Stepbrother Soldier: A Forbidden Military Romance Novel

Stepbrother Soldier

By
Emily
Whittaker

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Part 1

1

“…and so, anyway, that’s kind of the direction I’m headed. A
historical evaluation of the role of standing armies in fighting progressive revolution
in first-world nations.”

“I think you’re on the right track. You’ll want to focus equally on
nations like Switzerland, though, to create a really compelling argument. Your
thesis begs the question: is it the army itself, or the powers that rule it?
You have your agenda, clearly, and that’s fine, but don’t let it get in the way
of being convincing on a large scale.”

“Yes, I totally agree. I think that will be my biggest challenge, but
I’m up to it. Thanks for meeting with me, I’m hoping to have a draft of the
first chapter by the end of the month. Can I send it along when I’m finished?”

“Yes, please do. I’m excited about this, Ms. Starling. If this is even
half as compelling as the piece on North Korea you wrote last semester, I think
you’re going to really going to wow some people.”

I beamed, gathering my things and rising from the
desk I was sitting at.

“Thank you, Professor, that means a lot. I’ll be in touch,” I said as
I walked out of the room, giving a final wave before being swallowed up into
the horde of students rushing to their next class.

It was 3:30 on a beautiful, sunny March day in Columbus, Ohio. I was
headed home with a brain full of ideas and fingers that were itching to start
writing. In my last year of college, I was about to write my senior thesis, a
culmination of everything I’d studied for the past four years. I was a dual
major, history and political science, with a minor in philosophy. I was the
star of all three departments, the sort of student that teachers approached after
class to discuss post-graduate opportunities and recommended to grant
committees.

I’d already completed a year of studying abroad in Germany and a
remote work-study program for the U.N. I was the editor-in-chief of the campus
newspaper, an active member of the College Democrats of America, and a fixture
at campus protests and feminist lectures. I’d spearheaded a LGBT campaign,
helped raise funds for Planned Parenthood, and had more anti-war rallies under
my belt than hours of sleep each night.

I was that idealistic young college liberal that, I thought, scared
the pants off stodgy old conservative politicians. I was the future of American
democracy. I was on track to graduate top in my class and go on to grad school
at one of the ivies. Life was good for Christy Starling.

Unfortunately, life rarely
stays
good.

2

What’s the opposite of an army brat? A flower child? A peace baby? A
love child?

Oh, well, I guess that last one has totally different
connotations…though I guess you could call me a love child, too. At any rate,
if you want to get an idea of who I am, you could use any of those terms and
you’d have a fairly good idea.

I grew up on a sunflower farm in Kansas. Doesn’t that just sound
idyllic? Maybe not the Kansas part, but the sunflower farm part. I grew up
staring at the heavy, drooping, yellow heads of sunflowers grown in rows on
rows on rows. I tilled soil with my mother. I owned a child-size trowel. I
stuffed myself with sunflower seeds every year at harvest. I grew up believing
in two things: peace on earth, and sunflowers for all mankind.

My mother had me when she was barely in her twenties and living in San
Francisco. She moved to Kansas when she inherited her aunt’s farm. I was three,
and my father had been gone for three years and six months. She worked the soil
for four years before getting it to finally yield our first bountiful crop of
sunflowers, and after that we made just enough money every year to live on and
get the next year’s crop started. We had no farmhands, and she had no farming
experience. It was struggle and strife all the way up to my teens.

When I was 14, my mother met a man. Admiral Joe Walsh of the U.S.
Navy. I hated him. He was, to me, everything that was wrong with America,
personified. At the ripe old age of 14, I knew everything about everything,
including foreign policy and the military-industrial complex. Admiral Walsh was
a walking, talking advertisement for everything I was vehemently against.

My mother had a different opinion on the matter. Not that she was a
fan of the military, per say, or that she even agreed with the war or believed
in the government. She just loved Admiral Joe Walsh more than she hated what he
stood for.

I remember how betrayed I’d felt when she’d come home with the ring on
her finger. She knew how I felt about the Admiral, and I thought she was making
the worst mistake of her life by getting involved with him in the first place,
never mind marrying him.

“He makes me happy, Christy, and he’s a good man,” she’d said when we
sat down to discuss the changes that were coming. “Besides, now we can afford
to send you to college.”

