Just Once... and Yes I Mind

First, I owe an apology to Kalimaxos for not showing people how to get to

his original story

- he graciously allowed us to continue it and I completely forgot to tell everyone to go read that one first. It's a damn good read, and inspired me to try my hand at actually publishing a story. You will need to read Kalimaxos' first, then my preliminary follow up, for any of this to make sense.

For those of you who have been breathlessly waiting for this follow-up, I hope both of you enjoy this.

For those of you berating me about the brevity of the initial entry, my apologies. I wasn't sure that the thing wasn't just going to be rejected. So, to quote the late great Paul Harvey, here's "the rest of the story".

*****

My hand paused over the door handle. Years of training came rushing forward - always get a hotel room between the 3rd and 8th floor (any lower and a bad guy with a ladder can come through a window, any higher and it is difficult to be rescued in a fire), never reveal your military identification unless you have no other option (lying just makes bad guys angrier), and looking through a hotel peephole gives bad guys a perfect target to shoot.

Obviously, I wasn't expecting terrorists or spies, I was thinking of something worse - the ex-wife. I took a steadying breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth. I put my hand on the brass handle and turned it, pulling the heavy door inward. And there she stood.

I looked at her and smiled. A genuine smile. Something I never thought she would ever again engender in me. She smiled back.

I grinned, then snorted. She stopped smiling.

I started chuckling and she frowned. In seconds, I was laughing, loudly, tears rolling from my eyes. "...Rick."

I tried to answer but had to get myself under control first.

"Rick, may I come in or are you going to continue being such an ass that it actually makes people come out of their rooms?" As she said this, I saw her look to her right "It's all right, I think he's just drunk. I'll take care of him, you can go back to your room, very sorry." Turning back to me, she looked at me, body language screaming "Well?"

"Please," I said, in between breaths, "come in and bring..."

"TJ," she replied, with a voice that would have frozen a sun.

"For Trey, Junior, of course," I realized. My grin wouldn't leave my face. "You are aware that when the little tyke graduates high school, you'll be damn near 70?"

"Yes, thank you for the reminder," Marcy growled, bringing little TJ in his baby carrier. "Can you not be a dick about this?"

"No, I don't think so, Marcy. I think that nature REQUIRES me to be a dick about this. Not being a dick could cause irreparable harm to our planet." I glanced at the child. "How old is he?"

"Three months," his mother replied.

"Ah, so that means that you got pregnant in South America. By Dr. 'Little Dick' Trey. And how did that occur?"

"You know how I got pregnant, could you stop..."

"Yes, I understand the mechanics," I cut in. "You don't need a medical degree to understand that dick in pussy is the leading cause of pregnancy. I meant, how is it that you were wanting to come back to me and still managed to get knocked up?"

"Have you always been this crude? 'Knocked up'? What are you, in high school? As for what happened, apparently, the condom broke. This wasn't planned."

"And how do you think this would have played out, Marcy? You coming back, pregnant by Trey? Was I supposed to raise the bastard? Was I going to start sharing you, I get you on the weekends, Trey takes care of the weeks? What was the thought process here, Marcy?"

"I don't know, Rick," she sighed. She sat down in the chair across from the bed. She had put the carrier on the floor at her feet, the light blue of the carrier clashing with the "soil hiding" brown that some hotels favor. Years of being deployed afforded me little opportunity to be picky about my sleeping arrangements, but I still don't think I would have put MY kid on a hotel floor, carrier or no. "I guess it's lucky that you had skipped town before I got back, before he" she said, glancing at the child on the floor "became an issue."

"I noticed the ring," my eyes shifting to her left hand. "I guess Trey stepped into the breach."

"Yes," she agreed, "he did." Her eyes shifted from her ring to my eyes. "Someone had to."

"Let's not do this," I said. "You know why I left, why I did everything I did..."

"You cheated, and I cheated, we were even," arguing her point, her point in a case I long left dead in the past. I walked the few steps to the mini bar, taking out a soda. No booze for me, at least not while she was in the room. "I can't believe that you would..."

