Conduct Unbecoming

Then Lieutenant Colonel Osmond was beside her, saying something, and as she turned to speak to her superior, Nathan shook his head, spun on his heel and went to look for coffee.

________________

The debrief had taken two days.

The brass had been pleased. There had been handshakes and carefully worded commendations and a great deal of language about operational sensitivity that meant the next time any of them mentioned this in any form it would be in a classified document that nobody would read for thirty years.

Kayleigh sat through it and answered questions and accepted the commendations with the correct degree of professional modesty.

When it was over, she had gone back to her new hotel room on the Calea Victoriei and slept for eleven hours.

In the morning she had woken up and found herself reaching across the bed before she remembered she was in Bucharest. Then she remembered Bernkastel-Kues and spent the next five minutes looking at the ceiling.

She thought about Lieutenant Colonel Graham Palmer and the weight returned to her chest in full, now that she didn't have an active mission to occupy her.

It was a two-fold problem.

Thinking about Graham brought the image of him kissing Brenda Miller. Which made her think of Staff Sergeant Nathan Miller.

In ways an officer shouldn't be thinking about an enlisted man - no matter how peculiar their connection, or color of his uniform.

She got up and padded into the bathroom. Seven minutes later, she was out of the shower, toweled dry, lotion applied and reaching for a pair of boyshorts and a sports bra.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she was pulling the panties up and she paused to look, eyes critical, wondering - looking for something missing, some lack that her husband could only find elsewhere.

She knew she was comparing, and, internally, she chided herself for it. But she didn't stop.

She was five-three where Brenda Miller stood at least five-nine, raven haired where her husband's other woman was blonde, wide-hipped and protruding where she was trim and model thin.

Kay stared at her breasts - heavy Ds where SSG Miller's wife had what looked like perfectly sized Bs - perfectly fitting the very little black dress she had worn for Graham in Bernkastel-Kues.

At least her stomach was flat - the revised fitness standards from the Pentagon made sure of that.

She finally listened to herself and turned away. She pulled on the bra, pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater over a t-shirt, slid into a pair of laceless sneakers and left the room.

When she stepped out of the hotel, she found a much different Calea Victoriei than when she had arrived. She heard the music before she came out onto the street and stopped to look.

It was a festival and it was running in both directions. Vendors, musicians and old men at cafe tables lined the boulevard while couples, families and laughing youth strode through the vehicle-free carriageway.

She took a deep breath, smiled, and walked.

The air was cool but not uncomfortably so. The leaves on the plane trees lining the boulevard were only starting to turn yellow and amber.

She had nothing she was required to do until her departure the following evening and she decided to go where the festival took her without thinking about her husband, Brenda Miller or the last few days in the Romanian countryside.

An hour and a coffee from a street vendor later, she sat at a restaurant with outdoor tables, surprisingly not too far from her hotel, ordered a 'Tocanita de Vita', and leaned back with her face in the thin autumn sun.

She was halfway through the bowl of beef stew when the Staff Sergeant stepped out of a hotel two doors down from her restaurant - civilian clothes, a henley, jeans and jacket, hands in his pockets.

For reasons best known to their superiors, they were to leave Romania in the same clandestine manner in which they had come in. Which meant staggered flights over the next seventy-two hours and varying routes. But, perhaps as a reward, they were being lodged in much better hotels before leaving.

So she wasn't exactly surprised to see him. What she felt instead was something like what she had felt when she saw him stepping out of the Black Hawk he had flown out to, repaired and flown back with hostile forces bearing down on him.

Kay watched him look around at the mass of humanity moving around him - before turning in her direction on the pavement.

He was looking at the festival, not at the restaurant tables, and he walked past her at a distance of about two yards before something made him glance sideways.

He saw her.

He stopped, for just a moment. Nodded once, politely, and moved to keep on walking.

She should have nodded back and let him continue on his way. Instead she raised her hand and beckoned him over.

He looked at her for a moment. Then he came.

He stopped at her table. "Ma'am," he said, quietly.

