Hunter swallowed. He looked at the list.
Hunter slid out from under the gear. He lay on the concrete, looking up. Bailey was still crouched, and now they were eye-level. The hangar’s emergency lights cast half of Bailey’s face in hard shadow. His jaw was set. His name tape read BAILEY . Hunter’s read HUNTER . No ranks out here. Just bodies and duties.
Active Duty. Pre-deployment inspection.
He picked up his wrench. There was a mission to fly. But for the first time in six months, the pre-deployment checklist felt finished. Active Duty - Hunter And Bailey -Gay- - Checked
Hunter lay back down, sliding under the landing gear. His heart was pounding against his ribs like a rotor out of balance. He pressed his thumb to the fresh checkmark, smearing the ink just a little.
“Bailey,” Hunter said.
Bailey didn’t blink. “Hunter.”
Bailey reached down. He didn’t offer a hand—that would have been too public, too obvious. Instead, he ran his thumb once, quickly, along the edge of Hunter’s jawline, wiping away a smudge of grease. The touch was electric, forbidden, and over in a heartbeat.
Fort Hood, Texas. 0300 hours.
Bailey stood. A ghost of a smile—the one Hunter had only seen twice before, once in a supply closet during a tornado warning, once in a hotel room on a three-day pass—flickered across his face. Hunter swallowed
Active duty. Hunter and Bailey. Gay. Checked.
Landing gear hydraulic pressure – CHECKED. Tire tread depth – CHECKED. Emergency flare inventory – CHECKED. Secondary comms test – CHECKED.
The hangar bay was a cathedral of shadows and steel, smelling of jet fuel, hydraulic fluid, and the metallic tang of a Texas night bleeding into dawn. Hunter was on his back, wedged under the fuselage of a C-130, a headlamp cutting a white beam across the belly of the beast. His checklist was smeared with grease, the ‘CHECKED’ box for the port landing gear still empty. He lay on the concrete, looking up
One line remained, handwritten in the margin in Bailey’s neat, cramped script.
Then he handed the pen back.