"Stop." It was a whisper, maybe a touch more than that, but it stopped her cold. "I got a blowjob and went down on a woman shortly after we were almost killed. It was unplanned, it was one time, and it was regretted. You, on the other hand, planned to do so much more than just a blowjob, planned to do it more than once, and wasn't regretting it one bit. Our actions couldn't have been more different."

She sighed again. "I didn't want this. I didn't want any of this. I wanted the trip to end, to have my moment in the sun, to come back to you and to pick up my life. When that didn't happen, I wanted to come see you tonight, to introduce you to TJ and to ask you if you would be his godfather..."

The soda I was drinking was now sprayed on the mirror - probably one of the least offending substances sprayed on that particular mirror. "You have got to be fucking kidding me."

"Rick, you are still the best man I know. If anything were to happen to both Trey and I..."

"No. Not just 'no', but 'no fucking way in hell' no. There isn't enough money on the planet that would convince me to do that."

She looked at me, I think honestly appraising me for the first time in a year. To this day, I believe she thought she could come in and somehow make amends for what she had done. "Can we just be civil about this for a minute?"

My feet stopped moving. I slowly turned to her. "Fuck civil. I want you to understand something. I have no love left for you. It was slowly fading by your actions before you left, and it was snuffed with that letter. I don't care about you or Trey or that bastard" pointing my finger at the little bundle in the baby carrier, "and I certainly have no desire to be civil or polite to you. This is Rhonda's big day, and I won't do a thing to ruin it. But the moment you walk out of that door, I am done with you for the rest of my life. Live or die, I don't care. Do not talk to me or I will do everything in my power to publicly humiliate you so that you never do that again. If Rick talks to me, I will break both his arms and smash his hands to jelly. I'm not worried about prison, I have people who will ship me off an hour later and have no idea where I ended up. Look at me, Marcy, I need you to believe the truth of my words. Stay away from me. And keep your family" another glance at TJ, "away from me."

She looked stunned for a second, then gathered herself and walked to the door. "I'm sorry we ended up this way. It was never my intention to destroy our family. I still love you and I hate that I have made you into this...vengeful, angry person."

"If it's any consolation," I replied, "you didn't make me this way. I've been this way for my whole life. I just kept this" waving my hands in front of my body "under wraps for you. You meant that much to me that I changed how I interacted with the world."

"Then I'm sorry for ruining your life's work," she said softly. Those were the last words she would say to me for a long time. Trey never approached me or tried to interact with me. I heard through friends and sources that he didn't lose his license to practice medicine, lucky son of a bitch.

Rhonda's wedding went off without a hitch. She was beautiful in her gown, the long white train following us as I walked her down the aisle. I left her with her new main man, praying that her marriage went better than mine did, imploring whoever was listening that she have a happy life.

After the wedding, we moved to the reception. I felt that I looked quite good in my penguin suit, and did the traditional father-daughter dance. I'd like to say that I danced with a stunning redhead and caused Marcy to explode in flames of jealousy. But the truth is that I danced a couple dances with my little girl, talked to Kyle about his degree path and what was going on in his life - like me, he was stag at the reception, although this rather attractive blonde was trying to change that. I ate more than I should have, and fell into a deep sleep an hour after the bride and groom left for their honeymoon.

A month later, I was back at work, doing my consulting for the DoD. This time, however, I was liaising with a Joint Task Force in central Africa. The US military was making a push to secure various parts of Africa from both Chinese intervention and Muslim fundamentalism. Obviously, the scope of such an undertaking was well beyond what the US military and its allies could accomplish on their own, so my company trained the military of whichever country aligned with us, funding the weapons and personnel costs at the outset; for those countries that disagreed with our view, we did the same with the opposition, with the understanding that if and when they came into power, they would align their new government with the US, instead of China. It was a dangerous plan, as they could easily take our money, weapons, and training and still align with China, or just go rogue, but we had to make the effort. A Chinese foothold in potentially the most prosperous continent could be disastrous.