She gestured. "Sit down, Miller."

He looked at the chair across from her.

"That's an order," she said, lips quirking up for a moment. "More or less."

He visibly considered that. Then he sat.

She looked at him across the table. He looked back, neutral, waiting.

"Meeting someone?" she asked.

"No, Ma'am."

"Have you had lunch?"

"No, Ma'am."

"This tocanita thing is very good."

"If you say so, Ma'am," he said.

"I'm an officer," she said after a minute of him saying nothing, just looking at her. "Not a monster. The UCMJ doesn't prevent us from having lunch together."

He still said nothing.

"Even if," she added, as if an afterthought, "my husband is fucking your wife."

Something moved across his face. Then he laughed. It came out of him without warning or performance - a real laugh, short and involuntary - and it changed his face entirely. She had not seen him laugh before. She found herself smiling before she had decided to.

"No, Ma'am," he said. "Probably not even then."

He ordered when the waiter came and they ate and talked about nothing of consequence - the festival, the city, the food, where else both of them had been without any compromising details.

He was easier to talk to than she had expected. He listened well and paid enough attention that she felt a flush in her cheeks.

She found the faint irritation she had been carrying about his composure had mostly gone - probably since back at the FARP. What remained was something she preferred not to examine too closely as he sat across from her in the Bucharest autumn sun.

They finished lunch and she looked at the boulevard and then at him.

"I have nothing to do until tomorrow evening," she said.

"Same," he said.

"Walk?"

He left money on the table before she could reach for her wallet, which she noted and did not comment on, and they went out onto the Calea Victoriei.

They walked the festival from south to north, stopping when something was worth stopping for. He bought roasted chestnuts from a vendor and handed her half without asking if she wanted them. She did. They were very good.

She stopped when he stopped to look at a stall selling handmade woodwork. When she asked he told her that his father had been a carpenter and he had helped him build furniture until he left to enlist.

In turn, she told him about learning to sail in San Diego at fourteen and capsizing three times before she got it. He seemed genuinely amused by this.

The conversation was easy in a way she had not anticipated - not least because of what connected them and the clear status line that divided them. He was not trying to impress her - she suspected he knew he had already accomplished that. She also suspected that she had accomplished the same for him.

They came to a square where the festival had given way to music - a live band playing somewhere between a tango and something else, couples on the cobblestones moving in and out of the lamplight. She stopped to watch.

He stopped beside her.

She looked at the dancers for a moment. Then she looked at him. He was watching the dancers with a neutral expression and she decided, without quite planning to, that neutral was not what the moment required.

She took his hand and pulled.

"Ma'am..."

"Don't," she said, and pulled him onto the cobblestones.

They were bad at it. She knew the basic steps and he did not and they negotiated this through collision and laughter, neither of them particularly graceful, both of them finding it funnier than they probably should have. He was a quick study - she gave him that - and by the second song they were moving together well enough that a Romanian couple nearby stopped to demonstrate a turn they were clearly doing wrong.

They attempted the turn. She nearly went down. He caught her with an arm around her waist and for a moment they were very close, laughing, his hand warm at her back, and she was aware of something igniting inside her as their eyes met.

She had been in similar situations before. Another man catching her attention. For four years, she'd think of Graham Palmer, her oath - the vows she had spoken three years before - and a door would slam shut.

Now, when Graham Palmer appeared, she saw him kissing a taller blonde woman on a German street, his hand palming her butt as they entered a hotel.

Miller stepped back then, deliberately, and the dancing resumed at a safer margin.

When the band paused between songs she said she needed something sweet and they moved to the edge of the square and found a vendor selling Socata - elderflowers with water, sugar, and lemon juice. He collected two large cups, handed her one and reached for his wallet as she did the same.

Something fell to the cobblestones at her feet and she bent to pick it up.

It was a hotel key card in a paper sleeve - his. The hotel name printed on the sleeve and the room number written in pen on the back. Room 412.

She looked at it for a moment. Then she held it out to him.

He took it and pocketed it. "Thank you, Ma'am."

