Rules of Engagement

"Roger that." She put the radio down beside her and copied Jenkins's manoeuvre, wrangling her pants back up from a lying position, then returned the radio to her belt buckle. Mixed fluids continued to drip onto her underwear.

"I can't believe it," she said. "We should be dead."

"Yeah."

"Fuck."

"Yeah."

*

Davies and Jeelani joined them at the rampart ten minutes later. The squad arrived at the scene in another half hour and cleared the shack with ice-cold efficiency. There had only been one target, the usual kid of 18 or 19, now dead in service of a few empty slogans. They marched the body back to camp as a unit, expecting to encounter trouble but somehow returning unmolested.

A comprehensive debrief followed. Jenkins and Donoghue were outnumbered five to two by senior officers, and a microphone captured each of their statements. They recounted what happened in minute detail - not absolutely everything, of course. It had taken them all of two minutes after the first radio contact to agree not to mention the sex.

But what else had they said to each other? Not much of anything, really. The wait comprised mainly of long silences intermittently punctuated by terse observations and check-ins. Still no movement. You doing okay? Yeah, you? They won't be long, they'll jog up here. Hang in there. I'm good, don't worry.

After the debrief, they were given twenty-four hours off duty to recuperate. The first thing either of them did was shower, having suffered through the meeting with dried sweat and stained underwear. And after that, they went to their respective rooms and lay down separately, falling asleep in minutes.

*

Jenkins awoke in the middle of the night. His mind started replaying the incident: the release of tension when he slid into her, the pop pop pop of Donoghue's gun, the smooth swell of her ass so at odds with the harsh landscape around her. It was a confusing combination of sex and violence, somehow compartmentalized but clearly adjacent in his head.

He was surprised to find his response to this mindfuck of opposites was not one of horror. If anything, the heavy sexuality of the event was amplified by Donoghue's instinctive kill. The shimmering steel of her rifle barrel as it expelled high calibre rounds, his glistening shaft as he drew it back out of her. She had drawn him into her and executed the target with equal skill. The idea of all this happening at once still seemed ludicrous, like a dream, but it was all completely clear in his head.

Four rooms away, with the sheet strewn loosely around her, Donoghue dreamt of lying on her belly in a dusty field back home and watching a football game. The players wore tight-fitting military gear and crashed into each other at great speed, over and over. She began to thrust into a well-placed rock under her pelvis, slowly at first, timing each downward push to coincide with the collisions on the pitch. Her vision zoomed into the players' strong forearms, the bulge of their calves, the muddy sweat accumulating on their faces. She began to thrust into the rock at her own insistent rhythm, willing herself to feel every bodily impact, every jarring jolt of flesh and bone.

Suddenly, she awoke. A patina of moisture cooled her forehead. An insidious warmth spread out from her crotch. A ball of bunched sheet against her underwear felt remarkably similar to the rock in her dream, so she ground into it a few times, her arousal growing. Images of those bodies in tight closeup filled her mind and mingled with the recollection of Jenkins' thick penis finally meeting the upper reaches of her vagina. The sheet was not going to be satisfactory.

Donoghue reluctantly pulled the fabric away from her body and placed her feet on the floor. She reached for a clean white t-shirt and the discarded shorts she'd worn during the day, pulling them on groggily as she stood. Then she opened her door as quietly as she could, checked the coast was clear, and tiptoed into Jenkins' room and closed the door.

"Hey, you," said Jenkins, immediately turned on at the sight of her.

"Hey." Donoghue stripped all of her clothes off, beginning with the t-shirt and finishing with her underwear, filling the room with a subtle musk. Then she climbed into his bed and kissed him hard, pressing her swollen nipples into his bare torso.

He kissed her back then abruptly pulled away to shove his boxers down his legs and off his feet. She grabbed his semi-hard penis and pumped it up and down a few times as they kissed again. He squeezed the back of her neck and ran his fingers through her hair with one hand and cupped her beautiful, smooth, bulging ass with the other, remembering how it intoxicated him in the harsh sunlight.

