Homecoming - Book Two: Twenty-one Guns - I Tell Myself I'm Moving On, But I'm Stumbling
Title: Homecoming - Book 2 - Twenty-one Guns
Author: escapes
Artist: solostrightnow
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I don't own them, just the order the words are strung together in.
Characters/Pairings: luke/noah
Word Count: book 2: 26k plus Total: 60k
Warnings:You are going to have to trust me. Be warned that there is angst. Lots of it. i can't give you more without completely ruinding the story.
Spoilers: None
Summary:Sometimes the hardest battle in the war is finding your way back home.
Author’s Notes: Thanks for all your patience as I finished. In the course of writing this, I started a new job in a city an hour and a half away from where I live and I've been doing the worlds slowest move on record on my days off. And there was a trip and other stuff in there, so just...thanks for not yelling at me to get it done. Well, much anyway. =)
Special thanks to noelleleithefor the betas. I appreciate so much you managed it in the midst of everything else you have going on.
Link to Story Master Post: Book One
Link to Art Master Post: Click here for the awesome
The silence is immediate as everyone takes in the sight of Noah standing in the kitchen. It's shattered, literally, by the stack of plates that Luke is holding crashing to the floor from Luke's nerveless fingers. Everyone flinches and Ethan stares at his brother, wide-eyed, and then Noah.
Noah only has eyes for Luke and he has to restrain himself from walking over and plucking Luke out of the shards of plates that are at his feet and carrying him out of there in his arms like something out of the climactic scene of An Officer and A Gentleman.
Ethan is the first person to go into motion and rockets towards Noah, ignoring Lily's calls to watch out for pieces of plate and jumps towards Noah, who manages to crouch down enough to catch Ethan before he lands.
"Noah! I made a wish on my birfday fer you to come back and didn't tell anyone so it would come true! It worked!"
Noah looks down at Ethan in his arms and swallows down the urge to say 'you've grown so much since the last time I saw you'. He'd always hated that when he was a kid, so instead he hugs Ethan close to him. "Thank you for using your birthday wish on me. I know how important those are."
Ethan grins at Noah and pats his little fingers over the ribbon bars and medals on Noah's uniform. "Welcome!"
That seems to be the cue for everyone else to surround Noah and smother him in hugs and kisses (Emma, Lily, Faith and Natalie) and pats on the back (Holden). It's a few minutes of chaos until they move back enough that he can breathe and Noah notices that Luke is gone.
Emma pats the side of Noah's face. "He's probably down at the pond. He goes there a lot when he needs to get some air. Go on up to your room and change. We'll save dinner for you both."
Noah hugs her again, smelling the aroma of fresh baking clinging to her like perfume. He quickly makes his way up the stairs and into the room that had been temporarily his and now stored most of his stuff left behind when he'd enlisted.
Looking around, Noah can see that a lot of it has been unpacked by Emma, just waiting for him to come home and occupy the room. He swallows the lump in his throat as his eyes fall on the quilt spread over the bed. It's a pattern of blues and greens, dark brown and sandy blonde colors. Noah runs his fingertips over the quilted lines and to him it looks like a repeating pattern of the colors of him and Luke circling endlessly around each other. He touches it again and then forces himself to pull away and change. He thinks about going into his suit bag to grab newer clothes, but Emma has hung up the clothes he'd had boxed up and instead he slips into worn in jeans, a t-shirt and a plaid button up.
He sees the black running shoes he'd used for his shifts at Java sitting at the bottom of the closet and slides his feet into them, before making his way downstairs and out the back door as Holden cleans up the plates and Emma finishes dinner. His stomach growls as he catches a whiff of her sweet potato casserole and the cinnamon of oatmeal raisin cookies, but ignores it and pushes out the screen door to find Luke.
When he comes close enough to the pond, he sees Luke sanding at the edge, looking over the water. Walking up behind him, Noah stops a few feet away and clears his throat, feeling like the awkward boy that had left this farm two years ago all over again. "I didn't know. Up until I asked to bring Tony home I didn't know what had happened here."
Luke keeps looking over the water. "I know. When Reg called me to tell me about Tony, I thought maybe you might be the one to bring him back here, but then I thought no, McLane would probably talk you out of it. I'm the one who threatened McLane with the mother of all lawsuits and part of my conditions not to sue was that you didn't get told until it was unavoidable."