So, there I was, working with the senior leadership in Liberia, as a way of working towards the Central African nations. Liberia and the US have had historically strong ties, a relationship that went back over 100 years. While in Liberia, I met my team, mostly former military with a strong teaching background. One of the first countries we would head to was Cameroon. With English as the primary language, I wasn't worried about needing assistance, but a strong second was French. I spoke French at a conversational level, but wanted help in situations where legal or technical issues arose.

Our Liberian government contact called me, asking if I could meet him in his office for lunch. The French interpreter would be there and he would make introductions. Once I arrived, however, no introductions were needed - I recognized Janice Saito immediately, as we had worked together quite a bit the past year. As I worked with the various military agencies throughout Europe, Janice had come along on most of the assignments. She wasn't just fluent in French, but her father's native Japanese, Spanish, and Russian. Janice's mother was a retired Major General in the US Army, and had met her husband at Fort Buckner, where he was a civilian engineer. The couple made for an interesting picture, one Janice had shown me on one of our rare trips to Bulgaria (definitely not part of SHAPE, but worth assisting as a bulwark against Russian expansion). MG Saito was a tall woman, 6 ft easy, black as night, trim, with a wide smile as her arm draped across the shoulders of her 5 ft 3 in somewhat...doughy...husband. He looked the part of someone who had never seen the inside of gym, while she appeared to live for free weights. But despite their differences, both physical and

career, you could see how devoted they were to each other.

Janice took after her mother physically, with a darker skin tone than most African Americans, tall, fit, and gorgeous. And she got the brains of both her parents, though she used that intellect to both learn multiple languages, but also to get her doctorate in Geopolitics and Geostrategy. She once told me that she wanted to learn Swahili and Arabic to round out her language skills, so she had a language for every region on the globe to go with her knowledge of the governments.

Was I interested in her? Of course, what straight male on the planet wouldn't be? We had spent more time together the past year than most normal married couples who work the same 9 to 5 shift. We would get our pre-brief for a couple of weeks before an assignment, then head out where we stayed in the same hotel, worked together all day, ate dinner together, then went to our separate rooms. If I'm being honest, I think that worked to increase the attraction I felt (who knows if she felt the same) - spend all day together, then sleep alone. I could have obviously availed myself to one of the local escorts, but while the flesh was willing, the mind was distracted. Between Marcy's actions and the growing attraction to Janice, I just couldn't find the spirit to do so.

So, there she was, looking just as gorgeous as ever. I saw a smile creep onto her face when she saw me. Quiet, small, and shy, but a smile none the less. I walked over, shook her hand.

"Janice" I simply said.

"Rick" her other hand covering mine. A very simple gesture that spoke volumes...or maybe I was just hearing volumes and she was just one of those touchy people. "It's good to see you again. How was Rhonda's wedding?"

"Fantastic. And expensive." Her laugh was warming.

"She's your only daughter. Suck it up." She smiled again, looking into my eyes. I don't think either of us blinked until we heard an intruding cough.

"Sorry," he said, not meaning it, "but we really need to finish getting your briefing so you two can fly out in the morning." And so we did, going over the accommodations and points of contact. I had already had my brief through the DOD, outlining what our objectives were, time and cost constraints, and threat conditions. We were on good terms with the government of Cameroon, but there had been problems with attacks from local warlords and Ambazonian terrorists, and our outreach was to help support the government in their fight.

Janice and I flew out to Yaounde and checked into the Hilton in the capital. It was a very nice hotel, although I would have felt better with our own contingent of guards. The Office of the Secretary of State had overridden the objections of the DOD and allowed security at the hotel be headed up by the Cameroon defense forces. I had a small team that would follow in a few days, once the initial groundwork was laid.

Our first morning was spent with the general in charge of the forces fighting against the terrorists. Halfway through the day, Janice and I started discussing the human rights abuse charges that were being leveled against the military, making it a point that we wouldn't tolerate that and the US would withdraw support if action wasn't taken to quell the abuses. Needless to say, the general denied that anything of the sort was happening and cut our meeting short. We all agreed to meet up the next morning, and with nothing else left to do, Janice and I decided to do some investigating on our own.

There was a nearby village that had an orphanage. The children came from areas where attacks occurred - supposedly - by the very military we were supposed to be training. We drove out, using a local guide, as GPS would have been useless.

