Read The Henry Sessions for Free Online Page B

knew.
    We were at different points in our lives. Still, it didn’t stop me from wanting what I wanted.

 

 
 
    11

 
 
    After graduation, Jason was sent to Lackland Air Force Base for training, which is not that far from Randolph. We were there for nine months and hung out quite a bit.
    When training was done we were both sent to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. That was some seriously freaky shit right there. We said goodbye to each other after college, thinking that our road would fork and I’d go one way and he’d go another. Eventually, we knew we’d see each other again somewhere in the world. The Air Force family is actually quite small, and you’ll run into the same people even when you’re in backwoods BFE. We never actually thought we’d get stationed at the same place so soon.
    We both landed in Oklahoma around the same time and we rented an apartment together in the south side of the city. For a while there, we had it made. We had a really nice apartment, we had our brand new cars—mine was a convertible Mustang, cherry red, just like I’d always dreamed, and Jason’s was a black Camaro—and we had our brand new jobs. We threw parties every weekend, met friends in each other’s squadrons, dated some cute honeys we met in the clubs.
    We really lived it up in OKC. I can’t say that that the life of a bachelor officer sucks. We lived like little kings. Two years in, we pinned on first lieutenant. God, we had it made.
    And then Elsie showed up.
    Shit, I hate that I’m even saying this, but she really put a damper on our bachelor lifestyle. After graduating she tooled around Monterey for a while before she accepted a web design job in Oklahoma of all places. It felt like high school again, when she’d follow Jason and me around.
    It really drove me up the wall because, for one, I can’t very well bring dates to my apartment when there’s a girl living there, and two, because I still had feelings for her. I mean, there I was ready to let loose and live a little and she was in my space all over again, taking up my thoughts and shit.
    She said she only needed a place to stay for a few weeks while she looked for a place of her own, so I at least had that to look forward to. But Jason was a douche and made her sleep on the pull-out couch instead of offering her his bed so every time I came out of my room in the middle of the night, I had to see her laying there, wearing her tiny shorts and a tank top with no bra on. I developed a sudden case of dehydration after that, so I had to go to the kitchen and get a drink of water every night. I was just so thirsty.
    One night, while I walked past her on the way to the kitchen, she turned to her side and—I swear I tried to look away—her breasts just about fell out of her shirt. She was asleep so she didn’t do it on purpose, but the neck of her shirt was really low and when she lay on her side, I could almost see everything. God, I could have stayed there all night just looking at her but I eventually slapped some sense into myself and pulled the sheets over her shoulders. Then I went to my room and jacked off.
    The next morning, I went on a hard run and brought back a newspaper. I scoured the classifieds, ready to find a place of my own. I wasn’t going to be the bad guy and kick out my best friend’s kid sister but there was no way I could live there anymore. My self-control was going to snap sooner or later, and who knows what would happen then.
    When I got back from work that day, she had her stuff all packed up by the door.
    “Where are you going?” I asked her.
    She held up the newspaper with my highlighted ads of available one-bedroom apartments. “I’m going. I can take a hint.”
    I grabbed the paper out of her hands. “That’s not—”
    Jason chose that very moment to walk in the door and announce that he was going to deploy. That guy had interrupting down to an art form.
    “What?” Elsie asked, her attention completely to her