"What were the others?" Some Noah knows the one Luke mentioned for sure and others he has his suspicions on.
"You get assigned duty with McLane and they don't ship you back over to Afghanistan for them to finish the job of killing you. That you don't know what happened and that I got to see you, even if you were injured and unconscious."
Noah moves closer, hearing the raw note in Luke's quiet voice. "I thought until they told me that you were there, that the bits of memory I had of you in the hospital room were my subconscious putting you there because I wanted to see you so damn badly."
Luke's head turns to look at him and Noah has to stop himself from stepping back at the emotion that he sees in Luke's eyes. "Then why did you leave me in the first place?" Luke wraps his arms around himself. "You left me here, expecting me to just be okay with not having you here, to being the invisible man in your life that no one could know about. You left me here knowing that if you weren't ever going to come back alive, I would be the one that was notified of that." Luke turns around fully to face Noah, his face tight and his voice raw. "You. Left. Me." With each word he pushes Noah, shoving him backwards like he can shove Noah out of his life the way he felt Noah did to him.
Noah silently takes the shoves that Luke is doling out, until the last one pushes hard on still healing scars and he flinches and gasps before he can help it.
Luke pulls up short and stares at Noah, wide-eyed at himself for losing control like that. Noah ignores the lingering pain in his side and gives in to his own loss of control, reaching out to pull Luke against him and wrapping his arms around the man that is everything Noah wanted to make himself worthy of deserving when he'd enlisted.
Holding tight to Luke as he struggles, Noah can hear Luke's breath speeding up and then hitching as Noah keeps saying softly only two things over and over. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry", until he feels Luke break wide open in his arms and gasping breaths turn to sobs that carry and echo over the pond. Noah tightens his grip and lowers both of them to the ground, where he can wrap Luke in comfort from head to toe.
When Noah's voice is hoarse from whispering so much and Luke's breath has steadied to just the occasional stuttered inhale, Noah moves them so his back is propped against a tree trunk and Luke is curled between Noah's outstretched legs, his head pillowed on Noah's chest. Absentmindedly, Noah is combing his fingers through Luke's hair and just reveling in being close to each other.
He knows they have a hell of a lot of talking to do and probably, if they're smart, appointments to see a counsellor together, but right now Noah feels like everything is right for the first time in a long, long time. From the way that Luke is bonelessly leaning into him, Noah thinks Luke feels the same way.
He doesn't want to break the peace that has wrapped around them, but Noah needs to know. "Luke? Why didn't you ever write me?"
The bonelessness ends abruptly as Luke takes a breath and starts to pull away. Refusing to let him move, Noah tightens his grip on Luke. "No, stay there."
Luke gives up struggling and leans back against Noah. "It's not like I set out to not write you."
Noah can feel Luke fidgeting with the buttons on his shirt, something he only does when he's nervous. "So what happened to make it turn out like that?" He's careful to keep his voice as neutral as possible, knowing if he sounds like he's accusing Luke of something that things could go south quickly.
"Every time I started to write you back after getting one of your letters, one of two things would happen. I'd edit myself and my feelings out of the letter so much that it ended up reading like the yearly letter you were forced to write to your great-aunt Maude who smelled like mothballs and cats, or…"
When the pause stretches on, Noah scratches his fingertips over the nape of Luke's neck, hearing him sigh at the familiar touch. "Or what?"
"Or I'd end up writing the things I would be thinking after watching the news and hearing of all the casualties in Afghanistan, or in the middle of the night when I'd get woken up by nightmares of you dy…anyway, the things that would come out of me in those letters scared me."
Noah feels a pang of sympathy, knowing he'd had his own dark thoughts about Luke when months went by with no word from the one person he'd wanted to hear from most. "Like what?"
"Like wishing that I'd reject my kidney and you'd find out and not be able to come back here and see me and that maybe that would let you feel just a little of how I felt all the time without you. Charming, huh? I try to be a good person most of the time, but sometimes I think there’s more of my bio-dad in me than I realize."
Noah wraps his arms around Luke tightly, his heart speeding up at the idea of Luke rejecting his kidney and the dark, dark thoughts that had led Luke to compare himself to his bio-dad, who by all accounts from everyone who had talked about him to Noah, was not a good man. "You are nothing like him, Luke. We were both dealing with this situation and everything that happened to us before I enlisted in different ways."
