“Yeah, I like that.”
“Hmm.” Dar cocked her head.
“Now, what’s next... Ah, interior.” Kerry reviewed her choices.
“Oh, leather, definitely.” She selected it. “I’ve really gotten into this stuff since I’ve met you.”
One of Dar’s eyebrows lifted sharply. “Me? Why?”
“Leather car seats, leather couches, that leather vest, those leather boots you got me,” Kerry murmured. “I have nightmares of being visited by PETA sometimes and having to escape out the back.” She clicked on the added options. “Hmm...what do we have here? Heated seats? No thanks.”
Dar was still snickering over her comments. “I never thought about that. I just like the feel of leather, especially in stuff I’ve gotta sit on.”
Kerry laughed softly. “Me, too.” She paused and gave her lover an assessing look. “Hmm. Could I talk you into a pair of leather pants?”
“Sure.” Dar settled both arms around Kerry. “As long as you wear them,” she amended quickly, hearing the chortle. “I had a pair, long time back. I only wore them once.”
Kerry paused, and turned again. “Once?”
Dar nodded. “They squeak,” she explained. “I scared the crap out of myself every time I moved.” She felt Kerry start to laugh and she held on as her lover dissolved into helpless chuckles. “Ahem. Weren’t we discussing heated seats?”
“Mine’s plenty warm.” Kerry gave her a sultry, over-the-shoulder smirk. “Oh, you mean for the car. Right.” She returned her attention to the screen. “CD player, check. Sunroof, check. Four wheel drive, check.
Extra electrical package, check.”
“It’ll be nice when they do integrated satellite cellular,” Dar commented. “And put in a laptop mount.” She peered over Kerry’s shoulder. “Air bags and ABS? Good.”
“Yep.” Kerry reviewed her selections, then had the website provide her with a three-dimensional view. “Looks good. I like it.” She investigated further. “Lease, you think? Yeah. Okay, here we go.” She sent in her request and added a digital wallet and signature with her 100
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personal information. “Oh yeah, I like this, Dar. Much more fun than getting a car the old-fashioned way.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Dar freed a hand and took a swallow of coffee.
“It’s sort of exciting to go to the dealership...in a sleazy, carnival kinda way.” She chewed on her toast. “I remember the first new car I got. I’d been saving up for months, and I just decided to go one night, and not tell my parents.”
“Oh boy.” Kerry took a bite of the toast held so invitingly nearby.
“What’d you get?”
“I traded in an eighty-five Malibu.” Dar smiled in memory. “It was paid off, so that, plus the down payment I had, pretty much guaranteed me just about anything I wanted on the lot. I felt like a kid in a toy store.”
Kerry pulled the plate over and started sharing forkfuls of eggs with Dar. “Uh-huh.”
“I looked at little ones, big ones, musta driven that salesman nuts,”
the dark-haired woman said. “It was such a weird feeling. I finally narrowed it down to a choice between this little sports car number that was really cute and a pickup truck.”
“A pickup truck?” Kerry fed her some eggs.
“Mm. I was such a little redneck,” Dar admitted. “Besides, Daddy had a pickup truck.” She leaned back and drained her juice glass. “So I ended up with a charcoal gray pickup with racing stripes and a roll bar.”
“And fuzzy dice?” Kerry muffled a smile. “Hey, don’t give me that look. I used to have a pair of trolls hanging from my rearview mirror. I had to settle for something a lot more conservative, though. My parents allocated cars to us every year, whatever manufacturer was trying to woo my father.” She got up and retrieved her own coffee, standing before the window and gazing out. “The first time I got to pick my own car was when I moved down here.” A smile crossed her face. “I was so damn sick of teak panels and snooty hood ornaments. I remember passing by a Ford dealership and seeing the new Mustangs, and boy...I was right there.” She laughed. “Vroom vroom...a convertible muscle car. Damn, that felt good to drive off the lot in.” Kerry sighed. “I felt like such a rebel. My parents almost had a heart attack when I told them.” She turned and looked at Dar. “How did your folks react?”
Dar grinned. “Well, it was one of the few decisions I’d made that we all agreed on,” she related. “It was an extended cab, with space in the back for Mom, so I became the official driver in the family. Dad loved the truck, and Mom loved not having him drive, so for once, we were all on the same page.”
