When he can, Sam forces himself to keep active, to leave the apartment, to take out the garbage and get the groceries. He gets orange juice and biscuits, little tomatoes that he can fry in the hopes that the smell will get Riley to come out of his room one of these mornings. Sam spends fifteen minutes in the produce section, staring at sweet potatoes and trying to remember what makes them different from yams. He picks up winter squash and green beans instead, gets good at making casseroles and country side dishes.
"I'mma teach you how to make cobbler and pecan tassies next," Riley told him from where he was pulling a parchment-lined cookie sheet with bacon on it out of the oven in the off-base housing that they technically weren't authorized to have and could barely afford back in 2006. Most of the things Riley liked to cook required bacon, crumbled over the top or wrapped around the main ingredients. He liked dishes with an obscene amount of butter and cheese, too. Heavy, warm, gooey things that could make Sam moan while eating and feel guilty, like he needed to immediately run a 5K to make up for it.
"What the hell is a 'tassie?'" Sam asked, plucking a piece of bacon off the parchment paper and burning his fingers in the process. Riley tried to swat at him with an oven mitt, but Sam scurried back over to the safety of the table, blowing on his singed fingers and the hot bacon as he nibbled. He hadn't known about baking bacon or what parchment paper was even used for before they started living together. Now he wasn't sure if he'd ever bother pan-frying it again.
"Delicious, that's what," Riley hissed with a grimace, as though Sam's culinary incompetence was blasphemous and caused him real pain. "Oh! An' I got a recipe for banana pudding and cherry yum-yums in that book, too. You'll be such a catch when I'm done with you, Wilson. Gonna make you somebody's fine-ass husband one of these days."
"I'm already a catch, and I definitely don't need your help with my fine ass," Sam laughed.
"They just gonna love you for your body, man," Riley said, complaining with that particular brand of bitchy whining he had perfected over the years. "An' that shit's not forever. A good meal, though? That's happiness on a plate. We're cookin' up love in this kitchen."
Sam stalls out by the dairy products for almost ten minutes, staring at a carton of eggs and thinking about Riley, fresh out of the shower in their barracks room when they were at Fort Benning for Airborne School earlier that same year, in yoga pants and a cut-up gym shirt, making breakfast on a hot plate they weren't supposed to have and humming along with some awful country song on the radio. They'd just completed a night equipment jump and Sam was bruised and tired from a shit landing, but he still stood in the doorway leading to the bathroom for a few extra minutes to watch instead of getting himself cleaned up. Riley was young and stupid handsome and his ass looked great and all Sam could think about was how much he would have liked to pull Riley into the shower with him.
"Get in there, Wilson," Riley had chided, shooting Sam a grin over his shoulder. He was starting to shuffle along with the music and Sam had to snap his eyes back up to Riley's face before he got caught watching him bounce around down there. "You reek. Go on, get. I promise I'll make enough for you, too; you don't gotta watch me like a hawk."
When he can, Sam goes to his group therapy meetings and pretends that they help. He listens to people talk about checking for bombs while driving on I-87, about feeling anxious on crowded sidewalks, about reaching for weapons that they no longer carry. He thinks about Riley and how he's got it so much worse, how the door stays closed and how much he misses his wingman. Sam doesn't have a problem with traffic or the trash on the side of the road. He doesn't flashback to firefights and ambushes when he hears a car backfire, doesn't stay up late at night to dwell on the last tour and all the things that he maybe should have done instead.
He does laundry at the washers down on 106th Street, and sometimes Riley's things are mixed up with his, and that's when it hits him.
"Holy shit, I'm gonna die a virgin," Riley gasped over the comm. Sam could see him laying flat on his belly behind a pile of rubble, one leg cocked up and the other straight out behind him, from his own position, crouching with his shoulder pressed to the broken concrete wall he'd been stuck using as cover for the last six minutes. Most firefights didn't last more than fifteen minutes, because no one gave a shit about conserving ammunition and this wasn't the goddamn movies, but fifteen minutes went by awful slow when it was this hot and there were bullets and screams ripping through the air. Riley's rifle was supported on the rocks and he was trying to keep his head down because he didn't trust his flight helmet to stop a round.
"Riley, you stupid motherfucker!" Sam yelled, popping around the jagged side of the wall to return fire. The enemy, four or five of them, he thought, had good defensive positions in the bombed out shell of what had once been the lobby of an apartment building across the narrow street. It was late 2009 and they had no backup, no planned resupply, and nobody higher up listening in on their frequency. Officially, Sam and Riley weren't even in this country.
"Wilson, I'm gonna die a virgin and someone's gonna have to identify my fuckin' body. I'm wearin' women's underwear right now. How is the Air Force gonna explain that to my mama?!"