Noah pauses, wondering if he has the right to ask this. "I want to read them."
Luke shakes his head against Noah's chest. "Can't. I burned them. After..."
"All of them?" Noah knows that people do strange things when they're grieving, but he feels a little stunned that Luke had burned all the letters he'd spent so much time writing to him.
Luke shakes his head again. "No. Just mine."
Something Aaron said on the drive comes back to Noah. "Aaron said you disappeared for a day and came back with a burn on your hand. Was that what you were doing?"
"That happened right here at the pond after I got back. I was in Chicago. I needed to find you, some piece of you I could see and touch that wasn't wrapped in ghosts of us being in love and happy. So I went to the last place I saw you, first the hotel room and then the street you drove away on." He pauses and Noah knows he's not going to like what's going to come out of Luke's mouth next. "And then I went into a bar."
"Luke!" He knows using that tone is probably not the best thing to do right now, but he can't help the instinctive reaction to that word coming out of Luke's mouth.
"I didn't drink. I really, really wanted to, but I knew if I started I wouldn't stop, and you deserved better than a drunk and belligerent asshole at your funeral. I'd looked Faith in the eyes just after I'd been told and she'd asked me not drink and I told her I wouldn't. It was those two things that stopped me.
“When I got back from seeing you at the hospital, I came back here and talked to my Grandmother and the next morning I left for a treatment center. I wasn't going to be any good for you or my family if I didn't get myself to a place where my first thought when things go wrong isn't to drink."
Noah rests his forehead on the top of Luke's head, closing his eyes and taking a few deep breaths. "I'm glad you got help, but I'm so sorry it was because of me that you had to."
Luke raises his hand and wraps his fingers around the back of Noah's neck and squeezing it, all without moving from his place against Noah. "This is Oakdale, Noah. Bad things happen here sometimes and it was probably inevitable that something was going to force my hand into getting help at some point."
"And how do you feel now?"
Noah hears Luke let out a long breath. "Calmer. More focused. I don't feel like I need to fight so hard to be heard and recognized anymore.” He falls quiet for a moment, and Noah feels him tense. “How about you? Are you getting what you need out of the Army?"
Noah thinks about the answer to that for a minute. "I feel like…I've grown up a lot in the past two years.” The words come more easily than he expected. “I know more of who I am beyond being gay and wanting to be a director. I've always thought I could lead people, like a film crew, but now I know I can. I've learned to take responsibility for my choices, but not for the bad choices of others. The Army's version of therapy through war may be a little more heavy handed than where you were, but somehow it's worked on me."
Luke relaxes back against Noah. "Good. I'm not going to say I'm glad you enlisted, but I'm glad you're getting what you need out of it."
They're both quiet for a few minutes, just enjoying being in each other's company. Luke pulls away with a sigh and looks at Noah, "We should get inside and have some dinner. I need to go over to Tony's mom’s house and see how Reg is holding up."
Luke gets to his feet and holds out a hand for Noah to grab and Noah rises and looks down at Luke in the fading daylight. "I know it may be too soon, but I can't help it."
He cups Luke's face with his hands and swallows the gasp of surprise with his lips gently touching Luke's. He pulls away a little, inadvertently copying their first kiss, before their lips meet with more intent.
Luke responds wholeheartedly and it's only when spots are dancing in front of both of their eyes from lack of oxygen that they pull away. Luke smiles with his kiss-swollen lips and leads Noah by the hand back to the farmhouse for dinner.
Noah enjoys the feel of Luke's hand in his as he walks beside him. "I'm supposed to meet Tony's family at the funeral home tomorrow to hand over his personal effects. Do you think she'd mind if I came with you? I'd like to see Reg as well. I assume he and Tony were back on again?"
Luke nods as he leads them into the porch. "Yeah. They got back together shortly after you left. Reg had gotten out of the whole party scene when he wasn't with Tony and he put his foot down when they got back together about cutting back and concentrating on each other and their education. But even with that, Tony was struggling with staying focused with all the partying going on around him. His grandfather, you remember Merle Jenkins from the next farm over? He's Tony's grandfather and he suggested that if Tony wasn't ready for college, that maybe enlisting would give him some time to grow up,. Plus he could earn money to go back to school while he was at it."