Kerry tried to imagine what it would have been like to have had that kind of relationship with her parents. She couldn’t do it. Her mother had been horrified when she’d told her about the Mustang, and her father had told her in no uncertain terms that the car would be left
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behind when she came home from Miami. Thoughtfully, Kerry wondered if it was at that moment she’d decided she wasn’t ever going back. Certainly she’d gone a little over the line after that, staying out and breaking all the rules she’d lived under for such a long time.
She’d actually been lucky, now that she looked back on that wild period. She could have gotten herself into a lot of real trouble and not just ended up suffering a few hangovers and barely remembered near misses, the last of which had scared her so badly it finally knocked some sense into her. She’d been more careful after that, but she was still aware of that potential wild side, something she doubted she wanted Dar to ever see.
“Well. I’m going to go work on my inbox, so I don’t feel completely guilty about being trapped here in my underwear with you.” She winked at Dar. “Come visit me?”
Dar responded with a frank grin, visible in Kerry’s mind’s eye as she left the study and headed upstairs with Chino trotting at her heels.
“JESUS.” KERRY TUGGED her hood closer and bolted for the front door of ILS, crossing from the drenched air into the climate-controlled lobby with a sense of being slapped in the face with the chill. As she hit the tile, she lost her footing and slid, yanked to a halt by the frantic grip of the security guard as she passed the station. “Whoa! Thanks.”
“No problem, Ms. Stuart.” The guard patted her arm. “Careful there; it’s the Lord’s own rivers raining out there.”
“No kidding.” Kerry shook herself, scattering droplets of water over the tile, which she correctly assumed would be easier to clean than the carpet upstairs. “Much more of this, and we’ll have to close the parking lot. The water’s up to some hubcaps out there.” She turned, getting a brief glimpse of Dar’s taillights as she turned out of the lot and headed south. “Hope Dar doesn’t run into trouble driving.” She glanced at her watch and sighed, turning to walk across the cold lobby toward the elevators. The rain had let up a little, the winds abated just enough to allow the ferry to commence operation, and they’d reluctantly decided that playing hooky from work the week after they’d both been gone for days was probably not the best idea in the world.
Rats
. Kerry punched the elevator button and waited. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her job; she did. The door opened and she entered, turning and hitting the button for the fourteenth floor. She just liked spending time with Dar more, that was all.
“Morning, Ms. Kerry.” The doors had opened at the tenth floor, and Brent edged on behind a rubber-wheeled AV cart.
“Morning, Brent,” Kerry replied politely. Brent had been avoiding her for a few months, since the night he’d found out about her and Dar’s relationship. She suspected he didn’t approve of her lifestyle, and she felt a little sad about that, since she’d developed a fondness for the 102
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young tech. “Who’s that for?”
Brent had been staring intently at the wall, and now he glanced briefly at her. “Requisition 23343, ma’am.” He returned his eyes to the wall.
“Well,” Kerry exhaled, “I hope the requisition enjoys it.” The doors opened and she held them while Brent moved the cart off the elevator.
“Did the equipment for Accounting come in?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.” Brent turned and wheeled his cart away, keeping his head down as he walked.
Kerry made a mental note to talk to Mark about his tech, then headed for her office. She heard raised voices halfway down the hall and raked a hand through her still-damp hair as she readied herself for another fractious day.
THE CAMP WAS positively gray when Dar got there. The heavy rain had turned the ground into a slough of sheeting ripples of water, broken by heavily rutted areas of mud where marching recruits and multi-ton vehicles had passed.
The guard didn’t even blink at her this time, he just waved her through; and she navigated the puddles cautiously as she made her way into the main parking lot. “What a mess.” She regarded the steady rain with a critical eye, glad she’d brought her all-weather gear. She pulled up her hood and fastened the front clasps, then opened the door and slid out, her booted feet sending a respectable splash out in all directions. “Glad I remembered these, too.” She closed the door and started toward the command building, ripples moving away from her toward the edge of the lot as she walked.
