Don't Call Me Hero (2 page)

“You should slow down.” The woman finally acknowledged me.

“Excuse me?”

Dark eyes turned to meet mine. “If you keep ordering bottles like that, your bank account isn’t going to thank you in the morning.” Her voice was an impossible low burn, and I felt its hum all over my body.

I grimaced at the truth of her words. I hadn’t bothered to ask how much the bubbly beverage cost; I’d only been following Angie’s lead. I looked for our cocktail waitress, but it was too late to retract my order of the second bottle. I mentally vowed to pace myself in the future.

“I’m really sorry about this,” I apologized under my breath. “I didn’t mean to crash your party. My friends are idiots.”

“They wanted to make sure you had a good time tonight,” she supplied. “That doesn’t sound so idiotic to me.”

“Yeah,” I said, appropriately chastised. “I guess so.” I let out a shaky breath. I should try to have a conversation. “Do you, um, you live here?”

She twisted her long-stemmed glass on the table. “At the bar?”

“No, no. Of course not.” I forced out a nervous laugh. “In the Cities.”

“I used to,” she confirmed.

She didn’t supply any additional information, and my nervousness returned until the second bottle of champagne appeared. I busied myself with the task of filling five more glasses for my friends. I also topped off the woman beside me’s glass, but hated the way my hand shook. At least I hadn’t poured champagne all over the table.

I slid her refilled glass in front of her. “So what’s the occasion? Girl’s night out?” I asked. “Or are you celebrating something?”

Her dark, painted lips pursed. “I’m sure I don’t know you well enough to reveal that.”

“Maybe after a few more glasses of champagne, we’ll be best friends,” I shrugged.

I didn’t think of myself as particularly clever, but she laughed at my comment, and the sound was glorious. As soon as I heard the deep, throaty chuckle, I knew that as long as she continued to talk to me, I would continue to order champagne, regardless of the price.

“I’m Cassidy, by the way—in case you didn’t catch it from before.”

She shifted beside me, turning her body and attention more in my direction. Her knee bumped lightly into mine beneath the table. “Julia,” she returned.

With her hands at the base of her champagne flute and mine on my own, our fingers were nearly touching.

“Can I call you Jules?”

She leaned forward and my pulse quickened. I felt mesmerized as her lush mouth moved to form words: “Absolutely not.”

I tilted my head back and laughed, probably a little too loudly. When my palms landed on the table top in my moment of bliss, I promptly knocked over both flutes of champagne. The bubbly liquid tipped down Julia’s dress—not
on
her dress:
in
her dress.

I froze and the music in the club seemed to come to a halt, but it was only my overactive imagination. No one had noticed my clumsiness outside of myself and Julia. I would have found the look of horror on her face mildly comical if I hadn’t been the party responsible for it. I grabbed fistfuls of cocktail napkins with the intention of helping clean up the mess, but she stood up before I could ply her flesh with tiny squares of paper.

“Oh my God. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she said stiffly. “I’ll just … clean up in the restroom.” She wiggled out from behind the table and stalked away in the direction of an unseen bathroom.

I grappled with indecision. Should I follow her to the bathroom? Or should I give her privacy to put herself back together?

I settled on the latter and sopped up as much of the spilt beverage as I could that covered the table and the space where Julia had sat. I successfully cleaned up the champagne, but an ugly mess of saturated napkins remained heaped on the table as evidence of my ineptitude.

“You okay down there, Rookie?” Rich called down the table.

I could feel a dozen eyeballs on me.

I raised my voice to be heard over the noise of the bar. “Yeah. Everything’s fine.”

My words were a lie and the mountain of wasted napkins was evidence of that. I tried to catch the attention of the cocktail waitress who’d brought over the bottle of champagne so I could close my tab and escape the awkward situation before Julia returned, but she failed to look in my direction.

“You’re not going to make me crawl across your lap, are you?” Julia towered over me. Her lips curved into a small frown.

