“Damnit,” Jim said, “I’ve gone and failed your feminist test. Again.”
“No,” she said. “Now you’ve failed my feminist test by assuming I have a feminist test for you to fail, instead of simply apologizing and promising you’ll try harder to live more fully in a world where a chief from a military recruiting office might be a woman. Kathy’s really good at her job, by the way.”
Touché. Jim nodded. “Forgive me, twice, because I also absolutely misspoke. What I meant to say is that I’ve failed my feminist test. I blast through life, assuming I’m an ally—that I’m one of the good ones, the safe ones, someone give me a cookie for being so freaking wonderful—and then I do this, and trip over my dick.”
Ashley laughed. “At least you recognize that as a negative. Some men just, like, noisily windmill all over the place, completely oblivious to the fact that they—and everyone else trapped in the room, God help them—are tripping over their dicks.”
Jim laughed, too, although his laughter was mixed with a soupçon of shock and surprise—happy surprise. Windmill—which meant waving one’s penis in a circle—was a word he absolutely didn’t expect to use in a conversation with Ashley DeWitt. On the other hand, he’d learned last night that she was intriguingly funny. “I wasn’t aware there was noise involved in windmilling. Unless the dicks in question are so giant and moving so fast they break the sound barrier…?”
She laughed even harder at that. “Giant’s not usually the case,” she said, grinning back at him. “In fact, it’s usually the opposite of giant. And it’s noisy because there’s accompanied screaming or grunting or… maybe even manly burping and farting.”
And now she’d said fart. It was possible he’d just fallen in love. “You apparently know men quite well.”
“Sadly, I do,” she said.
And now, as they smiled into each other eyes, when that flare of heated awareness arose, Jim didn’t look away. Although… “How do you not have a boyfriend?” he asked, but then adjusted. “Or maybe a… girlfriend…?”
Ashley’s smile deepened at that. “Boyfriend,” she said. “And I don’t have one because I have a terrible ex-fiancé.”
“Ouch,” he said. “How terrible?”
“On a scale from one to ten…?” she said. “A solid twelve.”
“Well… congratulations on not marrying him,” Jim told her. “Some people don’t find out they’ve got someone with a twelve on the terribleness scale until after the vows, and that’s gotta suck even worse, so… Good job. Go, you.”
She laughed a little at that, but the expression on her face was pensive. “I never really thought of it that way, but you’re right. Go, me.”
“I’m not up on my terribleness-scale ratings, is a twelve a… cheater?”
“No, no,” she said. “Cheating’s a ten.”
“So… serial killer, then. Man, I hate when that happens. You meet someone, and everything’s going really well, but then they’re all I must now show you my collection of ears.”
Ashley laughed at that as he’d hoped she would, because damn, when she laughed something warm shifted in his chest and made the day bearable. More than bearable—it actually made it pleasant. What was happening…?
“I’m pretty sure Brad isn’t a serial killer,” she told him, “but after we broke up, well, he had trouble learning that no meant no, and over meant over. That’s one of the reasons why I’m here, because now, suddenly, he’s back.”
“Back?” Jim said. “As in back? As in, you currently have an active stalker and you didn’t think that might be something you’d want to mention…? Jesus, Ash, we’ve gotta work some hand-to-hand self-defense into your schedule, and I know you’re not a fan of firearms and I agree completely that getting a weapon without having either the training or impetus to use it properly would be a big mistake, but we can certainly take pictures that you can post on social media—like, Look, here I am getting some serious weapons training at SEAL World dot dot dot—”
She interrupted him. “Thank you, but no, because Brad’s really not dangerous.”
“Sorry, but I disagree. A grown man who hasn’t yet mastered no means no…?”
“He’s been… led to believe that when I say no I don’t mean no.” She shook her head. “I don’t think he holds that belief universally.”
“So it’s just you he treats like shit.”
She winced. “Yes, but no. It’s really just more of an… inconvenience and… it creates a little… discomfort.”