Noah nods. "I remember Mr. Jenkins. His wife is quite the talker."
Luke chuckles as they enter the kitchen and Luke pulls the warm plates out of the oven, thankful that if there is one thing that his grandma has a lot of, it's plates to feed people on. "Yeah, she gives Natalie a run for her money some days. Mr. Jenkins was really good to me when everything happened. He runs the V.F.W. here and he helped me get in contact with the family of the man you were mistaken for and I think they're probably still scratching their heads why so many flowers and donations to the charity they requested on the obituary came from this town.”
Noah plays with his fork as Luke sets down a plate in front of him. "Sam was a good guy. He and Jeff Davis and I were a patrol team, I… I miss them. A lot."
Luke sits across from Noah and reaches out a hand to put it over Noah's, his eyes shining with sympathy. "I'd like to hear about them sometime. When you're ready."
Noah turns his hand and squeezes Luke's fingers. "I'd like that."
They both tuck into the dinner Emma had left warming for them. Noah tries not to make inappropriate noises over how good the food is, but when he sees Luke chuckling into his plate, Noah only shrugs and at least tries to keep them to a dull roar.
Once they're done eating and Noah has made Emma blush and beam over his compliments to her cooking, Noah hesitates at the butcher block island in the kitchen, looking at Luke, who is taking a casserole out of the fridge that Emma had made for Tony's family. "Luke? When I change into my uniform, I'm on duty. I don't want you to get the wrong idea when I can't …"
Luke smiles as he sets the container down. "I know. Just don't take it the wrong way when I steer clear of you at the house. The last thing that Reg needs to see is me temporarily getting my soldier back when he's losing his forever."
Noah reaches out to pull Luke in for another kiss before he goes back into uniform. When he draws away, he takes a breath and runs the pad of his thumb over Luke’s damp lower lip. "Okay, tell me to go upstairs."
"Go upstairs."
"Mean it."
"Go upstairs. I mean it."
Noah mock winces when the command is followed with a finger poking into the center of his chest. "Ow. Okay, I'm going, I'm going."
Would You Lie With Me & Just Forget The World?
Author: escapes
Artist: solostrightnow
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I don't own them, just the order the words are strung together in.
Characters/Pairings: luke/noah
Word Count: book 2: 26k plus Total: 60k
Warnings:You are going to have to trust me. Be warned that there is angst. Lots of it. i can't give you more without completely ruinding the story.
Spoilers: None
Summary:Sometimes the hardest battle in the war is finding your way back home.
Author’s Notes: Thanks for all your patience as I finished. In the course of writing this, I started a new job in a city an hour and a half away from where I live and I've been doing the worlds slowest move on record on my days off. And there was a trip and other stuff in there, so just...thanks for not yelling at me to get it done. Well, much anyway. =)
Special thanks to noelleleithefor the betas. I appreciate so much you managed it in the midst of everything else you have going on.
Link to Story Master Post: Book One
Link to Art Master Post: Click here for the awesome
The silence is immediate as everyone takes in the sight of Noah standing in the kitchen. It's shattered, literally, by the stack of plates that Luke is holding crashing to the floor from Luke's nerveless fingers. Everyone flinches and Ethan stares at his brother, wide-eyed, and then Noah.
Noah only has eyes for Luke and he has to restrain himself from walking over and plucking Luke out of the shards of plates that are at his feet and carrying him out of there in his arms like something out of the climactic scene of An Officer and A Gentleman.
Ethan is the first person to go into motion and rockets towards Noah, ignoring Lily's calls to watch out for pieces of plate and jumps towards Noah, who manages to crouch down enough to catch Ethan before he lands.
"Noah! I made a wish on my birfday fer you to come back and didn't tell anyone so it would come true! It worked!"
Noah looks down at Ethan in his arms and swallows down the urge to say 'you've grown so much since the last time I saw you'. He'd always hated that when he was a kid, so instead he hugs Ethan close to him. "Thank you for using your birthday wish on me. I know how important those are."
Ethan grins at Noah and pats his little fingers over the ribbon bars and medals on Noah's uniform. "Welcome!"
