In the great game of romance, you’ve got your Easy Targets, you’ve got your Fence Sitters and you’ve got your Bitches. And then, every once in a while, you get a woman who makes you realize that you’ve been playing the wrong game all along.

If I was in a good mood and the lighting was just right, I could meet a woman and have her panties on my bedroom floor in under an hour. Easy. Getting women to giggle and blush and throw themselves at me was a trick I had mastered a long time ago. But for the last month, I had been on a new mission that truly tested my abilities. Here was a whole new vista, a whole new playing field: I didn’t just want to charm Becky. I needed to go further. I needed to reach deep into her heart somehow, to touch her as profoundly as she had touched me…

I already knew how to make her giggle and blush. And fuck, I knew very well how to make that gorgeous ripe body of hers shake like it was Armageddon and she was sentenced to death by orgasm. But the juiciest part of Becky was still hidden from me. I had spent all of our past relationship never even realizing what I was missing, but now I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more desperately. I needed her to trust me. To believe in me. To give me not just her perfect body, but her heart, her soul… that miraculous little twinkle in her eye.

Crazy, huh? I was as surprised as anyone that the I, the biggest player in a 1000-mile radius was hanging his hat and retiring. But with every day that I woke up with nothing but her on my mind, it became clear that it was happening whether I liked it or not. Like it was fate.

I opened my desk drawer and pulled out my box. I unpacked some colored notepads, pens and markers. Then I got to work on the newest addition to my Win-Becky-Back Box.

I folded this carefully and put it back into the box along with the ring box Max had given me and two dozen other little notes. It was looking good. But if I wanted to earn Becky’s trust again, the evidence would have to be overwhelming. I would systematically unravel every bad decision I’d made, and re-stitch it again, the right way this time. We’d go back and rewind the past and start fresh.

I hadn’t meant to kiss her, but it seemed to happen anyway, without permission from either of us. I had coasted on the thrill of that kiss for two full days now, but I needed more. I couldn’t rush her. It wasn’t about me, after all. But holy hell if keeping my hands off her wasn’t the hardest thing I’d done in a long time. Back in her natural habitat, Becky was right back to primping and preening to the nines, never arriving to any of our ‘dates’ without poufy Marie Antoinette hair, a loud outfit with heels and a glossy pink pout. I loved it. She was even more of an adventurous dresser than she’d been years ago. These days, she thought nothing of floor length zebra print dresses, or giant real dahlias for her hair, or little shoes that were encrusted with buttons. And she rocked it. Becky had always been a big woman, but now she was big in every way – she was a work of art, so dazzling, so beautiful she took up more space in the room than anyone else. I felt proud to stand beside her.

I pulled a notebook out and began writing.

I stared down at the words and tried to swallow down the weird sensation rising up in my throat. I had left before we were done exploring. We cut short our new games and then Becky was just …normal angry at me. I grabbed the paper and ripped it up into shreds, which I tossed into the trash. Nope. I was starting from scratch. The past didn’t matter now. The past was—

I jumped at the sound of my phone ringing, and answered instantly.

“Hello?”

“Hey. It’s me.”

I suddenly forgot how to breathe.

“Hey,” I said, and sat down on the bed. “What’s up?”

“Oh nothing. I hope I’m not interrupting or—”

“No of course not! I was just… just hanging out at home.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Hearing the faint rasps of her breath over the line was suddenly the most erotic thing I could imagine. It felt like a sitcom episode, but it was my life: I was having some kind of love story, but with all the pieces in the wrong order. Boy met girl, boy proposed to girl, boy un-proposed to girl, boy and girl broke up for five years, boy and girl had a wild wolf-themed honeymoon, boy and girl tentatively spoke on the phone and flirted, trying to see if the other one was into them or not… Yeah, this definitely wasn’t a textbook romance. I couldn’t tell if we were on track to have 2.4 kids or progress to second base.

“I just got home from this looooong work thing they had, oh my god Hugo I just needed someone to vent to.”

“Vent away.”

“Do you know what happened? You’ll never believe it. They’re pulling the dress code card on me.”

“Shit.”

“I know. Except it’s not really even about the dress code. Not really. I think it’s just Melissa – remember I told you about her? – I honestly think there’s just some huge passive aggression going on there.”

“She’s probably jealous you’re so fabulous,” I teased.

She laughed.

“You never talk about your work,” she said.

“I guess not. Old Navy habit. Nobody wants to know, right?”

“I want to know. Come on, tell me about what deployment was like.”

I gave a long, low whistle.

“You had to ask about that, huh? Well, let’s just say this. It was meant to be one thing, and then it turned out to be the other. In the worst possible way.”

“Ooh. Very cryptic.”

I laughed.

