Chapter 3: Shane

Fine. You want the rundown? Here it is.

My name is Shane Andrew Mavic. Captain Shane Mavic. I’m twenty-nine years old. I’ve been in the United States Navy for 11 years now, or to be more precise, 4,105 days, 15 hours, and 26 minutes, give or take a couple of minutes.

I’ve been a SEAL for 3, 875 of those days. Out of those 3,875 days I’ve spent less than 45 days in the United States and exactly zero days in my hometown of Gulf Breeze, Texas. And as you can probably tell, I’m a little hung up on numbers. I’m not math whiz by any stretch of the imagination. To the contrary, I barely graduated high school. I just like keeping track of things in my head. Counting helps keep me clear. Plus, I just like numbers. I find comfort in them. Numbers are safe, predictable, always logical: unlike most of the people I’ve dealt with in my life, where two plus two equaled any number but four.

During those 3,875 days, I’ve gone on missions in 24 different countries, most of that time having been spent in some of the world’s premiere shithole destinations like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Columbia, Turkey, Croatia, and Iran; places you could not pay me to go unless I was there in service to my country.

Still, I’ve loved every fucking minute of being a SEAL. The intense training, the constant adrenaline and exhaustion, the heat, the cold, the dirt, the mud, the swamps, the shit, the danger, the fighting, the knives, the bullets, the bombs, and yes, the pussy. Hell, I even loved that tingly feeling that inched its way up my spine, like a spider creepy-crawling under the skin, knowing that the motherfucker asking to bum a cigarette or wanting to know the time might be wearing a suicide vest or waiting for you to let your guard down so he could slit your throat. That shit gets my adrenaline pumping, man.

So, to answer your question: who the fuck am I?

I’m a motherfucking Navy SEAL, motherfucker.

That’s what I do.

That’s who I am.

Don’t get me wrong. It hasn’t been all work and no play. During that time, I’d had sex with 432 ladies of various shapes, sizes, colors, and nationalities. My standards tended to waver based on the amount of readily available pussy and the amount of alcohol consumed.

I’d been the beneficiary of 319 blowjobs that ranged from “just okay” to “fucking mind-blowing”. In my humble opinion, there was really no such thing as a bad blowjob, although there was one Peruvian chick that had one hell of an overbite who left me with teeth marks on my cock that took a few days to heal. I didn’t mind so much. I just considered them to be battle scars, like the three bullet holes in my back that got me my first Purple Heart and the jagged scars on my forearms from that cocksucker in that Columbian bar who came at me with a butcher knife when he caught me talking to his old lady.

I’d been on the receiving end of 272 hand jobs and spent an entire furloughed weekend in Bogota once, cuffed to a metal bed while identical twins named Lola and Lulu—who didn’t speak a word of English—did things to my body that I wished they’d videotaped because you’d have to see it to believe it.

I walked funny for a week after that, but it was worth it.

I reckoned my looks were the main reason I got laid so much. God knows it wasn’t my sparkling personality that attracted the women. I didn’t smile much. And I wasn’t much of a talker. And my intolerance for bullshit had led me into so many fights that I didn’t even bother counting them anymore.

A Ukrainian chick whose name I couldn’t pronounce and can’t remember once told me, “Is good thing you good looking. You have personality like dog shit.” She said it while she was straddling my hips, riding my cock like a jockey in the Kentucky Derby. I just told her to shut the fuck up and keep on riding. And she did.

“Tall, dark, and dangerous,” is how my buddy Troy introduced me to the ladies who hung out in the bars we hit when we had some down time. My SEAL call sign was Vader, which I thought was kind of cool. It fit me. I’m 6’4, with buzzed dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, and I can grow a full beard in less than a week. Over the years, I’ve packed on 225 pounds of solid muscle, and have black tribal tats all over my shoulders and arms. Women dig tattoos. At least a certain kind of women do. And those women of a certain kind seem to flock to me and it would be rude to turn them all down (I just turn down the dogs… I know… I’m shallow that way…).

One woman in Germany wanted to fuck me because she said I looked like the dude on the cover of some dirty romance novel she used to get herself off when her husband—a German Army colonel—wasn’t around. I think the name of the book was like, Big Dick SEAL, which fit me because I was a SEAL and I did have a big cock. It’s exactly 10¼ inches from base to tip when fully erect, to be precise. I know… numbers again…

What’s that? Have I ever been in love?

Once. But that was a long, long time ago, when I was just a kid.