This was rather a bright side for me: I couldn’t wait to break free of
our small-minded one-horse town and get out into the “real world” (I was young
enough to believe that college in a city constituted the “real world”).

“But he’s a
military
man,
Mom. He’s part of the machine! He’s even got his son enlisted already, I’ll
bet,” I’d said in protest. It was the same thing I’d said to her time and time
again, and which never changed her mind.

Of course, my mother married him anyway, despite my promises to go on
hunger strike and run away from home and perform any number of rebellious
stunts that would change her mind. At their wedding, I wore black.

The Admiral did his best to please me and make me like him: he’d bring
me little gifts while datng my mother, and once they were married and he’d
moved into our big farmhouse he would always be friendly and try to talk to me
about school, friends, normal teenage subjects. I wasn’t having any of it, and
I made it well-known that I would never approve of his marrying my mother.

The Admiral, which was what I always called him, never “Dad” or even
just Joe, had one son from his first marriage. Ashton was two years older than
me and, true to my prediction, he was enlisted the minute he turned 18. For a
long time, I only knew him from pictures I’d seen on the Admiral’s walls: he
was a handsome, blonde-haired young man with a wide, bright smile and green
eyes. When I first saw his picture, I had to do a double-take to believe that
he was actually related to the older, gruffer, Admiral.

When I finally met Ashton for the first time, it was a few months
before the wedding. He was enrolled in military school and lived away from home
most of the year. If I’d been surprised at how handsome he was from his
pictures, I was floored by his personality.

He was friendly, funny, overall a great guy. He joked around with me
about his super strict father, and even helped me on a newspaper article. He
acted just like I always imagined a big brother would. For those two weeks that
he first came to meet Mom and I, the house was full of laughter and it felt
like a home. Even the Admiral seemed to lighten up with Ashton around.

For the next four years, Ashton came in and out of my life on breaks
from school. Every time he did, life around the house got just a little bit
better. I began to look forward to his visits, and to summer vacations when
he’d be home for months. We did everything siblings do: watching movies, going
to the pool, joshing around. He was easy to talk to, despite my youthful
aggressiveness when it came to politics and social issues. It never ceased to
amaze me that he was the Admiral’s son, and that he was so entrenched in the
military but still managed to be easygoing and pleasant.

One summer, when Ashton was 17 and I was 15, he met a local girl and
started seeing her regularly. That was the only time in my childhood that I
remember being unhappy with Ashton: I thought she wasn’t good enough for him,
and that he was wasting his time. Of course, eventually, I would look back and
see this as adolescent jealousy, but at the time I really actually felt
betrayed, and I treated him like a leper because of it.

We fought a lot over that summer, about different things: dinner, what
TV show to watch, whose turn it was to water the vegetable garden. Stupid
little arguments. Towards the end of the summer, Ashton came into my room
unannounced.

“Hey, Christy,” he’d said. Turning to him, I’d
been surprised by the look on his face.

“What’s up?” I was concerned; he looked as sad as
I’d ever seen him, if not more.

“I mean, I don’t know if you know this, but I just talked with Dad and
this will probably be my last summer at home for a while. You know, I turn 18
in November and…” his voice trailed off. I could fill in the blanks. Graduate
military school, go into the military. Of course. I felt my heart break in my
chest. Hell, I could
hear
my heart
break in my chest.

Ashton had been the best thing to come of Mom marrying the Admiral, in
my opinion, and I knew that he wasn’t going to be around for long – the times I
saw him were already too short for me, and they were only going to get shorter
and farther between.

“I…” I started to say, tears welling in my eyes. I don’t know what I’d
planned to say, but he didn’t let me finish.

“Let’s not talk about it. Just, you know, I really care about you, and
I’m going to miss you,” he said with a half-smile. I rushed from my chair,
wrapping him in a hug. I breathed deeply, wanting to remember his smell. I knew
this wasn’t the last time I’d ever see him, but the summer was almost over and
after that…

“Oh geeze, come on, don’t be such a girl,” he said, but wrapped his
arms around me as well. We stayed in that embrace for a long time, but not long
enough as far I was concerned. And then, as soon as it always ends, summer was
over.

The last time I saw him before he deployed, I was 16. I remember being
unreasonably cranky and acting out like a true teenager. I was mad that he had
to go, I was mad that I’d not see him again, I was mad about the whole thing. I
wish I’d been nicer at that last meeting.

