a famous jazz musician. He was a little worried about what his very Southern parents would think about his dating a black girl, but they were thrilled and encouraging.

She was one of the first girls that he brought home to spend the night. While the sex with her was great, it wasn’t explosive, but she made his heart leap and that was all that mattered. She knew that he had fooled around with guys, told him she just assumed it.

He thought he’d found what his parents had. Although as soon as he met Sasha he stopped having sex with guys, it was comforting to know that she would never judge him. Even Jesse liked her, and they had always had a competition going when it came to conquests, but Jesse seemed to know almost immediately that this girl was different.

On prom night, Reece asked Sasha to marry him and she agreed. They decided to wait until after the spring break to make an announcement to their families. She was going to be gone the entire time anyway, an early graduation trip to Paris from her father. Reece kissed her goodbye at the airport and told her how much he loved her.

The plane went down over the Atlantic Ocean less than four hours later. He was devastated. It was the first funeral he had ever attended for an entire family. All he could think of while the memorial went on and on was the secret that he’d been keeping. It wasn’t that he and Sasha were engaged. It was that she was pregnant.

Two days after his graduation, he signed up for the air force. He just wanted to get Sasha and the baby that wouldn’t be off his mind. He thought a completely different way of life would do that. His mama begged him not to go. They both knew that he was headed straight for either Afghanistan or Iraq. Reece didn’t care. He didn’t want to die, but he didn’t really care that much about hanging around either.

It wasn’t fifteen minutes after he stepped off that plane in the desert that he ran into Kelly Hardman. Kelly was his squad leader, with a big grin, a puppy dog heart and a wife with four kids back in Michigan. It was he who pulled Reece through when a pipe bomb was thrown in the crowd they were patrolling and shrapnel burned a huge chunk into Reece’s back.

Kelly literally held his hand during painful skin grafts, and assured him he was still a hot looking stud. It was even Kelly who took him to a tattoo parlor on leave and paid for the design that helped camouflage the scar. It matched the one that Kelly had on his.

It never occurred to Reece that he had a crush on the man. Kelly was open an honest with him, but they had never discussed that fact that Reece had had sex with men before, and Reece wouldn’t ask if Kelly had.

Sex was the first and last thing on everyone’s mind there, but the occasions to have it were pretty non existent. Reece beat off in the latrines, as pretty much everyone did, and looked the other way when fellow soldiers were doing the same thing.

There were women in the corp., but most of them were