The two marines stood before the egg shell colored door. Their civilian clothes were slightly rumpled from the long flight. The first man unconsciously ran his hand over his short curly hair, eying the door skeptically.

"Is this the right apartment?" The second man, with darker hair and sterner features, pulled a crumpled piece of white paper from his pocket. He checked the number he'd recorded against the gold number secured to the door.

"Yep."

"Well, there's no smoke coming out from under the door this year, so that's a good sign." Bass vividly recalled last Thanksgiving's escapades. It had been fortunate for Ben that Miles was so handy with a fire extinguisher, or more than turkey would have ended up charcoal.

"Easy on my brother's cooking, Home Economics wasn't your best class either, as I recall." It was true that Bass hadn't excelled in the domestic arts, although he had managed to scrap by with a B minus, largely due to the generous assistance of his cooking partner. She been incredibly helpful in the kitchen and in return he'd tutored her in French and by French, he didn't mean the language.

"I'm just saying it's not too late for all of us to go to Dennys." Bass could swear that just last week he had finally dislodged a piece of charred turkey from his teeth that had been preserved there since last November.

"My brother believes in home cooked holiday meals and ever since Mom died…"

Bass was instantly contrite. Bass had been orphaned as a toddler and grew up bouncing from foster home to foster home. He'd learned charm as a means of social survival. When his deadbeat foster dad forgot to give him lunch money, he'd covered by going on about how he couldn't believe the other student could touch cafeteria food and how he had a buffet of oven fresh cookies that would be waiting for him when he got home. Everyone seemed to buy his act, with the notable exception of Miles.

Bass would never forget the day he knew that Miles Mathson would be his best friend for life. Miles had sat at Bass's table for two months, but had never spoken a word to him. Bass didn't take it personally, Miles rarely spoke to anyone. If he hadn't been so good at sports, Miles undoubtedly would have been labeled a loser loner. The fact that he WAS an all-star athlete earned him a seat at the table, but the boys had long since given up trying to engage him in conversation. Miles generally sat at the end of the bench, eating his lunch in silence, seemingly obviously to the world around him.

On the day in question, Bass had deliberated dawdled at the bathroom, wanting to arrive to late so that his friends would be so caught up in their own meals and conversation, they wouldn't notice he was going without lunch for the third day in a row. Bass had slid down on the bench next to Miles, grateful that no one's eyes were on him. He couldn't have been more shocked when a stack of homemade cookies, wrapped in clear plastic appeared in his lap.

He'd frowned, looking to his right, when Bryan Rhynebeck was flicking a paper football at Sean Morris' head. Bryan had the cafeteria's hard plastic tray in front of him. No homemade cookies could have come from that direction. He turned to his left, where Miles was methodically munching his way through a tuna fish sandwich. The brown paper bag that had held his lunch lay crumpled and empty in front of him.

Bass had stared at Miles a few moments, watching him chew while his eyes remained fixed on some unseen point on the cafeteria's far wall. Finally Miles had turned, looked Bass directly in the eyes and raised an eyebrow. In that instant Bass realized that while Miles might not have been big on words, he sure knew how to communicate. All it took was one raised eyebrow for Bass to receive the message, "What are you waiting for, a written invitation? Eat the cookies, stupid." Feeling vaguely sheepish, Bass had taken a bite and discovered they were delicious.

In the months that followed Bass learned that Ben's and Miles' dad had split when Ben was seven and Miles was three. Their mother slaved at two jobs to keep the family financially afloat and yet, she's still found time to make her boys hearty home cooked meals. The first time Miles had brought Bass home for dinner she welcomed him with open arms and a full, steaming plate. When she'd died three ago, Bass felt like he'd been orphaned a second time.

"Don't even listen to me, man. I'm just jealous you have family to share a burnt bird with." Bass wished he'd kept his stupid mouth shut for once. He'd choke down worse things than blackened turkey to honor the memory of the woman who'd given him the closest thing to a mother's love that he would ever experience in his lifetime.

"So long as I'm alive, you'll always have family." Miles knocked on the door, before Bass could respond. Typical Miles, to say something verging on sentimental and then become totally incapable of making eye contact until the subject was changed.