Unable to resist either the deliciousness of his fully erect penis or the pulsing of her own vagina, Donoghue broke off the kiss and straddled him. She zoomed into his muscular forearms, his firm stomach, his strong jaw. She wondered if she was still dreaming when she thought she saw streaks of dirt on his face.

As she lowered herself onto him with a satisfying pop, Jenkins imagined her pointing a gun down at him, forcing him to fuck her.

"Mmmmmm," she sighed.

"Fuck," he replied.

With his dick all the way inside, she leaned her body forward to press it into his again and kissed him. He gripped her ass with both hands and pulled it along him slightly, shifting the weight of his dick against the rear wall of her vagina.

"Ah," came her response an inch from his face. He rocked her back and forth with his hands, grinding her clitoris against his pubic hair. "Ah, ah, ah, ah."

Donoghue sat back up and took over, removing his hands from her buttocks and holding them tightly beside her. She leaned back so she could put more of her weight forward, on her vagina, and rutted on him in quick, shallow thrusts. His dick massaged her slick insides. She began to pant, loaded with sensation, desperate to come.

Jenkins got even harder when she began to dominate him, holding his hands by his sides and grinding him into the mattress. He loved that she was in charge of both of their pleasure levels and idly fantasized about being slapped and punched by her if he failed to get her off. The squelching sounds emanating from the join of their bodies spoke of the rushing fluid flowing ever more readily out of them.

"Hit me," he said. "Like your guy back home. Hit me."

She paused, sitting upright on him. Then she leaned forward slightly and pounded a balled fist into his chest. As it struck, she felt his full penis rub against the back of her clitoris and jar with the impact. Her breasts jumped.

"Ohhhh," they cried in unison. She did it again. Another shared exclamation.

She put one hand over her mouth and, maintaining the angle she found so effortlessly stimulating, bounced her body up and down on him, rotating her pelvis forward with every movement. She squeezed her eyes shut and limited herself to a tiny yelp each time he hit bottom.

Jenkins pushed his pelvis up slightly every time she landed. The lingering pain from her fist was beginning to fade, so he slammed his free hand into his chest. The thud traveled down his body and into his crotch, hitting them both where it felt good.

Donoghue kept up a solid pace as she refocused her attention on Jenkins' chest. She rained blows on him, summoning all the strength she could manage with such a powerful orgasm rising. He responded with grunts of shock and excitement.

It was too much. Like a balloon being popped, every time she hit him.

Back in the dreamt field, she'd wanted this exact feeling: of power over the male body, to be used and abused for her own pleasure and to be pleasured at her whim.

With a final blow against his chest, he exploded in her. And just as the first blast of cum drenched her, she involuntarily milked him with a tight contraction of her vagina, matched by an all-consuming hum radiating out from her clitoris. He rained viscous white fluid into her as her entire pelvic region loosened and tightened, over and over. His head fell back, hers forward, both silently screaming in agony. Their shared climax carried all the tension of the day. It concentrated the stress and trauma - and pleasure - of what they'd experienced and wrung it all into one extended peak.

Overloaded with sensation, Donoghue fell abruptly onto the bed beside Jenkins. She hyperventilated a little, her breasts rising and falling on coarse linen. Jenkins' eyes had been closed since his orgasm started; they remained so for a while.

They recovered together, again side by side, this time naked in the dark.

Eventually, once her breathing had slowed and Jenkins had reopened his eyes, Donoghue rolled towards his body - this toned, muscular, powerful object, put here for her use. The man inside it wrapped an arm around her pale shoulders and held her. And in that position they remained all night, wordlessly agreeing upon a dynamic that would colour the rest of their tour with bruises and bodily fluids. Where would it go from there? Could it survive the real world? Could it survive even these gossip-ridden barracks? These questions exhausted them, and were perhaps tangential to the strong connection they'd discovered. So they fell asleep, a loose sheet over their spent bodies, walled off - at least until their 24 hours were up - from the halls outside.