"Goddamnit, Riley, we're not dying today!" Sam yanked the pin off a grenade, thumbed the spoon and held it to his chest as he started his count. One, two, three, and lobbed it hard over the wall towards the enemy. Four, five, six went the count in the air. He didn't hear it hit the ground, but there was a boom when it went off, two different voices screaming in Khowar as the enemy hunkered down behind their own cover to avoid the explosion. "I got you covered, move move move!"
Riley rolled out from behind his position, scrambled up to his knees and ran for Sam. His boots slipped on the rocks and debris and Riley went down, slamming into the open space between where he'd been and where he'd been headed. He landed on his elbow and kneepads at first and quickly flattened out on his belly to start the quick low-crawl to get to Sam. The EXO-7 on his back made a big target, and all Sam could do was provide suppressive fire.
"I'm down!" Riley yelled, and Sam could hear him even without the comm in his ear. "Fuck, man, cover me while I move!"
He has to remind himself that that was three years ago and he didn't let Riley die that day. Sam takes a deep breath, tries to calm himself, slow his heart rate. He looks down at the clothes in his laundry bag, an Acadiana Roller Girls t-shirt and a pair of little black panties that aren't his sitting on top. He remembers teasing Riley about wearing them before he knew how much it meant to him, about wearing all his girlie clothes whenever they were stateside and off-post. At the derby track in Lafayette while on leave, in a drag bar in Greensboro one weekend when they were still stationed with the 24th Special Tactics Squadron.
"You ever gonna ask?" Riley said, leaning back against the bar. He had a day and a half's worth of stubble and red lipstick on. Black mascara and dark eyeshadow. Sam just smiled, and looked over the sequined top, the girlie jeans with useless front pockets and rhinestones on the ass, the bracelets that glittered in the bar's dim light. He took a drink of his rum and coke and shrugged.
"Nah, man," he had replied. It was early 2010 and Don't Ask, Don't Tell had been repealed but it wasn't going into effect until later that year. It was still a closeted Air Force until September and they'd spent the last six years ignoring this thing, whatever it was. Sam had had two girlfriends since they'd left Lackland, and Riley didn't date or do hookups, ever. Usually he played wingman and designated driver whenever they went out. "You do you. It's not hurting anybody."
"I don't think I'm gay," Riley told him. Sam frowned. He didn't care. He'd been out as a bisexual back in high school, before going to college and then joining the Air Force. Sam wasn't out anymore, and his friends back home were good about listing him as an 'ally' instead of a member of the community now. It was a lie, but it was an easy lie because serving meant something, means something still, and it was worth keeping his mouth shut about hot guys and limiting his dating pool.
"Riley, I don't care, either way."
"But I. . ." Riley looked down, unable to meet Sam's gaze. "I think about you, man. Like that. Sometimes. An' I'm sorry."
Sam swallowed hard, feeling suddenly too warm. "What if I don't want you to be sorry?"
"You date girls," Riley noted. Sam nodded.
"I do." He paused, then admitted, "But I've dated guys, too."
"What if I'm not either?" Riley asked. "There are times I don't know what I am, or I know I'm not one or the other."
"I don't care," Sam told him, and reached out for Riley's waist, pulling him closer. "Gay, bi, whatever. Whatever I have to be to be in love you, I'm it, okay?"
Sam reaches into the bag and pulls the shirt out with trembling hands, clutches it to his chest and can't stop his eyes from watering. The word he had needed then was 'pansexual.' The word Riley had been looking for was 'genderfluid.' He knows that now, but he can't be sure that Riley's heard him talk about that through the door, doesn't know if Riley's even listening anymore or if things like labels and belonging to a community matter at this point.
Back then, it seemed like being queer and in the military took up so much of their time with worry and vigilance and fear that they wouldn't pass as straight or cis or man enough, that someone would find out and they'd have to leave the service in shame. It used to be such a big part of their identities and now it's just a footnote, because they've got bigger things to worry about: Riley keeps his door closed and Sam has quiet breakdowns in between the aisles of the bodega where he does his grocery shopping or standing in front of the washers with his dirty laundry at his feet.
Sam would say that the worst part is that nobody notices, nobody knows or pauses or cares, because this is New York City and everybody's got their own shit to deal with it, but he'd be lying. The worst part is knowing that there isn't anything he can do to make their transition easier on Riley, that he can't take whatever is keeping Riley away from him. It's probably heavy but Sam could carry it, if Riley needed him to, because. . .
Because he's strong. He's always been strong, even when he doesn't have to be, even when they tell him to take a knee or a breather or to rest and recover. Sam's only gotten stronger over the years; he was strong in Harlem before the Air Force and then he was strong in training strapped into his wing harness and strong when they sent him overseas.
He doesn't always get why it's so damn hard now, when he's safe and home in New York, to have that kind of strength again.
Sam stuffs his clothes in the wash and pays, sits in one of the little plastic chairs off to the side and waits for the cycle to finish. He's got Riley's shirt in his hands still. It isn't even dirty.