{"id":579,"date":"2014-01-06T18:02:34","date_gmt":"2014-01-06T18:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jenfrederick.com\/?p=579"},"modified":"2014-01-06T18:02:34","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T18:02:34","slug":"unraveled-snippet-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jenfrederick.com\/test\/unraveled-snippet-two\/","title":{"rendered":"Unraveled – Snippet Two"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a continuation of Chapter One posted yesterday<\/a>. T-14 days.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\u201cDo whatever it is to make your mom stop crying,\u201d Bo advised. \u201cIf mama isn\u2019t happy, ain\u2019t no one gonna be happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe.\u201d The sad truth of it was that someone was going to be unhappy and because I cared about both of them, that sucked. Hoping to change the subject, I said, “You fuckers better have something good planned for me every day.”<\/p>\n

“We said you could come stay with us and hang out, not that we’d be your cruise directors.”<\/p>\n

“All I want to know is whether AnnMarie and Grace are bringing some single friends over. I’m a Marine on leave. I need some special attention.”<\/p>\n

“AnnMarie’s neighbor’s got a thing for guys, I’m pretty sure.”<\/p>\n

“Yeah.\u201d My interest was piqued. \u00a0Both Noah and Bo had been single in the Corps and for two years after they separated. The minute they\u2019d moved up here to go to Central College, they\u2019d each hooked so tightly to a girl neither could move without the other feeling it. I hoped it wasn\u2019t something in the water. I didn\u2019t need or want that kind of complication. But hot girlfriends usually meant hot single female friends and that was all good in my book. \u201cHot? Good personality? What?”<\/p>\n

“He’s bi-curious, according to AM.”<\/p>\n

I groaned. “Sorry, Gray don’t play that way. What about AnnMarie’s roommate? Seem to remember that she had a tight ass and body.\u201d<\/p>\n

“Taken.”<\/p>\n

“Do you know any single women?”<\/p>\n

“I’m not a pimp either.”<\/p>\n

“You suck.”<\/p>\n

“That was your fantasy, wasn’t it?”<\/p>\n

“How did you end up with such a classy piece like AnnMarie?”<\/p>\n

“Dunno but if you fuck it up for me, I’d have to kill you.” His words could\u2019ve been taken as a joke, but he was dead serious. That was another thing that just didn\u2019t make sense in my world anymore. Bo had once been the biggest skirt chaser in our platoon. It didn\u2019t matter if the girl was big, small, or Martian, he\u2019d do them. Now all he could talk about was one chick. And if that didn\u2019t set a lad\u2019s mind spinning, I did\u2019t know what would. It confused me because all I knew of women was that they\u2019d cheat on you the second your back was turned. I learned that lesson early on and that<\/i> cheating girlfriend had been my last.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve discovered my evil plan. I\u2019m here to lure your girl back to San Diego with me.\u201d I rolled my eyes. He knew, like all the guys in my platoon, that I didn\u2019t believe a relationship with a woman could ever survive repeated deployments or a twenty-four-month unaccompanied tour to Okinawa or some other overseas duty station.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou still believe in the no-relationships-while-serving thing?\u201d This time, it was Bo rolling his<\/i> eyes.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a thing<\/i>. It\u2019s a truism. Semper Fidelis<\/i> only matters within the Corps. Feel free to fuck your brother\u2019s girlfriend, sister, mother, so long as you\u2019re true to the Corps.\u201d The bitter taste of infidelity always sat on the back of my tongue no matter how many times I tried to swallow it away.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s healthy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThanks, Oprah. I\u2019ll let you know when I need more relationship advice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJust pointing out that the odds aren\u2019t much better outside the Corps, if that’s one of the reasons you’re thinking of not re-enlisting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDoes Noah have to suffer your Dear Abby musings?\u201d Noah Jackson and Bo were my kind of Marines. They fought hard and didn\u2019t complain but knew how to have a good time when we weren\u2019t busy picking sand out of our asses.<\/p>\n

Noah was the more serious of the two and I\u2019d thought he would have made a career of it, but his ambitions were different. He wanted to build an empire and you couldn\u2019t do that on a military salary, no matter how much combat pay you received. We\u2019d both signed up for every possible tour we could in all the most dangerous places. My burning ambition was to have as much adventure as possible. Unlike Noah, I didn\u2019t need to own the world to be happy; though these days, I wasn\u2019t exactly sure what I needed.<\/p>\n

When I was ten, Pops had given me a knife engraved with Semper Fidelis<\/i> on the blade. He\u2019d retired after thirty years in the Corps and my father had made it to twenty. But neither of my two older brothers were interested, and so it fell to me to carry out the tradition. After years of hearing whispered stories of bravery and honor and brotherhood, I couldn\u2019t wait to wear the dress blues, white gloves and carry that damn sword.<\/p>\n

Because I enlisted during a war time, I got to do things that had meaning. Since the troop draw down, I was felt\u2026unmoored, to borrow a Navy term. As if I was standing on ever-shifting sand. People I knew for a long time were changing.\u00a0 All around me, guys were settling down, picking out furniture, and going to flea markets on the weekends. They did couples things like showers and shit like that, and while I didn\u2019t want to go to those damn things, I felt like everyone else was moving on and I was just stuck, spinning my wheels like \u00a0some stupid ground hog that should be put of my misery.<\/p>\n

Every time I had gone to sign those re-enlistment papers, though, I couldn\u2019t bring myself to do it. On one side, I had \u00a0Pops and my commanding officer, Captain Billings, warning me about how boat space was shrinking and that even for an exemplary Marine like myself I could be squeezed out if I didn\u2019t hurry my ass up. On the other sat my dad, who sang an entirely tune\u2014that I should get out now while I still had time to go to college, find a job, settle down.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a continuation of Chapter One posted yesterday. T-14 days. *** \u201cDo whatever it is to make your mom…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jenfrederick.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jenfrederick.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jenfrederick.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jenfrederick.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jenfrederick.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jenfrederick.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jenfrederick.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jenfrederick.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jenfrederick.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jenfrederick.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}