me made a habit of standing wherever she was standing. A major asked her to dinner in a tone that made it an order, until she answered in a tone that made it not one. She handled all of it the way she handled weather, and she never looked over to see whether I had watched.
That was the discipline. I was the one who looked.