"Another Christmas movie?" her brother said as soon as he walked in.
"Leave me alone!" his recently-engaged sister told him with feigned indignance. "I love these movies!"
Her brother glanced at the screen and saw an actress he thought was particularly attractive and stopped just long enough to say, "Whoa! Who is that?"
"She's beautiful, huh?" his sister replied.
Her brother surprised her when he sat down to watch.
"Yeah, she's gorgeous."
"Her name is Jill Wagner. She used to do car commercials for Mercury," his sister told him
"Yeah. Right. I knew I'd seen her. 'You gotta put Mercury on your list!' That was her line, right?"
"Yep. You got it," she told him. "Sorry, but she's married and way too old for you, big brother."
"The married part I respect, but how is she too old for me?" he asked.
"Well, you're 28, and she's gotta be 40 if not older," his sister told him, as though that was some sort of definitive answer.
"Well, I'll tell you what. You introduce me to a woman that attractive, and it won't matter to me if she's 25 or 45."
"Ha! Listen to you. You're never gonna settle down. You just flit around from one pretty girl to the next leaving a trail of broken hearts in your wake."
"Hey, not everyone meets the right person by the time they're 26, you know."
His sister smiled, held out her left hand again in order to show off her new ring then said, "I really am the luckiest girl in the whole world!"
Her brother laughed, told told her how happy he was for her, then let her know he had things to do.
"Okay, I'll have to watch Jill for both of us then," his sister told him.
He took one last look at the very attractive woman on screen then said, "She's hot. No doubt about that."
Layton Russell was 28, and his 26-year old sister, Cassandra, who'd been Cassie to him his whole life, had been engaged for nearly a week, and both of them had come home for the holidays. He really was happy for his sister, but Layton had been a self-proclaimed, confirmed bachelor since his freshman year of college. He was also guilty of everything his sister had just said.
He wasn't about to give her the satisfaction of letting her know, but he was more than a little envious she'd found someone she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.
Layton had never spent more than two months with a woman, and that had happened only once. His 'relationships' tended to last a week or two with many numbered in hours rather than days. Being young and attractive, women came easily, and as he'd learned early on, nearly all who came were, in fact, 'easy'.
But when a good friend of his who was a year younger, and also a self-proclaimed bachelor had fallen hard for a woman, Layton began seriously asking himself why he always felt so empty. The only answer he could find was this vicious cycle that kept playing out in his life. Go out, meet someone, strike up a conversation, buy her a drink, take her home, sleep with her, and say goodbye.
He was beginning to feel it was a kind of learned, manic-depressive behavior in which the mania built and reached a crescendo in bed during orgasm only to be followed by a huge letdown that lasted until the next manic episode.
His thoughts were interrupted when his mom saw him.
"Come here, Layton!" she said happily.
He knew she was going to hug him again, and rather than protest, he opened his arms and said, "Hey, Mom!"
"I am SO glad you're home this year, honey!" she told him yet again.
"Me, too," he replied, and although Christmas was no big deal to him anymore, it was nice to be back in the house where he'd grown up.
Unlike a couple of his high school friends, there was no chance Layton would ever end up living there again, let alone staying there. He'd gone to college directly out of high school, and four years later graduated with a degree in accounting.
He'd fully intended on going to work for his father who was the owner of a well-known accounting firm in their relatively small town of Bellingham, Washington. But he'd surprised everyone, to include himself, when he announced he was joining the Marine Corps.
"You can't be serious!" his mother, Kathryn Russell, had said, worried sick he'd come him in a coffin.
"It'll be good for him," his father, Edward Russell, told her, but she was having none of it.
For days she tried to talk him out of it, but after running into a Marine officer on campus who talked to him about getting commissioned, he couldn't shake the idea that was the future he wanted. No office. No desk. No shirt and tie. Just being outdoors training Marines and living in the boonies.
So he completed the required tests, passed the physical with no issues, then found himself in Quantico, Virginia for ten weeks getting hollered at all day, every day until he and his fellow officer candidates could run the platoon by themselves. The staff was always there ready to pounce, but it was up to the candidates to get where they needed to go on time and in the right uniform.
It was structured exactly like boot camp, but with a few differences, with that one being the most noticeable. After all, they were being prepared to lead, and it made a lot of sense.
The day before his graduation from OCS, his parents flew out for his commissioning ceremony then drove to another location on the base called TBS which stood for The Basic School. Layton spent another six months there learning to lead an infantry platoon as well as getting all of the basics any Marine got in terms of history, customs, first aid, and marksmanship training.
The big surprise came in the last several weeks of TBS when the new second lieutenants submitted their top three choices of MOS (military occupational speciality), military-speak for 'job'.
TBS used something called 'the quality spread'. Each company of approximately 250 lieutenants was rank ordered from 1-250 based on academics, fitness, leadership, and other areas. The company was then divided into thirds.
If one was in the top of the upper third, one could almost be guaranteed to get one's first choice. The same was true for the top few in the middle and lower thirds. But for those unlucky schmucks who were at the bottom of any third, it was quite likely one would be assigned an MOS the officer did NOT want.
Among the most highly sought after were the combat arms MOS's: infantry, artillery, tanks. The Army called tanks 'armor' and artillery 'field artillery' and differentiated between straight-leg and mechanized infantry while the Marine Corps did not.
Among the worst possible assignments were: adjutant, disbursing, and supply.
Layton had been the bottom man in the upper third, and although he requested infantry, artillery, and tanks in that order, he knew that wasn't likely. But he couldn't have been more shocked or disappointed when his assigned MOS came back.
He still remembered quite clearly when his SPC or Staff Platoon Commander, a young captain with five years in the Corps who spent every day with his platoon said, "Lieutenant Russel. Congratulations, money man."
"No. Sir. Please don't tell me..."
"Yep. You made it. Disbursing officer. Don't hurt yourself counting all that money."
His buddies both gave him huge amounts of grief and equal amounts of sympathy. Most of the latter was out of a sense of relief they'd dodged their first bullet on active duty. Well, except for the prior-enlisted officers, some of whom had been to Afghanistan once or even twice with one of them sporting a purple heart because he really had been shot.
