Page 35

He frowned. "Um? No?"

"Then it's not really gender neutral, is it?"

He held up both hands, one still grimy with fish gut residue, the other clutching the knife. "Okay, okay. I won't call you babe or anything but Tea, then."

"That'd be great, thanks."

He shot me a glance. "We should probably just make a fire so we can cook and eat this now. No way to transport it."

"Got it," I said, and left him to finish that job while I collected wood and started a little fire.

Once the fire was hot and crackling, I found a flat piece of river rock at the edge of the bank and tucked it into the fire so it would absorb the heat for baking the fish.

The hardest part was waiting for the damn thing to cook all the way. But my god, once it was done and we were able to pluck bits of the fish away from the skin? He wasn't lying. Best fish I'd ever had, even without a single sprinkle of salt.

I felt like a new woman, with a bit of protein in my belly. We both rinsed our slightly burned fingers in the water and then sat by the fire, neither of us quite ready to leave just yet.

"Fine. Fuck it." I sighed, scrubbed my face. “But no interrupting."

Jax prodded the coals with a thick bit of stick, then nodded and mimed zipping his mouth shut.

"Eighteen months, three weeks, and…" I glanced at my watch and did some math, “six days ago, I was part of a mission that went very, very wrong. Obviously, most, if not all, of the details are classified, but they're irrelevant for the story. Suffice it to say that my job was the usual: insert a team and wait for the cue to go get them. Intel was mixed on enemy activity in the region. Brass wanted the target in a bad way—I'm not giving anything classified away when I say the target was an HVT who supposedly had some very important intel. But reports from the ground differed massively from the official intel coming from up top. Boots on the ground said shit was hot; command claimed otherwise. Well, guess who got overridden? Boots on the ground, as usual. Despite objections from just about everyone involved, the mission was greenlit. We all had a bad feeling about the mission, but when the brass tells you to go, you go, so we sucked it up and went. Insertion was normal; LZ was ice. No problems. Cool. I kicked my heels at the FARP for most of ninety minutes. Too long, way too long. I knew it, too."

Jax stirred the coals, watching me silently and attentively.

I licked my lips, sighed. "I haven’t discussed this with anyone since debriefing. Um. So." Another huffing sigh. "The radio lit up with chatter all at once—my guys got ambushed. They'd known we were coming, somehow, and were ready for us. It was…bad. Lost half the team in the first thirty fucking seconds. I heard it all and couldn’t do a goddamn thing. That’s a kind of helplessness I hope to god you never feel, listening to your friends and teammates get slaughtered. Only four made it to the LZ, which was cherry as fuck. My door gunner took one to the face as they were boarding. Terry, um…he…he took the fifty and bought us some time. Boulder was hit, Luke was hit. We got clear, almost. Fucking…we almost got away. But some fucker got a lucky shot off, managed to nail the tail rotor, and sent us into a nasty flat spin I couldn't control. We went down fucking hard. Daisy, my copilot, died on impact, broke his neck. Terry was thrown like a rag doll and broke his leg. That left Luke, Boulder, and me. We…we fought them off. For a bit, at least. We bought ourselves enough time to get away from the crash site. Terry, God, that man was tough as fucking nails. He reset his own fucking leg and walked away on his own power. We…we were all fucked up. Luke had taken one through the ribs, just missed his fucking heart and lungs, but he was losing a ton of blood and there wasn’t shit we could do. Boulder took one through his shoulder, and I was…well, initially, I wasn't injured. We fucking struggled, Jax. Fought like hell to get back to friendly territory, hiked across the roof of the world. Cold, thin air, could barely breathe, no food, no water, and half the fucking Taliban chasing our asses through terrain they knew like the back of their hands."

I stared up at the sky. Dug my fingers into the dirt. "They caught up with us. Terry's leg was infected and only getting worse, and then he took another one to his gut. Which, um…yeah, without medical help, you don’t survive getting gutshot. So he…um. He…he bought us time."

"Jesus," Jax breathed.

"So then it was Boulder and Luke and me. We…they…they took us by surprise. Boulder…" I choked. I hated the taste of sorrow at the back of my teeth, hated the weakness my cracking voice showed. "He told me to get Luke and go. He knew we were…" I shook my head—I just couldn't go there. "I—he wouldn't take no for an answer. Objectively, it should have been him who went with me. Luke was…it was bad. He may have…if we'd been able to…" I shook my head again.

Jax just gazed at me, his face full of compassion that gutted me.

"Don't fucking look at me like that, goddammit," I snarled, knowing it was unfair but powerless against the onslaught of emotions that were ripping me apart just then.

Jax turned his face away and resumed prodding the coals.

"In the escape, I took a ricochet, a bad one. It went through my side, right here." I poked the spot, high on my right side, under my armpit where my bra strap was. "Round is still in there. It's too close to a lot of important shit to risk digging out."

Jax stared at me, then. "Do…do you feel it? The bullet?"

I shrugged, shook my head. "No, not usually. It ached a bit during the storm. I can usually tell if it's gonna rain if it starts getting achy. Sometimes, if I move in just the right way, it tweaks a little, y'know? Like, an uncomfortable pull. But mostly I don't feel it."

"Got a gnarly scar?"

I rolled my eyes. "I don't know if it's gnarly or not; that’s kinda subjective, I suppose. It's just a little round scar right here." I poked it again, then pointed at him. "No, I'm not gonna show you."

He held up his hands. "I hadn't planned on asking."

"But you thought about it."

He held my eyes for a long moment. "Sure. I'm a straight guy who hasn't had a girlfriend in a long goddamn time, and you're a beautiful woman, so yes, Tea, it did cross my mind, if you must know. But I do possess the ability to think before I speak. Usually. Sometimes. If necessary. Sort of."

"That's a lot of qualifiers there, buddy-boy,” I teased, finding snark easier to dish out than addressing the rest of his statement.

"I know who I am. And I'm not always good at filtering myself. It's a hereditary thing. We tend to be pretty blunt in my family." He used the stick to scatter the coals. "I appreciate you sharing that with me, Tea. And… don’t take this as pity, but—I'm sorry you went through that. It sounds horrific, and I'm honestly impressed that you can function at all with shit like that behind you."