“Yeah. I worked with him for a long time. He was my buddy when I was in jump school.”
“Jump school?”
Jed handed him another picture. “Paratrooper training. 101st Airborne.”
Max flipped through a series of terrifying shots of men jumping from airplanes. He didn’t quite have the stomach to ask Jed which one was him. “Was Paul a paratrooper too?”
“No. These are from way before I met him. He must have pinched them from Glenn.”
Max pulled his legs up and crossed them underneath him. He kept his eyes on the photographs, attempting to appear casual. “When did you meet Paul? Where you in the same unit?”
“I met Paul seven years ago?” Jed frowned. “Maybe more. We both led small teams, and Command merged us together for a big operation. The setup worked, so we stayed that way, on and off until….”
Max got the picture and heard the deflection loud and clear. He’d heard whispers from Nick that Jed was Special Forces, and so knew better than to ask too much. “Where was this taken?”
Jed squinted at the group of men lounging in front of a tent. The image was faded and smudged, barely decipherable. “Africa.”
“That narrows it down,” Max grumbled dryly. He glanced up at the pin-covered map on the wall. Jed had been all over Africa, but the lack of desert and the jungle background told Max it had to be one of three central countries—Rwanda, Uganda, or Tanzania. “Rwanda?”
“Nope, next door. You wouldn’t find me smiling in Rwanda.”
Uganda, then.
It took a while to work through all the photographs. At first, Max thought Jed was handing them to him at random, then he figured out the order was deliberate, and roughly chronological.
Max stared hard at each and every one, taking in every detail, knowing he might not find Jed so accommodating again. The candid pictures of his team were fascinating. It was obvious the group of men was close, and Jed was central to their dynamic. “Did they know?”
Did they know you were gay?
Jed interpreted the unspoken meaning to his question with a wry smile. “Yeah, and they didn’t give a shit. I was… well, I was lucky, put it that way. I was good at my job, and my crew was loyal. They didn’t much care who I wanted to fuck.”
The setup was alien to Max. He’d never had many male friends. Even back home in England, long before he’d come out, he’d always found it hard to get past the macho crap that came with getting close to a straight guy. Jed’s Army life was unimaginable.
Jed grinned again when he said as much. “My friends were quite protective of me in that respect. No one outside our circle ever suspected a thing, but they got a kick out of camping it up anyway. If there were going to be rumors about any of us, by the time they were done, I was the last person anyone would look at.”
To prove his point, he showed Max a picture of a tall blond man standing on a tank, dressed in women’s underwear. Underneath the heavy makeup, the guy washot, almost as hot as Jed. “No one gave you any trouble?”
“No.” Jed shook his head. “There were eight of us, and we all had a rep for being badass at something. No one really fucked with us.”
“What were you badass at?”
Jed moved like a snake. Suddenly Max found himself pinned on his stomach with Jed’s arm wrapped tight around his throat. Jed flexed his arm, ready to snap Max’s neck, before he kissed the hollow below his ear and released him.
Max rolled over, his heart pounding, though not from fear. He knew Jed could kill him in an instant, but the dark humor glowing in his eyes was too alluring for Max to care much. He cleared his throat. “Who’s the drag queen?”
Jed’s grin faded. “Paul.”
“Do you have a better picture?”
Jed rooted around. The next picture he came up with was fairly recent; it had to be, given his leaner appearance.
Max took in Paul’s wide grin, friendly brown eyes, and dark-blond hair. “He looks like a cross between you and Dan.”
Jed snorted. “That makes sense. They were both fucking buffoons.”
“And yet they were both your best friend.” It was a guess, but while Max was unsure of the way Jed had loved Paul, there was no doubt in his mind they’d had a deep friendship.
Jed let the comment slide and passed over a picture of a German shepherd bounding through water with a flashlight strapped to its head. “You might like this one.”