Jim looked at her sitting there across from him. Even dressed way down in her camp clothes, with her hair sweaty and a streak of dirt on her chin, she was breathtakingly beautiful. Her sense of humor was crazy. She was highly intelligent—but someone had messed with her, badly, even back before the stalker ex-fiancé had made the scene.
“What does it take to get you angry?” he asked her. “Like, drop-dead seething, spitting-out-shards-of-your-teeth angry?”
Ashley looked surprised, and for a moment she seemed to seriously consider his question, but when she spoke, she neatly sidestepped it. “Getting angry solves nothing.”
“Okay,” he said. “Great. But if you were gonna get angry, say, if God suddenly came down from heaven and she’s all Ashley DeWitt, if you let yourself get angry, I won’t let one single child go to sleep hungry tonight. What has to happen to push you to that veins-popping-out-on-your-forehead place?”
She took a deep breath—and his freaking phone rang.
His instinct was to immediately silence it, but it was lying out on the table between them, and Dunk’s name appeared clearly on the screen. And because they’d spent the morning working closely together as team leader and team instructor, she knew that he’d been hoping to get Dunk’s ear again today, even for just ten minutes.
She didn’t know that the topic of conversation was going to be her.
And maybe it was because his question had spooked her, but she was already up on her feet and grabbing her TL bag as she said, “You should take that. I need to make a pit-stop in my trailer before this afternoon, anyway, change into jeans and…”
And just like that, she was gone.
“Yo,” Jim answered Dunk’s call.
“I got about twenty,” Dunk said without ceremony. “You to me, or me to you?”
“Me to you, Senior,” Jim said as he took the ice off his aching knees. “I’ll be right there.”
“Coffee?”
“Please.” Sweet Jesus. Not only was Dunk’s office halfway to the paintball field, Jim wanted this conversation to happen behind a door that tightly closed.
And the fact that there was a coffeemaker in Dunk’s office sure as hell didn’t hurt.
CHAPTER NINE
Ashley arrived a few minutes early at the double-wide trailer designated as one of the official paintball safety zones. It was a repurposed construction-site trailer, with a wooden ramp leading up to the door.
The building was dark, but she tried the knob anyway. The door was tightly locked, which confirmed that she’d gotten here before Jim.
The trailer sat along the fence line of the paintball grounds—a large, secluded area of woods. The only way into and out of the fenced grounds was via this trailer. Although there was another designated safety zone in a smaller trailer that was parked up at the north end of the expansive grounds. It not only provided a second safe place to de-mask, but it also contained a medical kit and a supply of water.
This was only day two of the week, and she’d already heard “masks stay on out on the paintball grounds, no exceptions” many dozens of times. She suspected, during this afternoon’s paintball equipment training session, that she was going to hear it many times more.
“I’m all right. Just stop.”
“Well, you don’t look all right.”
Ashley turned to see Clark and Kenneth coming down the trail, bickering.
“I’ll be okay,” Kenneth insisted. He saw that Ashley had heard them, and gave her a smile th
at was meant to be reassuring, but Clark was right. Kenneth looked pale—paler than normal—and his smile was forced. “Lunch didn’t agree with me. It’s really no big deal.”
“Lunch,” Clark said, “and breakfast, and dinner last night, and lunch and dinner the night before…”
“You both eat way too fast,” Ashley pointed out.
“It’s been going on for a while,” Clark told her. “The stomach aches. It’s been weeks, actually. It gets a little better, but then it gets worse. And each time it gets worse it’s worse.”
Kenneth shook his head. “That’s just not true.”
“Yes, it is.”
“And you’re not just eating too much crap?” Ashley asked. Their diets were atrocious at school—candy and soda and pizza and cheese-steaks and sugared breakfast cereals, washed down with beer and stout and Jell-O shots. Of course, here at camp, they weren’t drinking since they were both underage, and the junk food wasn’t as plentiful, although she suspected that one of their giant suitcases had been entirely filled with snacks.
“He’s barely eating anything at all,” Clark reported.