That seems to be the cue for everyone else to surround Noah and smother him in hugs and kisses (Emma, Lily, Faith and Natalie) and pats on the back (Holden). It's a few minutes of chaos until they move back enough that he can breathe and Noah notices that Luke is gone.
Emma pats the side of Noah's face. "He's probably down at the pond. He goes there a lot when he needs to get some air. Go on up to your room and change. We'll save dinner for you both."
Noah hugs her again, smelling the aroma of fresh baking clinging to her like perfume. He quickly makes his way up the stairs and into the room that had been temporarily his and now stored most of his stuff left behind when he'd enlisted.
Looking around, Noah can see that a lot of it has been unpacked by Emma, just waiting for him to come home and occupy the room. He swallows the lump in his throat as his eyes fall on the quilt spread over the bed. It's a pattern of blues and greens, dark brown and sandy blonde colors. Noah runs his fingertips over the quilted lines and to him it looks like a repeating pattern of the colors of him and Luke circling endlessly around each other. He touches it again and then forces himself to pull away and change. He thinks about going into his suit bag to grab newer clothes, but Emma has hung up the clothes he'd had boxed up and instead he slips into worn in jeans, a t-shirt and a plaid button up.
He sees the black running shoes he'd used for his shifts at Java sitting at the bottom of the closet and slides his feet into them, before making his way downstairs and out the back door as Holden cleans up the plates and Emma finishes dinner. His stomach growls as he catches a whiff of her sweet potato casserole and the cinnamon of oatmeal raisin cookies, but ignores it and pushes out the screen door to find Luke.
When he comes close enough to the pond, he sees Luke sanding at the edge, looking over the water. Walking up behind him, Noah stops a few feet away and clears his throat, feeling like the awkward boy that had left this farm two years ago all over again. "I didn't know. Up until I asked to bring Tony home I didn't know what had happened here."
Luke keeps looking over the water. "I know. When Reg called me to tell me about Tony, I thought maybe you might be the one to bring him back here, but then I thought no, McLane would probably talk you out of it. I'm the one who threatened McLane with the mother of all lawsuits and part of my conditions not to sue was that you didn't get told until it was unavoidable."
"What were the others?" Some Noah knows the one Luke mentioned for sure and others he has his suspicions on.
"You get assigned duty with McLane and they don't ship you back over to Afghanistan for them to finish the job of killing you. That you don't know what happened and that I got to see you, even if you were injured and unconscious."
Noah moves closer, hearing the raw note in Luke's quiet voice. "I thought until they told me that you were there, that the bits of memory I had of you in the hospital room were my subconscious putting you there because I wanted to see you so damn badly."
Luke's head turns to look at him and Noah has to stop himself from stepping back at the emotion that he sees in Luke's eyes. "Then why did you leave me in the first place?" Luke wraps his arms around himself. "You left me here, expecting me to just be okay with not having you here, to being the invisible man in your life that no one could know about. You left me here knowing that if you weren't ever going to come back alive, I would be the one that was notified of that." Luke turns around fully to face Noah, his face tight and his voice raw. "You. Left. Me." With each word he pushes Noah, shoving him backwards like he can shove Noah out of his life the way he felt Noah did to him.
Noah silently takes the shoves that Luke is doling out, until the last one pushes hard on still healing scars and he flinches and gasps before he can help it.
Luke pulls up short and stares at Noah, wide-eyed at himself for losing control like that. Noah ignores the lingering pain in his side and gives in to his own loss of control, reaching out to pull Luke against him and wrapping his arms around the man that is everything Noah wanted to make himself worthy of deserving when he'd enlisted.
Holding tight to Luke as he struggles, Noah can hear Luke's breath speeding up and then hitching as Noah keeps saying softly only two things over and over. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry", until he feels Luke break wide open in his arms and gasping breaths turn to sobs that carry and echo over the pond. Noah tightens his grip and lowers both of them to the ground, where he can wrap Luke in comfort from head to toe.
When Noah's voice is hoarse from whispering so much and Luke's breath has steadied to just the occasional stuttered inhale, Noah moves them so his back is propped against a tree trunk and Luke is curled between Noah's outstretched legs, his head pillowed on Noah's chest. Absentmindedly, Noah is combing his fingers through Luke's hair and just reveling in being close to each other.