They drank the socata. It was very good. She paid because she glared and he backed down.

He walked her back to her hotel. The festival was winding down around them, the vendors beginning to pack, the dancers dispersing, the boulevard returning to itself. They walked without talking and it was not uncomfortable.

At the entrance to her hotel he stopped.

"Ma'am. Captain," he said. "Thank you. I had a good time."

She looked at him. "So did I, Staff Sergeant."

He nodded once, stiffened slightly, then turned and walked back toward his hotel.

She went inside and up to her room and stood at the window for a while, looking down at the boulevard below. The last of the festival was clearing. A street sweeper moved slowly along the far pavement.

She thought about her promotion board just months away and her brother's West Point application.

She thought about a man - an enlisted man - catching her when she nearly fell on Romanian cobblestones, his hand warm at her back, his face mere inches away, and the warmth that had spread through her and not abated since.

She thought about the key card. Room 412.

She looked at the clock. 2247. In Bucharest.

She thought about her husband, about his hand at the small of his wife's back, the kissing and groping after a romantic dinner in Bernkastel-Kues.

She thought for another few minutes as she brushed her teeth, getting ready for bed.

Then she got out of the bathroom, slipped on her shoes, put on her jacket and checked her hair in the mirror.

Then she went out.

________________

Nathan read the message from CW4 Danny McCord on CW3 Bill Cameron's condition. Both legs remained attached, but he would be grounded for at least nine months as everything knit back together. Then there would be physio and strength training - and a medical eval - before he could fly again.

There was an audio of Cameron, already out of the operating theater in Landstuhl, promising to be back in the air within six months. He sounded as alert and gruff as usual and Nathan, alone in his room, had pumped a fist at that.

That was when the knock sounded.

He left the bed and went to open the door in his t-shirt and jogger pants.

Captain Kayleigh Palmer, United States Air Force, stood there, jacket open around a cropped tank top and sweat pants. She was looking at him with clear eyes, nipples visibly pointing, lips parted.

"Captain Palmer," he said.

"Staff Sergeant Miller."

"What can I do for you, Ma'am?"

She met his gaze, unwavering. "I want you to let me in."

He stared back at her for a long moment, then he stepped back and opened the door.

She stepped in. Then she stepped closer and he pulled her the rest of the way.

________________

Sex with Nathan Miller was good, she'd thought at first. Then he'd manhandled her into another position, her knees over his arms, her back arched up, and she had revised her opinion after the notable orgasm that came from that; sex with him was very good.

She appreciated that he had the presence of mind to exit out of her when he felt his control slipping. She felt him come on her belly and felt a disturbing surge of excitement at it, at his spurting his semen on her skin.

"I'm on the pill," she had informed him as he lay on top of her afterwards. "You can come inside me. If you want."

"Okay," he said. And kissed her.

She'd considered establishing rules on the walk over. Like no kissing. But she had violated that one herself when she entered his room. Now he took her lips at will and she let him.

She was letting him do anything he wanted, she decided.

"This definitely violates the UCMJ, Ma'am," he said.

"Do you see any MJ here, Sergeant Miller?"

He chuckled. "No, Ma'am."

She giggled along with him.

Then he matter-of-factly positioned her to pay some delirium inducing attention to her breasts. After making it clear that he liked them - really liked them - his lips and tongue had gone between her legs.

He found her clitoris and she'd called out his name then; "Miller! Oh...!" Then she lay back and held herself open as widely as possible so he could have his fill.

She orgasmed again, revised her opinion about the quality of sex with Nathan Miller and yelled something unintelligible when he reinserted in one harsh plunge into her depths.

He came inside her this time and she had wrapped her arms and legs around him, their lips locked together as he shuddered on top of her, somehow setting her off again.

"I should go," she said, three hours later. When she had woken up with her head on his shoulder and found him awake, his hand trailing a meaningless pattern on her back.

"Kayleigh," he said, cupping a breast, her traitorous nipple already coming to turgid attention. "Stay."

She liked how he said her name.