The village was small, with the largest structure being the orphanage. We went in and introduced ourselves to the woman running the operation, Armelle Ebode. She was a large woman, friendly but somehow, at the same time, guarded. It was as though she wanted to trust us but wasn't quite there. Janice spoke for us, explaining that we had heard rumors and wanted to confirm them, if possible. Armelle pushed herself up from her large, metal desk, looked me in the eyes, then did the same to Janice. "If you honestly want to know, come with me," her French accented English booming.

We followed behind, and she took us to a yard filled with children playing. "Most of these children are from villages that have been destroyed. We are attempting to find relatives, anyone who can care for them. We don't have the funds to feed all of them, and they came here with what they were wearing. You want proof, here it is," Janice relayed. Apparently, Armelle's English only went so far.

Janice talked to the children, one by one. I could tell from her body language that she was hearing a lot of the same stories - families killed, houses razed - but nothing that would hold up in a court of law. Luckily, my marching orders didn't need "beyond a shadow of a doubt" level evidence. My gut would be more than enough to either pull the plug on our assistance or keep it rolling. I looked around, and saw one child, sitting by herself. She looked older than the rest. "Who is that?".

Armelle replied, saying her name, but I had no chance of repeating it. She said it a few times, before I just said the first two syllables. "Ami?" Armelle paused, then nodded. We walked over.

Ami looked up at us as we approached. I heard Janice and Armelle speaking behind me. I squatted down near Ami, tried on a smile. "Hello, I'm Rick."

She said her full name in return. I tried a couple of times, to no avail. "Do you mind if I called you Ami? Like my name is actually Richard, but my friends call me Rick." She nodded her approval. "Ami, do you understand English well?"

"I do."

"Do you mind if I ask how old you are?"

"Six," five fingers on one hand and her index finger on the other confirming her age.

"Six? Wow, I remember when my daughter was six. She was really shy and quiet. But smart. She would remember everything she saw. Are you like that?"

"I remember a lot," she said, with better English than Armelle. Her parents must have taught her well.

"Can you tell me how you came to this place," I asked.

"The soldiers. They came one night, took my mother and sister away. While they were doing that, my father hid me. I saw through the door, they shot my father, and put my mother and sister in a truck. Before they left, they set our house on fire. When they drove off, I ran outside. A neighbor found me and brought me here," her voice breaking at the end, tears falling. I could feel my heart breaking for this girl, who had gone through worse than what 99% of American girls would ever endure.

"Armelle, she told me that her mother and sister were put on a truck. What happened to them?" Janice translated for me. Armelle took a breath, indicated with her head that we should walk off a bit, and then lumbered a few feet out of Ami's earshot. She quickly and quietly spoke to Janice who flinched a bit, then turned to me. "Rick, you remember the Comfort Women? The Chinese and Korean women forced into brothels in the early 1900s?"

"Shit," my chest tightening.

"Rick, Armelle tells me that Ami would have been put on that truck."

"What?" My voice was rising and I needed to keep it even. That was too horrible to imagine. I looked over at Ami, thinking that poor kid's life just keeps getting worse. "What about her family? Aunts, uncles, anyone who can help her?"

"Armelle said there is no one."

"Shit." Apparently, this was going to become one of the most used words on this trip.

The next morning, our meeting with the general went slightly better. He acknowledged that there were issues, and that they would be taking care of them, in house. I wasn't sure that I believed him - hell, I knew that I didn't believe him, but I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt until I saw that either he was true to his word, or that he was just trying to keep the money rolling in. Janice and I toured various military installations, took plenty of notes during the days, and spent the afternoons with Ami.

A few months later, we went to a military encampment not far from Ami's home village. The soldiers seemed tense, a little nervous but also very guarded. They were good - they revealed nothing of interest to us, answering our questions with as few words as possible. During an afternoon break, however, I noticed a white backed vulture on the ground. I was too far to see what, exactly, had captured its attention, but I knew that whatever it was, it would soon draw other scavengers, hyenas being my main concern. I looked at Janice and made a signal that we should wrap it up and head back to the hotel for the night.