“That’s not good.” Ashley pulled both boys aside, lowering her voice as Bull and Todd arrived. Now they were only waiting for Jim—Lieutenant Slade. “You think I should call Lieutenant King?”
“No,” Kenneth said, as Clark said, “Yes!”
Kenneth turned to give Clark a withering look, that—along with his clipped British delivery—called to mind the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey. “To do what…? Rub my tum-tum…?”
“No, to just make sure you’re really okay,” Clark argued.
“Lieutenant King’s a medic—a first responder—not a doctor,” Kenneth pointed out. “Am I bleeding? No. Am I on fire? Not since the last time I checked. He’ll take my blood pressure, which I’m sure is dead normal, and suggest I take the afternoon off, feet up in the trailer, to which I say, No, thank you. Paintball’s the one activity I actually want to learn, and, if you must know the truth, I suspect my problem is that I’m celiac.” He turned to Ashley. “Louise was having similar symptoms and has just been diagnosed.”
“Who’s Louise?” she asked.
“My twin,” Kenneth reported.
Kenneth had a twin. Wow.
“Oh, my God, of course you’re celiac if Louise is,” Clark realized, “I mean, you’re identical twins.”
“Not identical,” Ashley pointed out.
“I’ve seen her picture,” Clark insisted. “They look exactly alike.”
“Because we’re siblings,” Kenneth hissed. “We not exactly identical. Do the math, Clark.”
Ashley did it for him. “Male, female…?”
“Oh!” he said. “Yeah. Right. Huh.” But then he also realized, “When was Louise diagnosed, and how come you didn’t tell me?”
“I got an email from her about a week ago,” Kenneth said. “I was sort of still processing it.”
“Celiac,” Clark said. “That sucks.”
“Since we’re twins, we share a lot of DNA,” Kenneth said, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean I have it. It is, however, more likely, and since I haven’t been feeling well…”
“Celiac,” Clark said. “Oh, man, no more pasta…? I don’t think I could live without pasta.”
“It’s not life-threatening,” Kenneth told Ashley. “Certainly not at this stage. I just feel a bit under the weather. Some moments are a little bit worse, but, really…”
“No more Twinkies,” Clark said.
“I’m going to mention it to both Lieutenants Slade and King,” Ashley told him. “And the first thing I know they’ll both ask me is if you’re drinking enough water.”
“I am,” he told her.
“Oh, dear God,” Clark said, “no more beer…?”
Ashley looked at her brother. “How is that helping?”
“No more Italian bread,” Clark lamented, “or croissants, bagels, pizza, donuts…”
“Why didn’t I tell you, you asked,” Kenneth said. “Hello. This is why.”
It was then that Jim appeared. He was driving one of Dunk’s golf buggies and as he pulled up by the paintball field fence, he looked from Ashley—standing with Kenneth and Clark—to Bull and Todd.
“Sorry, I’m late,” he said as he cut the electric motor. “My meeting with Senior Chief Duncan ran a little long.”
“You’re actually right on time,” Ashley informed him as he climbed out of the cart. He managed not to wince, but she didn’t miss the muscle flexing in his jaw as he clenched his teeth against what must’ve been pain from his knees.
Still he managed to sound breezy. “Early is on-time in SEAL World,” he reminded them as he moved toward the back of the cart. “And on-time is late. So first round’s on me in the lounge tonight.”
No one responded—team spirit was definitely suppressed—so Ashley spoke up. “You really don’t have to—”
Jim must’ve realized that almost half of the team couldn’t drink, so he quickly amended with, “Or the equivalent in video game plays.”
And although Clark quietly all-righted, Kenneth’s smile was wan. It was clear that Jim noticed, because he glanced at Ashley again, a question in his sharp blue eyes as he reached for the huge trunk—some kind of storage container made of heavy duty black plastic—that was in the back of the cart.
“Hold up, LT!” No way was she letting him carry that. God, his knees… “Clark and… um, Todd, please,” Ashley called in her best Team Leader’s voice. “Get that trunk. Lieutenant, if you don’t mind, Kenneth needs to speak to you for a sec.”