“Well, they call it a top secret mission for a reason, right?”

The sound of her breath close on the phone had me imagining the forest again, where the night was silent and warmed only her whispering breath. It somehow brought me right back to that strange, secret cocoon we built for ourselves.

“Wow. Top secret? I guess I always thought you were always exaggerating or something. You really can’t tell me what you guys did?”

“Nope,” I said.

“So, like, you could have been the baddies in the story?”

I sat upright on the bed.

“What me? No way. We were out there fighting the good fight, trust me. I had to be super heroic and manly, obviously.”

I loved the soft, muffled sound of her giggle. It made me think of her magnificent tits, and how it was close on the best thing in the universe to watch them quiver whenever she laughed.

“Oh really?” she teased.

“Oh yeah. Sometimes we ran away with huge car explosions happening behind us, and sometimes we had to find bombs and figure out which wire to cut before they went off…”

“Just like in the movies, huh?”

“What? No way. It was much, much better than the movies!”

Her laugh was warm and sweet and uncomplicated.

“Well, I can see why Kirsten was so into you then,” she said.

I swallowed hard. The line went silent. She was testing me. There was a hidden question in her words, and I knew I had to be very, very careful about the way I answered it. In my mind, the decision was made. Becky was going to be my wife, sooner or later. But now I had to do whatever I could to get her there with me.

“Well, you’ll have to ask her I guess. How is she?” I said and braced myself.

“Oh, she’s fine. She’s probably dating a different moron now…”

I couldn’t help laugh, and she immediately started to apologize.

“I mean, not to say that you were a moron though.”

“No, no, fair comment. I’m not going to argue with that,” I laughed.

Silence.

“So! Are you seeing anyone these days? Which lucky girl gets to hear all your top secret SEAL stories?”

I knew she was trying hard to sound casual.

“Me? Oh, nobody.”

“Come on, you can tell me. It’s not like Hugo Turner to be without a hot girl on his arm, right?”

“Nope, no hot girl.”

“What? Are you sick or something?” she laughed.

“Well maybe… to be honest…”

“What?”

“Well, it’s hard to explain. I don’t think you’d understand.”

“Try me.”

I could tell I had her interest.

“Well… it’s just not worthwhile anymore. That kind of thing? Don’t get me wrong but …it’s not really satisfying in the end, you know?”

“Huh.”

“When we were on deployment, all the guys made promises about what we’d do when we got back home. We all – hey don’t tell any of this to the guys, okay?”

“You have my word,” she whispered.

“Well, we all made promises to one another. Hell, I don’t want to get into it too much, but shit happened out there. It really fucked Max up. I was okay. I guess. But we all made a …kind of pact together. That we would make it up somehow, what had to happen out there…”

“But what happened? Oh my god, Hugo…”

“Becky?”

“Yeah?”

“Promise me you’ll never ask me that. I wish I could tell you, I honestly do. But I can’t.”

More silence.

“My promise was lame compared to the other guys. They all took it so hard, but you know me, I’m easy going. So I promised myself I wouldn’t let it get to me. I wouldn’t let what happened over there change me or hurt me in any way. I’d just keep going and forget about the past. All of it.”

“All of it,” she whispered.

“But maybe it’s good to be changed, you know? Maybe it’s okay to be hurt a little, to have your world turned upside down.”

“Well, I never knew you to be the philosophical kind.”

“Well, yeah. Me neither. Maybe I’ve changed already!” I laughed. “But maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to just forget about everything. The past always catches up with you anyway. Like… do you ever get the feeling that life is just sometimes… I don’t know, playing with you? That you’re being moved around somehow by something you can’t see or really understand, but it’s working behind the scenes anyway?”

“Yeah. All the time.”

This time the silence between us felt more comfortable.

“I felt that way about… well, the time we spent in the forest.” I said. Fuck. No. I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t want to push her. I had to let her come to me…

“Hugo? Are you okay? I could come over.”

I thought for a moment.

“Sure… But Becky?”

“Yeah?”

“Is this …weird?”

“Yeah. It’s really weird.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

“Becky?”

“Yeah?”

“We can’t have sex tonight,” I said. In my mind, I added “yet.”

Silence.

“Yeah, yeah of course. Sure, I wasn’t gonna… yeah, I understand.”

I’d embarrassed her.

“I was just thinking we could watch TV or something, I could make cocoa…”

“You do make the best cocoa,” I said.

“So, you want me to come over?”

“Yeah.”

“For cocoa.”

“For cocoa.”

When we hung up I realized my hands were shaking. I looked over at the box I’d left on the dresser. It wasn’t full enough yet. But it would be, one note at a time. Things were weird. But I couldn’t rush anything. When I next asked her the question, I wanted to be 100% sure that her answer would be yes.