I scrambled to my feet. The tops of my thighs bumped the table again as I stood up, causing our champagne glasses to wobble, but there was nothing left for me to spill. “I’m
so
sorry,” I apologized again.

Julia dismissed me with a wave of her hand and maneuvered past me to return to her place at the table. “Don’t worry about it. It’s dark in here, and it’s not like champagne stains.”

“Can I get you another drink?” I offered.

“That depends. Do you plan on dumping this one down my cleavage, too?”

At her words, my eyes drifted to said cleavage. Her black cocktail dress dipped modestly in the front, but it revealed enough to keep my attention. When I realized I was openly staring at her chest, I jerked my eyes away. But it was too late; the smirk on her mouth said she’d caught me.

I waved a hand in the air, and sure enough, this time the waitress immediately saw the motion.

“What’ll you have?”

“Dirty martini,” Julia ordered. “Three olives.”

“Um. Beer,” I stumbled out unsophisticatedly.

“What kind?” the waitress asked.

“Surprise me?”

The waitress arched an eyebrow. “Sure thing.”

She returned a few, painfully silent minutes later.

“Dirty martini,” the cocktail waitress announced, setting Julia’s drink down in front of her. “And … a beer. Enjoy ladies.”

I flashed a smile in thanks and the waitress left to check on her other tables.

Julia brought the funnel-shaped glass up to dark red lips. When she returned the drink to the table, her lipstick had left a stain on the glass’s edge.

“I don’t know how you can drink that stuff,” I said, making a face. “Martinis are pure alcohol, aren’t they?”

“And olives.” She speared one of the olives at the bottom of her glass with a toothpick and sucked the salty fruit into her mouth. Once again I found my gaze drawn to her bee-stung lips, but it was better than me gawking at her breasts.

“I take it you’re not picky about your alcohol?” she said, nodding to the beer bottle I worried between idle hands.

“Not really,” I admitted. I fiddled with the bottle’s paper label, shredding and peeling it out of nervousness. This woman was attractive enough that even without having spilled our drinks on her I would have been tongue tied.

“So what do you do?” I swallowed down a mouthful of whatever beer the waitress had brought me. It tasted like a lager—not my first choice—but I didn’t care. It was wet, and it kept my tongue loosened.

“Besides get free drinks from strangers?” She ran an elegant finger along the edge of her martini glass. “I’m a lawyer.”

“Wow.” I took a second pull from my beer. “That’s impressive.” It wasn’t a line. Anyone who used their brain instead of brute strength for their job was impressive to me.

“Perhaps.” She tilted her head to the side. “But no more so than being a police officer. Isn’t that what your friend said you do?”

I nodded and looked down at my hands. I didn’t bother telling her that I was no longer a cop with the city and that I was leaving town the very next morning for Bumble-fuck, Minnesota. There was no need to put an expiration date on the evening.

“Yeah. I graduated from the academy last year.”

“And you enjoy it?”

I bobbed my head. “Uh huh. Serve and protect and all that.” I mentally grimaced. It was just one lame string of sentences after the other. I might as well have been talking about the weather.

“Do you find it difficult being a female cop? I imagine you’d get backlash from some male officers as well as the public who think only men can do a good job.”

“It has its challenges, for sure,” I acknowledged, “but once you prove yourself, eventually they see you as just one of the guys.”

Julia’s lips pursed in thought. “Law school was like that, too. Women are still very much a minority in the profession. Plus, I went into criminal law, which is very much a male-dominated specialty. I always felt like I had to be the most prepared person in the room.” She shook her head and laughed self-consciously. “I’m sorry. This sounds like a therapy session. I must be boring you.”

Every word that came out of that gorgeous mouth was the most interesting thing I’d ever heard.

“I’m starting to feel this alcohol. I can hear myself rambling.” She pushed her half-empty glass away. “And no one likes a drunk. It’s not attractive.”

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about there,” I said pointedly.