The Marine beside the door opened it as she approached, and she gave him a nod as she went inside the building, taking in a breath of the brass-scented air with a renewed twinge of nostalgia. She took the stairs up two at a time and walked briskly through the upper hall entrance, turning right and crashing headlong into Chief Daniel, who had been headed just as quickly in the other direction.
Dar hopped back a step, reaching out in pure instinct as the chief bounced off her and slammed against the wall. “Hey. Sorry about that.”
The chief ripped her arm out of Dar’s grasp and glared at her. “You really should watch where you’re going, ma’am.”
“Well, I would, but my eyeballs don’t extend out on stalks and reach around corners,” Dar replied. “And I left my handheld radar at home. So, either accept my apology, or just get the hell out of my way.”
The chief wrestled her best stiff upper lip into position and dusted herself off. “We didn’t expect to see you here today.”
“I bet.” Dar smiled engagingly at her. “We left off at Battle Operations yesterday, didn’t we?”
The chief’s jaw jerked and her lips twitched, but she merely extended
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a hand in the direction she’d been originally going. “After you.”
They passed through the halls, going through offices, then the chief turned and went through a door into a stairwell. “It’s on the top floor,”
she informed Dar with a brief smile. “We don’t have elevators.” The chief started up the stairs without further words, and Dar shook her head and rolled her eyes before she followed.
The six flights served to give her a nice little workout, and she was in a better mood by the time she beat the chief to the door at the top of the stairs and pulled it open, sweeping her arm forward in a courtly flourish. “After you.”
The chief eyed her narrowly, then sighed and walked past into the hall.
Dar undid the catches on her trench coat and let the edges flap free as she strode down the center of the woven carpet floor. On either side of her, the walls were lined with bulletin boards, and this area had the look of a working space. It was more Spartan than the floors below, and she could just detect the scent of sweat and old wool on the air. The boards held notices of classes and rotations; she caught glimpses of platoon names and the personnel assigned to them, uniformly typewritten with a first initial and surname. She smiled at a brief memory of when she was very young, running up here and searching for her father’s name, hoping against hope he’d been assigned to a base unit and not a ship for the next six months.
She’d usually been disappointed. But every once in a while, there’d been a break, and she’d gone back home in giddy high spirits, looking forward to six months of piggyback rides and Saturday morning games in the backyard.
“Ms. Roberts.”
The chief’s voice broke into her memories and she looked up to face the sailor’s dour expression. “Yes?”
“I don’t care what you think about what you see in here, do not voice your opinion in front of the recruits or my sailors.” The ginger-haired woman’s jaw moved. “Is that clear?”
Dar let her wonder what her response was going to be for a few seconds. “Agreed,” she finally replied. “Even if it’s a good opinion.”
She met the chief’s eyes steadily. “Let’s go.”
They passed through the doors and entered into another world.
Here, the quiet hallways were left behind, and a bustle of activity surrounded them, consisting chiefly of moving bodies in blue denim with serious faces. To one side, a small group of recruits was getting bawled out, their bodies stiffened against the tirade and their eyes strictly to the front. To their left, a row of closed gray painted doors with rubber seals on them called to mind the watertight doors on a ship and, Dar knew, enclosed simulators.
They kept walking, past the open doors of a large open room where a class in hand-to-hand was being taught, the hoarse yells and dull 104
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splats of bodies hitting the floor distinctive in the air.
“Chief!” a male voice hollered from just in front of them. A young man with bright-red hair was leaning half out a doorway and gesturing to Dar’s reluctant guide. “That damn sim program’s down again!”
“Wait here,” the chief ordered, heading in that direction.
Dar ignored the order, following the sailor with a look of mild amusement.
Chief Daniel stopped and turned. “Don’t you ever do what you’re told, Ms. Roberts?”
“No.” Dar walked past her and ducked around the redheaded sailor. “One of the major reasons I never joined the Navy.” She evaded a hurrying tech carrying a piece of hardware and let a brief grin cross her face. “This place hasn’t changed.” Three men were gathered around a computer console, and as she watched, one reared back and slapped the side of it in frustration. She walked up behind them and peered over their shoulders as the chief hurried up on the other side. Lines of code were scrolling across the screen, and Dar studied them, head cocked just slightly to one side, blue eyes intent.