Dana Stabenow - Blindfold Game

He hadn’t slept much that night, and hadn’t let her sleep, either. He was proving to her how much she had missed him, and she knew it, and she didn’t care. He wanted everything she had to give him and he took it without hesitation or apology, tender only when it suited him, rough and urgent when it did not.

She had reveled in it. She’d never understood other people talking about how the sex had become routine in their marriages. There couldn’t be anything better than married sex, with each knowing exactly what button to push when, that one move that would-

“XO?”

Her eyes snapped open to see Ensign Hank Ryan looking in her open door with a quizzical expression on his face. By sheer willpower she forced the color from her face. “What’s up, Hank?” she said.

“You look tired, XO,” he said. “The cap’n still pissed?”

She sat up and said briskly, “Captain Lowe doesn’t dwell, Ensign. It’s done, it’s over, and we’re moving on. What’s up?”

A member of that generation raised by baby boomers, he had no problem serving under a woman and moreover thought Sara was a damn fine officer, and if he also thought she was hotter than a stick of dynamite he was able to hide his admiration beneath a suitably professional veneer. He accepted the implied rebuke without flinching. He had some crew requests for training to discuss, and when he left she turned to her computer to check her e-mail. Hugh’s name in the in-box was like a siren going off. She swore out loud, earning a quizzical look from BMOW Meridian, passing by on the bosun’s mate of the watch’s duty round.

She swore again, silently this time, resisting the urge to close the door to her cabin, and turned away from the computer and her in-box and the e-mail that seemed to glow in the dark.

That night in October was the first time they’d seen each other in over a year, since the big fight when she was offered the XO position on “I thought you wanted to join the Peace Corps!”

He looked at her, still with that saintly patience that made her want to rip his head from his shoulders and hand it to him, and said, “Sure. Someday. When I’m older. When we’re both older.”

“When we’re retired and too old to be of any use elsewhere,” she freely translated.

They’d managed to battle their way back from that precipice to maintain an uneasy peace in a marriage that was conducted in at best rare and admittedly joyous fragments of time when they were both in the same town at the same time and at worst with long stretches of separation endured with at least the appearance of compliance.

Until she’d been offered the XO position on the Sojourner Truth, when it had been Hugh’s turn to stage a meltdown. “We don’t spend enough time apart already, now you’ve got to go to sea again?”

“You could move to Kodiak,” she said, her turn to be patient, if not precisely saintlike.

“And what the hell am I supposed to do in goddamn Kodiak, Alaska, while I’m waiting for you to get back into port? Learn to speak grizzly?”

This time, the fight had ended with her packing her bags and moving into bachelor quarters on base until her orders came through. She hadn’t called him before she left, either, maybe the one thing she felt guilty about.

Well. She shied away from thinking about how she’d crept out of that hotel room in Anchorage while Hugh was still asleep. Make that two things.

But still, it wasn’t like Hugh didn’t know whom he had married. They’d been friends since birth, coconspirators since they were five, and lovers since they were seventeen. During all that time she had never made a secret of her intention to follow a life at sea.

She tried to imagine that life without Hugh and couldn’t, but truth be told, that was essentially the life she was living.

There were other maritime jobs, even other Coastie jobs she could have taken and been home for dinner every night, but none of them had either the sense of mission or the freedom of action she craved. With the advent of satellite communications it was true that much of the autonomy of a ship at sea had leached back to the District HQs, but she still dreamed of the day when she would command her own two-sixty-four. It was a dream she had had since her father sat her on his lap in the wheelhouse of the Melanie L, and placed her five-year-old hands on the wheel. Sara could have paid her way to the college of her choice with ease, but nothing but the Coast Guard Academy would do. She wanted ships, and in some atavistic throwback to a more barbaric time, she wanted an armed ship. She had been raised by a commercial fisherman in a commercial fishing town and there had never been any question what service she wanted.

She’d been lucky in being born American. She’d been lucky in that her father had had friends in the Coast Guard. She’d been even luckier to have been born smart enough and competitive enough and right-brained enough to merit a place in the academy.

She only wished she could apply those same qualities to her personal life.

For the first time she allowed herself to say the word out loud: “Divorce.”

She hated the sound of it. For one thing, it signified failure. For Sara Lange, failure was not an option in any endeavor.

Even more important was the sense of being not quite complete without him in her life. With Hugh, she never had to explain herself. He always understood what she meant rather than what she said. He was the only person, come to think of it, who understood her relationship with her mother. She wasn’t sure she understood it herself, but somehow Hugh got it.

Was it only geography that kept them from making it work? No. He worked for a government agency she despised in principle and in practice. She worked for a government service that replaced its personnel around the country and around the world in two- and three-year rotations.

She said the word out loud again. “Divorce.”

It sounded just as bad as it had the first time, and she was therefore relieved when the quick rap sounded at her door. “XO?”

“Yes?” she said.

The phone rang at the same time Cliff Skulstad stuck his head in with something perilously close to a grin on his face. “We’ve got an incursion.”

She unhooked the bungee cord that kept her chair from sliding away from her desk with the roll of the ship and was on her way to the bridge before the last word was out of his mouth, with not even a backward look at the screen of her computer and the unopened letter in her in-box.

THE BRIDGE WAS SILENTbut for the whisper of static coming out of the radio and the sound of two hundred and eighty-four feet of metal hull slicing through a two-foot chop. There was a very slight long swell beneath the chop, not enough to slow them down and certainly not enough to cause more than the most imperceptible roll in a vessel with a fifty-foot beam and a three-thousand-ton displacement. The Sojourner Truth was a great ride, even in the Bering Sea, also known as the Birthplace of Winds, where boxcar lows beginning in Kamchatka regularly turned it into a roller coaster for every ship within five hundred miles.

A swift glance at the captain’s expression told Sara that this was one of the times when he was going to compensate for his lack of height with a serious display of attitude. The helmsman, who looked as if he’d lied about his age to get into the Coast Guard, and not that long ago, either, appeared to be oblivious to the scowling visage glowering out of the captain’s chair, but Sara noticed that his knuckles were white on the small brass wheel. She met his eyes briefly, and winked.

Seaman Eugene Razo eased off on his grip. He felt better with the XO on the bridge. They all did. It reflected no doubts about their commanding officer’s abilities, it was just that Captain Lowe had a very low tolerance for ineptitude and while Seaman Razo was among the fortunate who had escaped the recent conflagration in Dutch Harbor, he had a lively sense of self-preservation and serious plans for his future that didn’t include official reprimands in his personnel file. He had selected the Attu loran station as his first duty station so he’d have top priority for his next assignment, which meant he could select a ship out of his hometown of Kodiak with a fair chance of getting it. It was his firm intention to run through every black, orange, and white hull in the Kodiak fleet for the next sixteen years, until he retired at full pay to take over his father’s halibut charter business in Larsen Bay. He was engaged to his high school sweetheart, at present studying for her teaching degree at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She would graduate this year and they would be married out of her father’s house in Chiniak in June.