I lost my virginity when I was 16, roughly 4,745 days ago, to a girl named Annabel Lee back home in Gulf Breeze. Her daddy said he named her after that Edgar Allen Poe poem, but I knew that was bullshit. Billy Ray Lee had trouble reading the backs of cereal boxes. I knew for a fact he didn’t know who the fuck Edgar Allen Poe was. Somebody smarter than him must have pointed out that he named his baby girl the same name as the poem and it made Billy Ray feel smart, so he went with it.

Anyway, in the poem, the narrator fell in love with this girl named Annabel Lee when they were both very young. She was so beautiful, and their love so deep, he believed the angels were jealous and took her from him. His love for her continued even after her death and he never stopped pining for her. I remembered reading the poem over and over again in high school, hoping in some silly teenage way that it was not an omen of things to come for me and my Annabel Lee. No, she didn’t die, but her love for me did the moment she caught me with my dick in another girl’s mouth in the back of my mom’s old Chrysler after a football game. I tried to win her back, but she wouldn’t even give me the time of day, and I couldn’t really blame her. I royally fucked up. I fucked us up. It wasn’t too long thereafter that the sheriff put me on the bus headed for boot camp clear across country and that was all she wrote.

I never saw or spoke to Annabel Lee again.

It was the one regret that topped all others in a life filled with regrets.

I can still remember a few lines from the poem. I recited them in my head every night the first few months I was gone.

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

Like a lot of girls from south Texas, Annabel was one part Mexican, one part Cherokee Indian, and two parts “who the fuck knows”. Her hair was the color of a raven’s wings and her eyes were as deep a blue as the Gulf of Mexico at sunset. Fine, I’m no Edgar Allen Poe, but that’s how I remembered her, so fuck you.

Annabel and I were just sixteen-years-old the night we popped each other’s cherries in the back seat of my mom’s Chrysler (that old piece of crap Chrysler had a back seat like a mattress on wheels).

We had been unofficially dating and fiddling around sexually for a long time. We were young and horny and loved to experiment and make each other cum. I didn’t count things back then, but there were a lot of hand jobs, finger jobs, blow jobs, and massive amounts of tongue fucking. I lived for those moments when I could suck on Annabel’s tender clit and part her pussy lips with my fingers and shove my tongue deep inside her sweet hole. Her juices flowed from her pussy like a warm stream over my tongue and into my mouth. It was like drinking the nectar of the gods. I lapped it up like a kitten attacking a bowl of milk and prodded for more. Even after all this time I could still close my eyes and taste her on the tip of my tongue… sweet… salty… pungent… I could still smell the scent of her cunt when I inhaled deeply, recalling the memory of her squirming against my lips.

We had done everything except fuck at that point, so we knew each other’s bodies well and knew how to quickly reach the point of orgasm. Slipping my cock inside her pussy just seemed like the natural progression of things, at least that’s what I’d been trying to convince her of. I’d been begging her for a while to let me fuck her, but she kept saying no, no, no. I had cum in her mouth, on her belly, on her tits, on her ass, and on her face, but I longed for the tight, wet, searing heat of her pussy around my cock.

And then the night came when Annabel said we could take things all the way. She had been milking my cock and I’d had my fingers buried all up inside her pussy for nearly half an hour when she whispered, “I want you to fuck me, Shane” in my ear. I was so fucking excited I almost shot my load just hearing those words. I could barely get the rubber out of the wrapper, my hands were shaking so bad.

Annabel calmly took the rubber and expertly slid it over my cock and climbed on top of me. I could remember the exact moment her tight pussy opened up like a delicate flower and allowed my big cock to slowly come inside. Her pussy was so tight it hurt going in at first, like a thousand fingers squeezing my dick as it forced its way into a hole the size of a thimble. Then, the tip of my cock hit her hymen and she froze. I watched her take a deep breath. Then she smiled at me with tears in her eyes and impaled herself on my cock in one quick movement. She gasped and fell still for a moment, then she exhaled deeply as her hips started to slowly move back and forth, sliding me in and out of her gushing virgin hole.

I exploded within seconds and so did she.

And from that moment on we never looked back.

That night still stands as the greatest night of my life.

I have replayed it in my dreams a thousand times.

* * *

Annabel was tall for a girl; thin, with pert, firm tits and not much in the way of curves, but she had a beautiful face and a tender way about her that just made me want to be near her. She had this aura, I guess you could say, this chemical magnetism that drew me to her like a moth to a flame or a magnet to steel. Like the moment I first slid inside her, I could still close my eyes and feel the heat coming off her young body as we lay there naked and sweating after our first awkward sex.