"So, tonight's the night we meet the famous girlfriend? What's her name again? Rebecca?" Ben had been routinely communicating the details of this girl to Miles for the past 10 weeks. Miles, naturally had been relying it piece meal to Bass, who'd had less than no interest in the information.

"Rachel. And be nice, he really serious about this one." Since when was Ben not serious about anything?

"If you ask me he's too young to be settling down. He needs to live a little. Experience everything the world has to offer." Bass liked Ben, despite the fact he was more than a little straight-laced, and on occasion a bit preachy. Ben shouldn't be tying himself down now, while he was still in his twenties. He could easily wait another decade or even two before resigning himself to the altar. Ben had graduated at the top of his class at the University of Chicago, been fast-tracked through his Masters programs and was months away from completing his doctorate. He was smart, dependable, soon to be well-employed. He was exactly the sort of guy women wanted to 'settle down' with, so there was no harm in Ben's keeping his options open for a little while longer.

"Nobody asked you, least of all Ben, so I'd keep your opinions to yourself. Besides you're hardly one to offer advice. It's not like your track record with women is stellar." Miles shot Bass his patented double arched eyebrows.

"What are you talking about? Women love me." Bass couldn't believe his best friend's pronouncement. Whenever he and Miles returned from duty and hit the nearest bar, Bass, without fail, ended the evening with either a phone number or an out and out invitation back to some woman's place.

"Yeah, for a weekend or two, before they figure out what a bum you are." It was certainly true that Bass' encounters didn't have much of a shelf life, but then he didn't want them to. Ask any so-called happy couple and they will tell you that the first few weeks of their relationship were the most fun and exciting. That was what Bass got, again and again and again. He was never forced to endure the domestication of a relationship, where the arguments and the boredom set in. In Bass' eyes his love life was perfect.

Suddenly the door opened and revealed a slender woman with a mouth that quirked up at the corner as though there was some joke being told that only she could hear. For some reason the sight of her left Bass feeling temporarily stunned, like someone had smack the back of his skull with a two by four.

"Hi, I'm Rachel. I know one of you is Miles and the other is Bass." Bass struggled to assume his typical devil-may-care smile, fighting against whatever fog had suddenly overtaken his brain.

"Care to guess who's who?" There, that seemed normal, light. Bass glanced at Miles out of the corner of his eye. His best friend didn't seem to notice anything peculiar.

"Hmmm…give me a few minutes, and I bet I can figure it out. Why don't you both come in?" Bass let Miles step through first, in order to put as much space between himself and the woman as possible. Rachel, her named was Rachel, continued, totally obvious of the chaos she'd created in Bass' head, "Sorry about leaving you waiting out there. We were in the middle of pulling the pies out of the oven." Bass inhaled, hoping the smell of burnt crust would distract him from his inner turmoil. Instead of smoke his nostrils were greeted with the smell of baking apple.

"Pies from the oven? You mean non-store bought pies?" Miles sounded as surprised as Bass felt. Apparently in all of his letters Ben hadn't mentioned his girlfriend could bake.

"Apple, Pumpkin, and Banana Cream. The turkey needs another hour before it's ready, but I thought we could all sneak a little dessert in before the main meal." Bass's last 'girlfriend' had had a conniption when he'd told her he wanted to go to I-Hop for dinner. She'd had very specific rules about when and in what order food must be consumed. She had explained these rules at length until he'd been forced to manufacture a military emergency that required his immediate presence back at the base.

"Dessert before dinner? Pinch me, I think I'm in love." The words had flown out of his mouth before he'd had the sense to stop them. There was nothing to be done, but play it off like he was just being his usually roguish self.

"I'm going to take a wild guess that you're Bass." He had never so liked hearing the sound of his own name.

"How you'd know?"

"From Ben's description of you." Bass' mind immediately began to race with all the unflattering stories about him Ben could have recounted to Rachel. He was torn between worrying about what details Ben had shared and worrying about the fact he cared so much.

"How did he describe me? Let me guess, 'unbelievably handsome and charming?'" Rachel's blue-grey eyes seemed to stare right down into him with such an unnatural intensity that in the moment he would have sworn she could see each and every thought he had ever had or ever would have.

"Completely full of shit." No doubt about it, Bass was screwed.