One-night Stand | Simon "Ghost" Riley

Ghost couldn't remember the last time he'd enjoyed sex that much. That wasn't a throwaway thought and it irritated him on principle.

He'd been turning it over since 0530, since the alarm on his phone had gone off and he'd taken four extra minutes to get up because his body was doing something unfamiliar. Something loose. Warm in the shoulders. Light behind the sternum in a way that had nothing to do with cardio and everything to do with the number he'd put in their phone.

He'd given someone his number. His actual number. Not a burner, not a dead-end contact, not the careful distance he maintained with every person who'd ever shared his bed. His real number.

Ghost had stood in the doorway of their flat with his jacket on and his mask off and he'd meant it when he said he wanted to see them again. Hadn't dressed it up. Hadn't softened it. Had just said it, plain, because he was forty minutes into the kind of afterglow that made honest men out of cynics and he didn't have the energy to pretend otherwise.

He showed up to briefing at 0700 in a mood so unprecedented that Gaz did a double-take from across the room. Soap noticed the second he saw his face.

"Christ, L.T., you look like someone who's either had a religious experience or a stroke. Which one and do I need to call someone?" Grinning from his chair, boots on the table in anticipation of the answer.

Ghost didn't tell him to shut up. That was the wrong move because Soap's grin widened into something feral. Gaz looked up from his phone. Even Price, in his office with the door open, paused mid-sip of his coffee.

"Something happened," Soap said, pointing at Ghost's face like a man identifying a rare bird. "Something happened to Simon Riley's face and I need everyone to see this before it goes away."

Ghost poured his tea and ignored them all. Couldn't quite kill the glint in his own eyes, the faint pull at one corner of his mouth. He felt ridiculous. Better than ridiculous, if he was being honest, which he wasn't planning to be.

He felt good. That was the insane part. He, Simon Riley, the man who'd built an identity out of controlled misery and tactical silence, felt genuinely, unreasonably good. The feeling had survived a commute and Soap's entire personality.

Then Price called out. "Recruit training rotation starts today." Voice carrying the specific warmth of a man delivering a sentence he knew was unjust. "Short straw came to you, Simon."

Ghost stared at him. "No."

"Wasn't asking, Lieutenant."

"I hate recruits."

"I'm aware. Hence the short straw." Price took another sip of his coffee. Unbothered. Bastard. "0900 at the training yard. You've got the third intake batch. Thirty-two bodies. Green as grass. Try not to make any of them cry on the first day."

He'd said that last part with the particular dryness of a man who knew Ghost would absolutely make at least four of them cry within the hour.

Ghost finished his tea. Pulled his balaclava and mask on and walked to the training yard with his shoulders set and his jaw tight. The good mood fighting a rearguard action against the specific dread that came from standing in front of people who didn't know which end of a rifle was forward.

But.. He had a number in his phone that belonged to someone who'd looked at his face without the mask and hadn't flinched. That was still there. That was still operational. Nothing could take that from him, not even thirty-two idiots who couldn't shoot straight.

The training yard was a rectangle of packed earth and faded paint lines under a grey sky. The recruits were lined up in formation when he rounded the corner. Thirty-two bodies in standard-issue kit, standing at something that should be attention but mostly looked like a collection of people who'd been told to stand straight and had interpreted the instruction creatively.

Ghost walked the line. Cataloguing faces, assessing posture, reading the small tells that separated the ones who'd make it from the ones who'd wash out in week two. He did it automatically. His body ran the drill while his brain was still half in the doorway of a flat hours ago.

Then his eyes caught a face in the third row and he stopped walking. His head had tilted by a single degree. His body, which had been in instructor mode, had gone still in the way that meant his brain was processing something that didn't fit the operational picture.

The face in the third row was looking back at him.

The face from the flat. The face he'd watched in the dark while his hands learned the shape of someone who'd let him close. The face that had looked at him without the mask and smiled and said something that had made him laugh, actually laugh, the kind of sound he'd forgotten his chest could make.

Standing in recruit kit. In his training yard. In his formation. On his base.

Ghost's jaw clenched so hard his molars creaked.

Thirty-one other recruits stood at varying levels of attention around the one person on the planet who had seen his face in the last twelve hours and the good mood that had survived Soap, Price and the short straw died a clean, instant death in the space between heartbeats.

He finished walking the line. Reached the front. Turned on his heel. Faced the formation with his hands clasped behind his back and his voice coming out flat and even and completely dead inside.

"I'm Lieutenant Riley. You will call me Ghost or sir. You will not call me anything else." His eyes swept the formation without landing anywhere specific. "Some of you think you belong here. Most of you are wrong. By the end of this rotation, thirty-two will become twenty or fewer and I will not lose sleep over a single name I cut."

His gaze moved across the rows.

"We start with conditioning. You have four minutes to be at the far end of this yard. Anyone still standing here when I finish this sentence is already gone."

Thirty-two bodies moved.

Ghost watched them go. Watched one specific body move with the others, recruit kit fresh and clean and wrong. Because twelve hours ago that body had been under his hands and now it was standing in his formation wearing someone else's uniform and the number in his phone was suddenly a problem he didn't have a protocol for.

He pulled his phone from his pocket. Looked at the new number. The one he hadn't gotten around to adding a name to because he'd been too busy memorizing the shape of their smile in the dark.

He put the phone away.

"Four minutes," he said to the empty air and started walking after them with his boots heavy on the packed earth and his chest doing something that wasn't the good kind of tight anymore.

.