He knows they have a hell of a lot of talking to do and probably, if they're smart, appointments to see a counsellor together, but right now Noah feels like everything is right for the first time in a long, long time. From the way that Luke is bonelessly leaning into him, Noah thinks Luke feels the same way.
He doesn't want to break the peace that has wrapped around them, but Noah needs to know. "Luke? Why didn't you ever write me?"
The bonelessness ends abruptly as Luke takes a breath and starts to pull away. Refusing to let him move, Noah tightens his grip on Luke. "No, stay there."
Luke gives up struggling and leans back against Noah. "It's not like I set out to not write you."
Noah can feel Luke fidgeting with the buttons on his shirt, something he only does when he's nervous. "So what happened to make it turn out like that?" He's careful to keep his voice as neutral as possible, knowing if he sounds like he's accusing Luke of something that things could go south quickly.
"Every time I started to write you back after getting one of your letters, one of two things would happen. I'd edit myself and my feelings out of the letter so much that it ended up reading like the yearly letter you were forced to write to your great-aunt Maude who smelled like mothballs and cats, or…"
When the pause stretches on, Noah scratches his fingertips over the nape of Luke's neck, hearing him sigh at the familiar touch. "Or what?"
"Or I'd end up writing the things I would be thinking after watching the news and hearing of all the casualties in Afghanistan, or in the middle of the night when I'd get woken up by nightmares of you dy…anyway, the things that would come out of me in those letters scared me."
Noah feels a pang of sympathy, knowing he'd had his own dark thoughts about Luke when months went by with no word from the one person he'd wanted to hear from most. "Like what?"
"Like wishing that I'd reject my kidney and you'd find out and not be able to come back here and see me and that maybe that would let you feel just a little of how I felt all the time without you. Charming, huh? I try to be a good person most of the time, but sometimes I think there’s more of my bio-dad in me than I realize."
Noah wraps his arms around Luke tightly, his heart speeding up at the idea of Luke rejecting his kidney and the dark, dark thoughts that had led Luke to compare himself to his bio-dad, who by all accounts from everyone who had talked about him to Noah, was not a good man. "You are nothing like him, Luke. We were both dealing with this situation and everything that happened to us before I enlisted in different ways."
Noah pauses, wondering if he has the right to ask this. "I want to read them."
Luke shakes his head against Noah's chest. "Can't. I burned them. After..."
"All of them?" Noah knows that people do strange things when they're grieving, but he feels a little stunned that Luke had burned all the letters he'd spent so much time writing to him.
Luke shakes his head again. "No. Just mine."
Something Aaron said on the drive comes back to Noah. "Aaron said you disappeared for a day and came back with a burn on your hand. Was that what you were doing?"
"That happened right here at the pond after I got back. I was in Chicago. I needed to find you, some piece of you I could see and touch that wasn't wrapped in ghosts of us being in love and happy. So I went to the last place I saw you, first the hotel room and then the street you drove away on." He pauses and Noah knows he's not going to like what's going to come out of Luke's mouth next. "And then I went into a bar."
"Luke!" He knows using that tone is probably not the best thing to do right now, but he can't help the instinctive reaction to that word coming out of Luke's mouth.
"I didn't drink. I really, really wanted to, but I knew if I started I wouldn't stop, and you deserved better than a drunk and belligerent asshole at your funeral. I'd looked Faith in the eyes just after I'd been told and she'd asked me not drink and I told her I wouldn't. It was those two things that stopped me.
“When I got back from seeing you at the hospital, I came back here and talked to my Grandmother and the next morning I left for a treatment center. I wasn't going to be any good for you or my family if I didn't get myself to a place where my first thought when things go wrong isn't to drink."
Noah rests his forehead on the top of Luke's head, closing his eyes and taking a few deep breaths. "I'm glad you got help, but I'm so sorry it was because of me that you had to."
Luke raises his hand and wraps his fingers around the back of Noah's neck and squeezing it, all without moving from his place against Noah. "This is Oakdale, Noah. Bad things happen here sometimes and it was probably inevitable that something was going to force my hand into getting help at some point."
"And how do you feel now?"
Noah hears Luke let out a long breath. "Calmer. More focused. I don't feel like I need to fight so hard to be heard and recognized anymore.” He falls quiet for a moment, and Noah feels him tense. “How about you? Are you getting what you need out of the Army?"