If Jim was surprised by her commanding tone, he didn’t show it. He simply stepped back as Clark scrambled over to get one end of the trunk. Todd took a little bit longer to snap to, so Jim handed the key to the trailer—old school, on a ring—to Clark. “You’ll need the keypad code, too,” he told her brother, leaning in to share the code in a lower voice that Ashley couldn’t hear. And then, no doubt because Clark had reached him first, he drove home the point that the kid was in charge of Operation: Move the Trunk by ordering Todd, “Help Clark move it all the way onto the field.” Back to Clark, “Find us a good patch of shade. We’ll be talking safety, and that’s gonna take a while.” And with that, he turned toward Kenneth.
Which left Ashley with Bull.
“Safety instructions take longer when half the team are morons,” the big man informed her with a smugness to his tone.
Don’t worry. We don’t mind going slowly so that you and Todd can keep up. Things she’d never dare to say aloud, because frankly, escalating the hostility never worked. Not only was it rude, it was ineffective. Getting angry didn’t help, either—all it did was make her feel more powerless and impotent, as well as potentially putting her into danger.
Although the sad truth was, Ashley had spent most of her life feeling powerless, impotent, and in danger. But at least no one could ever call her impolite.
That wayward thought reverberated in her head as she gazed into Bull’s mocking eyes, and all she could think was of all the ways he’d been unbelievably rude to her over the past few days.
He was an a-hole—no question.
But what was she…? She’d earned her “Politeness” Girl Scout Badge a gazillion times over, and… She had exactly nothing to show for it—aside from the giant boot treadmarks on her doormat-of-a-face.
“Hey, TL.” Jim’s voice interrupted her and she looked over to where he was standing with Kenneth, near the golf-cart-dune-buggy hybrid.
“I’m good with Kenneth staying in the program, if you are,” Jim told her. “He says he’s hydrating sufficiently. I’ll inform the kitchen, and we’ll make sure he’s got gluten-free options for each meal.”
“You really can do that?” Ashley asked.
Jim’s smile was infectious. “Navy SEAL,” he reminded her. “Come on, let’s get in there. We got about five thousand safety rules to cover before we get to the fun part.”
“The fun p
art…?” she echoed as she followed them into the trailer, and then almost immediately out the other side into an expansive fenced-in area filled with trees and other obstacles.
* * *
“The fun part isn’t getting hit with one of these pellets,” Jim told his team, after distributing both the masks and the air-guns that were called markers because they fired pellets of paint that exploded on contact and marked their targets.
He’d lectured, in some detail, about the tanks of compressed air, as well as the hoppers that fed the marble-sized paintball pellets into the markers. And although both the tanks and hoppers had yet to be dispersed, he’d passed around a handful of the pellets, which were a non-toxic, biodegradable mix of oil, gelatin, and water-soluble dye.
“It stings,” he told them. “The pellets come at you, somewhere between one-sixty and one-ninety miles per hour, so yeah. It stings. Gentlemen, wear your athletic cups. But when it comes to velocity, combined with the three meter rule—which is…?”
“No firing at anyone closer than three meters,” his team all repeated, in unison, although Bull and Todd mumbled unenthusiastically. They’d been through this before and were making sure that Jim knew they were bored.
Tough shit.
Jim hammered it home. “And in American, rounding up, three meters is…?”
“Ten feet,” they all said.
“Good. But you combine the three-meter rule with the relatively low velocity of the paintball pellets,” he said, “and you get an astonishingly high rate of bouncers—pellets that bounce off without breaking. And what’s the rule, Team Leader, when a pellet bounces off of you without breaking?”
“Keep going,” Ashley said. “You’re not dead.”
“And what’s the consensus on wipers?” Jim asked. “Mr. DeWitt?”
“No one likes wipers,” Clark said as, interestingly, neither Bull nor Todd managed to hold Jim’s gaze.
Wipers were the guys—people—who, in the course of a paintball game, attempted to cheat by wiping off the paint that marked them as “dead.”
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