She liked how he turned her on her stomach and pushed into her body again. She twisted her head and their lips met as he grasped her breasts, making her writhe as his fingers worked her nipples.

"Fuck..." she gasped.

He went still. "Is that an order, Captain?" He sounded... amused.

She couldn't violate the UCMJ any harder than she already had. Besides, she very much wanted him to continue.

"Yes, Sergeant," she snarled, moving, telling him to stop being still. "That's a fucking order!"

He laughed. So did she. Then he gripped her harder and started moving again and the laughing stopped.

Adultery. Improper fraternization. Why not add issuing an illegal order to the mix?

She heard his growl, felt his release inside her.

She came. Hard.

________________

She flew back via Schiphol under her own name, and discovered that Osmond - already back - had sent a car to pick her up.

The house looked exactly the same as she'd left it. If Graham had entertained Brenda Miller in their living space, she couldn't detect any sign of it.

Leftenant had looked up from the couch when she'd arrived to get him. He'd stared at her, blinked and lowered his head back, eyes closing again.

"I missed you too," she said to the feline. Lieutenant Kenley's wife had laughed and she had thanked her for taking care of him.

He came to rub himself against her legs when they got home, purring loudly, as if he'd not wanted to show his affection in front of strangers.

She sat on the floor of the hallway with him for ten minutes, letting him walk across her lap and butt his large gray head against her chin, and she had simply let herself enjoy the most uncomplicated thing that had happened to her in a month.

Graham had come home that evening with a bottle of wine, Chinese takeout and a wide welcoming smile. He'd kissed her thoroughly, and she'd kissed him back with equal ardor.

He had asked about her TDY in general terms over dinner, and she had smiled and answered in the same manner, and asked him about his own activities while she was gone. He had reached for her hand across the table and she had given it to him.

Later on, she had lain back and spread herself open when he stepped naked out of the bathroom, already hard. She returned his kisses and moved with him as he rode her, and grasped him against her as he came.

She lay beside him afterward, looking up at the ceiling with his arm across her waist and thought about a hotel room in Bucharest, about another man unloading inside her body and how much more present she had been for the experience.

It had been noon before she finally left the Staff Sergeant's room. He'd refused to let her leave any earlier and she had lost any command of the situation by then.

She felt a disturbing surge of heat at that, at how easily she had been subordinated and how she had responded to his increasingly confident manhandling of her.

Then she had stopped thinking and gone to sleep.

The next two days were long. Another debriefing session about something that officially never happened, documentation for equipment that needed to be accounted for, and catching up on her unit's activities in her absence.

She had lunch with Diane Russo again. The JAG Major had no new advice for her, but the supporting hand on hers and soft smile meant a lot.

Kay did not tell her that she now knew who her husband's other woman was. That she was married to an Army Staff Sergeant who was an aircraft mechanic. That she had gone on her mission with him and learned that he was as trapped - by the same forces - as she was.

She certainly didn't tell her about a night and morning in a hotel room in Bucharest that had started out as a matter of vengeance and felt very different as she made her way back to her own room.

She returned home tired both evenings and ate and read and went to bed, Graham joining her not too long after.

It was on this third evening, as she was scooping out a sardine and salmon mix for an excitedly yowling Leftenant when Graham had called.

"Working late, honey," he said, voice clipped, serious. "Don't wait up. Someone somewhere fucked up and I gotta sort it out..."

She knew better than to ask for details, even under the circumstances. She never had, because it came with wearing a uniform. "Okay."

"Love you."

"I love you too," she answered automatically.

She held her phone for a long moment after hanging up, looking at Leftenant, who had already cleared half of his bowl. As if sensing the moment, he sat on his haunches and looked up at her with his sapphire eyes.

She opened the Pawsition app.

The tracker was where it had been since before Romania - in his car, where she had decided to leave it. She had ordered a new one for Leftenant the day after she got back from Bucharest. She'd clipped it to his collar herself and registered it on the app. His new dot - showing that he was within six feet of her - was purple.

The blue dot was moving... outside the base.