Noah thinks about the answer to that for a minute. "I feel like…I've grown up a lot in the past two years.” The words come more easily than he expected. “I know more of who I am beyond being gay and wanting to be a director. I've always thought I could lead people, like a film crew, but now I know I can. I've learned to take responsibility for my choices, but not for the bad choices of others. The Army's version of therapy through war may be a little more heavy handed than where you were, but somehow it's worked on me."
Luke relaxes back against Noah. "Good. I'm not going to say I'm glad you enlisted, but I'm glad you're getting what you need out of it."
They're both quiet for a few minutes, just enjoying being in each other's company. Luke pulls away with a sigh and looks at Noah, "We should get inside and have some dinner. I need to go over to Tony's mom’s house and see how Reg is holding up."
Luke gets to his feet and holds out a hand for Noah to grab and Noah rises and looks down at Luke in the fading daylight. "I know it may be too soon, but I can't help it."
He cups Luke's face with his hands and swallows the gasp of surprise with his lips gently touching Luke's. He pulls away a little, inadvertently copying their first kiss, before their lips meet with more intent.
Luke responds wholeheartedly and it's only when spots are dancing in front of both of their eyes from lack of oxygen that they pull away. Luke smiles with his kiss-swollen lips and leads Noah by the hand back to the farmhouse for dinner.
Noah enjoys the feel of Luke's hand in his as he walks beside him. "I'm supposed to meet Tony's family at the funeral home tomorrow to hand over his personal effects. Do you think she'd mind if I came with you? I'd like to see Reg as well. I assume he and Tony were back on again?"
Luke nods as he leads them into the porch. "Yeah. They got back together shortly after you left. Reg had gotten out of the whole party scene when he wasn't with Tony and he put his foot down when they got back together about cutting back and concentrating on each other and their education. But even with that, Tony was struggling with staying focused with all the partying going on around him. His grandfather, you remember Merle Jenkins from the next farm over? He's Tony's grandfather and he suggested that if Tony wasn't ready for college, that maybe enlisting would give him some time to grow up,. Plus he could earn money to go back to school while he was at it."
Noah nods. "I remember Mr. Jenkins. His wife is quite the talker."
Luke chuckles as they enter the kitchen and Luke pulls the warm plates out of the oven, thankful that if there is one thing that his grandma has a lot of, it's plates to feed people on. "Yeah, she gives Natalie a run for her money some days. Mr. Jenkins was really good to me when everything happened. He runs the V.F.W. here and he helped me get in contact with the family of the man you were mistaken for and I think they're probably still scratching their heads why so many flowers and donations to the charity they requested on the obituary came from this town.”
Noah plays with his fork as Luke sets down a plate in front of him. "Sam was a good guy. He and Jeff Davis and I were a patrol team, I… I miss them. A lot."
Luke sits across from Noah and reaches out a hand to put it over Noah's, his eyes shining with sympathy. "I'd like to hear about them sometime. When you're ready."
Noah turns his hand and squeezes Luke's fingers. "I'd like that."
They both tuck into the dinner Emma had left warming for them. Noah tries not to make inappropriate noises over how good the food is, but when he sees Luke chuckling into his plate, Noah only shrugs and at least tries to keep them to a dull roar.
Once they're done eating and Noah has made Emma blush and beam over his compliments to her cooking, Noah hesitates at the butcher block island in the kitchen, looking at Luke, who is taking a casserole out of the fridge that Emma had made for Tony's family. "Luke? When I change into my uniform, I'm on duty. I don't want you to get the wrong idea when I can't …"
Luke smiles as he sets the container down. "I know. Just don't take it the wrong way when I steer clear of you at the house. The last thing that Reg needs to see is me temporarily getting my soldier back when he's losing his forever."
Noah reaches out to pull Luke in for another kiss before he goes back into uniform. When he draws away, he takes a breath and runs the pad of his thumb over Luke’s damp lower lip. "Okay, tell me to go upstairs."
"Go upstairs."
"Mean it."
"Go upstairs. I mean it."
Noah mock winces when the command is followed with a finger poking into the center of his chest. "Ow. Okay, I'm going, I'm going."
Would You Lie With Me & Just Forget The World?