Nate blinked, rapidly, as his mental conception of the world played musical chairs with itself and resettled into a new and, Nate admitted, thoroughly baffling configuration. Brad was – really?
But he was – he was Brad.
Not just a Marine, but the Iceman, the Marine other Marines hoped they would be when they grew up. How did that square with – and hadn’t he been engaged to a woman? And hadn’t he talked about women all the time in theater?
No, Nate thought, suddenly. Brad hadn’t talked about women in Iraq – he’d talked about prostitutes. Which, granted, were also women (or men, Nate abruptly realized), but by his own admission Brad had regarded actual relationships with women to be a total waste of his time. Nate had assumed, when he thought about it at all, that that was either just pla