I’d known Annabel Lee pretty much my entire life, since first grade probably, but we started hanging out regularly our junior year when the chemistry teacher put us together on a project, probably because Annabel was the smartest kid in the class and I was the dumbest (plus I needed at least a C to keep my spot as quarterback of the junior varsity football team). I guess Coach Hand, the chemistry teacher who also happened to be an assistant football coach, figured I needed all the help I could get to even get a C in the class. He was right. I would have racked up another in a long line of D’s if it hadn’t been for Annabel’s hard work. We all knew it; her, me, and the coach. She got an A on the project and I got a sympathetic C that allowed me to keep playing football. My mom was proud as punch because she couldn’t remember the last time I’d made a grade above a D.

Me and Annabel hung out a lot after that, then casually became a couple our senior year. We never made it official, I mean, I never gave her my football jacket or a ring, but she had my heart for sure. She was my girl and I was her guy and everybody knew it. I was only happy when I was with Annabel. The rest of my life back then was shit. Pure unadulterated shit.

Then I fucked up big time and she caught me doing it and wouldn’t even talk to me after that. When she saw me coming she’d head in the other direction. She ignored my calls, my notes, the pleas sent through mutual friends, and my late-night visits outside of her bedroom window. Her mom would call the cops and I’d flee when the sirens got close. Once, the sheriff followed me home and told me to keep the fuck away. Fortunately for me, my old man had already passed out or he would have beaten the living shit out of me.

Then my brother Kenny was killed and everything went to shit.

The last time I saw Annabel was 4,103 days and 11 hours ago, the day I climbed onto the Greyhound bus for the long ride from south Texas to northern Michigan, headed to basic training at The Great Lakes Naval Training Center on the western shore of Lake Michigan. I didn’t even know she was there until the bus was pulling out of the terminal. I glanced out the window and there she was, sitting in her old man’s pickup truck watching me through the dirty windshield. She had her thin fingers wrapped tightly around the steering wheel. She didn’t wave. She didn’t blink. She didn’t move. She didn’t open her mouth. She just watched me go with a blank expression on her gorgeous face. I’ll never forget the look of apathy in her eyes. Or the sharp pains in my chest as I mentally ripped out my beating heart and tossed it out the window. It splattered like a ripe melon when it hit the scorching hot blacktop and sizzled like a frying egg. That was fine. I could live without it because I wouldn’t need it anymore. I was leaving it behind forever, along with my Annabel Lee.

* * *

I spent eight weeks in basic training, then put in my request to join the SEALS. I was numb back then. I literally felt nothing. No joy, no pain, no fear, no love. Nothing. Not a fucking thing. I wanted to pay for my sins with my flesh, blood, and bones. I wanted to atone for everything I’d done and the things I didn’t do. I wanted to pay for breaking Annabel’s heart, for betraying her trust. I wanted to offer myself as a sacrifice for the death of my little brother. I wanted to make up for all the years of abuse I took from my old man rather than killing him in his sleep when I was old enough to squeeze the trigger on the gun he kept in his nightstand. Dark thoughts, I know. I wanted to pay for just being me. I wanted to put my life on the line every day just so I could feel something. And I knew of no better way to do that than to become a SEAL and volunteer for every dangerous mission that came along. And that’s what I’ve done for the last eleven years.

Honestly, between you and me, the requirements for getting into the SEALs aren’t that stringent. It’s mostly physical stuff—endurance, perseverance, the willingness and ability to follow orders and put your ass on the line time and time again. Thank God, otherwise I never would have been accepted. Like my buddy Troy said, “Getting in was easy. Staying in and staying alive was hard.”

From Michigan, I flew back across country to the Naval Amphibious Base Coronado across the bay from San Diego, California. After twenty-one weeks of SEAL training, they herded my team onto a C-17 troop transport plane and it was off to Iraq for my first mission. And like leaving Gulf Breeze, I never looked back. From there, I have bounced around the globe like a fucking pinball with an assault rifle and enough attitude to fill a tanker truck.

Hoo-fucking-rah, SEALs…

A day hadn’t gone by when I didn’t wonder what became of Annabel.

I still thought about her late at night, when I felt alone even with another woman in my bed.

I wondered if I would ever see her again.

And if I did, I wondered if she would even speak to me.