A ghost of a smile played on her painted mouth.

“I can relate though; it was like that when I was enlisted, too,” I said. “I had a serious chip on my shoulder after boot camp. The Marines say soldiers have no gender—we’re just Marines—but my experience wasn’t genderless at all.”  

“How long were you in the Marines?”

“Once a Marine, always a Marine.” I flashed her a grin. “But I was active duty just shy of ten years.”

Her eyebrows rose on her unlined forehead. “Ten years?” she echoed. “That’s like half of your life.”

“You might be a fancy lawyer, but you’re not very good at math,” I teased. “I’m twenty-eight.” I always got carded when we went out. With my blonde wavy hair, dimples, and wide, toothy smile, I had a bit of a baby-face.

“Well thank goodness for that.” Her laughter was like a drug. If given the chance, I’d soon be addicted to the sound. “I was worried I might be corrupting you.”

I leaned perceptibly closer and lowered my voice. “I don’t think I’d mind that at all.”

It hit me all at once: I was pulling this off. I was holding my own, talking to a gorgeous woman; we might have even been flirting.

I didn’t want our conversation to stop, but I had to go to the bathroom. I was so worried about the indelicacy of admitting to having a small bladder that for once I didn’t worry about my physical awkwardness. My knees bumped the table as I stood up, knocking over our drinks.

Julia’s gasp was audible when the drinks spilled across her lap and legs.
Again.

One accident might have been forgivable, but two? Never.

I kept going without looking back or trying to help, forgetting about my need to use the bathroom, forgetting about my credit card and the open tab, and most definitely forgetting about the woman on whom I’d spilled four drinks.

+ + +

The next morning came too soon. My head pounded and my stomach gurgled from mixing liquors the previous night. It was like a giant mixed cocktail of champagne, beer, and tequila sloshing around inside of my body. The morning sun was too bright, and I stumbled around my nearly empty apartment trying to find a pair of sunglasses that hadn’t already been shipped up to Embarrass with the rest of my belongings. 

My phone was full of missed calls and text messages from my friends, all worried where I’d disappeared to last night. I would have probably left town without returning anyone’s calls, but Angie had left a message that she had my abandoned credit card and would continue to use it unless I came to pick it up.

Meeting up with Angie became my final stop before I left town. We met on a riverboat on the Mississippi River that doubled as a bar. It was more like a glorified double-decker pontoon boat, and the bottled beer was overpriced, but it offered a nice view of the city I was soon leaving. Having grown up in Minnesota, the murky Mississippi River was far from the prettiest waterscape I’d been witness to, but it was an open body of water, and when I’d been stationed in the middle of an ashtray, thousands of miles away, it had been what I’d missed the most about home.

To say that the years between 2004 and 2012 were an interesting time to be a soldier was an understatement at best. The country was fighting a multi-pronged war on terror, and as the memory of 9/11 became farther and farther in the rearview mirror, the war became increasingly unpopular with the people back home. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed, and in July 2010 WikiLeaks released seventy-five thousand secret documents related to the United States and the war in Afghanistan.

I wasn’t anything special in the Marines. I didn’t go to officer school until after my first tour, and I wasn’t doing one-handed pushups like Demi Moore in
G.I. Jane
. I’d signed up in 2004, straight out of high school, on an open contract. That meant the Marines could put me wherever it needed an extra body. It hadn’t mattered to me, though; I just wanted to get away. I wanted adventure. I wanted to get out of Minnesota.

I attended boot camp at Parris Island, just outside of Beaufort, South Carolina, as part of the Fourth Recruit Training Battalion. Although the Marines accepted both men and women, we were separated for training. The Island was gender segregated, but we received the same training: martial arts, close-order drill, pugil sticks, marksmanship, bayonet, gas mark, obstacle courses, rappelling, and combat water survival. I used to think about Swim Week of Phase Two of boot camp when I sat in desert sand so fine that it better resembled moon dust.