Though we’d promised to keep in touch, life gets in the way, as it
often does. We lost contact by the middle of my senior year in high school,
after which I only saw him a handful of times. Each of those times, it seemed,
he was a little less happy to see me, or anyone else, for that matter. I was
getting busier and busier with college, and didn’t have time or energy to
notice that Ashton was becoming more withdrawn over time. I guess it wouldn’t
have mattered whether or not I’d noticed. By the time my story really begins, I
hadn’t seen Ashton in three years.

Believe it or not, as I got older, the Admiral grew on me. I still
didn’t approve of his life in the military and thought he represented
everything that was wrong with America, but do you know how draining it is to
live day in and day out with someone you’re actively trying to hate? It’s
exhausting. I guess, more than anything, I just got tired.

By the time I was at the end of my junior year of high school, I was
actually smiling at his jokes. By the end of that summer, I was letting him
teach me how to drive (something my mother had been too afraid to do). By
Christmas of my senior year, I was buying him gifts and wrapping them, placing
them under the tree with anticipation. And by the time I’d graduated, I even
allowed him to hug me in my cap and gown.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t some major tension in the house at
times. When you’ve got two stubborn, smart people with totally different
opinions living under the same roof, there are bound to be tensions and
conflicts. We all learned, rather quickly, to avoid watching the news together,
or mentioning current events at the dinner table. More than once I went to bed
willingly hungry because I’d stormed off in the middle of dinner.

But the Admiral and I maintained a truce, and as long as topics like
police brutality, abortion, immigration, the Iraq war, climate change,
marijuana legalization, racism, sexism, corporate bailouts, and about a dozen
other issues were avoided, we managed to get along. When it was finally time
for me to go off to college, I was desperate to meet people whose political
views aligned more with my own – or who had political views at all.

See, that’s the hell of small towns. Either people are against you, or
they don’t care. None of my friends from high school cared one way or another
who was going to be their senator or congressman or even the president. They
were a lot more concerned with their trucks or purses than human rights issues.
I was the only member of the school’s political community, and no matter how
many strongly-worded editorials I wrote for the newspaper, they ended up in the
trash with the rest of the week’s garbage.

I was so ready to leave.

And college was everything I’d hoped, for the most part. I’ve already
told you about my resume by the time I was in my senior year; from the first
day of class, I was an active participant in every discussion from the Prussian
War to the corruption of the White House. I made friends who were as passionate
as I was, and I found myself forgetting all about the humdrum life I’d left
behind.

Unless I absolutely had to go home, I stayed on campus or, later, at
my apartment near campus. By the time I was in my third year, I was living in
Columbus through most of winter and spring break as well as summer, dividing my
time between internships and a part-time job at the school library.

In the end, I’d regret that more than anything in the world. Still, to
this day, I wish that I’d gone home more often. I wish that I’d called more
often, too. And that I’d hugged my mother more, and told her how much I love
her, and thanked her for everything she’d done for me, raising me on her own.

But how could I have known? If we knew about the tragedies that would
befall us before they happened, they wouldn’t be tragedies, and we could
prepare for them. We could do everything right the first time around. We would
never have to lay in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, thinking of all the
things we should have said. We would never start crying in the middle of
pumping gas because we suddenly remember something we’d done long ago.

But, alas, that’s not the way things are, and we don’t know what’s
going to happen before it happens. Reality jumps up and bites us in the face
when we least expect it.

I’m taking a long time to say it because it’s taken me a long time to
make peace with it, and if it’s hard to think about, you can’t imagine how hard
it is to write. When I was 22, in the early months of my final semester at
college, my mother was killed by a drunk driver only a few miles from our home.
That stretch of highway is all sunflowers, and I like to think that’s the last
thing she saw before everything when black: a beautiful sunflower, leaning over
her, welcoming her to whatever comes next. Welcoming her home.

Everything stopped when I got the call. I remember the exact moment: I
was sitting in front of my computer, reading a libertarian blog about gun
rights. I was taking notes for my advanced seminar in constitutional law.

As soon as I saw the Admiral’s number pop up on my phone, I knew
something was wrong. He
never
called me;
my mother called me, and would put him on to talk to me, but he never called me
himself. I remember thinking I’d let it go to voicemail, so that I would at
least know exactly how bad it was before having to talk to him. But instead, I
picked up. I’m glad I did.