Love Began with the First Meeting

"What?" She was shocked. "What do you mean?"

He glimpsed at Maggie while he filled his plate with rice as well. After eating a piece of fried eggplant, he slowly said, "I mean exactly what I said. You can eat whatever you want, as much as you want. Just eat." He watched Maggie's angry face and shrugged. "You wanted this, right?" However, when she saw the mockery on Tompson's face, she felt even angrier. So she decided to turn anger into hunger. She began eating like a glutton, as if what she was biting into was not food, but Edgar's body. That was what she craved, but she filled up on food instead.

While eating, Tompson made his voice sound as natural as possible and asked, "What? Did you succeed with your confession?"

Maggie suddenly shot him a stare. "Who told you... that I went to confess to him?" Infuriated, she clenched her teeth, as if to say, 'Don't mess with me, or else the consequence will be disastrous.'

"It's so easy to guess that part." He completely ignored Maggie's anger. "You had just found out that the man in your heart had saved you.

Of course you would confess to him." Maggie fell silent, unable to find anything with which to refute this. Unlike her ferocious eating earlier, she began to eat slowly, and without appetite. Perhaps, she just found that the food had lost its taste.

Tompson was feeling uneasy, but he knew that he shouldn't rush. Though Maggie looked smart, she was really oblivious to her surroundings, and she was especially so when it came to things concerning emotions and love. In the past, everyone else had known that he loved her except for her, while she was secretly loving a man who was more than ten years older than she was. If her experiences were to be written as a novel, it would be really dramatic. The title could be, "Love Me, Old Man!", or, "Deeply In Love With An Old Man". Suddenly, Tompson felt disgusted, but he managed to suppress his own feelings and said, "When we were doing the drill, Blue Force and we... I heard that most of the S Army was assigned to Blue Force, including the Eagle Special Brigade."

"Sounds like you don't really belong to S Army..." Maggie shrugged indifferently.

"I am a military doctor. I think I should belong with the director department." He rolled his eyes and said derisively, "Please, use your brain."

"Sorry, I left my brain in the patient ward. I didn't bring it along with me," she snipped him.

"You are like a stone in the toilet," he retorted, deeply annoyed at her words.

"What?" Maggie hadn't quite heard what he just said.

"Stubborn and smelly." He imitated Maggie by clenching his teeth as well, though he did so in an excessive way to illustrate his point.

Maggie was struck speechless. She didn't feel like eating then. After the quarrel with Tompson, she had no desire to eat at all. If there were only the two of them in the canteen, she might have thrown her chopsticks in his face, or even stabbed him with them! Furious, she quickly finished her food and walked away, leaving him to eat alone. Before Maggie left, she shot him a dark glare, which she had directed at him a million times in the past.

When she did that, Tompson would return it with a wicked smirk, almost every time. That sometimes made her wonder what was in his brain. Did he actually enjoy quarreling with her?

At the moment, Maggie was not in the mood to think of Tompson. Her mind in a mess, she packed a nutritious meal in a box and brought it to the patient ward. When she entered, Edgar was sleeping, lying on his side, propped in place by the pillows. She hesitated, not sure whether she should wake him up or not.

In the end, she decided that she would allow him to sleep. Quietly setting the food to one side, she watched him. 'He can fall asleep even with that weird kind of posture. That's incredible! Perhaps he has gone through too many jungle training sessions and has adapted to sleeping in all kinds of positions,' she thought absent-mindedly.

"I am your soldier. I wasn't thinking about anything else other than that," Maggie murmured. Pouting her lips bitterly, she walked to a chair and sat down. However, those words only fueled her sadness instead of consoling her.

The army was going to hold a large-scale drill. In this peaceful era, the modern soldiers had no chance to experience a real war or experience the potential threats which they should keep vigilance against. They might possess the knowledge of how to fight, but when it came to a real war, they might not know what to do when placed under live fire. So to train the soldiers and simulate real wartime conditions, the army was going to hold a gigantic "party".

Although Edgar was physically fit, he wouldn't be ready to fight at the frontier during the drill. But he could still play his role as a commander in the war by giving instructions. Of course, Maggie had done a great job helping Edgar make a fast recovery by taking care of him. Moreover, Claire had come to visit him every day using the excuse of discussing details of the drill with him.

One day before the drill, Maggie and Edgar returned to the Eagle Special Brigade. When the soldiers saw them, everyone came to ask how they were. After ensuring the worrying soldiers that they were fine now, Edgar held a meeting in the brigade.

Since this brigade was comprised of troops with the highest quality, it wasn't necessary to remind them of the rules of the drill again, not to mention that Edgar didn't have time to explain the details. He just gave a brief overview of what their goal was as part of the Blue Force.

After the discussions, which lasted two hours, the various battalion commanders, instructors, company commanders, captains and vice captains of the different commandos all felt disgruntled. They sat stiffly and made little reply to their orders, their discontentment evident. Although they had been informed earlier that they would be joining the Blue Force, they were still discouraged when Edgar announced this to them.

Maggie felt that everyone was upset, so she said, "It doesn't matter whether we're with Red Force or Blue Force, good people or bad people. Actually, the only goal is to win. We just need to prove to them that, whichever side S Army is on, that side is going to win." All their eyes had focused on Maggie after she said this. Maggie blinked and asked in confusion, "What? Did I say anything wrong?"

Cathy shook her head and laughed. "No, you didn't. What you said is absolutely right!" She clapped her hands to show her support. Following her, everyone else also started to applaud.

"I didn't expect that," Edith said to Maggie, winking at her, "you've started to sound like a real commander, just after spending some time with the captain! Awesome!"